A New York Reality

A few months ago I posted a rated NC-17 story entitled: A New York Fantasy. Although it had a strong element of denial and submission (although everything that takes place is consenual), the places and events in the story were also a big part of the fantasy.

Even more recently I posted Fantasy Girl, where I claimed I had met somebody that reminded me of the fantasy girl I used to dream of when I was a teenaged boy. What the heck, I'll call her "Paulina."

Earlier this month, the two stories collided. I don't know what it all means yet, but I thought I'd write about it.

As usual in these missives, the story starts with I met a girl.

I met a girl . Hardly a new thing... so what makes this worthy of writing?

Well, for one thing, I met her twice!

We had met first at a scientific conference a few years back. But of course her being an attractive foreign scientist made her appear unobtainable.

We met another time online. I didn't know it was the same person. She had read some of my posts about hobbying. She saw past the arrogant posturing, shameless name dropping, and the swinging lifestyle... to the thoughtful and shy geek underneath (ok, you can stop gagging).

More to the point, she had linked my real persona to my online one... and then she sent me an email. Some digital back and forth resulted in a phone call. Somewhere in there she let drop that we had met before. How could I help but be intrigued? There's that superficial resemblance to Paulina, but beyond that, she is also a foreigner spending some (limited?) time here in the states.

Is she a supermodel? no, but one meeting proved she has the pretty face, smile, lean body, fantastic legs, sharp wit, and irreverent attitude that I like.

It is a weird situation, right? Here's someone I meet professionally, and then later on she knows all this strange stuff about me (for example, what I've posted here). And we meet. Is the meeting in a professional context or a prurient one?

But we tried a brief couple of hour meeting.

The remarkable thing is that she is a scientist, geek, and entrepreneur, like myself. Now I am only somewhat chauvinistic; it's not all bad: for women it makes me open the door, pay for dates, and give up my subway seat. But I am willing to admit that statistics alone may not be responsible for why I find few attractive women very smart, or few very smart women to also be attractive. Chauvinism surely plays a role.

Not that they don't exist. They certainly do. Usually they occupy a territory reserved for major dieties and I find that I can't talk to them without looking really stupid. Thereby putting me in the category of "ok looking, but an idiot" rather than "ok looking geek."

But perhaps because we started with shared common entrepreneurial interests and with my prurient habits exposed online a priori, I found talking to Paulina very easy, and so I probably avoided landing in the category of "idiot." At least not yet!

So we set up a date for a couple of days.

Paulina is beautiful, funny, satirical, creative, and smart.

And the sparks flew.

Mind you, "the sparks flew" isn't always a good phrase.... flashback over fifteen years ago:

FLASHBACK: Repelling Myself
I met a woman who was a lot like me. All our common friends thought we should be together because of how similar we were: high talent, rationalist, entrepreneurial, research scientists, and non-stop hyper-analytical thinkers. We even had competing scholarships in the same program. But that was the year I discovered that I really didn't like dating myself. The sparks flew, but they rapidly became a conflagion that burned and consumed everybody nearby. We were Bad News. Black cats would cross the street to avoid walking in front of us. The sex was incendiary as well, but that did not make up for the ego-bashing no-holds-barred arguments that routinely crossed the line from intellectual to personal. After several months, when it became clear that neither of us would break off the relationship first, that we were in an ego-driven mutually-assured brinksmanship, the same common friends who had set up this "ideal couple" begged us to stop dating. They arranged a mutual cooling off period.
Later that same girl dated a friend of mine who was as different from me (and her) as a duck pond is different from a whirlpool. And they happily dated for at least two years. (Hmm, just Googled her and found out she's either a married medical professor in Texas, or an unmarried math professor on the east coast. It's a testament to her intellectual breadth that I could believe in either outcome.)
The moral of this flashback? Some asymmetry is helpful in a relationship.

Now back to the story: so the sparks flew. But in a different way. Although Paulina was very similar to me in many ways (although fortunately she did't look like me,) it seemed to work well. Perhaps there were asymmetries that I haven't nailed down. The most provocative theory is that it works because of the financial asymmetry we have. But then again, maybe that's wishful thinking, turning a constant long-term liability into an asset!

I titled this entry "NYC Reality" in homage to my "NYC Fantasy" story. No, Paulina did not torture me with sex deprivation for days. On the contrary, there was a surfeit of sex. But many of the activities and places we visited were very much like the story.

