From my standpoint, I could say it was work…or writing for the other blogs where I get more visitors. And from SepiaQueen’s standpoint, I could just say she’s been really busy with the non-profit she runs (in good ways and bad ones).

Those would be true, but it’s also true that we’ve been going through some challenges in the marriage lately, and not sure if we just haven’t done a good job of opening it up properly, if we’re just going through a bad patch, or if we’re headed toward separation or divorce. The ironic thing about this is we both still love each other and like each other. I’ll probably have more to say on that front soon around here, but in the meantime, some recent-ish articles at Eden Cafe by me for you to read:

Navigating the Fine Lines

When does fetish become dysfunction? I don’t have the answers, but I do think I have some insights and personal experience to show why we shouldn’t assume that just because we’re kinky we’re not in bad relationships that might be hurting us. Or that we might be in lifestyles where we don’t belong…or that we aren’t really as committed to personally as we think. (Read the article here)

Open and Shut

A little update on some of the challenges of trying to open up our marriage to encounters with other people. The entire process is still an evolving one, and as I mentioned above, we don’t even know what shape our own marriage will take in the coming months or years, so perhaps this piece is a good intro to get you ready for when I post about current relationship issues (Read the article here)

Reaching “O”

Shouldn’t be a surprise that the “O” stands for orgasm. I talk about women’s orgasms and how they don’t happen nearly often enough (or as often as men think they do), and what men and women can do about solving that problem (I focus mostly, but not exclusively, on the male side). Click here to read: The Elusive O

Avoiding “Oh Shit” Encounters

Sexual assault is not joke, neither when it’s really perpetrated on a woman nor when a man is falsely accused of it. A little caution and responsibility in both genders is good but, again, I speak more to the men than to the women, but also like the other article, I have tips for both. Click here to read: Being the Responsible One

Something to Look Forward To…

I’ll be doing more reviews of sex toys around here soon. I had been doing most of them at the Better With Smoke blog but that’s because I was in the Eden Fantasys review program and that blog gets more traffic. Now they’re going to have me do a couple sponsored posts a month instead. As I use my hard-earned Eden gift cards to buy toys, I’ll probably review them for your benefit here from time to time.

I will not go down in history as the suavest, most macho, sexiest, smoothest Cassanova ever to grace North American soil. I’m sure this shocks you greatly. After all, I’ve got “dawg” in my name so surely you had images of one sexy damn beast.

I mean, it’s not like anyone gives themselves artificially amped-up names online, right?

Anyway, all digression aside (and I’m getting off-track before I’ve even started making my point), I’m a nerd. Or a geek. Depending on how you define them. Not a dork, though. I’m not nearly as shy as I was in high school, college or early career years. Very young female clerks at stores sometimes flirt with me at stores now, which certainly does my middle-aged ego some good, even as it weirds me out just a little. So, I have, clearly, grown into a cute and desirable geek thanks to my wife.

And here’s where I’ll finally get to the damn point: While it was a team effort between the two of us, my wife gets huge credit for doing a lot of the planning and design work to build me from the ground up in terms of style and confidence and sexuality over the 16 years we’ve been together, 14 of them married. And yes, she was even the woman to claim my virginity when I was a tender, innocent, fresh-faced….um…27-year-old.

But, all that said, she wasn’t my first for a lot of other things. Before my wife, SepiaQueen, there was K.M. And K.M., my friends, was an exercise in dating efficiency, allowing me to experience some of the key “first relationship experiences” before landing SepiaQueen and to do so in what might be record-breaking time.

In fact, SepiaQueen owes K.M. big-time not only for having been the last in a long string of women who ensured that I would enter my first long-term dating relationship (and subsequent marriage) disease-free but also for having broken me in in almost every way except for sex. And all in a mind-bogglingly short couple of months before K.M. and I ceased to be a couple. And yes, I dated for a couple months and didn’t have sex. I have a good excuse. You’ll see. Stop laughing already—wasn’t it enough I already admitted to being a 27-year-old virgin?

So, I met K.M. in the days before the Internet was much of anything worth spending much time on, and when dial-up was the main way of downloading porn, meaning you could pretty much paint the entire interior of your apartment while waiting for a 30-second-long porn video and a couple hundred nude photos to download. I didn’t pick her up at a bar or party, or meet her at work, or get hooked up by friends. I did it the old-fashioned pre-Internet-dating-site way with the personals ads in the dating section of my city’s alternative weekly newspaper.

Sadly, I lived on the north side of the big city where I worked and resided, and she lived in the south suburbs, meaning that to go see her took an hour of driving each way, if I was lucky, I sped, and I didn’t encounter state troopers. So, it was my first long-distance relationship.

Also, she worked in social services and was very dedicated to the youth on her caseload and even if she hadn’t been so committed, you get paid shit to be overworked in that field. So, my first workaholic, too.

