Moving from just extra-pair sex to a world of atypical love and connection

When my husband James and I opened up our long-term monogamous marriage to other lovers several years ago, we made the decision to only see other people together. We were in the midst of a very connected and sexually exploratory phase and we wanted to see what adding in other partners might bring to the mix. We weren’t trying to “spice up our love life” and we certainly weren’t bored with each other, so it made perfect sense to date only as a couple. …

It’s quite possible to love more than one person at a time

One of the misconceptions about polyamory that I find the most frustrating is the persistent belief that this relationship style is at heart an inability to commit to any one person. This is a belief rooted in the notion that since you can really only love one person at a time, any intimate involvement with more than one person must be superficial and focused solely on the sexual component.

First of all, I’d posit that polyamory is actually the opposite of a fear of commitment and in fact is the ability to commit to more than one person at a time, on a variety of levels. Not every committed relationship has to look exactly the same and have all the same components in order to be a true commitment. For example, I live with one of my life partners and don’t even see the other one in person anymore since we now live far apart. …

Taking time away from everyday life in order to fully process hard stuff

Intentional grieving: Creating time and space to just totally feel your loss. “Intentional grieving allows us to listen deeply to our hearts instead of reacting mindlessly to our emotions.”

It was a tough holiday season this year, the first one without my mother, who passed away in early September at the age of 89. But it was also my first holidays living in a world without parents, or any family of origin to speak of. They are all gone. I’m the only one who is left. No cousins even, just a few second cousins whom I like but am not particularly close to. As much as I miss my mom, I think that part has been the hardest to adjust to. I’m not just an orphan (at age 56) but someone who is grappling with a whole new paradigm that was unexpectedly much more destabilizing than I anticipated it would be. …

“Great,” I thought to myself the other day when I first learned of a new Netflix movie about an open relationship. “Here’s finally a story about people like me.” But it turns out the only thing worse than very rarely seeing the kind of life you live depicted in a movie is to see it grossly misunderstood and judged. Newness turned out to be nothing more than a morality play warning people of how vapid and doomed to failure open relationships are, and presenting the relative boredom (as they depicted it) of monogamy to be worth the price of love.

Newness, which started out very promisingly is about Martin, a divorced pharmacist who is still hung up on his ex-wife and Gabriella (Gabi), a physical therapy assistant who admits to getting bored easily with anything that isn’t new. They get together one night through a dating app that allows users to indicate whether they are looking for a relationship or just a hook-up. …

Our favorite pieces published in Sensual this past week, plus a featured writer

This week in Sensual: An Erotic Life was a hot one for erotica, with lots of new writers and great sexy stories published. And we’ve also got our usual array of compelling essays and sensual poetry. Below are links to the highlights.

Our newsletter format is changing slightly, coming out now on Sunday afternoons rather than on Friday afternoons.

Beginning this week we will be featuring one writer in each newsletter, showcasing his or her work and celebrating that writer’s contributions to the Sensual community. …

The crowd who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday came from a variety of factions, from Proud Boys and other White Nationalists to more garden variety Trumpists, but what they had in common was that they were overwhelmingly white men, men who feel their cultural centrality slipping away as minorities and women continue to gain ground.

Documentarian, Jackon Katz has pointed out that many white men feel disenfranchised as women gain more equality and power, and the country becomes more racially and ethnically diverse. Trump says to these men, “we celebrate you, and the other side hates you.”

The cult-like sway that Donald Trump holds over some people is directly related to his total embodiment of the 1950s era masculinity that these men so fear losing — so much so that they would prefer to overturn democracy rather than have that sense of identity and place in society challenged. They not only were prepared to storm and trash the Capitol but were ready to hang Vice President Mike Pence as a traitor for refusing to carry out Trump’s orders to subvert the orderly transition of the presidency to Joe Biden, who won the election by over 7 million votes. …

If you had any doubt about that before, you shouldn’t any more

“This is a direct reaction to the past six months,” said a friend of mine about the attacks on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, an attack which President Trump invited and encouraged. I think my friend meant that it was an understandable if not entirely justified response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that erupted in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. …

Not just for me, but for many people from ancient times onward

I have to confess, I have a bit of a spanking obsession. The mere thought of being put over my lover’s knee to have my bare ass swatted by him engenders an erotic buzz. (I’ve not yet been spanked by a woman, but I hope to be someday.) Looking at images of people being spanked as I did research for this story raised my blood pressure more than a few points. Spanking appears in most of the erotica that I write because I find it so incredibly arousing. …