Busted!…and it almost feels good

So, it was only very recently that SepiaQueen and I decided to embark on this whole polyamorous lifestyle thing. Neither one of us has hooked up with anyone yet, but my wife is making strong headway with one very interesting woman (friendship or something more one day? who knows yet) and has a few other people (male mostly) nibbling around her various profiles online…and I’m finally starting to get the attention of a few folks, too. Plus, we’re going to a swinger’s event this weekend, which will be eye-opening for both of us, and we’re meeting with a polyamorous couple we’ve never seen in real life to just chat and hang out.

All this in the matter of a couple weeks. We’re on dating sites, fetish sites, planning to attend events…hell, aside from the fact that we haven’t actually had sex with anyone but each other (and our journey into both polyamory and kinkier explorations have made that sex both plentiful and wonderful), we’re pretty much about as far along as one can be.

Let it not be said we tarried in our plans to shake things up in our life together.

So, it’s probably not entirely surprising that as the racier sexual stuff impacts so strongly into our day-to-day life that our newly emerging lifestyle would smack right into our reality.

Yeah, I got busted looking around for other women.

Of course, we know I didn’t get busted by my wife, because she already knows (and has been encouraging me to move a bit faster than I have been…sorry, babe, but deadlines for work come first ). No, I got busted by one of her online friends (and someone she’s been meaning to have lunch or coffee with in real life soon, and probably will). Seems that in our fairly small population here in our little portion of New England, everyone single person is on the same dating site SepiaQueen and I are on, which isn’t even one of the bigger and better known ones. No, this site is OkCupid, which is a free dating site that we went to only because its rules and classifications and such are pretty friendly to those who are polyamorous (which the big sites are not).

Since it wasn’t one of the most well-known sites, we didn’t expect to see many people there (if any) that we knew. And yet we have now run across several profiles of people we recognize both from Twitter and real-life, all of them within 20 miles of us. My wife is masked in her profile pic, so her identity and professional reputation are fairly safe. We didn’t mind putting my face up there, because I don’t have the same kind of reputation locally to maintain and the bulk of the people who deal with her regularly aren’t likely to readily recognize me (and we didn’t expect any of them to be on OkCupid anyway, and so far none of those people in her professional life seem to be there).

So this Twitter (and perhaps one day IRL) friend sees my profile. Since I used the same avatar as I do in Twitter, and both my wife and I follow (and are followed by) this person on Twitter, she recognized me, and immediately sent a message to me through OkCupid politely demanding to know if my wife knew I was on there.

It is to her credit both that she didn’t 100% assume the worst and go straight to my wife and also that she was looking out for my wife (as she noted later, she was hopping mad that I might be betraying SepiaQueen and might have hurt me if I were). I told my wife, my wife contacted her, and all was well. As long as my wife knew, she was cool (also a big gold star with regard to her character that she didn’t judge my wife about that).

Now, I admit I was really thrown off by this event at first. Not so much because I might be “exposed,” since it had already become clear that several local people we know on Twitter would be able to trip over my profile and possibly tease one or both of us mercilessly should we meet in real life. We had pretty much resigned ourselves to that happening (though now we realize it might happen sooner than expected).

No, I was actually more concerned that my wife’s friend would think ill of me, and that my wife might want to do a little smokescreen action to disguise her own polyamorous inclinations in life, and thus that I would end up looking like an asshole to someone I think is pretty cool. Fortunately, my wife is big into the honesty thing (at least with people we might hang out with) so all was cleared up and the friend removed me from her shit list.

My knees thus remain intact, and my reputation as a decent guy as well. However, we’re not exactly going to hit her with the incredibly long list of kinks I have nor the steadily growing one for my wife. A person can only take so much truth at once.

I guess the main point of all this, though, as my headline suggests, is that it kind of feels good to have someone know. Do I want everyone we interact with to know? Shit damn hell fucking no. They don’t know about my vanilla sex life; why should they know about the 36-flavors one? But knowing that our “secret” can get out and not be a ruinous thing is nice. To have someone I respect online know and not judge me is cool. So, I was “busted” but in the end feel pretty positive about that.

However, while being outed isn’t all bad and might be a positive thing, we’re going to tread as cautiously as we can for a while.

And that’s why the cool photo of me used for my Twitter avatar has now been replaced with one at OkCupid that kind of makes me look dork-ish (just a little)…here’s hoping that doesn’t turn all the ladies off.

(The picture I used above has little to do with this post, really, but I thought it was cool, it had the “Busted” thing going, and so I figured I should have the image link to the actual book online to which it belongs. I get no kickback for doing so and no next to nothing about the book except what I read in passing as I grabbed the image. I just don’t want to get sued for copyright infringement or something.)