ne year before her nuptials, Leah begins checking off every item on her sexual bucket list. Call it creative monogamy!
They’re not married yet, but Leah’s tired. Tired of missionary and tired of the same face in bed every night. “Eddie is sweet, and I do love him. But I think there’s more. I want to know about more.”
Leah, a 5’2” brunette with green eyes and full lips, is a 26 year old event planner in Long Island. She’s been dating Eddie since they were 17, and have been engaged since she turned 24. “There’s a lot of stuff I wanted to do – sexually – before I got serious with Eddie, and I thought there’d be time for it. Like, in college, maybe.” But one thing led to another, and they were engaged.
I met Leah through our mutual friend, Zoe. Zoe and Leah have been best friends since they met in ninth grade, and I was Zoe’s roommate in college. A few weeks ago, Zoe contacted me to see if I’d want to chronicle the months leading up to Leah’s wedding and the interesting agreement she’s made with her fiance. Of course, I said yes.
Leah’s never been with anyone else, and despite her reservations, her eyes glitter when she says, “The wedding’s planned for next year. We wanted to wait until after Eddie passed the bar to plan a date. Too many of my friends gave up their whole lives just so they could get married, and now they’re all having babies and I’m traveling whenever I want.”
Still, life’s not all perfect. “I’ve always wanted to be with a woman. I’ve always known I was bisexual, but I never had the chance to try anything out.” Like most girls, she experimented at parties, but it never went further than kissing. And for a long while, Leah never thought it would.
But last week, things changed. “Eddie and I talk a lot in bed, like, our fantasies and stuff. He’ll talk about stuff I want to do, but I know that’s all it’s ever going to be. I’m happy, and when it comes to the vanilla stuff, I couldn’t ask for more. But there’s a part of me that wonders if I’ll regret not experimenting when I had the chance. I don’t want to be old and wondering. I don’t think he knew how much it mattered to me.”
She was flipping through a bridal magazine in bed when Eddie noticed her lingering on a photoshoot for wedding night lingerie. “I knew it wasn’t just the clothes,” he said.
“She’s talked about wanting to be with a woman before, but I didn’t realize how serious she was. I thought it was just talking.”
“I was so surprised when he gave me permission,” she said. “I didn’t think, in a million years, he would go for it. But he saw me looking at the girls, and they were just so soft and lovely and…I don’t know. I think he likes the idea of it.”
“I didn’t want her to be unhappy,” Eddie said. “If she needs to get it out of her system, I’m not going to stand in the way. And I’m not going to act like I’ve never thought about it. Leah’s sexy and if she wasn’t going to be my wife, I’d totally want to watch. So I said yes. Just as long as I don’t know the details, I’m fine.”
Leah, an hourglass beauty with breasts just verging on a D cup, is almost shaking with excitement when she says, “He told me that I can experiment up until the altar, as long as he never has to know what I do. Then I can only be with him. But up until then…I’m free.”
Zoe was just as surprised at Eddie’s rule. “Eddie’s so tightly wound. I’m pretty sure he was born in a suit. None of us could believe that he’d said it. But he did. I’m so happy for Leah. She’s been talking about wanting to try it with a girl since high school, but it just never happened. I think monogamy’s been hard on her.”
Arrangements like theirs are not actually as rare as you’d think. According to one study, as many as 28 percent of couples allow for “nonmonogamy,” depending on the circumstances, and as many as 5 percent describe themselves as polyamorous.
Zoe, who went to school with Leah, has beautiful dark skin and perfectly manicured, thick, long braids that reach down to her waist. She works as an assistant editor at a fashion magazine in the city. “I have some gay friends who’ve been wondering about Leah for a while. I brought up their deal over lunch last week, and a couple of them got really excited about it, so I figured I could invite them all out to a bar and, like, see what happens.”
Leah was anxious about the night. “It was all great in theory, but in practice – I mean, how do you dress to attract a girl? How do you flirt with a girl? I felt like a total fish out of water at first, but it turns out it’s not all that different from what I’m used to. Like, other than the obvious. But otherwise, it was truthfully pretty easy.”
[adrotate group=”9″]In the end, Brooklyn ended up taking her home. When asked, she said, “Are you kidding? Leah’s hot. We’ve all noticed her when Zoe’s brought her to work functions and stuff, and a long time we thought they were dating. But it was even worse when we found out about Eddie. When Zoe told us about their deal, we were all too happy to help out.”
Leah blushes when she says, “I don’t want to go into too many details, but it was exactly what I wanted. Brooklyn’s gorgeous. She’s a redhead and she has this tattoo that goes from just to the side of her bellybutton down to her hip and…oh, just yes. I had a lot of fun.”
Brooklyn’s a little less shy when it comes to what happened. “We ended up at my apartment, on the counter in the kitchen. Leah was so sweet and nervous, but she’s a natural and really eager to learn. I mean, the first thing she did was push me up on the kitchen counter and spread my legs out across the marble, and while she ate me out, she was making this really intense eye contact with me. Lips, teeth, tongue. She’d speed up or slow down based on my reactions, and after she slid her fingers into me, she found my g-spot like she fucking lived there. I’ve been with plenty of full-time lesbians who weren’t even half as good as Leah.”
Leah shrugs at Brooklyn’s compliment, though she’s clearly pleased. She says, “I mean, I know what I like. I figured I’d use that as a starting place and then let her guide me from there. And I certainly got a lot of practice – we’d stopped in the kitchen, the living room, the bathtub, and on top of the washer before we even got to the bed. God, that sounds awful, doesn’t it? No. Brooklyn’s something else.”
Brooklyn says, “I could suck on those breasts alone all day and not get tired of it.”
Would she repeat the experience? “Oh hell yes. Any time.”
Zoe said, “I’m just glad that she found what she was looking for! But knowing Leah, that was hardly the last straw.”
Zoe couldn’t be more right. After getting dressed in the morning, she said, “Technically, Eddie said I could experiment as long as we hadn’t gotten married yet. And there’s a lot of stuff I want to try out before I walk down the aisle. I’ve never been with a black guy, or a stranger, or more than one person at a time. I’d love to try sex on ecstasy – Zoe says it’s amazing, but Eddie won’t go for it since his firm does drug tests all the time. So, I’ve got a year to try things out, and I intend on trying everything out.”
Stay tuned for Leah’s next adventure in creative monogamy!
Further Reading
Are you in a relationship with someone who has expressed interest in “opening the relationship?” Maybe you are the one dissatisfied with monogamy? Have you been thinking about polyamory as a lifestyle, but don’t know how where to start? If so, this book is for you. The Open Relationships Handbook is an introduction to the most common types of open relationships: swinging, non-monogamy, and polyamory. In this book, we’ll cover definitions, important questions, and things to keep in mind in deciding what shape your love life will take, and how to negotiate changes with your partner.[/]
Applying new research, esteemed scientists David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton dispel the notion that monogamy comes naturally. In fact, as The Myth of Monogamy reveals, biologists have discovered that for nearly every species, cheating is the rule — for both sexes. Careful to separate scientific description from moral prescription, Barash and Lipton still poke a little fun at our conceptions of monogamy and other kinds of relationships as “natural” or “unnatural.” Shoring themselves up against the inevitable charges that their reporting will weaken the institution of marriage, they make sure to note that monogamy works well for most of those who desire it and that one of our uniquely human traits is our ability to overcome biology in some instances. If, as some claim, monogamy has been a tool used by men to assert property rights over women, then perhaps one day The Myth of Monogamy will be seen as a milestone for women’s liberation.