Chapter 25: Experiment in Reality

Susan said, “This sounds a bit like a cult.”

Dave chuckled. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard the accusation about the Circle. In a way, every unique group was a cult in his mind. His old Christian church had been more of a cult than the Circle because of how they restricted everyone’s thinking to only the rules and such they wanted the congregation to adhere to, but then again, the Circle tried to select its members based on their own set of beliefs about life and love.

Alice nodded at Susan and shrugged, “Perhaps. We try to keep a lot of links to the outside world so we don’t become too inbred or insular. Most of us work outside the Circle in some way. Most of our discussions are not about our philosophy, but about books we’ve read, TV shows, movies, hobbies, current events, and more. We think we’re pretty normal, well, except for our lifestyle about our intentional polyamorous family.”

“Why cohousing?” Susan asked, changing the angle of the conversation slightly.

Dave responded, “Eight of us that started the Circle were in the same neighborhood, but not next door to each other. As we became increasingly sexual, we wanted to be physically closer to each other. Our numbers were growing, too; and we annexed a few people who were not in our neighborhood, but wanted to be near one of us. The house Alice and I had filled up with my new wives – her sister wives and Alice’s first boyfriend Owen.

“Owen suggested that we create a new project – what turned into this cohousing project. As we did and at their request, we also annexed the architect, his wife, and their daughter. We grew again. My assistant joined us, one of club friends, and several others like Holly.”

Alice said, “What started this, and Susan this might apply to you, was that one of my friends decided that Dave and I needed to loosen up. We were fundamentalist evangelicals, and wound tighter than a spool of thread. That said, we were slowly realizing that something wasn’t right in who we were or what we’d been taught. I guess we wanted something refreshing because we started our loosening up process with enthusiasm. Everything we did brought us closer to this.” She gestured around at everybody and the homes.

The table talked more about the Circle, how it had formed, and some of the problems. Alice also talked about the loosening up process that Dori had put them through including many of her challenges.

Susan asked Holly, “You came to the Circle because you were in love with Dave, but broadened out to everybody. What caused that?”

Holly said, “Dave had to sit me down and explain to me about being non-monogamous and not being exclusive. Those are part of the underpinnings for the Circle. No one ‘possesses’ anybody else. There’s no ownership. Imagine if there was; one of the men might say, ‘I ALLOWED my wife to have sex with so and so’ or ‘I gave her permission to do such and such’. That statement means he owns her; he’s her controlling owner or parent; he’s her gatekeeper. This place is the most egalitarian group of people I’ve ever known. Consequently, I un-fixated from Dave and broadened my focus; and I’m so glad I did.”

“How’d did you stop your fixation?”

Holly looked at Alice, almost for permission to speak.

Alice said, “Let me talk about this. Shortly after we had loosened up enough to have sex with others, a challenge was laid down for us by one of our members to spend the week with someone other than your spouse. I ended up paired with a man I really liked a lot, Owen. He happened to have the resources to take me to Paris and Rome for that week, and it remains the most romantic week of my life. I damn near left David to spend the rest of my life with him, but I stopped myself literally at the last second.

“The instant that I saw David after having been with my lover for that week, I knew I had to make a decision. It wasn’t a contest; I chose my husband. It was damn hard, because I wanted the other man, too. As it turned out, I got both of them, but I didn’t know that at the time. I thought it was an either-or decision. I had to un-fixate.”

“How’d you let that man go if you felt that way? Say more.”

“I had to focus on what I needed to keep and what I needed to let go of in my life, and it wasn’t the men; it was the underlying set of rules about relationships that I’d been raised with and the love I felt for them. As it turned out I had some stored-up anger and resentment at David, and at myself. Much of that stemmed from the way I was raised and my church upbringing. We’d been co-enablers of that paradigm our whole time together. I realized I had been treated as a chattel unworthy of making it on my own. My father ‘gave me away’ at my wedding to David; what the fuck do you think that symbolizes; certainly not the start of an egalitarian relationship. David and I went to the same church for years, and I received continuous messages to ‘obey’ and ‘support the man of the house’ and so on. David was fat, dumb, and happy, and doing what was expected of him by the church, our parents, and by me. He took care of HIS little fiancée and later wife – his possession. I was his dependent and his submissive.

“When we started to loosen up, I realized how I had been put upon. So did David. He was more rabid about not possessing me than I was. We set about correcting all those past mistakes and nearly thirty years of upbringing. I didn’t know it until I got with Owen and fell in love with another man, one that was also liberated but operating under the miasma of exclusivity – and hence ownership. It took a while but I realized I’d just become a different man’s ‘Little Woman’. Dave had already made that transition. It took a while longer to get Owen to see the light. We all crawled out of a hole society had dumped us in. We were all supposed to conform but didn’t.”

David spoke up, “I thought for a while that the hardest part of our loosening up was ‘allowing’ Alice to have sex with another man. Somewhere in the midst of all our talking and trying new and sexy things, I realized that wasn’t my big daunting issue. The real issue was turning her loose as an independent being. I wasn’t sure how to relate to a wife that was my equal. Fact is, I had been a terrible partner just muddling along following the rules I was taught as I grew up. I made some decisions without asking her, and then pushed off others on her without any support or guidance when I had all the facts. How would I live in an egalitarian relationship? I had no idea, and even today, I’m still learning – and with four wives, too.”

Alice said, “I realized if I went with Owen, it would be different but the same. He’d been raised in the same society and had just started to make the same breaks with tradition, in part because he heard what we were trying to do and become. I had to control my thoughts for a while, and force myself not to mope about having to ‘give up’ Owen and stay with good old Dave. I turned things around. I went through the grief process, too; denial, anger, and then exploration and acceptance. I forced myself to stop heaping MY anger and stress on David. My thinking wasn’t his problem; it was mine.” She turned and patted Dave on his knee.

