How Power Shifts in a MFM Threesome
Chronicle of an Open Marriage #42
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how my life has improved since HoneyBear became part of our long-term marriage. First and foremost is sex. While Hubs and I have a long history of tension over sexual access, freighting our interactions with emotional peril, HoneyBear and I don’t. His dick pops up and I sit on it. Easy peasy! There’s no back story to (mis)interpret.
Next is the leavening added to our domestic life by HoneyBear’s personality. It’s almost a perfect complement to my husband’s. While Hubs is smart and funny and dry and aloof, HB is friendly and funny and sweet and warm. To me, it feels like we moved to the rainforest after living in the high desert for years. Both landscapes are beautiful, but I’m glad for the change. I was parched!
Another improvement is an emotional power shift, the upshot of which is more power to me. Before HB, a big problem in our marriage was the outdated notion that I belong to my husband, and that my “wifely duties” include sex. It’s a backwards mindset, but one that a lot of couples struggle with, and one we both harbored despite knowing better. But the addition of HoneyBear to our marital bed has uprooted the “property of…” sign planted deep in my mind. That feels liberating and delightful to me. Also, hot.
Besides the gratification of getting more sex, love, and power, the outlandishness of our new arrangement makes me feel like a cool, forward-thinking person who is disregarding society’s demands. I get to have exciting extramarital sex with my husband’s approval — so without guilt, anxiety, or very much risk. Hubs gets to have exciting homosexual sex without coming out of the closet and suffering repercussions from that. It’s like having a Get Out of Monogamy (and the closet) Free card.
Then there’s the way HoneyBear takes care of Hubs when I’m away, shouldering some of the obligations of our relationship. If I want a night on the town with a friend, or a week in the woods, I don’t feel guilty that I’ve left Hubs behind, and he doesn’t feel neglected. I rest easy in the knowledge that Hubs and HoneyBear are having a good time together while I’m off doing my thing.
And when I sleep over at HoneyBear’s house, which I’ve been doing about once a week, it feels like I’m going to a mental spa or getting a psychological spring cleaning. After almost 40 years of marriage, sleeping in a different bed with a different man for a night is like opening all the windows in my stodgy, old mindset and letting in some fresh air.
Finally, there’s the counseling, which has been immensely helpful to me and Hubs. Long ago, in the very beginning of our marriage, I insisted we go to counseling because Hubs found it difficult to tell me he loved me, and I wanted to hear that from him. But that experience wasn’t productive. Since Hubs barely participated, our counselor took the easy route and focused on me, eventually telling me something like “get over it.” I should learn to interpret Hubs’ behavior as love, she said, rather than require him to say the words, since he was a shy person who found intimacy difficult. I made that my motto for decades, even though it didn’t work very well.
But when we decided to open our marriage, we agreed to try counseling again, anticipating that we would need a guide through this new, wet landscape of bisexuality and non-monogamy. And lucky for us, our new counselor is skilled. Over the course of the last year and a half, he’s drawn Hubs out of his shell and into the conversation, making him aware of the ways his emotional distance harms our marriage and willing to attempt change. He’s also taught me to be less reactive, leading us both to more open and vulnerable communication in which we’re neither offensive nor defensive, but truly trying to understand the other person’s point of view.
It’s not perfect. And we probably won’t ever become that couple made in heaven. But we’re moving in the right direction.
Don’t forget the drawbacks
There are also negative elements to opening the marriage, of course. One is trying to avoid hurting Hubs’ feelings when I give more sexual attention to HoneyBear or HoneyBear gives more to me. I love Hubs and want to treat him fairly and respectfully. But given Hubs’ coolness and HB’s warmth, sometimes I prefer to have HoneyBear’s hands on me as he whispers sweet nothings into my ear. The way HoneyBear touches me, the way he kisses me, the way he speaks to me — all these are more gentle and loving than Hubs’ personal style, and since I’ve lacked that kind of attention for literal decades, I’m hungry for it now. That creates some rough emotional waters in our marriage. But they aren’t any rougher than the ones we were trying to navigate before HoneyBear came along.
