An Open Marriage

Marriage was once sup¬posed to mean fidelity — that is, sex only with your spouse and no one else. But it no longer means that and probably never did. Even in the 1940s, the Kinsey Report found up to 40 percent of women and 90 percent of men having sex outside their marriages, and today the figures are even higher The real issue is not whether married couples have sex outside their marriages. Most do. The real issue is whether they are open with each other about it. When they are open about it, we might say they have an “open marriage.”

Several years ago open marriage burst on the scene as a revolutionary new life-style. Open marriage is different from swinging in that swingers usually go to events together as a couple. There they have sex with other swingers, after which they return to a monogamous life until the next swinging event. People in an open marriage consider themselves free to date other people independently of their spouse. Thus a man with an open marriage might have an ongoing affair with one other woman, or might sleep with various women, and a woman with an open marriage might sleep with various other men.

The first thought that comes to mind when hearing about open marriage is, What about jealousy? The original advocates of open marriage claimed that jeal¬ousy was not a natural human response, but rather was something we learn and that we can unlearn. Years of experimentation and a close look at other cultures suggest that they were wrong. Jealousy is natural and is not about to go away.

A recent survey showed that of all the people who have extramarital sex to¬day, only 15 percent tell their spouse about it. The other 85 percent have dis¬covered it’s better to keep their extramarital affairs quiet. What their spouse doesn’t know won’t hurt him or her. The first question that comes up in open marriage is jealousy. If, realistically, it is always going to be there, how do people handle it? To find out, we spoke to Mark and Edna, a couple who have had an open marriage for over five years. We asked them about jealousy.

“Ten years ago everybody was saying jealousy was something you could get over,” Mark began. “The result was that couples were often brutalizing one an¬other. The husband would have an affair. If his wife was upset about it, he told her there was something wrong with her for being jealous. She then tried to overcome her problem. The thing I have noticed about most of the people who worked on the theory that you can overcome jealousy is that they are now divorced.”

We asked what approach Mark and Edna have to jealousy. “A healthy respect for it,” replied Edna. “Right,” continued Mark. “If Edna is upset about something, that’s not the right time for me to see an¬other woman. If she is worried about her weight, it’s not a good idea for me to say: Hey, Edna, when are you going to do something about your weight? By the way, I’ll be home late on Thursday. I have a date with Judith.’ Edna might not react right away, but the long-range result can only be disaster.

“A better approach would be something like: ‘Edna, you’re really looking great these days. I’m tied up with Judith on Thursday, but how about us doing something special on Friday evening?’”

We asked Mark about his affair with Judith. “She was a friend of Edna’s before we got married. She’s really into opera and so am I. Edna hates opera. So Judith and I go to the opera about once a month, and we usually go back to her place for sex afterward. We have our little rituals. First she showers and then I shower and we get under the covers together. I’m really into her breasts. She has large breasts. Edna doesn’t particularly like me to suck on her breasts and I like to do that, so I pay a lot of attention to Judith’s breasts. Sometimes when we fuck she comes before I do, so then I withdraw from her vagina and straddle her and she squeezes her breasts together and I push my penis between them and move back and forth and I come between her breasts. If I’m hot enough I shoot all the way to her face and she catches it in her mouth.”

“Sounds pretty gross to me,’ commented Edna. “That’s why I do it with Judith and not with you,” replied Mark. Buddy and Sally are a really cute young couple. They are full of life and seem to enjoy everything they do. Their first two years of marriage were mono¬gamous, but they enjoyed sex too much to keep it that way. Sally describes a recent affair. “I teach elementary school, and since the principal lives down the street, we car pool. He’s married too, and he’s real good looking. He and his wife don’t have an open marriage, he just cheats. He can’t control himself, and I’m not about to help him.

“He was really nervous about it the first time. He slipped his hand onto my leg while he was driving and tried to make it look like an accident. I slipped my hand between his legs. I had been hot for him for a month, and I was waiting for him to make a move. I thought he was going to drive the car up onto the sidewalk, he was so surprised by my response.

“That afternoon while driving me home he asked if he could take me somewhere for a bite to eat. I suggested we go to my place, since Buddy was still at work, and I could make some sandwiches. We hardly got into the living room before we were both at each other.