SIDEBAR: Avenue Q! We saw Avenue Q. When you hear about a Broadway musical with puppets and sex, how can you not go? Highly recommended.

There also was more emotional depth to the NYC Reality, which brings us to the question:

Paulina: girlfriend, friend with benefits, or mistress?

Now that's an interesting question. "Normally" I would think of her as girlfriend material.

But as I noted in previous posts (and she has noted herself), it's difficult to hang out with me long-term unless I shoulder most of the financial load and the woman has a flexible (or no) job. Or if the woman is independently wealthy (hmm, perhaps I should watch Dirty Rotten Scoundrels again!)

And episodically doesn't really work for me. I can lose interest.

I recently read that, in marriages between spouses of vastly unequal wealth, the best long-term strategy is for the wealthy spouse to give the other enough money to put them on equivalent footing. Not equal footing, mind you, but enough so the other person isn't influenced by the invisible pressure of finances (ah, a new form of the invisible hand of Adam Smith.) That would suggest a mistress situation, with a stipend and expenses taken care of. But I have written before how that has not worked in the past.

As to friends with benefits, I believe there is too much emotional content to make that work.

So we are faced with an odd situation again. The sensible thing would be a hybrid between the two. But what is that really? Can two rationalists keep that in perspective as the emotional content of the relationship becomes larger? Is the "I owe you / you owe me" invisible obligations and self interest too powerful? (and there's that invisible hand again!) Is it possible to overcome the loss of interest from an episodic relationship by substituting a business relationship? Will that keep things going when we can't meet face to face?

So this is why I call this NYC Reality. It's relationship reality, not a denial fantasy. Reality can be much better than fantasy, although during the honeymoon phase of any relationship, the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred anyhow. We shall see how it turns out.

In the words of Dumas:

...until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words: wait and hope.

Relationships, Back to the Future

I promised to think about what I want from a relationship, and I am convinced it is something non-traditional, yet very traditional.

I think of myself as a traditional person, but back in The Goode Olde Days, they probably would have publicly burned, stoned, or hanged me. I am a person with traditional values trapped in the shell of an innovator. Unsurprisingly, this dichotomy extends relationships. Something I've written about recently is how I was not bothered by my bisexual girlfriend having a girlfriend. Yet I am very traditionalist when it comes to a girlfriend having a fling with another man (public flogging). But the dichotomy goes deeper than this. 

At one point I was going to write about my ideal relationship as a next generation relationship. But I've come to realize that my vision is really a modern translation of the very old style of relationship, the community-stabilized monogamy. In a sense, it's Back to the Future not The Next Generation.

RELATIONSHIPS THEN AND NOW

Once upon a time, a relationship between man and woman was an economic and social commitment oriented around a small social circle. Villages were made up of multigenerational extended families, as long-distance travel was generally not practical. Social mobility was nearly non-existent; you died in the class wherein you were born. Most socioeconomics was based around land, which was owned by family, or deeded through feudalism. Either way, once you had land, you didn't move around much.

This created islands of stability. A man and woman worked jointly in their socioeconomic niche, for example their farm or store, as well as the family. Their roles and expectations were clearly defined and supported by their social groups.

Fast forward to the present or near future.

Economics is no longer tied to land. Fungible currencies shifted power from land to an abstraction of wealth called money, banks made it move faster than humans, and then complex financial engineering vaporized economics into the realm of abstract mathematics. And recently economics is no longer tied to organizations, but asset classes. Companies come and go, or move from asset to asset. People shift from companies to companies to follow suit, based on their interests and skills. This is indeed a new world.

Through the rise of air-fuel engines, radio and electronic networking, our social networks are not geographically bound. Whether it's a chat room on AOL or the World Economic Forum at Davos, people are connected across the world by interest or attribute rather than by land. Many people know more friends in another state than in their own neighborhood.

An example the result: a person in a Starbucks with a laptop can make as much money with friends across the world as a person with a thousand acres in their family for seven generations and a statue of their great grandfather in the town square. A kid in a garage with a synthesizer and a CD-burner can make as much money as the CEO of a multinational corporation with billions in assets. And all of them are more powerful than the kings of old.

