After Friday Night

Neither John nor Sandra could ever decide if the following Friday was the day their marriage died, or whether it was dead on 'Michael Friday' and had just been walking around for a month like a zombie. Whatever the case, whether death or simply coup de grace, it happened on that Friday.

Sandra had taken to ringing John at his office every morning and afternoon. Ostensibly to profess her love for him, but actually to make sure he was there. Likewise, John kept a close eye on the tracker when he was in the office but rang Sandra regularly when he wasn't. On the Friday morning, as they were discussing their days, John told of having an off-site meeting all afternoon. At one of the breaks about 2:00 p.m., he called Sandra's office, only to be told she'd gone home early. John thought of Sandra's elevated mood at breakfast and leapt to a conclusion. He made his excuses and sprinted back to his office and logged on to his computer. The tracker was at home. Packing his laptop in its carry bag, he hurried to his car.

Parking down the street from his house he slipped into the back door. There was no sign of Sandra downstairs. He crept up the stairs with straining ears. If she was there alone, he could always sneak out again. If she wasn't, then, well, who knows what would happen.

John was just outside the bedroom door before he heard the unmistakable sound of the shower running. That was unusual; Sandra normally showered in the morning. His heart raced with a surge of adrenaline. With three and a half hours before he normally got home, what was Sandra up to? Was she getting ready to go out and meet her new, big-dicked friend or was he coming here? What had changed? Was it the sexual frustration that was driving Sandra or was it, as he'd thought all along; that a further episode was inevitable right from the start?

What to do? If he confronted Sandra now, he would never know. After about a minute's thought, John decided to secrete himself in his closet to see what transpired. He opened the closet door and shuffled things to the side to make room. He was about to enter his hiding place when an incongruous sound caught his attention. After years of knowing her, he knew what noises Sandra made when she was approaching a good orgasm. That's what he heard. With a heavy heart, he walked in the bathroom and put his hand on the shower curtain just as another loud groan came from within.

For once in the last three weeks, John had surmised correctly. Sandra had been sexually excited since she'd come home at five-thirty the previous night. Waiting for her in the post box was the item she'd ordered at the lingerie party, weeks before. Frustrated by weeks of obsessive thought, but little sexual release, she'd been totally unable to concentrate at work and had excused herself.

Suddenly the shower curtain was thrust aside. Sandra froze in mid thrust. John's eyes were drawn to the dildo in Sandra's right hand. It was black, nearly twelve inches long, and very fat.

Just like that, John and Sandra's once perfect marriage ended.

Could it have survived without mutual respect? Perhaps. Could it survive the knowledge Sandra would never be truly satisfied with anything John had to offer? Well, John, for one, was too embarrassed to hang around and find out.

EPILOGUE

Neither John nor Sandra seriously considered giving their marriage another chance after that. They both came to the conclusion, in much the same way that a paramedic, coming on an accident scene where the victim's head is a couple of body lengths away from its natural home, considers starting CPR—pointless.

Like I said, neither Sandra or John could ever decide at what point their marriage ended but I reckon it was after that Friday night.

The End

Now lighten up.

A guy goes into a public urinal and stands next to another guy he vaguely knows and flops it out. To relax himself a little and to play one of those little games some men like to play, he says to his neighbour, "Brrr, the water's cold today." Without batting an eyelid, his neighbour replies, "Yes, and deep as well."

Afterword

The following has absolutely nothing to do with the above story. It details the problems I had researching the subject.

When I first discovered LE, I read a few stories about men that like sharing their wives with other men. I didn't understand this mindset, so I began researching the subject and came across a problem all such researchers must. There just aren't any reputable studies out there that explain it. Well, none that I can find anyway. Why is that? IMHO the answer is remarkably simple. Researchers need a large, unbiased sample to ask questions of. Otherwise, the answers to their questions are meaningless. Most swingers are a little embarrassed of the lifestyle so don't readily come forwards to talk about it.

So, I approached one of the authors of one of those stories who claimed he'd found a study that was scientifically defendable. I checked it out and the author of the study had based their findings on interviews with a thousand 'swingers'. The results of the study were that the vast majority of those questioned stated they had happy marriages and were happy with the lifestyle. That sounded fair, until I delved deeper into how the sample was chosen. The study authors put a notice on a swinger's website, inviting people to contact them. I can see you're already smart enough to have spotted the flaw. The only people that contacted the study authors, were people that visited that particular website, i.e. active swingers. Excluded from the study were the people who maybe had tried swinging and either gave it up before it destroyed their marriages or didn't have a partner to exchange in a swing because it had already destroyed their marriage. Who knows, for every successful swinger that volunteered for the study, there might have been ninety-nine who tried and gave up. If that was the case, then the study reflected the opinion of the 1% and ignored the 99%, so was fundamentally biased before it started.

I can see, looking around the class, that some of you are still a little confused, so let me give you an analogy. Let's say a magazine, with a readership of a million people, asks readers to visit an anonymous website and answer one question. "Have you cheated on your partner?" In the next issue of that magazine, they report the result. 100,000 people responded and 36% admitted to cheating. That's 10% of the readership responding and statisticians say that is a good sample size. So, can we conclude that 36% of the population cheat? No. The exercise had many built in biases.

- It was biased against the elderly, probably uncomfortable with the technology involved in responding to the survey.

- People who had cheated are a little embarrassed about it and so, anonymous or not, felt uncomfortable responding.

- It was biased against lazy people who didn't expend the required effort to respond.

- Of course, the biggest bias by far, is that the only people that knew about the survey, were readers of that magazine. If that magazine was 'Horse of the month' magazine, then logic says that the million readers they have are overwhelmingly female and middle class.

The best we can ever say is that 36% of the younger portion of the middle class, female readership of that magazine, who bothered to respond and weren't embarrassed about cheating, cheated. Suddenly the results of that survey become meaningless. The only way you will ever get an accurate picture of prevalence of embarrassing social taboos, is to kidnap a representative part of the population, inject them with truth serum, then ask the questions. I'm not an expert on the ethics of surveys, but I can spot a couple of flaws in that approach.

With no reputable source of research material, and still no clue as to what motivates these people, I kept contacting LE swinger authors. Only one would freely talk and he behaved rather strangely. He started off saying that both he and his wife slept with other people, but over time seemed to sense that I thought less of him, as a man, because of that, and the story changed to, "Well these days, I sleep with other women, but my wife doesn't sleep with other men". How do you spell bollocks? Where can I go for honest, unbiased data? Shortly after this, my internet pal became hostile and abusive, I think, driven by embarrassment or a belief that his world view was superior to mine and by inference, he was better than me.

Possibly the most believable article I found on the subject was entitled, 'Why would you do that? (watch your wife with another man), by David J Ley Phd. He interviewed men of the lifestyle as part of his research for a book. He came up with 12 different reasons, from masochism and desire for humiliation on the man's part, to the thrill of the taboo. He claims that over half the men in his study were driven by a desire for some sexual contact with the guy they invited into their bed to screw the wife. Now that's a believable reason. Just lends weight to my theory that men that share their wives, would probably score poorly in the testosterone test.

QED