What Is a Demisexual and Can I Have Two, Please?

Chronicle of an Open Marriage #19

Hubs hooked up with the potential man of his dreams yesterday. He has his own apartment, so Hubs doesn’t have to lay out precious cash for a hotel room. (I haven’t yet said it’s okay for him to bring his lovers home.) He wants the same kind of sex Hubs wants, which has been surprisingly difficult for Hubs to find. And he doesn’t seem to be an ax murderer. Dream date!

Hubs told him about us recently opening our marriage, and how, after almost 40 years of resisting his unbridled sex mania, I’ve suddenly become a “salacious little slut” whom he can barely satisfy. (Don’t fret. I use the s-word affectionately here, to mean person who enjoys having a lot of sex.)

“Bring her around,” the man said. “I’ll be glad to help out.” Hahahah!

But even though this guy looks cute in the photo Hubs showed me, I’m not excited about joining their play. That’s because I want more than a random hookup. I want to feel chosen. I want my outside sexual partners (all theoretical, so far), to be specifically drawn to me. I want an emotional connection.

Or do I?

Let’s parse this out.

A Brief History of Opening Our Relationship

In the six months since we opened our relationship, Hubs has been with four outside men, and I’ve been with zero, although I started a strictly sextual relationship about a month ago, and it’s definitely hitting my g-spot, throwing my already increased libido into hyperdrive.

What I thought I’d get out of opening our marriage was relief from Hubs’ constant hunger for sex.

What I actually got was relief from my own self-imposed (and husband facilitated) patriarchal notions of what a “good wife” does and how I didn’t measure up.

What that led to was a surprising release of all the natural, female, powerful sexuality that I’d been bottling up and protecting since effing puberty.

Don’t ask me how or why. The connection isn’t clear. So that right there is a lot to try to process and understand. No wonder I’m a bit off the rails.

Then Hungry Man wandered onto the scene and started whispering sweet nothings in my ear — in French. How could I resist that? And though I was excited by the sexual talk, at first I felt threatened by the emotional tone.

All I (Don’t) Need is Love

I remember specifically being triggered before and after the stripper party I went to. This was maybe a week into our sextual relationship? (I can hardly believe how fast everything has happened.) And while my husband laid impassively on the couch as I ventured out into this strange new, scary world, Hungry Man left me a tender voice memo beforehand, wishing me luck, and another one the next morning, just checking in, to make sure I was okay and had survived the experience.

Who does this guy think he is to me? I remember thinking angrily when I listened to the voicemail at Bethany’s the morning after, hungover and wrung out. I don’t even know him!!!

Yet before the party, in a manic burst of bravado, I had invited this unknown man to meet me and Bethany in New Orleans for the Southern Decadence Festival in September. And he accepted the invite.

Then after the listening to the sweet voicemails, I informed him that I might have to f*ck other people while there, specifically a beautiful big black man whose voice I had fallen in love with on a music track (should I serendipitously run into this accomplished musician in NOLA), and that I’d also need breaks and solitude. That we couldn’t be together 24/5. I accompanied my email with a link to the classic Leslie Gore song, You Don’t Own Me.

Hahahah!

So here I was inviting a stranger to spend thousands of dollars to meet me in a faraway city, and then adding the caveat that he couldn’t have me all to himself? I suppose I was trying to scare him away. Because his quickly intimate, intense, emotional closeness felt threatening to my heart defense system and my long-term marriage. But he didn’t go away.

About (Saving) Face

What happened next?

A mere two weeks later, I was telling him I loved him. Yikes!

Do I sound unhinged to you? Because I do to myself. Or if I wasn’t before, this wild ride into ethical non-monogamy is taking me there, stat.

Let me save a little face by saying that Hungry Man had already said he loved me a dozen times or more before I made my own declaration.

He loves me “openly, freely, and without reservation, not in the way I love my wife, but in a way that makes me feel good, warm, sexually heightened, and most important, loved back,” was just one proclamation he made.

(Perhaps I should clarify here that his wife has given him permission to seek sex outside the marriage for much the same reason I gave permission to Hubs — he wants more sex than she does.)

And after learning to accept his tender ministrations (which took all of three weeks), and when I was in a particularly vulnerable circumstance, all on my own, and HM was the one checking in on me (not Hubs), I went ahead and told him I was getting used to being loved by him, and that I loved him back.

Then HM got distant. We’d been emailing back and forth almost constantly for days. And suddenly, there was radio silence for a few hours.

Uh-oh! I thought. Perhaps I’ve gone too far! And I was reminded of the Mission Impossible TV show from my youth, wherein the protagonists would construct elaborate ruses in order to trick the bad guys, creating alternate universes in which they could lead them astray. Was I the bad guy? Was all that had transpired in the past three weeks an elaborate ruse?

I had a few hours of anxious unhappiness, during which I was reminded why I had endeavored to defend my heart in the first place, and then I was back in Hungry Man’s virtual arms again, being petted and held.

Once there, I quickly backpedaled, saying what had happened to me was akin to what happens in therapy, called “transference,” when the client falls in love with the therapist because s/he is providing such welcome and surprising relief from the client’s entrenched woes.

Here’s what Hungry Man had to say about that:

“Haha — it is exactly like transference, but we don’t have a client/therapist relationship so they have a different expression for it in this case, it’s called ‘falling in love.’”

Am I Really Falling in Love?

Am I “falling in love” with Hungry Man? I honestly don’t know. I guess it depends on how you define “love.” What I do know is polyamorists claim it is possible to love more than one person wholeheartedly without harming your primary relationship, and I guess I’m about to test that theory out. I also know that my marriage isn’t seriously threatened by this dalliance with Hungry Man, since he and I both have rich lives in our respective locations — thousands of miles apart — which neither one of us is looking to destroy.

Awhile back, I stumbled upon the word “demisexual” in my reading, and discovered it to mean someone who needs an emotional connection before they desire to have sex. Maybe that can shed some light?

Because one thing I’ve learned from this latest episode in the ongoing experiment of opening our marriage is that I’m a demisexual. It doesn’t have to be a strong emotional connection, like I’m currently experiencing with HM. But I need more than a dick pic and an offer to get laid if I’m going to get enthusiastically on board.

On Saturday, for example, I went to a party and met two people whom I’d be happy to f*ck. (This after decades of never seeing anyone who sparked that feeling in me.) One was a Black man who looked like Obama. The other was a mannish woman who dressed like a UPS driver. She was the caterer. In both cases, it was their charisma that lit up my nether regions: the eye contact, the smiles, the positive energy, the openness to all the beauty that life has on offer, and the air of mutual appreciation.

So I guess this story is just a long way of saying that I’ve recently discovered that I’m a demisexual, and I’ve become open to meeting more of them.

To the bartender in the sky offering sexual partners I say “yes please” to those delicious and intoxicating demisexuals! :) I’ll take two.

What happened next? Read Chronicle of an Open Marriage #20. 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 fulfilling day.