Loosening Up Bk. 02 Ch. 10-14

Pam was home and greeted him with a full body hug and kisses. "Welcome home from the wars, honey."

Heather repeated the warm welcome, and then Matthew got some attention. Julie then appeared, and last was Alice. Dave announced, "I feel suitably welcomed home. Let me go change. I also have some news. My first executive seminar is going to be in three weeks, for a week, at some resort in Sedona, Arizona."

"Wow, that's cool. What an honor."

"I don't consider it an honor to be called away from all of you. I miss you all during the day every day I'm at work. This'll take me away for the nights, too; and not just for the five days of the course. I have to arrive on Saturday, socialize on Sunday with the other students, and the attend the course right through the end of Friday, and that means staying over into Saturday before flying home."

Heather teased, "But maybe you'll meet some hot babes who can help you stay warm at night. January in Arizona is not like the summer when the temp registers in three digits."

"Unlikely," Dave said over his shoulder as he headed off to change into casual clothes.

When he came back to his own living room, he found the others had gone to the core, so he walked through the short corridor to the circle corridor around the entire hub, and then from there into the core living room. He took time to note his impending trip and absence on the large white board.

There was another round of handshakes, hugs, and kisses. The dinner team had produced a pot roast, Caesar salad, fruit cup, and sherbet for dessert. There had been a concerted effort by most of the Circle to eat healthy and avoid heavy sweets that packed on the pounds. Additionally, Dave noted that more and more of the Circle members were using the gym partway around the core towards the pool house and pergola.

Dinner was a lively discussion in part about the seminar Dave would be attending: High Potentials Leadership Program. Dave noted, "They fly the faculty in to run the seminar. It's not the same people everyday except for one program facilitator and one key faculty member – a woman, I think, from some august institution of learning. I guess there are some others around to help things go off without a hitch. I know we do case studies as part of the course. I'm supposed to come out with more leadership skills."

"How many will be attending?" Sean asked.

"I think about twenty or thirty from all over the world. I saw the list of attendees, and the companies are from all over: Britain, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, China, and then all over the U.S., especially California."

Alice posed, "And the mix of men and women?"

"From the names, it looks like two-thirds or so are men. Business is still very tilted in that way. Only a decade ago, it might have been all men. There's some progress being made. This country is way behind many others, yet thinks it's so progressive."

The group discussed the international perspective that Dave would be exposed to during his week away, and guessed at the various topics that would be covered in the leadership course. He also got teased about how desirable he'd be to the women and how he'd have a different one in bed with him every night. He laughed at the fantasies, and commented that their suppositions were highly unlikely.

A few Saturdays later, Dave left the Circle enclave and started the trip from Florida to Arizona. He flew into Phoenix, and then a short hop in a smaller plane to the Grand Canyon Airport. He'd never seen the canyon, and the flight got right down and personal with some of the beautiful gorges on the approach to landing. The views were spectacular.

As he got off the small commercial jet, he spotted several other people near his own age looking perplexed about what to do next.

Dave walked up to two women that seemed to be comparing notes, "Might you be going to the Leadership Program?"

"Yes. Thank you, we are. I'm Tan Ching and I met Holly Iverson here on the plane. I'm from Hong Kong, but I work in Silicon Valley."

Holly said, "I'm with a VC firm in Chicago. This weather is positively balmy compared to what I left behind this morning."

"Let's see if we can share a cab or whether there's someone meeting the plane to pick us up."

Just on the other side of security, a young man stood with a sign saying 'Leadership Program.' They joined three others and the six got on a small mini-bus and were driven to the sprawling and very western Sedona Resort and Conference Center. There they checked in and got general directions to their wing of the hotel as well as directions relating to the next day's activities.

Dave discovered that his room was between Tan's and Holly's, as they all came to a stop with their roll-on luggage and looked at each other. Holly said to the other two, "Meet in the bar in ten minutes for a drink, and then I hope you'll join me for dinner."

