Readiness

I know, in principle and by accumulated memory, that what is coming will be both electrifying and deeply painful.

My thrilling and majestic wife of nine years, Stacey has been without a genuine romantic partner since last August. I see and understand all the signals that this drought has run it course.

By way of background I ought to explain that Stacey and I transitioned into our cuckold marriage nearly five years ago. Like many married couples, our nuptial sex life was on an increasingly obvious trajectory towards listlessness and ennui. That entirely common circumstance was intensified by the disparity in our inherent libidos: mine perhaps just below average (a gentlemen’s C?), and Stacey’s stratospheric (A+ summa cum laude). Our attempted antidotes, I have come to learn, were equally typical: the introduction of fantasy games and roleplaying into the marital bedroom. Grasping for a renewal of excitement we mimed the landscape of erotic ideas that encompass other participants. With all the originality of Milli Vanilli we concocted elaborate visions of threesomes. We rehearsed these themes until they, too, became equivalent fodder for dullness, until one evening I shifted the stream slightly and placed my fantasy self in a voyeuristic stance, at the end of a fantasy bed, and watched Stacey couple with her imaginary partner. Some ancient psycho-sexual combination in my frontal cortex finally clicked into position and a world of dark arousal blossomed in my body.

Predictably my recurrent fixation on this fantasia elicited curiosity and concern from Stacey: was I subconsciously trying to push her away? Why did my body offer such a florid reaction to this notion, where so many others had failed to inspire? Being both honest and thoroughly mystified myself, I was entirely open and together we joined in mutual exploration of our interest. For yes, Stacey, too had found the vision similarly aphrodisiacal. I could belabor what was in the event a many-months long spelunking into our own and each others’ primal stimuli, but the last few of you reading might capitulate and so instead I will relay our conclusions. Stacey’s exceptional sexual fervor was intensified imagining the regeneration of that infatuated state: fresh love (and lust), the most overpowering phase of a relationship. The idea that I could, and perhaps even would, accept her experiencing that again with another partner was shockingly titillating for her. And for me: I suppose all of you true cuckolds will understand that excruciating paradox, the inexplicable urge the clash of sting and stimulation by pondering that it just might be, however distant and improbable, a possibility.

The relational arithmetic was compelling: I might allow my wife to experience more and better of what was so central to her sense of self and pleasure, at once ameliorating my own inadequacies and divining a hidden source of electrifying arousal. And so we embarked on, consciously or not, an inexorable passage to an unconventional, exotic, rarified cuckold marriage.

Stacey’s initial examination was full of doubt. She is not, like so many “true” stories found hither and yon, a “slut,” a “horny bitch” a “cunt,” a “whore” a “tramp,” or any other of the mysogynistic epithets that pepper this subculture. She is in fact fun-loving, elegant, intense, committed (yes, I said that) and quite thoughtful about her sexuality. There may exist women who actually do get “banged” by a “gang” of (inevitably) “Black bulls” in the “parking lot” of a “bar in the next town over so we could remain anonymous” and… oh yeah, “without a condom” (of course). I’ve never met any of those women and Stacey bears not the slightest resemblance to them. So as we gingerly tip-toed towards the flicker of a notion that she just might entertain something like this in our lives, the first complexity was that she simply couldn’t possibly consider it with a stranger. She bears lingering shame to this day of her single experience, at age 22, with a one-night stand; she has no intention whatsoever of adding to that. I understood this intuitively and she confirmed it explicitly, and thought that would bring a quick conclusion to these ponderances. She was surprised (and perhaps I was, as well, at myself) when I posited that I could tolerate, accommodate, perhaps, eventually, strange as it seemed, support the reality that she would be involving herself in genuine relationship. She pressed, to be certain: you understand what I mean? Dating. Seeing him. Spending the time one spends with a person to get to know him, to build trust and attraction, to develop the foundation for a physical relationship. I suppose I swallowed hard at the bit about seeing him. But of course, yes, no logic had even been available to support anything else. My fantasies had focused on a bed (and eventually a chair at the side of the bed), but knowing my wife it would never have not also involved restaurants and theaters and parks and drives and, well, all those things one does when one is dating.

God, what was I getting myself into? And yet. There was something mysteriously affecting about this realization. In some odd way it aroused me almost more than the purely sexual imaginings that had led us to this conversation. For weeks, we examined this, on and off, in our evenings, in our bed, at our dinner table. The suppositions and responses would ebb and flow, Stacey obviously intrigued, subtly eager, but cautious too, to test my thresholds. For my part, the more dangerous the emotional entanglement between Stacey and her imagined beau, the more pulse-elevating the discussion. Would I be hurt when she was on a date with him? What if my bravado was shattered by the real event? Was I really prepared to accept that she would be, as she carefully cloaked it,  engaging in all of the things that adults who are attracted to one another feel free to experience?

My reassurances eventually took hold. On a vacation trip 5 winters back, Stacey and I found ourselves confronted with an ideal opportunity to make our daydreams real, and we took it. If this community is interested I will share how we became “real” and what has happened in our lives over the ensuing five years. That will bring us up to date on our current limbo and impending escape from it.