But along with losing the geographical context of socioeconomics, we have also lost the lynchpin of monogamous relationships. It isn't as practical to be monogamous if there is so much travel and so much separation from your mate. If you spend about 2/3 of your waking hours apart, and much of that time you are around other people (e.g. coworkers), why should we be surprised it's difficult to stay monogamous? In addition, the socioeconomic interests of mates are not as tightly aligned. Each mate is mobile, with an independent career or job opportunities, and no pressure to stay together in the same local geography forever. And on top of all this, roles are not clearly defined, and yet expectations are that they should magically mesh together (the difference between love and true love is that the latter is easy. And, by the way, never happens. It's just an evil Disney-esque expectation setting that dooms us to unhappiness.)

SEEKING LONG-TERM STABILITY

I would never advocate that we should go back to the Dark Ages and confine ourselves to small geographies and no upward mobility, just to save relationships. I'm no Luddite. But I do believe we can shift the traditional relationship to the new context we face.

First we have to put our human loyalties to something we decide is stable. Yet in our modern world, very little is stable. Or is it? I believe that very few concrete things are stable. But there are abstractions that are stable. We will have to embrace abstractions for this next-generation relationship. 

Think of other kinds of relationship terms we have today, in the context of a male-female relationship:

Friends, friends with benefits, sister, significant other, girlfriend, wife, mistress, prostitute, courtesan, consultant, coworker, business partner, and so on.

These terms define relationships with different interaction dimensions: work interactions, sexual interactions, financial interactions, family interactions. Some are driven by contractual expectations where the cost and benefit are measured in money, time, milestones, etc., and some are driven by social expectations. There are a growing number of these terms because of the continuous social evolution (and segregation) of these interaction dimensions.

My belief is the relationships driven by social expectations are least stable because there is so much social evolution and diversity. Relationships that are strictly specified (e.g. contractually) are stable, but short term. Relationships that are highly adaptable can have longevity.

So let’s say that we are looking for stable and long lived relationships. What then? I say that both specification (to achieve stability) and adaptability (to achieve longevity) in the context of a changing socioeconomic environment require abstraction.

abstraction  n 1: a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance.

Note: Abstraction is necessary to classification, by which things are arranged in genera and species. We separate in idea the qualities of certain objects, which are of the same kind, from others which are different, in each, and arrange the objects having the same properties in a class, or collected body.

from dictionary.com

The note mentions how abstraction is used for classification, and that's essentially what we want. We want contracts and expectations to be associated with a class of something rather than specifics, since the specifics will change. See, for example, this reprint of the NY Times article for a view of what has led to the new social relation: “friends with benefits”.

SIDEBAR: Why Long-Term Stability?
One could ask, why even strive for a long-term stable relationship? Why not a long series of short term relationships? I will write about that alternative, because once you factor out family and kids, there are some attractive attributes of short-term optionally-renewable relationships.
But then I think, hiking up a mountain is not the same as a series of short hikes up a hill. And companionship in old age is also attractive: an old age when I’m more mellow, relaxed, and looking for a deeper dimension of friendship and historical perspective.
So for those who find the notion of long-term suspect, please suspend disbelief and read on.

So let’s look at some of these abstractions I find interesting for relationships.

SOME ABSTRACTIONS

I believe the first abstraction is the relationship itself. Perhaps more than even to ones partner, one must be committed to the concept of the same relationship. Today's entrepreneurial equivalent is believing and sharing a vision. For purposes of this article, I have discussed a long term stable relationship, but there are others (I will write about a short-term contractual relationship in a future post.)

The second abstraction is socioeconomic investment. Like the Goode Olde Days, there has to be a commitment to a society and an economic system. Remember these are now virtual, no longer grounded in geography such as a house, neighborhood, ethnicity, country, work environment, corporation, or culture. Given that list, hmm, everything seems unstable! But abstractions such as entrepreneurship or science or social justice or social relativism (or its enemy, the Cult of Free Inquiry!) can survive. Such abstractions have richly world-wide distributed communities, social and networking supports, strong social expectations, and social inertia that makes them difficult to leave.  Can people commit to investing in a socioeconomic abstraction for the long term? Rather than being born and bred to landowning gentry or serfdom, can we be life-long disposed toward entrepreneurship or the cult of science?

The third abstraction is interaction schema. This is what is implicit in all the labels we have for different forms of relationship. For example, imagine choosing from the following menu of interaction schema elements:

Intellectual: we think together, share ideas, and build on each others' ideas.

