My second menage-a-trois was a time of both sexual adventure and domestic bliss.
Sexual Paradox - our websitePolyamory as the Spice of FidelityI was a shy, only child become a willowy male who met a mysterious beatnik American expatriate girl who was way ahead of me in the love stakes, having already had a string of heady relationships and sexual experiences, when I was still a gangling somewhat jealous virgin.
We married on the somewhat paradoxical basis that she could have other lovers should she wish later - an option encouraged by her father. Things were relatively idyllic for three years and we had our first two offspring, a son and a daughter.
Then she fell in love with one of our best friends. she was the experienced, confident, independent party and I was the anxious, dependent, paranoid party and it dragged our relationship down to the point where we split up for a short period, just as I began to have my first exploratory polyamorous relationship with a younger music student, who was a brilliant pianist.
My first double partnersThen the three of us came together again partly as a way of keeping the children together and looking after them as a family and we lived for a year and a half as a menage-a-trios. This led to a crazy period in the seventies where we held open free love house to a number of our hippie friends and pursued an ever increasing number of casual and intimate relationships, in a kind of race towards the full sexual charisma of loving or being loved by just about everyone we knew. Those we the innocent days when the worst disease we suffered was genital herpes.
It was at this point that I met Christine and she became an integral partner in my second double marriage, and we proceeded to have one, and later two, children together. My wife as the 'leading lady' was highly ethical about her relationships with both the other women and relations were friendly and conducive to a resourceful and positive family environment for our children. Four and a half happy adventurous, but chaotic, years ensued in relationship terms, in which we brought up the children together while pursuing a variety of strange affairs that eventually led to the breakup of all three of us.
My wife became involved with another of our close associates and became pregnant to him with whom she later had a second child all of whom have become an integral part of our extended family of adult offspring. Christine also became involved with another associate, just as I was heading off alone on my first sabbatical to wander India as a sadhu, and do research in Europe and the US - the ultimate full circle back to solo existence.
The simultaneous split ups with my two familial partners were very painful, but we agreed above all to look after the children together, with them able to come and go freely between us on neighbouring blocks of land, on an equal time-shared basis, after I returned from my year overseas. This kept the overall family intact and enabled it to become an even larger extended family, all of whom share a deep bond of love and commitment to one another, even to the third generation.
I continued to be polygynous by choice and entered into a third double relationship for 15 years or so with Christine and another partner. This was also fraught with tension caused by the two partners' reluctant and at best partial acceptance of one another, even when we sometimes had other male partners in common, leading after a couple of years to each having separate domains with me going to and fro between. This is an endless problem of polygynous marriages.
Eventually, after Christine and I had my fourth child together, my relationship with my other partner ended in overt terms, only to become a long drawn out smouldering clandestine affair - a decision I made after continuing tension, made to confirm my commitment to the partner with whom I was rearing a family, while still being faithful to the principle of being lovers with my other partner, as opportunity provided.
Eventually this situation led to separation, but was followed by a consensual open partnership with Christine, where it was possible to negotiate to have an outside sexual relationship, but only if ring fenced with total care for our health, by having 'pre-nuptial' STD tests of any potential outside partners to protect existing partners who could be harmed. This was an essential reaction to the HIV era and something we have never been prepared to compromise on since for all the casual habits of swingers, the tortured lifestyle choices of devoted polyamorists, let alone the unprotected clandestine affairs of more conventional people.
I have since had a small number of outside relationships to further a creative psychic and physical relationship with another person, not for the fulfillment of polyamorous sexual desires, but to live out fully an intimate creative relationship with a member of the opposite sex with whom I have had an emerging engagement.
The critical point in favour of open polyamory is that it makes it possible to be honest that you are entertaining an affair and to gain some acceptance of it from ones existing partner, establishing some trust around what is often a painful situation if only one partner is actively seeking a new relationship. Conventional monogamy has the almost inescapable pitfall that it leads to deceit and betrayal in the affairs of love and often the health of the affected parties, leading to divorce settlements, and acrimonious contests over custody.
Finally, for the last seven years, Christine and I have entered into a period of creative monogamy, in which we are each giving our full energy to our sexual relationship with one another and making it into a passionate saga of unforgettable experiences, whose ultimate peaks we are continually in the process of scaling to mutual oblivion. This has proved for both of us in our sixties to be the unleashed sexual high point of our whole lives. I am still inherently polygynous, as most men are liable to sew wild oats by evolutionary trait, but I sublimate this, through using mild pornography as Tantric exercises towards another bout of creative sexual reunion with the beloved.
