Chapter 21: A New Normal

“I can’t get over how ‘normal’ you all appear to be,” Joyce exclaimed after Alice, Julie, and Dave had responded to her various questions for the past half-hour about their life and marriage. Dave wondered about her excessive curiosity. There was more there than simple prurient interest.

Dave teased, “Despite?”

Joyce nodded and even frowned, “Yes, despite the three of you having sex with all of your neighbors ... and you two are sisters ... and you have three other wives ... and you all like each other, even love each other.” Dave detected something amiss in her statement. She’d been making good eye contact before that and then suddenly seemed evasive.

Dave corrected her, “Yes, we do love each other. Soon it’ll be Alice and five other wives once we marry Scarlett.”

“You’re amazing,” Joyce crooned. “How can you do it? A movie star!”

Dave teased, “‘How can we do it?’ Ask the question a different way and don’t use the word ‘it’.”

“Errr, do you feel any guilt or social pressure to go back to monogamy and fidelity – to the old and traditional way of having a marriage? Does anybody regret their decision to fully engage with everything going on in the Circle?” The last question seemed to be asked with a different, more emphatic tone, than the first. Dave wondered if what he sensed was anger, but that didn’t fit what he was hearing either.

Dave nodded for Alice to respond as he studied their old friend. Joyce had really been more her friend back in high school. Dave sensed something was wrong, but he concluded it didn’t have to do with his family, lifestyle, or the Circle.

Alice said, “As for guilt or regrets, we feel none. There’s no need; we aren’t doing anything wrong. Are we over-sexed? I pointed out that we’re all nymphomaniacs or hypersexual – men and women. Fortunately, none of us have the attendant bipolar disorder that often accompanies the symptom. We just love to make love with each other, and occasionally to indiscriminately fuck our brains out with someone new.

“As for the issue of fidelity, that raises a whole new subject your questions didn’t touch on. ‘Fidelity to what?’ is the question. If it’s to the concept of monogamy, well, you know we aren’t too enamored with that concept. We think it’s restrictive and invites cheating and dissatisfaction. Present divorce rates and indexes of marital happiness or rather unhappiness back that up.

“If the term ‘Fidelity’ refers to being faithful to only one person, well we’ve all been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. Personally, in hindsight, I felt hemmed in and like I was in a pressure cooker with the lid on. I worried about being left behind or stepping over some invisible boundary I might not even know about. I kept feeling I wanted to break out, but I didn’t know how or in what direction. When Dave and I talked about it, he was feeling the same way.”

Alice sighed, “We told you about Dori giving us challenges to ‘Loosen Up’. While we were doing those, we talked for hours every day after we got home from work. Our discussions were intense and honest. As it turned out, neither one of us liked how we felt being in a traditional marriage although at the time I don’t know we would have said those words. Maybe we were at the point of the seven-year itch, but whatever the reason we were open to doing something new. We’re now certain that some of our feelings had to do with disenchantment with our rigid religious upbringing; we were breaking out from being brainwashed. Some of that came from church and some from society.

“We talked about our marriage vows. Our church pastor even gave several sermons on the subject of the traditional marriage vows and what they meant in God’s eyes. They were very male dominant, in hindsight. We’d come home and discuss them the rest of Sunday and even into the following week. We decided that our pastor was putting words in God’s mouth and he was using the Bible for his own purposes and gain, and not to promote love, compassion, and brotherhood. He strongly promoted female submission to the male. When we considered the real messages of the spiritual masters, and we’re not limiting this to Christianity, they all professed that the most important guidance they could provide was to love ourselves and to love each other.”

Joyce nodded, “I appreciate that. I got tired to our priests in our Catholic church doing the same thing. My ex-husband bought into the whole male dominant thing. He’d also use church teachings and actions to back up his own line of bullshit. I’ve come to believe that the church is one of the biggest scams going, although I have to admit that at the local level some good stuff happens. I list myself as a ‘recovering’ Catholic. I could never go back there knowing and feeling what I do now.”

Dave said, “We agree. A high-degree of brainwashing is going on there. One more word on fidelity: our faithfulness and loyalty is to each other in the Circle and the Circle’s close friends. Are we willing to be open and expand that occasionally, yes; and we do.”

Joyce said, “How do you respond when someone says that you’re all just swingers?”

Alice, Dave, and Julie shrugged. Alice spoke, “As some interpret our actions, we are. We willingly acknowledge that we each have a lusty streak. We were just at a Halloween party where such activities were forefront, but those were also the way to help us merge two like-minded groups. We approach what we do with our love of sex and the joy we find in variety. If we were otherwise, we wouldn’t have had the fabulous intermixing with that other group. We’ve had other mixer events as well.”

Joyce said, “Tell me again, how many are in the Circle?”

Dave smiled, “Thirty-one men and forty-seven women. We have a few more we think will join in soon.”

“And no one ever gets pissed off at anybody else?”

“Of course we do,” Dave laughed. “All the time.” Alice and Julie laughed, too.

Joyce looked surprised. “So all this harmonious living is just a guise?”

“No, it’s for real. What do you do when you get mad at someone?”

“I usually avoid them. If I’m forced to interact, I tell them off and rip them a new ‘you know what’ these days. I wasn’t always so forthright.”

Dave, Alice, and Julie laughed.

Julie said, “We try to do exactly the opposite. We’ve trained ourselves to not respond that way. We try – difficult as it is – to respond out of love.”

Dave said, “If I’m mad at you for some reason, you may not even know that you’ve done something to irritate me. If I come to you and tell you about my peeve or anger, usually we can work it out in some way – create a win-win solution. If you’re not willing, I have a choice. I can swallow my egotistic pride and let things pass, or I can try to find a work-around in some way other than completely avoiding you.”