Professional: we work on projects together, some his and some hers.

Social: we go to parties and meet people together, leverage our networks.

Sexual: we please each other sexually.

Exploration: we explore new worlds and civilizations together... to boldly go where no... oops, there’s that next generation reference again.

Sharing: we share experiences, contacts, and knowledge.

Friendship: we spend unstructured time hanging out and help each other.

Romance: we do romantic things to and for each other, making each other feel good about our socialized sex roles.

The fourth abstraction is symmetry. I have written elsewhere about this. Asymmetry is damaging to a relationship, and yet it is what makes relationships wonderful and interesting. I had a relationship with somebody that was a female clone of me (forced into by my matchmaking friends) and it was a disaster. So I’m advocating the abstraction of symmetry, in other words, an overall balance is required. Sometimes this requires deposits on one side or another, which is a system advocated by several marriage counselors.

The fifth abstraction is obligation. In the past, obligation was a social contract. The concept of marriage is a social contract; you are wed before your social group. It was a promise and obligation to join that social group as a couple. Today's equivalent is a legal contract. Interestingly, marriage is more a legal contract than a social one these days; it is no longer taboo to discuss the prenuptial or divorce.

The sixth abstraction is operating constraints. Love may be romantic, but it also has to be pragmatic to survive. Relationships are on Antarctica, not La Jolla, so you need a little planning. Part of it is recognizing ones own needs, strengths and weaknesses, and building operating constraints around the relationship. Not exactly romantic, but in the long run, isn’t survival more romantic than failure?

I believe these and other abstractions form a term sheet or contractual framework for a long-term and stable relationship.

And I will address the contractual framework in Part Two.

1st Ruby Air-Fuel Talent Show, Las Vegas, NV

I don't have much of a social life. I rarely get out, and spent most of my twenties as a total geek entrepreneur. Consequently I have a very small set of close friends, and they all date back to school when I started my first companies.

• When we started to pass the drinking age, we threw beer bashes.
• The dirty thirty parties were more serious. Success gave us the ability to throw very nice parties, although for the most part we kept them pretty quiet.
• In somewhere in there were a few bachelor parties, company success parties, and company funeral parties too.

And we're still together, growing older.

This year I noted an impending 40th birthday for one of the gang, the first of us to pass that magical portal from "young" to "not so young". And after the party I threw in Las Vegas in the spring, I thought, why not try something like that for John?

A few emails, a flurry of ideas, some wild-assed financial forecasting, and the rest of the gang was committed to the Tyco-quality budget (expenses before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization, of course). I, of course, was given planning responsibility.

So I was sitting there, the phone number of one of the dancers I had hired for the previous Vegas party in hand (the one who baked cookies), thinking. And while I was thinking, I saw a news item on my portal page mentioning a shut down in the porn industry. Sadly, an actress was found to have HIV, and the porn industry shut themselves down while they tried to chase down the chain of intercourse.

Kind of like a chain letter, but in this case you are blessed if you break the chain. 

An industry insider was quote as saying that they could not shut down for too long, as much of the talent in the industry tended to live month to month and needed the work. Perhaps they need better financial advisors.

But if a porn actress and a financial advisor met in the same room, who would end up getting fucked?

Well, after I read the article and commentary, light bulbs went off.  If there were porn talent hungry for work, perhaps I could provide some!  And that's how the party concept started, the Ruby Air Fuel Talent Show (RAFTS).

Ruby = the traditional 40th anniversary gift Air-Fuel = a combustive mixture ideally at about a 15:1 ratio Talent = think media actresses Show = well, it sure wasn't intended to be literature!

Now merely logistics remained. 

RAFTS LOGISTICS

I have a few contacts from years back in the so-called adult entertainment industry, for a reason you wouldn't believe so I won't bother telling you. In any case, I made a few calls to ensure that I could name drop, and was given a few leads to agents. Now I hadn't known there were agents in that industry, having thought that talent were under contract with studios like the Good Old Days of Hollywood, but apparently agents are the norm.

And a few contacts with agents coupled with shameless name dropping yielded... an invitation to a karaoke event in California.

Huh.

So I went. And it appears that there is a porn industry karaoke event approximately every week to every month. There was also a charity event. I attended both. Only to network, of course...

And I only rent porn movies to listen to the cool soundtracks... and I buy the magazines for the articles.