Those first two “firsts” might give you a sense of why I dated her for a couple months without getting any action. Not only was I hampered by my innate shyness and awkwardness, reinforced by years of being rejected even by nerdy girls, but we also hardly ever got to see each other.

She was also my first goodnight kiss—no other first dates had ever ended on such a delicious note. (Hey, I didn’t promise you a list of only embarrassing moments—you might have to deal with a couple nice things happening to me, too).

K.M. also turned out to be my first “crazy pet person.” I mean, shit, she had a parrot who plucked out his own feathers out of anxiety and couldn’t come out of the cage while I was there, lest he bite off one of my fingers or my nose; she had four other small birds, two of them lesbian lovebirds living in the same cage; she had a turtle who was inactive even by turtle standards and may have actually be an undead amphibian; and she was mistress to a hyperactive little dog name Hercules who was incontinent and therefore constantly wore a diaper.

Also on the list of firsts: She was my first rebound relationship. As in her being on the rebound, that is—remember, I couldn’t manage to get beyond first dates before her. Her boyfriend was having trouble committing, and she had only just broken up with him a couple weeks earlier. I will also point out that when we broke up, she immediately went from me back to him. Bonus. My first time being dumped for a previous beau.

I also got to first base and second base for the first time with her—mostly first base though. Lots of French kissing and breast fondling. SepiaQueen owes K.M. hugely for breaking in my tongue, which has served so well on so many of my wife’s body parts.

It was also with K.M. that I made my first “moving too fast” over-commitment blunder, though it was completely unintentional. We had been walking around admiring the overly decorated houses near her neighborhood in the weeks before Christmas, and I commented how nice it would be in future years to bring our kids to see them. I had meant that in a general sense—as in, kids of her own and kids of my own, not necessarily mutual kids, because I thought it would be a cool thing to take any kids to. It occurred to me shortly after we stopped dating that she must have thought I was sizing her up for marriage and child-bearing already, and figured a commitment-phobic boyfriend might be a lot better bet, since it turns out she couldn’t safely become pregnant and wasn’t planning to ever have kids.

With K.M. also came my first experience in…well, not coming. Or staying erect for that matter. When we finally did try to have sex, after a good half-dozen heavy make-out sessions, I had so much performance anxiety built up after more than a decade of unwanted virginity that I couldn’t stay hard, especially when I put on the condom. On the bright side, we cuddled very nicely and at least I slept with a woman—even if it was literally sleep—for the first time, too.

Now, in my defense for not making it to full-on sex, this was also my first time dealing with an awkward medical condition. You see, K.M. had type 1 diabetes. You know, the one you are born with and get hit with young, and that often leads to blindness and amputations, and means you need to take shots of insulin several times a day. Or, in my girlfriend’s case, she had an insulin pump. Slightly larger than a modern-day cell phone, it contained the insulin and gave her small doses throughout the day through a catheter that led to her abdomen, where a needle penetrated her flesh and was held in place by medical tape. Try being a nervous first-timer in the sack trying to figure out how to bump pubes without bumping too hard against a device that keeps the woman you’re dating from going into glycemic shock and diabetic coma and shit and see how well you do.

Of course, I also got my first experience with a jealous and vindictive rival. The diaper-dog Hercules had already gotten a reputation for trying to get in between me and his human lady-love when K.M. and I made out on the couch. I suspect he must have seen us trying to have sex on that failed night and he got a little pissed that I was mounting the person he loved—or trying to, at least. I awoke the next morning to find that he had pissed on my clothes on the floor. My pants were wearable, but I had to put on one of K.M.’s sweatshirts to wear on the long ride home. And yes, it was a girly one.

And, in the end, when she told me she had gotten back together with Bill, I got one last first: She gave me the “We can still be friends” post-breakup speech. As it happens, we did remain friends for several years. She had her quirks, but she was a sweetheart.

Not sure if she still is or not. She’s got a passel of adopted Central American kids now and lives halfway across the U.S. from me, so it’s hard to get a good read since I only see her on Facebook these days and not very often even there. She might be crazy as shit now.

But hey, I got plenty of firsts with SepiaQueen, too. First ex-husband who wanted to kill me. First time trying to navigate a relationship in which there was already a young child before I arrived in the mix. First sex. First kinky sex. First really fucking kinky sex. First open relationship (though that’s a recent development). First home ownership. First interracial relationship. First time doing a preacher’s daughter. First time having a biological child of my own, currently six going on cute-as-a-button dictator. And lots of others.

But in all that delicious madness with my wife, though, no incontinent pets, thank God. I don’t want to be pissed on anymore. Well, at least not by a dog…

(Feel free, if you haven’t already, to head to Eden Cafe to read the article “Losing My Overripe Cherry,” in which I regale you with my thoughts…hopefully humorous and maybe a tiny bit insightful, on losing my virginity fairly late in life.)

