I dated someone in an open-relationship who tried to organize an orgy within his friend group. By Cat Damon.
Mark was a long-haired bird watcher with ruler-sharp cheekbones and a boundless appreciation for rough sex. He was the first guy on Tinder I went out with, and I didn’t know he was in an open relationship until halfway through our first date. I wiped pizza off my lips as he told me about the fact that his “roommate” was a woman he’d been dating for eight years. We would have trysts in my white-sheet room, since their solar-powered house in the country was their sanctuary, their safe space, and I wasn’t allowed there. He told me this with great authority: “You can’t visit, and if we decide you can visit, there’s no sex here under any circumstances.”
What I loved the most was his assumption that I even wanted to. Considering the fact that we broke all of his rules the first time we had sex, I couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t end up fucking me outside his sanctuary, amid all his kale and Sun Gold tomatoes—dirty country sex with bugs in my hair and gravel in his knees. Did sex count as being “at the house” if it took place in the garden?
Gardening, science fiction, and hitting me with a belt appeared to be Mark’s greatest joys, but I hadn’t known him that long. He also seemed to really love his friends, love them so much that he wanted to get them all naked and act as the Group Sex Facilitator. Most of them were men he’d met in grade school, one of whom was fucking his girlfriend. I was the first new blood that had been introduced to the group for years, and I wasn’t even introduced to the group. I was referred to as “my friend” when Mark and I ran into some of his female friends at a taco shop, which was less messy and more obviously false than saying “the woman whose mouth I spit into during sex.”
“Your friend?” a harsh-looking brunette said scathingly. I pretended to look at the menu, sucking in my stomach and wiping my face clean with a look of bored disinterest. I was not disinterested. I felt wired and watchful, poised for fight or flight. I hoped she would notice my Birkenstocks. “Oh yeah, I’m sure she’s your friend.” Apparently the friend group was aware of Mark’s open relationship, but didn’t know he was actively sleeping with a new person. Mark talked to the two women for a while longer before we ordered our tacos and got back in my car.
“So the girl with brown hair is really wild,” he said to me excitedly with a stack of styrofoam take-out boxes in his lap. “She’s got a really controlling boyfriend, but if she didn’t, I think she’d be down for some weird stuff. She’s a very sexual person,” he said knowingly. This surprised me, considering the fact she was wearing a lightweight plaid button-down. She didn’t give off the chillest of vibes, or anything remotely smoldering. But I guess maybe my sense of her sexuality could be off.
“Oh?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral. “Do you want to expand your circle to another one of your friends?” Despite Mark’s fixation on “the hoooooonesty of the whole situaaaaation,” the fact that his best friend was barebacking his girlfriend was clearly was not working out. He clearly hated his best friend, and hated that his girlfriend was fucking his best friend, but he clung fast to the belief that he and his girlfriend would get married and that the books they had read about opening up their relationship would guide them through the sea of bodily fluids safely. He could push my face down into pillows during sex, send horribly dramatic sexts about my snatch at 9:30 in the morning, then go home to his dog and girlfriend and do it all again. They had read the books on open relationships– they were fine.
He said, “Not exactly… I was thinking more of an orgy.” He laughed, uncomfortably and a little bit bad. “You know, like all of us all together.” I sat there and thought about it. I saw them all running around a field of flowers naked, rubbing zinc oxide into each other’s noses. I saw sun hats and uncircumcised penises flopping with exertion. I saw group trips to the river, filled with microbrews and acid and bacteria-ridden athletic couplings in inflated tire tubes. I saw plaid blankets laid out around a campfire, with the shadowy shapes of bug-bitten and knobby-kneed bodies tangled in sex. I saw partner-swapping as a gift exchange on Christmas.
“Wow,” I said. “Look at you go.” We pulled into my driveway and he had a dreamy look of sexual reverie on his face. He looked proudly nasty, delighting in his imagined deviance. Eagle Scouts had prepared him for knot-tying, coordinating different peoples’ genitals, and sex outdoors. I imagined him covered in tree bark and blindly thrusting at his friends in the dark.
We ate our tacos in the car. “Have you ever experimented with that before?” I asked, eating a piece of pickled carrot. He told me about a summer night spent skinny-dipping, followed by back massages and hand-holding. It seemed like pretty tame, prom night-level stuff to me, but he was practically vibrating with excitement. I couldn’t tell him that swapping cum with his girlfriend’s best friend would offer a different kind of group bonding than seeing the outlines of butts underwater on a drunk night in the river.
I realized then that I had not been invited to participate in the orgy. We had been talking about his friends, their boyfriends, his girlfriend, her boyfriend, but my hypothetical participation in this backwoods bacchanal was never broached. Maybe it was because his girlfriend didn’t want to meet me even with my clothes on, maybe it was because he knew my lingerie preferences wouldn’t hold up well outdoors. Watching his friends fuck was never a fantasy of mine to begin with, so I would have to be content with chokeholds and nude texts. We finished our food in the car, in silence.
Main image by Helmut Newton