Tan and Dave responded, and he went into an upscale and nicely appointed hotel room with a southwestern motif. He clicked on the TV and was pleased to see that he could not only record programs, but also tune into a number of private stations that showed the various sights around Sedona. He queued up some news broadcasts to record, and then left for the bar. Part of the value from the course was building a network and friends.

Tan was already at a table in the bar; Dave joined her. Holly arrived a few minutes later. After getting some drinks, the trio spent an hour talking about their companies and jobs. Dave felt a little under-classed coming from a utility; his job didn't seem as exciting as supporting burgeoning startups with a huge market potential, or in Tan's case, working to get driverless cars on the road.

As the second round of drinks started, the conversation shifted to their personal lives and background. Tan talked about coming to the U.S. to study engineering at Stanford, and then getting caught up in the driverless car project during graduate school while she worked for Google. She was living with a guy in Palo Alto, but was careful to point out that the relationship was nothing serious.

Holly was single, but dated. She'd done several papers on the success rate of venture capital firms in the high tech industries. She made a lot of contacts in her research, and also shared her paper with them after she'd graduated. As a result, she got several offers from those firms to work with them. She chose one, and had been working with the fledgling management teams of those startup ventures. She lived inside the loop in Chicago.

Dave talked about the southern utility, his past work on engineering the high and ultra-high voltage lines that managed power all over the southeast, and then his month of new experience since his promotion.

Dave also mentioned that he and his wives had just moved into a unique cohousing project, and that he was on the board of the project. There was a young child, too; that loved the swimming pool. He hadn't even been aware of his slip of the tongue.

Both Tan and Holly heard the use of plural.

Holly held her hand up and said, "Wives? As in plural? What do you mean? What's the story there?"

"Errr, I live with more than one woman and we consider ourselves married. One of them is my legal wife."

"Just how many women?"

"Errr, four including my legal wife."

"Is it religious or something? A cult?" Tan asked in a slightly teasing tone.

"No, not at all. We just love each other." Dave fished his cellphone from his pocket and called up a photo taken at Christmas when they were all together around the Christmas tree in the core." He showed it to the two women."

"My God, they're all beautiful," Holly declared. Without asking permission, she started to scroll through the adjacent pictures in the album Dave had called up. Dave tried to remember what was there.

Holly asked, "Who are the other people?"

Dave responded, "The other members of our cohousing project. We call it the Circle; we're all Circle members."

"Holy shit!" Holly exclaimed. She quickly passed the phone to Tan. Dave watched her eyes get large.

"What are you looking ... Oh, shit. You shouldn't have been scrolling through my pictures. You weren't supposed to see those."

Holly said, "But you were all nude. Some people in the background were fucking. Just what is the Circle, you just mentioned?"

"Just what I said. A group of neighbors that decided we liked each other enough to want to live close to each other and share some housing resources. I'm sorry you saw those other pictures."

Tan chuckled, "I can't unsee them. How many people are in your co-op?"

Dave explained as he tried to put his phone away, "There are eight men and eleven women right now."

Holly said, "So that sexy picture showed just about everyone."

Dave said in a near whisper, "I guess. What do you think the weather will be here in Sedona this week?"

Holly ignored his shift, and made a jump, "And given what was happening in the background, I assume you are very open with each other – sexually open."

Dave blushed, "We are. How about we change the subject?"

Tan asked, "You said you'd just moved into your house at the Circle. Is it new?"

"Yes, we built it to accommodate my family and some room for growth. There are nine other homes on our Circle, and they all became available at about the same time. Right now we have one empty house that's not owned except by our cohousing association. So, my neighbors and I are just getting used to living really close to each other."

Holly got snarky, "Like as close as those two couples in the background of that group photo?"

Dave tried to ignore the comment. Tan was laughing.

Dave tried to put a lid on things, "Look, I live in a polyamorous family, nested within a larger polyamorous family. Can we just leave it at that?"