Julie said, “I went to an anger management seminar for the Bennett Foundation. I bet half the course was teaching us when to spot our ego getting into another fracas. We do like each other, so it makes communication easier and we know going in that there’s a willingness to find a solution. I don’t want to go around pissing people off. I want to be loved.”

“So, you’re cool, calm, and collected?” Joyce stated. The look on her face definitely revealed something darker in her background to Dave.

“After I take about ten deep breaths,” Julie said. “I center myself. I ask what the real issue is that I’m dealing with. I ask myself to define the problem and try to state it in a sentence or two. I need to analyze the problem statement. If I can’t see a solution, my next thoughts deal with how to present the problem that ‘I have’ to the person. Notice that it’s ‘MY problem’ not theirs.”

Dave quoted Shakespeare, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

“Give me an example,” Joyce asked.

Julie responded, “Sure. You discover that Alice and her husband Dave are having sex with other people outside their marriage. That infuriates you, raises your blood pressure almost to the point your arteries are going to explode, and you think it’s a huge sin.

“I ask what the real issue is. In this case, you might say this goes against everything I know about relationships and the moral teachings in the Bible. Solid relationships can only be between two people – a man and a woman.”

Alice picked up the point, “So now I need to test the hypotheses on which my anger is based to be sure their valid. Can a relationship only be between a man and a woman? No, we know many successful gay and lesbian relationships. Can relationships only be based on the basis of two people? Well, that sounds suspect when I ask the question. If I check the facts, there are millions of people happily living and loving in groups of three or more people. I suppose I could even examine why I care about Alice and-or Dave.”

Dave said, “Then I could ask where I learned about relationships – the memes about relationships. Let’s see, I was taught at church. Well, we know that might be suspect even though those teachings are based on the Bible. Many of the significant men and women in the Bible supposedly lived in plural or group marriage with multiple partners. Many think the Bible only a book to aid in teaching moral principles; this isn’t one of them.

“I might have learned in school or from watching that reliable information source called television – excuse my sarcasm. I might check the statistics about how many of the households in the country consist of two people – a man and woman. I’d discover that the number is much less than half, and it’s declining.”

Joyce spoke softly, “So my initial anger is based on ideas that someone else gave me or based on assumptions that turn out to be false or that deserve to be suspect.”

Alice said, “Exactly. Now, you have a choice. Forget your anger and let it ebb away, or redefine the problem again and start over. Maybe your next definition of the problem is ‘I have difficulty being friends with people that have more than one person they have sex with’.”

Julie grinned, “Is it my duty as a friend to change how they act? What is it about them having sex that bothers me? They are open with each other about what they do and neither of them seem to care. You might ask yourself, if I even raise the issue with them will they care or take any action towards my way of thinking? In this case, since you are outside their relationship, they might humor you and explain how they are very happy with their lives and friends, how they feel loved and able to return that love, and how the deep and intimate sense of community is so important to them. As we discussed a few moments ago, they might describe their hypersexuality to you as part of the rationale for why they have expanded their circle of lovers.”

Joyce thought, “What you’re showing me is that before I’ve even talked to you, I’ve argued away a great deal of the problem and my anger has abated.”

The three Circle members smiled at her.

Dave said, “It works most of the time regardless of the issue. Sometimes, one of us will bring in a friend to help negotiate or arbitrate. Sometimes, the angered person will just talk the issue out with a friend, who’ll help them deal with what seems to be an intractable problem. There are many other ways to come at it.”

Alice said in a soft tone, “When we come at an issue with love and desire to learn, we also come at the issue with a willingness to work it out. Joyce, I love everyone in the Circle and many more in my life. I like having a harmonious life, too. Those goals are very compatible.”

Joyce nodded, “Thank you. I need to think about what you said, and also about the example you gave, although I’m not at all angry at your lifestyle. Curious and even fascinated might be a better description. I wonder what it would be like to live that way.”

Julie grinned, “Apply the same logic. Start analyzing what you’re feeling and why? Where did the ethical dilemma come from? What’s it look like? Who’s making you feel that way? Are there alternatives or options? This is my version of critical thinking.”

Joyce got that dark look about her and said “And no one is forcing you to do something you don’t want to do.”

Scarlett’s face lit up the sixty-six inch, 4K television screen in the core media room as Dave, Alice, Julie, Heather, and Cricket sat in front of the TV and camera. They were having a video conference call with her. Scarlett was wearing a very cowgirl western outfit with a jeweled vest. The others were for the most part wearing monokinis or athletic shorts.

Scarlett said, “I had a lot of fun the past few days. I finally got to go to the Playboy mansion, at least the L.A. version of it. The weather is considerably better in L.A. than Chicago right now, I’m told. We were shooting the scenes for part of the opening in Crystal Clear, at least how it got rewritten. In this case, a photo shoot for Playboy got moved to the mansion. I met about a dozen bunnies, too. They happily played bit parts in the background, too.”

Cricket nodded, “So, they’re filming the parts of the play around L.A., and then you start traveling?”

“Yes, but not before I get married. I got some of the schedule changed so I can be with you Valentine’s weekend. I marry all of you, get my brains fucked out, and then I get on a red-eye flight to Paris where we film for a week. Crystal has to ‘wow’ Europe, so someone is staging all of that. I might even actually appear as myself at some rock concert or something in a cameo. The details on that are still being worked at. If I can sing in some stadium or large arena that’s full of people, it’ll do wonders for the movie footage.”

“Do it,” Dave urged with a laugh. “You have such a nice singing voice.”

“Thank you, darlings. You lie wonderfully. By the way, how’s little Nikky working out?”

Dave smiled, “Very nicely. She’s there before I get into work, and leaves after me. When I do get into work, my desk is full of her output on my behalf.”