Portrait Of An Open Marriage

She wasn't the first woman I’d been with. When my husband and I began dating, I told him that I was bisexual. "I don't care who you were with before," he told me. "But once it’s just you and me, it's just you and me." And that’s why—as lovely and sweet as my affair with Artist Girl was—it was awful, too. I felt sick about lying to my husband, sick about wanting to be with her, sick for not just calling it off—or avoiding it in the first place.

I thought hard about how I had gotten there. At first, I figured that my being with her really was about my bisexuality, about a part of me that I simply couldn't brush aside. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t true: It was about wanting more sex than my husband could offer, and sex different from that which any one person could provide.

My relationship with Artist Girl ended very, very badly. One night while in bed with her husband, she told him about us, foolishly thinking it would "turn him on." It didn't. He was furious and threatened to tell my husband. I knew I had to tell him myself. When I confessed, he was crushed, more because I had lied to him than because I had slept with her. I cried and cried, wondering if I had destroyed my marriage, if he would leave me, but also wondering if I would ever be happy, ever be sexually satisfied, ever find a way to make this work.

We didn't talk about it much for several years. He couldn"t. I would ask him once in a while if he was "OK," and he would tell me he was fine. Eventually, I believed him. I was keeping my nose clean, and we were bumping along—hitting rough patches, but bumping along. We had an adequate sex life; probably pretty darn good by some standards. Still, there were always things I wanted that I simply couldn’t get from him.

"I want you to talk dirty to me," I told him. "To tie me up. To attack me in the middle of the day on the kitchen floor." Dirty Talk Saved My Relationship

"I can’t, baby," he'd say, drawing me into his arms. "I love you."