The Green Eyed Monster

I haven't felt like writing for the past three months due to some tough times in swinger land.

What is the number one risk that we face in this lifestyle (aside from cooties of course)?

Jealousy!
Yep, it sucks... and I caught a serious case of it that temporarily rocked the foundations.

The Cause?
Definitely a blurring of boundaries. I got all worked up into believing that I needed to just pretend everything was OK and take one for the team, but it totally backfired and set us more than a few steps back.

With boundaries—what one is comfortable with—you can't always know what they are until they've been crossed. I have ideals of how I want to be, but in this case my ideals—and my rational self—were seriously clashing with my gut feelings. And those gut feelings wrestled my rationale self to the ground, spat on it, and kicked it in the face.

Jealousy is such a primal emotion.
I imagine it as one of the older emotions in the development of humans, in fact way before we could be considered humans. I've seen cats get jealous.

For mammals in general, I suspect jealousy serves as a function to keep a mating pair together until nature sees fit. It could be argued that jealousy still serves that function for humans, but it sure gets in the way of "fun"! But anyway, I digress.

Why did I get jealous?
As I said above, my boundaries were crossed. We talked and made up. And then they were crossed again.

But I blame myself. I wasn't assertive enough, and did not spell out exactly what things I wanted to stop. I say 'exactly' because it is important for anyone reading to understand that you can say something, feel that the other person understands, and yet if you haven't totally spelled it out, there may still be room for interpretation.

As well, I was telling only Mr. Fine, and not communicating with our friends. This wasn't fair, as they had no idea how serious things were and had no opportunity to alter their behaviour.

What we came up with
We all finally talked about, cleared the air, and decided that we want to maintain a same room only policy (ha, that makes it sound like such a business arrangement!)

We agreed it is important to 'us' to keep it as a group activity, a pile of bodies, and a very interactive event. Full swap is fine, as long as us couples stay in somewhat close proximity, ideally at an arms reach.

And the thing that bothered me most about this fiasco—the actions that led to my jealousy—were not about 'sex'. On the sliding scale between sex and love, I saw things that I interpreted as being closer to the 'love' end of the scale.

BTW, I'm not making accusations that that is what happened at all! I am saying that that is what I saw and interpreted, and hence my fight or flight reaction.

Things get confusing for me when affection is displayed outside the realm of playtime. It takes it from fantasy into reality, and I start to feel threatened. There are pros and cons to meeting great people that you want to spend time as friends with, as well as have sex with. However ultimately, I think we are more drawn to the pros, and are all mature enough to be able to continue and enjoy it.

Anyway, I just had to get this off my chest, so that I could return to blog-land. I'm sorry I had to bring reality into my fantasy blog, but hey, it's my blog!