“My First Encounter in the San Francisco Bay Area Swingers Community”

I was married 35 years when my husband finally figured out he was gay.  How could it have taken him so long?  His parents had to die first.  So now we are separated (and I finally understood what was wrong with our sex life all those years) and for the last two years, I have been despairing of ever having a sex life again, not that the old one was so great.  I tried Match.com and Yahoo Personals with no luck.  I kept thinking that I had to find the perfect mate and I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to get married again.

Finally, I realized that it was actually the sex that I was missing.  Not just the intercourse, but the touching, the connection with another person.  A friend who lives in another part of the country recently confided in me that he and his wife were swingers (what used to be called “wife swapping”).  I started thinking about that and researched it on the web and found what looked like a good web group, signed up and put up a very straight forward ad with a picture of me sitting in a restaurant:

Subject: Older BBW wonders if there is a place to find sexual pleasure again (BBW stands for Big Beautiful Woman, which is the politically correct way to say “fat”)

My Post: No sex with anyone (other than myself) since split with my husband. I am not getting any younger and who knows if/when the “perfect” relationship will come along. I have always loved sex with a man and would like to have some again. I am interested in fairly “vanilla” activities, but mostly love oral, both giving and getting.

Almost as soon as that got posted, I started getting a ton of e-mail and IMs (Instant Messages) on the site.  I started feeling overwhelmed.  Some of the e-mail was from people I clearly would not be interested in.  Many of the profiles only have pictures of men’s penises, or, as they are known – cock shots or dick pics.  Those I immediately pressed the “No Thanks” button, which is a very interesting feature of this website. 

When someone e-mails you on the website, you can respond, of course, but there is also this button that you can press that says “No Thanks”.  When you press it, an e-mail goes out to the original sender saying something like “Thank you for taking the time to write me.  Unfortunately, I am not interested at this point.  Best of luck to you in your adventures and have a wonderful day.”  This button really comes in handy.  It keeps you from saying very negative things.  For instance, when I got the e-mail with the subject heading: “How would you like a 30 year old cock?”  I just pressed that “No thanks” button, instead of hitting “reply” and saying the first thing that came to mind, which was, “Not if I have to take the asshole that’s attached to it”.  And when the e-mail came that said, “How would you like to just go down on me”.  I just pressed the “no thanks” button instead of saying, “How would you like to just go fuck yourself?”  See, it keeps things a bit less hostile.   

But there were a couple of people who interested me.  One in particular, sent me a picture of himself (his face and upper body with clothes on) and told me that he would be brief, since he knew that I was probably getting a lot of mail, but that he was interested in getting to know me better and asked me to check out his profile and see what I think.

This man sounded like a nice person and he was good looking too (so why was he interested in me?)  So I checked out his profile.  He was married and he and his wife were in a “poly” (open) marriage and his wife’s profile was on the website also.  They were a “full swap” couple (meaning they have intercourse with other people).  They swing alone and they swing together (meaning that sometimes they switch with another couple and also they play with individual people separately.) 

Every couple (and person) has their own rules, which are most of the time spelled out on the profile.  Some couples are “soft swap”, meaning that they do everything else, but don’t have intercourse with people other than their spouses.  One couple I saw on the site will only switch with another couple and only if all four people stay in the same room, so that they can watch each other.  The operative philosophy in the group as I see it is “respect”.  They are very clear that you have to respect other people’s boundaries.  You do nothing that the other person doesn’t want.  After exploring this website for a while it occurred to me that the people who had been in “the lifestyle” for a long time were some of the most “sexually sane” people I had ever come across.  Those that were married were devoted to their spouses, and they understood that what they were doing with other people was “play” with NSA (No Strings Attached).  They also appeared to have a whole friendship network within the swinging network.  

So, Johnny (the man I mentioned above) and I started e-mailing back and forth, asking questions of each other and eventually negotiating what we wanted the encounter to be like and the logistics of getting together and who would “host”.  We spoke on the phone once, before we met.  We went to my house for sex about an hour and a half after we first met.  So, he first e-mailed me on the 18th of the month and we had sex on the 22nd of the month.  The truly amazing thing about this is that the encounter with Johnny ended up being one of the most significant experiences of my life.  It was about as far away from what my concept of “anonymous sex” was as it could possibly be.  And yet it took place within this framework.

We agreed to meet at Starbucks in San Bruno.