Reproductive Passionate Love as the Holy Grail of ErosWe have a highly heterosexual view of sexuality that prizes Tantric complementation of female and male energies as manifesting the full completion with the alien exotic other. This is not just sex as erogenous gratification, but more of a cosmic fusion and annihilation, in which both the woman and the man play an active creative part in the inner mounting flame of love, as forthright as Krishna is to Radha and as topsy turvy as Kali is to Shiva.
Willendorff Venus meets Green ManIt also holds, as its full quintessence, reproductive fertilization, and the implicit capacity of sexuality to emanate the life force both psychically, energetically and in the capacity to get physically pregnant and to give birth to new life.
It worships the sexual differences between the two sexes, as fully manifesting the complementary nature of the Tao in its totality between wave and particle, mind and body, female and male, chaos and order and so on.
While it is true that many of the Tantric temples of India and Nepal, such as a the Lakshman temple at Khajuraho, have lower freezes depicting all the sexual postures and erotic perversions of which humanity is capable, from bestiality to anal and oral sex, the higher pinnacles depict the union of Shakti and Shiva, not just of two unisex people, gay, lesbian or coincidentally heterosexual, performing any act from sodomy to cunnilingus without discrimination, but the intimate complementarity of female and male cosmic principles, in reproductive lingam-yoni coitus, often surrounded by a supporting group of attendants.
Khajuraho upper and lower friezesIn today's epoch of consenting adult eros and the pursuit of simple gratification by any means, there is only a limited difference between heterosexual and homosexual eroticism because both engage the same spectrum of perverse erotic acts unrelated to the reproductive quest. There is a poetic irony in that heterosexual pornography is as engaged as gay male voyeurism in non-reproductive sexuality, from exploitative deep-throat fellatio to sometimes violent sodomy, as an expression of male sexual power.
It may well be that this is ancient - that some women throughout history have been prepared to subject themselves to any form of sexual concourse to give their man everything he desires and thus to hold on to him by letting him possess them utterly and completely, but it is rarely for their own sexual fulfillment or sexual autonomy that they do this. Female eros and particularly astute female reproductive choice takes a very different direction of its own, more likely to very discretely seduce and attract the most genetically endowed and capable man in sight on her own terms of ecstatic enticement.
Eros only makes sense if integrated into creative relationship with the deeper unifying truth of the fusion of the complementary principles of which the universe is composed in the burgeoning of the diversity of new life. This doesn't mean neglecting contraception, or denying women the right to reproductive choice. In fact it is founded on the principle that women, as the principal bearers of new life, must have reproductive sovereignty over their own autonomy and a degree of sexual choice that can't be made subject to male control.
The strategic preservation of female reproductive choice is why females have evolved to possess an ecstatic orgasm even though it is unnecessary for fertilization, why ovulation is concealed, and why women have become sexually attractive at all phases of their reproductive cycle.
It is because my beloved partner has pendulant flowing breasts which I have seen and tasted running with milk and an aromatically delightful copulin-filled vagina and I am fertilizing her fullness with my manhood to my oblivion with all the poly-orgasmic manifestations of the abundance of life flowing forth that affirm the sexual complementation is complete. It is also because the sexuality is implicitly reproductive that it fosters long-lasting meaningful relationships, related to family, the passage of the generations and thus the immortality of ongoing life.
Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing;
whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.
It is not self-love, or the love of self-natured sexuality, which is forever limited, because it ultimately seeks sameness and is thus narcissistic, even when one or other in a uni-sex relationship assumes the stylized roles of butch or doe, but the worship of the complete other in the overflowing fullness of their natural abundance.
The seeking of the complementary 'other' is at the evolutionary source of all sexuality, because in sexual reproduction we communicate only half our genes in an intermingling with the other's, and it is through the genetic differences between the two parents that each generation gains its adaptive strength and resistance to disease. This is why women are pheromonally attracted to men with complementary histocompatibility genes and resist the incestuous advances of close male relatives.
It is also a completion, by contrast with the sexually stereotypic extremes of male-exclusive or female exclusive sexuality, which despite its pretensions to a more overarching gender encompassing identity, tends to extremes of runaway male promiscuity or female nesting.
"There's a joke in the gay community that goes like this -
'What does a lesbian bring on her second date?' - 'A U-Haul'.
'And what does a gay man bring on his second date?' - "What second date?'
Reproductive passionate love is not in any way homophobic - it has no need to need to be for the very reason that it is complete, but it IS all-consumingly and overflowingly heterophilic, as Tao and Tantra, and as the Holy of Holies - the Song of Songs declare:
Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled:
for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.
I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh,
and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.