Alice went on, “Last, as part of my letting go or getting past my fixation was developing a vision of the life I wanted to have. Pam was already with us at that point, and I even tested whether I wanted her in my future life. Ultimately, I defined pretty much how we’re living now, except it got better with the cohousing situation and being physically close to the people I love. I was short sighted as it turns out. I was too limiting in the number of people I would love. I initially thought only two or three. I was too conservative about what my sex life would be like.”

“Would you change anything?” Susan asked.

“Not right now,” Alice replied after a few seconds of thought. “I’ve never been happier. I got my cake and I can eat it, too. We pulled Owen into our Circle. He loves not only me but also all of the others. I get to spend time and make love with him frequently. I admit we still have a strong connection just as I do and even stronger with Dave, but I made all the other connections I had in my life stronger, too.”

Dale asked, “How do you hide all this at work?”

Alice laughed, “I don’t. My boss is making out over there with one of our friends. He lives in that house over there. He’s one of the Circle bachelors, like Owen, and we also make love frequently because we care so much about each other.”

Dave observed, “In fact, the woman he’s making out with is my personal assistant, Nancy. She lives here, too. And, by the way, my promotion a few months back was partly due to my lifestyle, specifically having four wives. My bosses got wind of it and figured that anybody that could be that creative in thinking outside the box about their personal life, could do the same thing at work with some of the stuff we do. I think that’s proving to be the case. I have a license to be creative from him because of how I live. By the way, to my knowledge he doesn’t know all of the details, but he’s seen the trailer.”

Dale asked, “Do you guys do kinky things?”

Dave and Alice looked at each other and laughed. Holly also got a chuckle.

Alice spoke, but mainly to Susan, “First, kinky is a relative term. What’s kinky to one person is normal to the next. The group is not into sado-masochism, or bondage, or domination, or scat or water play. That stuff is too kinky even for all of us. Mostly we just love each other. The kinky part is wrapped up in the words ‘each other’.

“We do have a few sex toys that we bring out once in a while. The massage table over there might be kinky for some people. Sometimes, a few of us will put on a sex show for the others to help get everyone revved up or just to be exhibitionists. We do like to watch each other have sex, particularly our spouses; thus, our Friday and Saturday orgies are probably considered kinky since they’re group sex personified. The women are all comfortable having sex with each other, but the men aren’t although two or three of them might gang up on one woman if that’s what she wants.

“We have all discovered that sex is fun, too. We used to think of sex as serious and even taboo. Dave and I scheduled it for Wednesday and Saturday nights – once, usually in a very dimly lit room. We had formula foreplay and afterglow activity of cleaning up. We stuck mostly to the missionary position. God, we were sad people.”

Dale and Susan glanced at each other with guilty looks.

Alice forged ahead, “Now that we know sex can be fun, we’ll play sexy games, even with the whole group of us. We do risqué things and I suppose some kinky things. Many of us have made a porn movie or danced at a strip club. A couple of us have written erotic stories, some even based exactly on what goes on in the Circle. Oh, we change the details and use disguises, but we play. We tease each other a lot.

After some further conversation in the group, Alice wasn’t surprised when Susan asked for a little private time with her. The women didn’t bother to put on their bras, and simply walked between the two houses so they could take a walk around the circular perimeter road surrounding the ten houses and the core. Since it was a private road in a gated community, the only people they expected to meet on a Saturday would be another Circle member, and they were all already on the patio or in the core.

After reaching the sidewalk around the perimeter of the homes, Susan said, “Thanks for talking to me. Dale seems to have made his mind up that he wants this lifestyle, but I’m not sure he can handle it. He HAS been very possessive, as you were talking about a few minutes ago; I worry that he’d have a sense of loss and get jealous.”

“Try some test situations,” Alice recommended. “Dave’s brother and sister-in-law just did the same thing and we suggested that to them. After some staged situation, ask Dale what he thinks and talk to him about what something more intense or explicit would be like. Use details to spice up the topic.”

“We’ve done some of that. I guess Dave told him to experiment with me flashing or interacting romantically with other men. I’ve gone along with that, and it has been fun and erotic and arousing, and I want more of that. I hope he’s being realistic in his thinking. I think I am.”

Susan asked, “One question, in your situation do you often interact with more than one man?”

Alice chuckled, “Sometimes. I enjoy being DPed or made air tight, but not on a steady diet. I’ve even done some gangbangs where we role played a few things. More than likely, given that we have more women than men, I end up in a threesome with a man and another woman from the Circle.”

“Do you and your sister ... you know, interact?”

“Yes. We didn’t until she broke away from our parents and the rest of our family just the way I had to do. Fortunately, they live a thousand miles away, so the schism isn’t as evident on a day-to-day basis as it might be. Yes, Julie and I love each other in many ways besides just being close sisters.”

“What about your individual fetishes? Do those manifest in the group?”

Alice laughed, “Oh, yes. Julie, for instance, accurately describes herself as a ‘cum slut’. She’s developed a ‘thing’ for cleaning up messy cocks and pussies after couples in the Circle have made love. She loves the taste of cum and pussy juice mixed together. Needless to say, she’s a popular adjunct to everybody at our group sex parties. I like being DPed. Kat is the consummate voyeur, so she has taken a job editing porn movies for the man in our Circle that films them. They’re a good team. A couple of the men have a fetish about making love with a teenager, and, fortunately, we have Rachel who loves older men and loves to make love with them with almost no holds barred. She is of legal age, but she’s also a teen and still in high school.”