Tan said, "I want to see the picture gallery again, please." She held out her hand.

Dave reluctantly passed her his iPhone, hoping this would put an end to things. Holly shifted so she and Tan could look at the pictures together. Tan started to scroll. Dave still couldn't remember what else was on his phone. He normally didn't keep any salacious shots there. Somebody must have picked up his phone and taken pictures with it that he didn't know about for them to have been left there.

The cocktail waitress asking whether the trio wanted to order dinner right there in the bar interrupted the review of photos. They did, so she passed out menus and then left them for a few minutes.

Holly passed the phone back to Dave after they'd gone through about two hundred photos.

Dave said, "I don't know what's on there. One of my friends apparently used the phone to take some candid photos at our Christmas and New Year's Eve parties."

"THOSE are positively the best fucking parties I've ever seen," Holly announced. "I wish I lived in your Circle. I may never be happy again until I visit you for a month or two."

Dave rolled his eyes. "Look, it's really not that big a deal. We all love each other."

"And love to fuck. I think one picture showed your wife Alice having relations with some other guy. You're all right with that?"

"She probably did, and yes, I'm fine with it. Given the time and accounting for time zones, she may be with him right now, or one of the other men in our Circle."

"What are the guiding principles of your Circle, or is that a silly question?" Holly asked in a serious tone, seeking to understand.

"No, it's a good question." Dave thought for moment and responded, "First, we all see the world as a friendly and loving place, and come at every situation with that as our overarching paradigm. We also believe that consenting adults can do what they want about sex. We do not believe that a wife or girlfriend is a possession that may or may not be shared with someone else; no one is.

"We treat men and women quite equitably. We're not high on monogamy or exclusivity, and we don't think that you have to be limited to a heterogeneous couple to have a valid relationship. We believe a person has an infinite capacity to love, and that the more people they love the more love they have to give. We believe in safe sex, I might add. We think that sex is fun, especially in a group setting. We think there are such things as soul mates – that's plural, and that a great relationship is based around intimate understanding of each other in mind, body, and spirit. Intimacy need not include sex, and having sex need not imply intimacy. We think you're responsible for your own happiness; it's no one else's job but yours and depends a lot on your view of the world and how you interpret what happens. We also happen to believe that you can make a commitment to another person without having to marry them.

"Last for now, we believe in an open marriage or open relationship, and that one purpose of each relationship is to help each other grow and evolve in mind, body, and spirit."

Tan and Holly had been hanging on every word. Tan asked, "And you all agreed to all that you just said?"

"More or less. I'm sure we have slight differences here and there, the same way men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Fundamentally though, that's the basis for our behavior and for the entire Circle. There's a lot of love in our group."

"And no one gets jealous?"

"It doesn't appear that way. I've passed through that stage. That's why knowing Alice might be with one of my other friends or just having fun with my other wives or both doesn't upset me. I hope she's having a good time and enjoying lots of orgasms. The way I feel is sometimes called compersion; it might be considered the opposite of jealousy."

"Oh, you are such a dream husband," Holly declared in a tone expressing awe. She stroked his arm.

Dave shook his head, "No, I'm just a guy who worked to loosen up, and then not be locked into thinking the way everybody else does about some fundamental things. Just because a billion people believe something, doesn't make it the only option or even the right answer for everybody. Some of the people I work with, the executives, know about my home situation. A couple have told me that's why I was promoted and that they hope I apply the same thinking to the jobs they see for me in the future."

"Breaking out of the current paradigm?" Tan asked.

"Exactly. I've already done that in a couple of situations."

"Can you give an example?"

"The utility industry is notorious for wanting to string wires everywhere, but there are things like generators – small ones, that might be more cost effective in some situations than stringing miles of wire on a hundred poles to deliver service. We had an isolated resort area that needed power. I suggested we give them generators and pay for the propane to power them, instead of the multi-million dollar expenditure to do what we've always done with poles and wires. Overnight, we saved most of that money. I got a lot of praise for thinking outside the box or even throwing the box away."