“Friends with Impediments“

Read it here: Moms Against Sexuality

Exploring the possibilities promises to keep us busy and stimulated (mentally and physically) for many, many years to come.

Question is, will I start needing Viagra for the cumming to properly commence?

See, that’s where middle age can be a right bastard, as the body starts to go wonky on you. Simple positions or basic locations for sex (like the floor) can wreak havoc on my 40+ year old knees, back, etc. And then there’s the penis, which likes to let me down just often enough to piss me off.

I don’t see any sign that I have erectile dysfunction, mind you, but I wonder if I’m going to need pharmacological help at some point in the future for recreational needs. Because sometimes, dammit, I really want to have sex, but the dick just doesn’t want to cooperate. He doesn’t want to get quite hard enough to get things going…or he decided to lose rigidity because he thinks thing are taking too long (instead of taking his directions from my brain).

This is immensely frustrating, and makes me feel bad on behalf of my wife. Sure, I’ll always get SepiaQueen off with my tongue and fingers without complaint, but now that we’re looking to open up our relationship to other people, I admit I’m nervous that my package will decide to be cranky on me at a time when I might have an audience that isn’t as sympathetic and as committed to sticking through it with me as my wife is.

And, of course, thinking of such things make anxiety more likely which increases chances of temporary equipment failure. Rinse and repeat. Vicious cycle. Ugh.

Well, not sure if Viagra is the answer, but I guess since performance anxiety may be at play, perhaps I’ll just rely on the tried-and-true chemical/pharmaceutical value of a good, strong red wine…won’t hurt that having new people should be more exciting (I would think) than it would be scary.

So, how has that played out in my life, and what does it mean now?

Find out at Eden Cafe, where my latest article has just posted recently: “How the Spirit Moves Me“

Find out more about the journey and what it means to us at Eden Cafe, in my article: “Trying to be the tough guy”

Fast-forward to 43, and I’m a man who’s been with his wife for about 16 years (nearly 14 of them in a matrimonial mode)…I think it goes without saying I’m not a virgin anymore. More than being a married man, though, I’m a guy in a relationship that recently became an open marriage. I’m discovering that as kinky as I thought I was, I have even more potential for kink than I thought, and my wife is discovering her own inner kinkster really fast.

Part of this new life involves me being more flirty with women in person and online (and some of those online women reside near enough and are sexually open enough that I may one day see some of them naked). It is still odd to me, though, to think of myself as sexually desirable to women in general. It’s a strange sensation to have my flirting reciprocated and to have women comment that I’m cute or…in rare cases, handsome.

Remember: I was a virgin well into my 20s. It was my wife who popped my cherry, so I was…what? 27 I think, if my math is right.

I held no appeal for girls in junior high or high school. Even in college. In hindsight, I recognize that there were four women whom I probably could have connected with easily, but I missed the signals at the time in three of those cases and in the fourth case the woman had emotional and psychological issues I simply could not entangle myself in just for the sake of an orgasm from something other than my right hand.

It’s not that I was unlikable. I made friends fairly easily from both sides of the gender line. In fact, some of my friends were from outside the geeky or nerdy circles I inhabited, and many of my friends were women. But the fact was that I was a nerd (or geek, depending on the venue, circumstances, subject, etc. …thankfully, I’ve never been a dork [at least I think I haven't]) really tripped me up.

The girls when I was a teen and the women when I made adulthood didn’t want me except as a friend. And lest you think it’s because I was shooting for cheerleader or bad girls or some other nerd-unobtainable love, that wasn’t it. The nerdy and geeky girls didn’t want to date me, either. They were all either with nerds they found more desirable or were pining for the popular boys who didn’t want them. In adulthood, it seemed like my closest women friends were mostly content to be in bad relationships and bitch about them to me rather than consider one with me.

A lot had to do with me, of course. I wasn’t the most fashionable of guy, nor was I terribly assertive though I could be pretty flirty with a woman I knew well. I could banter all day long, but making an actual move terrified me, if for no other reason than earlier attempts in life had tended to end in humiliation.

Now, though, a combination of maturity and my wife’s valiant efforts to mold me mean that I actually dress and present myself in a more attractive way. Age has been good to me, I think, and given me a more interesting appearance than I did in my youth. And somewhere along the line, being nerd-like or geek-like became cool in many parts of society, including among the sexy folks, so I’ve already got a leg up since I’m not posing as a nerd or geek but come by it naturally, and now can do so with a little bit of swagger thanks to well over a decade of being in a relationship.

Still, I have to say, I often don’t notice when women think I’m cool or desirable, unless they actually tell me. I guess that’s the remainder of my old self. Still oblivious, because a part of me doesn’t understand why things have suddenly changed, and perhaps doesn’t believe it, either.

So, I leave it to my wife and my 19-year-old stepson to let me know when the women are checking me out.

In some ways, that’s nicer. Like a surprise package.

“Opening Day” for Sexual Liberation