When I went for the events I met several agents in San Fernando Valley. Their business wasn't real estate, that's for sure, although their properties had huge, er, tracts of land. 

Meanwhile I found a big house to rent outside Las Vegas. It was surrounded by, er, huge tracts of land and adjacent to a small lake. And of course it had broadband.

I showed the color of my money, and it was set. I was cautioned by both agents that many of the talent were flaky, and a certain percentage wouldn't show sometimes. The long and the short of it is that I offered to hire fifteen plus or minus two girls for my event from two agents. I specified a location event in Las Vegas, and accepted a makeup person and two videographers. Just what I always wanted: a whole mobile pornography crew of my very own.

A bus was found to transport the whole group to Las Vegas on Friday and back on Sunday.

I enjoyed the Venetian so much last time that I chose it for my return. They also had made a mistake on the last trip and owed me some credit. I rented twelve rooms and one small conference room. I was told the girls and crew typically double up in rooms, not much luxury in that business, which was to my benefit.

  SCHEDULE

Roughly what I emailed to John:

John,

 

I'll pick you up around 7 PM. I'll have girls and guns and an SUV. We'll spend Friday night with the boys in Vegas. Bring your bankroll so we can make some of our money back.

 

Then on Saturday we head out to the back trails of Nevada. We'll lose you in the desert and leave clues for you to find your way back. Pack light: GPS, compass, mirror, hat, sunscreen, water purifier, four water bottles, and lots of condoms.

 

No, seriously, pack all that and lots of clean underwear, chapstick, and several tubes of Preparation H. You also may want to bring a tape demagnetizer.

 

You have been warned.

Expect anything. But don't expect to be back at work until Tuesday.

Sig (your friend, ha, ha!)

Here was the schedule I emailed to the rest of the party:

Friday:

   --   Arrive and check into Venetian under RAFTS party

  3 PM  Sig meets bus   5 PM  Meet at conference room XXXXX, catered snacks    8 PM  Sig picks up John    --   Dinner, drinks and pool

Saturday:     --   Check out of Venetian, Dan handles lunch, Sig leaves for house   3 PM  Girls arrive at house and set up, caterers arrive   6 PM  Dan arrives at house with John    --   Dinner, drinks and pool

Sunday:

   --   All girls out of house by 3 PM   3 PM  Cleaning crews arrive    6 PM  Dan takes John to airport

  9 PM  Jack returns keys to house I reminded the guys that part of our goal was to keep the suspense and terror high, say at the Red threat level.

 

 

THE ATTACK

So the day rolled in. Did it all go according to plan?

Well, yes and no.

On the plus side, almost all the gals showed up. Now you have to understand, when the girls outnumber the boys by 5:1, and only the girls are professionals, you just can't expect the event is about sex. The men just aren't able to keep up. This was designed as entertainment. Several scenarios, filming scenes, lots of girl on girl, toys, and so on. But...

On the minus side, my friends went totally nuts, lost inhibitions, and you know, there are some things you just don't want to see your friends do. Especially on three CCD digital video. Suffice it to say that there was far more, um, direct participation than I had expected or planned.

Oh, and apparently girls in the industry are like family. Ok, an incestuous family. But it also means they have history. And a few of the gals had some current history. As in fights over boyfriends or girlfriends (I couldn't quite figure out which it was). As in Jerry Springer class fighting. In the living room. Without the oil wrestling paraphenalia.

Well, it was exciting.

Two sets of video, given to the birthday boy to cherish until his significant other finds it.

But we, his best buddies, will never tell. As long as he keeps wiring money into our accounts...

Is Love Enough, or Can Women Feel Inadequate About Sexual Performance?

In an earlier post I mentioned that a major reason why I had difficulty with relationships was that I prioritize my work too highly, which has the secondary effect of excessive travel. I also hinted that there was another reason. There is.

I am difficult to bring to climax.

It's not a boast, but I can go for hours. And despite how great this may have sounded when I was young and worried about premature ejaculation, it is a curse. A curse that has fragmented many otherwise promising relationships.

Recently I received a comment about this via email:

It seems extremely strange to me that this would be the reason a GF relationship wouldn't work out--I don't quite buy it. Although, I suppose if they were very sexually inexperienced they might take it personally or something and it would make them feel not sexy.