"And you've obviously done that in your personal life?" Holly asked. "What if you met someone you felt attracted to and wanted to be intimate with them?"

"It's not a big deal, except to me and that person. I would want to adhere to our safe sex practices unless there was an STD test result we trusted that negated the need for condoms, for instance. I would want to make sure that we were aligned about why we were doing what we were doing, and manage any errant expectations."

"What do you mean?" Tan asked.

"Say the situation was about you and me. I'm married to four women, and interact with seven others. I'm not about to leave any of them or my home situation for a monogamous, long-term relationship. If that is your expectation then we have a major disconnect that we should address before we go any further so neither of us gets hurt or feels bad about our interaction."

Holly said, "But if we both like each other and just wanted a temporary hook-up, and we all felt that way, then we'd be aligned and you'd go ahead and have sex with us?"

"Sure. Besides, you are both delightful partners and pretty to boot. I'd want to make sure you didn't feel possessive about me, and that if I was with one of you the other didn't get their nose out of joint, or if I met someone else, say at the Program, and spent some time with them that neither of you would feel upset. You need to put the concept of compersion in play."

"Compersion? You mentioned that a moment ago. I was going to look it up."

Dave responded, "A state of happiness and joy you feel when another person experiences happiness and joy, for example, when someone you love or care about is enjoying another relationship, including the physical acts associated therewith."

Tan said, "So, if I see you making love with Holly or someone else, I'd feel good because I'd hope you were having a really good time and a good experience."

"Well understood. Compersion has often been called the opposite of jealousy, as I said."

Both women nodded. Tan said, "I like that concept in a big way."

Holly probed, "About your home life, and I know I'm being nosy, but do you sleep together?"

"We have a custom bed that's over twelve feet wide that holds all five of us, and even a guest or two. When a spouse or partner is away, the one left behind often joins one of the other singles, couples or family units for companionship and loving."

Holly nodded, "That's sweet. I guess that's the right word for what I'm hearing. I wish I would stumble onto something like that and try it. I'd have to see how it felt to be on the 'inside' as one of parties instead of just hearing about it and thinking it sounds erotic and cool."

Tan said, "Yeah, it's not exactly what you say on a first date either. 'Hey, I'm thinking about an open relationship or a group marriage, you interested?' I bet that would be a showstopper for a lot of men."

Holly said, "What's the difference between what you do and a group of swingers? I think I know what you'll say, but tell us."

"Love," Dave said. "The deeper level of caring between us. One of the couples in our group, Ty and Dori, were into swinging as our neighborhood group grew closer and closer together and became more intimate. They pretty much stopped going to the monthly gatherings for a while, but are now reconsidering just as a fun activity. They even asked about bringing some of their better friends to one of our Saturday parties, just so they could see and feel what our group is like, especially when we get horny and sexual."

Holly said, "Nonetheless, what you're doing could be considered swinging."

Dave pondered a moment, "Yeah, I suppose it could. Some days, I admit, it feels exactly like that."

Tan said, "You said something about loosening up; what did you mean by that?"

Dave chuckled, "Just that my wife Alice and I were so uptight about sex until a couple of years ago. I never would have dreamed or fantasized about our current lifestyle back then. We were rigid, structured, dutiful, and obligated, as taught by church, parents, schools, and the media. There was only one 'right' arrangement: man, woman, two-point-one kids, dog, cat, white house, picket fence, and so on. One of our friends helped us break out of that mold. We're all so glad she did."

As David talked, he realized that he was being exceptionally open with his two new friends. One part of him thought he'd never see these women again after this week and the class. Another was just drawn in by their own friendly nature and curiosity.

"How long did it take?" Holly asked.

"To realize we needed to break out about twenty-eight years; to get started from realization, about two weeks; to move from simple steps one might describe as risqué to sex with others about three months; and to move from there to the love and deep feelings in our Circle, about another four or five months."