So I walk into the Starbucks – now I know why Starbucks makes so much money.  People aren’t there for coffee.  They are there to hook up!  Every crappy date I ever had through Match.com or Yahoo Personals took place at a Starbucks.  And all the swingers are meeting at Starbucks for the “meet and greet” – which is the nice way of saying “let’s see if we really want to have sex with each other, or if we just want to have coffee and shake hands.”  So that’s how Starbucks makes all that money.  Howard (you know, the guy who started Starbucks), you are one smart guy.  Anyway, I digress.  I walk into Starbucks.  Now John had sent me a picture of himself – fully clothed – he IS a high class guy — so I already knew that he was a hunk.  But I walk into Starbucks and this absolutely gorgeous guy is smiling at me.  I look at him and I say in a small voice (because I couldn’t fuckin believe it!) “Johnny?”  He continues smiling and says “yes”.  Then he says to me, “How are you feeling?”  I said, “Fear and excitement are vying for first place”.  He already has his coffee, but he asked me if I wanted some coffee, but I said no.  Look, I was so nervous, I knew that if I put coffee or anything else in my stomach, it would go someplace I didn’t want it to go, if you know what I mean, and probably at the wrong moment, if you know what I mean.  So we sit down at a table outside and he starts talking a blue streak.  About his work, about his wife and her work, about his favorite entertainers.  And I was wondering, “What the hell is going on here?”  But he kept smiling at me.  And then, after a while of listening to him talk, I started relaxing and then I understood – he was trying to put me at ease — like I said, a high class guy.  So after I am relaxed, he said, “Would you like to sit here a little longer?”  “No”  “So, should I follow you home?”  So here was my response:  “You mean you are still interested?”  (I still couldn’t fuckin believe it!)  Luckily he said yes.  I gave him the Mapquest printout, just in case he lost me in traffic and we both pointed out our cars to each other so he could follow me.  How the hell I was able to drive home is beyond me!  You know, you have no idea who the people are in traffic with you.  You really need to be careful on the freeway.  You might be driving next to a conservative looking older woman who is leading a hot stud she just met to her house for as much touching, sucking, licking and fucking as she can get out of him.  People like her are probably dangerous and should be barred from driving on the freeway.  Again, I digress.  So we get to my house (amazingly, without incident on the freeway) and I will just skip over the “little boy’s room”, “little girl’s room” comments, where we went off to separate bathrooms to do whatever.  So then, when we were both finished with “whatever”, we meet in the living room and I lead him off to the guest room where I have set up a little area (maybe I should call it an altar to sex).  You know, an assortment of condoms, lots of lube (I am old, remember), some tic tacs (in case either of us is worried about our breath), a bottle of water (in case one of us wants to replenish some lost bodily fluids).  Oh, and I did have a box of latex gloves.  I thought, just in case he was into anal play…  But when I had asked the doctor I consulted whether I needed gloves for anal play, he said, “not unless you are planning to eat a pizza right after”.  Do they teach comedy in medical school?  Anyway, we get into the bedroom and he pulls me into an embrace and just holds me for a little while.  I was so scared I held onto him for dear life.  Then he asks me if he can start undressing me.  He was so polite.  I have to say that he did cop a feel of my breasts without asking first, but then, that was what we were there for, right?  So he takes my dress off and I stupidly said, “sorry, no sexy lingerie” (I am such a scintillating conversationalist).  I think he said, “that’s OK”.  I don’t really remember that well.  I was so incredibly frightened.  He was about to see my 61 year-old fat body and I was ready to be rejected.  I thought he would either laugh at me, look at me in disgust and/or run for the hills.  Meanwhile I was starting to undress him (he was helping a lot) and when I put my hands down into his underwear in the back and brought them around to the front, I got a huge shock.  Johnny, being the high class person he is, had never sent me a picture of his cock, so I had no idea.  You know it’s ironic.  My vagina had not had anything in it for over 5 years and it had pretty much forgotten what it was supposed to be doing.  Kind of like – “closed for business”.  So I was really hoping for a smaller cock to start with, kind of to ease myself back into the game, you know.  And this was the largest cock I had ever had any personal contact with in my life.  This was like God’s little joke, you know, “Hey, let’s see if you can handle this one, Ruth”.  So, of course, I said something stupid like, “Oh God, you’re huge!”  Very original, Ruth.  Anyway, back to my fear of rejection while he was undressing me.  He unhooked my bra and as he took it off and stepped back to look at me, I closed my eyes. I was afraid to see what I thought I would see in his face as he was looking at me.  He must have known I was scared – well duh, I had my eyes closed when most people would have had them open.  So he said something sweet and funny like “One of us has more clothes on than the other” as he took off my panties.  I was about to look away again, fearing what I would see in his face when I looked at him.  I was totally naked in front of this gorgeous naked man who was more than 20 years younger than me.  But, he sat down on the bed and he just looked at me, all of me, and his gaze settled at my crotch and this soft smile was on his face.  It was as if he were admiring a piece of fine artwork.  And my life changed.  No one had ever looked at me like that before.  Then he reached for my hand and pulled me onto the bed with him and made me feel even more wonderful.

Thank you Johnny for the incredible gift you gave me.  You taught me that every person’s body is a work of art unto itself.  And that pleasuring another person’s body and receiving pleasure from them is a wonderful way to spend some time – life changing even – and a hell of a lot more fun than playing bridge.