Another problem is that HoneyBear has a long distance girlfriend who doesn’t know about his relationship with us, and that rankles me. They see each other seldom, but talk on the phone daily, and have a long-term plan to move in together. Meanwhile, HoneyBear has been seeing us three times a week or more for almost a year. I struggle with that. How much responsibility do I bear for deceiving this woman? Our counselor says none — it’s HoneyBear’s business. And I’ve adopted that as my point of view. But I’d still feel much better if he came clean with her, or at least negotiated a “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement that gave him permission to have sex with other people while they’re living apart.
Yesterday, with his cock deep inside me, HB looked me in the eyes and asked me if I loved him. I said yes, I do. And sometimes, I fantasize about the three of us moving in together, coming out to our family and friends, and living happily ever after as a throuple. But the presence of a long-term girlfriend who’s unaware of our relationship forces me to wonder, does this emotional connection we’re feeling have a basis in reality? Or are we just, like children, playing a game of pretend? I don’t know.
How to make a delicious manwich
One thing I do know after opening our marriage is that I love to be in the middle of a manwich, with one man on either side of me, pressing in close. That isn’t something I ever dreamed of before, and it’s just one of many new sexual experiences that I’ve welcomed in the last year and a half.
Getting sexual attention from my two men simultaneously fills me with so much good feeling that it spills into my mental and physical health, giving me a general outlook of abundance. I remember one moment in particular, when I lay on the bed between Hubs and HB, who were kneeling on either side of me, and saw the two men look at each other over my naked body, like friends on a great adventure, their eyes lit with joy.
That moment felt almost like an antidote to gang rape — like my sexual enjoyment of two men at the same time cast a magical annulment over all the gang rapes I’ve ever heard and read about, diminishing their power to harm: the drunk girl abused in a bedroom at a house party in high school, whom my male friend saw but didn’t have the balls to rescue; the student in my class who took her rapists to court, only to be violated again when they got a few meager hours of community service for their heinous crime; the college experience revealed to the world by Christine Blasey Ford, then swiftly ignored, which proved once again that women don’t matter in the halls of power…
On our bed, in that moment, those stories couldn’t hurt me; they didn’t describe me. Because as a woman, I can be gang raped, sure. But I can also invite two men to enjoy my body, with my permission. I can be the one granting that privilege. I can make that choice.
The three of us have made many varieties of delicious manwich since then — virtually every position and combination that comes to mind. I’ve been bold in my adventuring, and I’ll be bold in the retelling, despite the prudish lady who resides in my subconscious, trying to rein me in.
In one recipe, both men are beside me, pressing in close, with HoneyBear kissing my lips and fondling my breasts while Hubs focuses on my butt and nest. The first time we tried this I had an orgasm. The second time, I had an unprecedented two, with the feelings of pleasure cascading and overwhelming my reluctant conscious until I had no choice but to submit.
In a variation on the standard, Hubs reverses direction to give me oral. I like the sensation of two tongues exploring my body at either end… We’ve tried double penetration, with one man in my vagina and another in my anus, but haven’t managed to make that work. The angles are daunting. And sometimes we’ve put a man in the middle. When HB was centered he liked to watch both me and Hubs giving him oral, with our lips sometimes touching in an accidental kiss. When Hubs was in the middle he wanted to penetrate me (first frontwards, then backwards) while HB penetrated him, making a daisy chain of connection between all three.
I’ve been writing about our journey into ethical non-monogamy from the beginning, when the waters were dangerous and the course unknown. Now, 18 months later, we’re more experienced sailors, making fewer errors. So I’m hoping we’ll get a long spell of smooth sailing before the next big storm.
What happened next? Read Chronicle of an Open Marriage #43. Find all of my stories about opening our marriage on the list below, or about sex in general on this one. Get an email whenever I publish. And have a sweet day.