Only a few women have been able to satisfy me sexually in the traditional manner. This is probably a lot more than you want to know about me, but it's important to this discussion. Make no mistake, I enjoy sex. I enjoy it a lot. But it doesn't finish in the typical male way for me. I have been surprised how much trouble this causes in partners. Not for a short relationship, but for long-term ones.

I have been fortunate in that I have dated or consorted with women who are attractive and sexy. They do not have trouble satisfying men. Except me. And over the long haul, they seem to prefer to be with somebody they can bring to orgasm than somebody they cannot.

But let's place my issue into context.

There is no question that I am well off. I am successful. I am a gentleman. I am educated and intelligent. I treat women well. I'm not ugly. So here is my theory:

In relationships women like to sexually satisfy their men. Men like to satisfy their women also, but society accepts that may be difficult, whereas men are supposed to be easy to satisfy, at least until they have erectile difficulties (which is most certainly not my problem, mine is the opposite.)

Women may contribute many things to a relationship, including beauty, children, child rearing, income, intellectual support and so on. But I'm a difficult problem here. I have access to many beautiful women. Children aren't an issue (yet?) I don't need income support. I hang with some of the smartest people on Earth. My meals are prepared by chefs, my appointments made my concierges and administrative assistants, my clothes selected by expert buyers, my homes bought, managed and sold by other professionals... oh, and yes, I'm physically not around a lot. So what is left for the woman to supply in a relationship? How do they express their love and commitment to a relationship?

Jerry Hall, when paired with Mick Jagger, was famously quoted as saying that her mother told her she should be a "maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom", and since she already had a maid and a cook, she could handle the rest.

My situation is a challenging form of this.

Some partners have commented in a positive way how this can create new sexual experiences, and these are usually providers. And there is definitely short term novelty.

So... is love enough? Has society set expectations that men are so easy to satisfy that it can make women feel inadequate?

Fantasy Girl

In my teenage years I used to drool over (in the manner that adolescent boys do) photographs of Paulina Porizkova. Obviously I am not alone in this, as Google returns over 50,000 pages on her. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't a rabid fan or a stalker, but merely a connoisseur of her beauty.

Here is one of my favorite photos of her:

Paulina Porizkova

Then she had to go off and marry Ric Ocasek, the lead singer for The Cars. The disappointment I felt was less about losing her to another man, but more about the lack of intelligence or thoughtful decision-making that this implied. So she wasn't beautiful and brainy? How crushing for an adolescent of high expectations.

(To be fair, they've stayed together, take care of six kids (two of their own), and seem happy. Most of us could only hope for as much. As I learned as I grew older, brains do not make us happy.)

So why am I posting this? Because I may have met somebody that reminded me of the fantasy girl I had in my mind in those days. A dream, but in a more pragmatic form.

Stay tuned.

Women on Women

Why are so many men fascinated with women making out or having sex with other women?

From my point of view, it's simple: Women are beautiful.

I don't doubt that many people find men beautiful, but generally I do not. I find women exceedingly attractive: their curves and planes, their grace and clumsiness, their mannerisms and complex personalities, their strengths, needs, desires, and insecurities... all of it!

For whatever reason (to be addressed in another blog entry), I also want to see women happy. It is almost a mission for me, sometimes to my detriment. So seeing two women pleasuring each other is double the pulchritude and double the goal satisfaction, without arousing the desire to pick up a club and bash the head of a competing male.

No jealousy?

I had two bisexual ex-girlfriends. In both cases they were surprised to learn that I was supportive of their dating girls while we were in a relationship, even if I was excluded from the sexual component of their interactions. Their surprise was that I was not "jealous."

I found that interesting. It was a point of view echoed by a few other bisexual women in discussions.

Maybe part of the reason is that I am frequently travelling or busy, and so it's a non-threatening way to have a girlfriend satisfied when I am away.

Or perhaps it's just that it turns me on so terribly much to think about it!

Whatever the reasons, I think it is a fine thing.

I discovered this some years ago. Let's pop into the Wayback Machine, kick out that obnoxious kid Sherman, and relive the discovery...

My girlfriend had recently told me that her last relationship was with a woman, and that she was bisexual. We had a frank discussion of her thoughts on bisexuality, and what different aspects girls and boys added to her sexual experience. She mentioned that both her previous girlfriend and her boyfriend before that were jealous of her bisexuality, and forbade her from dating others, no matter what the sex. She felt that this was part of her commitment to a relationship.