“I got my panties off and he got his pants open and his dick out. I lay back on the sofa and he pulled my dress up and away we went. I was really wet and it felt good after all that time. He was so excited that he came right away. He was all apologetic about it, but I said to never mind, that I would fix it, and I got him on his back and took his limp dick in my mouth. It was all sticky from the two of us, but I sucked it clean and kept on sucking while I reached into his pants and got his balls out. I could feel him getting harder while I sucked on him. It didn’t take long. But I wasn’t going to let him come in my mouth. I wanted him inside me. “He got on top of me again, and this time he con¬trolled himself better. He was really good, with long, slow strokes, going in real deep and not bumping me hard or anything. I just lay back and let him do it to me with those long, slow strokes. Not like you, Buddy,” she said, turning to her husband. “You’re fast and nervous. You should learn to slow down. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, he was fucking me real slow, and pretty soon I could feel it build up inside me like I was going to pop soon, and I did. I had a real noisy —one. It was a good thing nobody else was around! “He didn’t come, though. He said he liked it so much when I was sucking him, and his wife won’t do that, and could I make him come with my mouth. I said I’d love to, I just wanted to be sure he made me come first. I wasn’t going to get left hanging out to dry without coming during this whole thing.

“So I went down on him again. He was really big and somewhat soft even with his erection, and I liked having him in my mouth. I ran my tongue all around the head and then moved up and down on the shaft, sucking real hard and holding his baggy balls in my hand, and he came, shooting against the back of my mouth. I thought I was going to choke, there was so much of it. It just kept coming out. And it was the second time he had come in less than a half hour. He sure had a lot of stuff in him. No wonder he has five kids.

“He just couldn’t get enough of me for the first month, and I had to keep sucking him off like that. Now it’s not so bad. He comes in when he drops me off every other Thursday and we fuck and I suck him before he goes home. He tells his wife he’s on a committee that meets every other Thursday I don’t know how long he can get away with it. One of these days she’s going to spot his car.” We asked Buddy how he felt about his wife’s extra¬curricular activities every other Thursday. Did it bother him while he worked at the brewery, knowing what she was doing?

“No,” he replied, “but I don’t know if it would matter if it did. Sally is so full of sex, she’s going to do it no matter what I think. But I have no complaints. It takes a little pressure off me. On those Thursday nights she’s satisfied if I fuck her only once. The rest of the week it’s two or three times a night.” We asked if Buddy also has outside sex.

“Yes, but not as much as Sally. Her principal is just one of her boyfriends. There are a couple of women I see every month or so, which is enough for me. Actu¬ally, with all the sex I have with Sally, I don’t have much left. My favorite thing to do when Sally is out on a date at night is to go over to Becky’s house and watch TV and make out a little. We don’t even get our clothes off, just sort of fool around.” For most people today, an open marriage is not a long-term life-style, but rather part of a transition or a period of experimentation. Harold and Ginger were married at eighteen. Neither of them had slept with anyone else before their marriage. “After a few years of being married and observing all the sex going on around me, I began to wonder if we were missing something,” Ginger said. “We really didn’t know much about sex, and other than straight fucking we really didn’t try things. I had read about oral sex and stuff, but we never did it. After a while I got up the nerve to talk to Harold about it and dis¬covered he felt the same way. We discussed it for a few months to fully explore all our feelings, and then decided to open up our marriage. Harold said I should go first, since he didn’t want to be responsible if something went wrong. So I did.

“It didn’t take long. My boss had been making none-too-subtle hints for months, and I just let him know it would be OK. Except we couldn’t figure out where to go. We couldn’t use his house or mine, since we both have kids, and I felt a motel was too tacky, so we ended up on the table in the Xerox room after everyone else left. It was fun. He was real nervous someone would find us, and wanted to keep his clothes on—just open his fly—but I wouldn’t stand for it. I made him take everything off, and I did too. And there we were, as naked as could be, on the table in the Xerox room.

“I guess he wanted to be sure I came, so he went down on me with his mouth. Harold never did that, and at first I couldn’t see why he wanted to lick my pussy, but then it felt so nice and made me tingle all over. He kept doing it until I came. It was the first time I ever came that way. Then I asked him if I could make him come with my mouth, and would he show me how. He told me to be careful not to bite on it with my teeth and showed me how to get the pressure just right. I really got into it, moving my mouth up and down on it.

“Then he said we could do it to each other at the same time. I asked how, so he showed me what he called sixty-nine. I was on my back and he was on top of me. His face was between my legs licking me and his crotch was over my face, his balls hanging down and his thing in my mouth. I loved it, it was so exciting, and all in the Xerox room like that. We both came that way and he came in my mouth, which was wild. I had never tasted it before.

“I really liked that sixty-nine thing and I taught it to Harold right away that night and now we do it all the time.”

We asked how they liked their open marriage. “We did it a lot for about a year, and now we don’t do it much anymore,” Ginger said. “We did it because we felt we were missing something by getting married so early and never even having dated any¬one else. We wanted to experiment and learn new things. We sure learned a lot. It was like taking a post¬graduate course. We learned about oral sex and vibrators and all kinds of sex toys. Our sex life together is much more interesting now.”