The holy grail of promiscuity — friends with benefits, fuckbuddies — the idea of having the benefits of great sex, without the complications of a romantic relationship. People talk about achieving this ideal, but is it really as simple as it sounds, as it should be? I think I had a fuckbuddy. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. We didn’t get there easily, though.

I met Dirk online, in the usual way one finds a partner for sex these days when the old alternatives, like bars or through friends, are not available… like, for example, if one is married, or living somewhere isolated. We found each other on a dating website. To be honest, he was one among many prospects. It’s amazing how many married men are looking for NSA (no strings attached) sex, and how few married women are, apparently. My inbox was consistently full. Admittedly, most of the messages said things like “Like young cock?” or “Hay how r u?”. I might have been looking for an uncomplicated good time, but I did hope to meet someone who could speak a few coherent sentences before and after sex. There were still many to choose from. Dirk became one of several men with whom I chatted online. There was a difference though. From the very beginning, he was upfront about the fact that he was promiscuous. I wasn’t. I was still looking for my first affair. His theory sounded great though. It wasn’t so much that he was sleeping with a lot of women (which he was), it was that he was having experiences, and not limiting himself to one woman, or even one kind of woman. He had women of all different sizes, shapes, ages, education level, social background. He even had men. He was doing it all. From the outside, being invited in, it looked absolutely wonderful — so free, so liberated. Exactly what I was looking for.

I met him one afternoon. We had sex. We had wonderful, fabulous, uninhibited sex, like I had never experienced before. We spent hours together, making love, having sex, fucking — in various locations, in various positions, with unvaryingly good results for me. Then I went home, and emailed him, to tell him what a wonderful time I had, and to ask if we could chat online. Well, no, we couldn’t. He had plans that evening. He was going to have another first meeting with another woman.

I was taken aback. Well, of course I knew he slept with others. That was the whole point. With any luck, I might soon be sleeping with others, too. That was what I wanted, wasn’t it? Nevertheless, I felt strange, like something that had felt momentous to me was of very little moment to him.  Never the shrinking violet, I told him that I thought he had ruined the experience. Angry words shot back and forth through the ether. Finally, and not really until after several more meetings, several more instances of wild, adventurous sex, we realized that we needed some definitions. We required some way of defining our relationship that accounted for its passionate nature and its complete non-exclusivity, but still allowed for the fact that we were more to each other than to the others we were fucking. We tossed the L word around for a bit, but it didn’t seem to fit. We looked at fuckbuddy quite seriously, but it didn’t capture the emotional facet of what we were doing. Finally, we decided that we were anchors to each other, and co-explorers. The idea seemed to allow for the fact that we explored together — and did we explore! We tied each other up (not at the same time), we fucked every hole that could be located, from every direction, in every locale imaginable, in various combinations of extra participants. It also allowed for us to explore separately, but bring the experiences back to each other.

It sounded perfect, and there were times when we achieved that balance, where I could lie in his arms, and listen to him tell me about his impromptu threesome with a woman and her roommate, or I could regale him with tales of the strict dom type who had hog-tied me before fucking my mouth. At other times, though, the balance was precarious, and there was more tension and remonstrances than affection between us. He accused me of preferring another lover (he was right… I did fall in love with the other man). I accused him of being passive-aggressive, telling me to be with others, then criticizing me for flattering them in my report to him of what happened.

Ultimately, though, it worked well enough for a while. Having someone who could both fuck like a star, and (usually) share in my joy at finding others who could do likewise, was worth the effort, for many months. And then, one day, it was no longer worth the effort. That’s what ends every relationship, isn’t it?