After thinking of this I thought that I was not jealous of the situation. But I wasn't certain enough to make a commitment to that, so a trial was in order: thus I decided that a good birthday gift for my girlfriend would be another girl for the day.

Of course I was quite uncertain of how one went about this, never having picked up a girl myself, not to speak of picking up a girl for another girl. So I decided to call escort agencies to find somebody appropriate.

It actually took quite a bit of calling, but I eventually found a few, and interviewed all of them. Interestingly, they fell into two camps, the casually bisexual, and the professionally lesbian. The former were usually younger experimental girls who mostly provided to men, and the latter were very experienced providers for women. The latter often had a fair amount of disdain for the former, using terms like "amateurs". I picked a very attractive professional who assured me that she was extremely proficient and skilled. She also told me that I could watch but not participate.

My original plan was to make it a surprise for my girlfriend. The provider was extremely worried about this plan, since she didn't want to have a bad experience if my girlfriend freaked out. She asked many questions about how committed my girlfriend was to female relationships, and eventually I persuaded her to believe that she would definitely enjoy it.

So it was a few weekends later that I arranged an overnight at a romantic resort a few hours away. I drove my most ostentatious sports car, toured some beautiful scenery, had an outrageous meal set up, had flowers installed in the suite and the heat turned up and the lights turned down.

Romance was in the air, and I seduced my girlfriend into a jacuzzi bubble bath. While she was bathing I pretended that I had left my wallet at the restaurant, so I excused myself to go up there. In reality I went to let in the provider, who I hid in living room. Then I rejoined my girlfriend in the bath.

After some cuddling, I dried her off and led her to bed. I told her that I had a surprise for her, and persuaded her to put on a blindfold. I then tied her hands to the bedposts, a kinky but not novel experience in our relationship.

I went out to signal the provider. So there was my girlfriend, blindfolded and in bed, thinking I was her lover. I got on the bed and started to warm her up. Then I tapped in the provider, and sat in a chair near the bed.

It was a marvelous exhibit of beauty magnified.

My girlfriend took a few minutes to discover that it was a woman while she was teased senseless. Her initial confusion was manifest by her calling my name, and I went up next to her ear, licked it, and whispered, "She is for you, my darling." The answer, an excited moan, was ample evidence that this was a welcome gift. It is a wonderful thing to see your lover experience such pleasure. Oral sex and toys are one way to see it, group sex another, but to see the energy and passion of two people making love... it's different.

Judging from my girlfriend's reactions (and her comments later), the provider was, in fact, quite skilled. Per the rules I did not participate (threesomes are another story for another entry), but my girlfriend's thanks were profusely expressed over the next several weeks.

So, a welcome and creative gift, a great sexy show, a learning experience, a wonderful experience for my lover, a new dimension in a relationship, and major major! points with my girlfriend... all in one.

Not bad, I say. And so I still say: I'm all for it.

Miscellany

A few miscellaneous items to catch up on the last few weeks:

• I spent a bunch of time travelling, living in a particularly hedonistic manner. Yachts on the Cote d'Azur, private villas in Europe, and so on. I didn't write as much as I had expected, and SPF 30 means no tan.
• After a few business meetings in the States, I will be making a return trip to Asia, to see if I can recapitulate some of the amazing experiences I had there earlier this year.
• I am usually not involved with the hobbyist crowd in any social capacity, as I explained before. But I just served as financial underwriter or sponsor for a Seattle party of 100 hobbyists and providers. I found the experience quite interesting, although I did not attend the party itself (out of town.)
• My dating with the "dancer" Cameron appears to be over. Absence doesn't make the heart fonder, I guess. I'll follow up with her the next time I'm in town and we'll see if anything happens, but anybody who doesn't use email or SMS is going to have a hard time keeping in touch with me.
• I have had a lot of interesting correspondance with providers and civilians, mostly arising from this blog. It has been interesting, to say the least. It has provided a few opportunities for dates before I go to Asia.
• The most interesting thing these correspondances have done: made me reconsider what it is I am seeking in sex and relationships. Yes, that is the title of the blog, and it's insufferable for me not to have a well-defined goal in the title, isn't it? But without a strong forcing function to make me decide, I am clearly having trouble zeroing in on a goal.

More on this later. Lots of work meetings tomorrow!