After Jack and I started dating other people, I began to move about the world like I had a secret. It was energizing, but could be awkward, too. Like the night Jack and I were hosting friends for dinner who confided with some disdain that they knew a couple who had just started swinging. Jack and I avoided eye contact, so we didn’t smirk and give ourselves away. (Was their indignance masked envy? Maybe. Some months later the wife half of the couple confided during our kids’ soccer practice that they had started swapping with another couple.)
I had never realized how much I took for granted as a married, monogamous-assumed heterosexual. I began to worry what would happen if other people found out—people tend to discriminate against people who are different from them. Would my female friends ditch me if they knew we were open, because they envied my liberation…or thought I wanted to sleep with their husband? Would Asher’s friends’ parents still let their kids play at our house if they knew we were nonmonogamous—or would they assume we were a part of some twisted sex cult? What if one of us ran into someone we knew while we were on a date with someone else? (This happened once, actually—
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