DragonHeart

Wow! I’m overwhelmed by the heartfelt responses from all of you. Thank you for taking the time to help me with this. I appreciate all the different advice and insight. I wrote to this site because I didn’t have any other outlet for talking about what happened, and now I know I came to the right place. I’d like to just add that I know there are always two sides to every story, and that if he was willing to write out his version of that night, you might also feel sympathetic towards him. He did not intentionally mean to hurt me. He could explain his motivation for approaching the woman as being just a way of finding us a partnership for the night. He could say that his focus on the woman afterwards was because they had focused on me for some time while I was in bondage, and that he wanted to make sure she was pleasured in return. I’m not trying to make him into some selfish monster, because he isn’t at all. I’m just writing out my perception of that moment while I was in the middle of it. I can’t change the way it made me feel at the time – I freaked out and it was bad – but neither can I change his reaction to that expression. He said to me that that night, watching me cry so hard on the way home, was one of the worst nights of his life, and that he never wants to go through that again. That’s one of the main reasons why we broke up, because he wants to avoid the possibility of putting me or him through something like that again. I think he wants to find someone more like him – who is able to fully enjoy all the sexual experiences without emotions getting in the way – although what I’m hearing from all of you is that an emotional bond between the couples is what makes swinging work… (The irony is, the balance of our differences was what made us such a good couple in the first place.) I learned a lot about myself – my likes, my dislikes, my boundaries - and questioned myself deeply about why I didn’t say anything while it was happening. I learned that it’s my responsibility to the relationship to express my feelings; it’s not right to blame him for not being able to read my mind. I know that through honest communication, as many of you have said, we could learn from this bad experience and become stronger. But instead, after 15 months together, he’s choosing to walk away, as though the answer can be found in a new partner, when really the answer can be found by looking within ourselves. Sincerely, Heart

(I know this is long, but I needed to write it all out - a type of catharsis for my broken heart. Thank you ahead of time for taking the time to read it and respond if you so choose. Sincerely, Heart) A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I went to a swinger’s club and had an amazing time together. We danced, drank and talked with several fun couples. We found a couple we were both interested in and formed a really good bond with, but they needed to leave early and so nothing happened. At that point, I thought he and I would just end up having awesome sex in a group room. But what happened was he went and approached a woman he had spotted across the room and told her he thought she was very attractive, while I sat on the couch (her partner was out of the room.) When my boyfriend came back, we went into the play room. There, he strapped me to a bondage wall and blindfolded me. As he was playing with me, this woman and her partner came over and began touching me and kissing me. The woman also began touching and kissing my boyfriend. He then told me that she was sucking on him. The whole time this was happening, I felt very disjointed from the whole situation. I had no emotional attachment to this couple and only knew that my boyfriend was interested in this woman. And now here she was sucking on him – without asking me first! My boyfriend thought I would get very excited by the bondage experience, but I was totally dry. I didn’t like not knowing who was kissing me (I had not met either of them), or what he was doing with her. We then went into a private room and the experience just got worse. My boyfriend was very focused on her, while her partner came over and put his penis in my mouth. I was drunk, so I went along with it, but I felt really uncomfortable. Then I watched as my boyfriend had sex with this woman, without getting my okay first. It was awful. I cried all the way home. First of all, I was disappointed in myself for getting so jealous – I felt like I had let him down as a partner. But I was also crying because I felt betrayed by him – that he had done these things without asking, which is, as is my understanding, the "rules" of swinging. In the morning, I came to realize two things led to that bad experience. First, I was drunk and had overreacted, and second, we hadn’t communicated – him or me. He said, "Why didn’t you tell me you were uncomfortable?" And I said, "Why didn’t you ask me before doing things with her?" I wanted to blame him for my reaction, but ultimately it was my fault because I didn’t communicate. The truth is, in the moment, it didn’t even occur to me that I could say something. Maybe it’s growing up female and being socialized to go along with things, but the thought of me interrupting him and saying, "Um, excuse me, but I don’t even know that woman and I’m not comfortable with you going all the way with her" was not a thought that entered my drunken mind. It was only later that I was able to verbalize what I had been feeling. I came to realize that I had been uncomfortable because I had no emotional connection to this woman. All I knew was that she was some woman he had felt attracted to across the room. I came to realize that for me, I need to have an emotional connection with the woman or couple for me to be comfortable having my boyfriend be that intimate with her. Once I know her story and get to know her a little bit, maybe dance or laugh together, then I don’t mind sharing my boyfriend with her. It excites me because he really is amazing. But when the connection is just between him and another woman, with me on the sidelines, I feel hurt and angry. We were both so traumatized by this experience of me crying all night that we broke up. He says he needs to be with someone who’s excited for him when he’s with another woman, and I say I would be supportive if I knew the woman beyond the point of her being just some stranger he thinks is sexy. Is this a common situation, where the woman needs an emotional connection? I feel like he expects me to be like him, but I’m not.