Marriage | Empty Nesterhood | Sex | Intimacy | Swinging | Polyamory

We’re About to Be Empty Nesters. I Hope We’ll Again Spend Whole Weekends in Bed.

In a happy marriage, sex isn’t just an expression of love. It’s one of the most important ways to keep the fire burning hot.

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Lauren and I are days from being semi-empty nesters. I say “semi-empty nesters” because our son is going off to college and will be home probably once a month, during holidays and this summer. Regardless, this is a huge change for all of us, and a lot about it will be hard as we’ve been a happy family for 18 years. Then again, this stage in life is inevitable.

I’ve thought a lot about Lauren and me and what things will look and be like for us once our son is at college. I’ve thought a bit less about the swinger lifestyle and even our girlfriend, Piper, and more about the two of us as husband and wife.

Yes, as empty nesters, we’ll probably host and attend more lifestyle parties. We enjoy consensual sexual experiences with other couples, and we probably always will.

We’ll also have more time with Piper, which is wonderful. We’ve been a throuple with Piper for more than 7 years. Not to get into the details, but she isn’t getting married after all; things ended on that front. She’s dating a little, and she’s not above occasional fun with others. She’s told us that any guy who she gets serious with will have to accept that she’s in a long-term polyamorous relationship with us and isn’t really into monogamy. That would understandably be a hard reality for most guys to accept, and I should know because I had to accept consensual non-monogamy as a relationship reality very shortly after Lauren and I became an item.

Consensual nonmonogamy within a marriage is a hard concept for many people to wrap their heads around. They’re intrigued by it, and they might even fantasize about others (they probably do), but it scares them, too. It’s been a huge part of the nearly 30-year journey Lauren and I have been on together.

Still, as we enter a new phase of life — semi-empty nesterhood — I’m thinking a lot about how at the heart of everything we have as lovers is…us as a couple. In 1997, when she was in medical school and I was in grad school, we met and quickly fell in love, though we did have a huge relational issue to get over — her desire to have a girlfriend she was happy to share with me. It wasn’t easy.

All these years later, our love is stronger and more beautiful than ever. I’m sometimes amazed that we’ve lived the life we have as a consensual non-monogamous couple and made it this far. That’s mainly because I’m aware of how at odds polyamory and the swinger lifestyle are with puritanical societal norms and relational constructs that are so pervasive in the U.S. and even in her native Sweden. Before Lauren, I accepted those norms without even thinking about them. Now? I think they’re choices, not defaults. She’s always considered them choices. And so we’ve made choices to have sexual experiences with others like us.

The reality is that sex is a defining attribute of what we’ve always had together as a couple. I mean sex as husband and wife, and I also mean consensual sex with our girlfriend and other married couples. For us, sex is kind of a shared hobby, which may sound glib but it’s the literal fucking truth (no pun intended). We’ve been non-monogamous for 99.9% of the time we’ve been together; it’s what we do and part of who we are. But it’s the sex we have together as a couple that helps keep the fire burning hot, the passions strong and, most importantly, the connection enduring.

Very early in our relationship, we had days as boyfriend and girlfriend— mostly on the weekends — when we didn’t get out of bed except to eat, exercise, go to the bathroom and maybe venture to the store. That wasn’t always the case, but there were weekends when we made love — we fucked — over and over again, not uncommonly five or more times in a day. Oftentimes, we fucked very hard, to the point where my hips and glutes tired out, but sometimes we fucked gently or had oral sex.

I remember preparing and eating meals together naked, sometimes fucking in the kitchen while dinner cooked. Or Lauren might have dropped to her knees and blown me.

In those years, we loved to role-play, and we dabbled in exhibitionism. I was and still am her “daddy” in bed. There was a sex shop not far from where we lived that sold naughty outfits, toys, videos, etc. Lauren and I did some role-playing (with outfits bought at that shop) that was scandalously naughty, including her being my own private stripper and call girl.

Speaking of which….

What I didn’t know at the time was that only a few months before we met, Lauren had walked away from stripping after a few years of taking it all off on stage. She was in college when she stripped, and she gave it up when she went to medical school. By her own admission, the lines between who she really was (Lauren) and who she was known as on stage (Erin) had blurred by the time she walked away. I’ll leave it at that, except to say she had sexual experiences before we met that I never at the time could have imagined. Turned out that our first threesome in 1997 with our then-girlfriend, Allison, wasn’t Lauren’s first threesome — not by a long shot. Also turned out our first swap in 2009 wasn’t her first swap.

All I knew at the time was that I’d never loved a girl as much as I loved her. I’d also never known a girl who had a more voracious sexual appetite than Lauren. I hadn’t known such a libido in a woman was possible, and I didn’t fully understand it at the time. But, looking back on it now, it’s clear that she was a young woman with an extremely high drive, which isn’t that unusual. And she was a young woman who had very progressive views on consensual nonmonogamy and wanting to be dominated in bed. All these years later, even as a 52 year-old woman, she still has a high sex drive, and so do I (yes, she’s taking hormones).

The sex we have now is better than ever, even as we’ve had to make some adjustments due to age, such as using more lube now and not being able to have pounding sex multiple times per day like we could years ago. Still, it’s more intense than ever. It’s naughtier than ever. It’s more adventurous and fun than ever.

And the sex we’re having with others is better than ever. We’ve been more active in the lifestyle than ever (which is saying a lot — the 2010–2012 era was pretty wild)), enjoying consensual sexual experiences with couples we know well and couples we don’t know too well just about every weekend (mostly at privately hosted parties). Our fun with others has been so amazing that I’m convinced over time it brought out some bicuriosity in me, which led to my bisexuality.

But.

I miss the way things were long ago. We still have occasional all-day affairs (we need a lot more lube now than we did then!), but mostly on vacation. I want that again with Lauren — in our bedroom, in the kitchen, in the living room, on the back deck, in our sauna, in our bathrooms, everywhere. All day long. I’d like for Piper to be there for some of those days, too.

But I want those days with Lauren again.

She said she’d be happy to have those days, too.

So, while we’re both a little sad about seeing our son off to college (we’re very proud of him!), we also are looking at the coming years as a series of new adventures as a couple, as a throuple and as swingers.

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