“Sometimes you will go through deep experiences that bring up intense pain inside of you. If it is in there, it’s going to come up. If you have any wisdom, you will leave it alone and not try to change your life to avoid it. You will just relax and give it the space it needs to release and burn through you. You do not want this stuff inside your heart. To feel great love and freedom, to find the presence of God within you, all of this stored pain must go.” (Michael A Singer – The Untethered Soul, 172).

Dead-eyed phantoms 
Murmur lies 
Into my soul 

Seducing me 
Toward that chasm 
In my chest
Where I fold into myself —

Into that dark pool of fear
Where my demons lurk. 

I’m in a room with a man, and we’re going to fuck. It’s my birthday party, and nearly everyone has been fornicating except me. I just haven’t been in the mood. Life has me feeling extra sensitive, extra vulnerable these days, and I just haven’t felt like opening up. So I’ve enjoyed the night in other ways. We played an erotic role play game. I watched other people fuck, including my husband and his girlfriend. I had snacks and good conversations. 

But it’s late, and this man is attractive. I enjoyed the soft play we had throughout the night — some kissing, some touching, his large hand on my throat —  and so in a moment of feeling just enough inner strength to try and open myself to this experience, I pulled him into this room because I don’t feel like being in a group setting. I just want a quiet one on one moment. 

He’s tall, 6’2 at least, maybe 6’4. He’s a boxer and his body is dominant masculine perfection. We start making out. His cock is hard, and I grab the girth of it in my hands. It’s huge, the biggest I’ve ever touched, which is saying something because my husband is very large. I take him into my mouth, stretching my jaw wide to do so. He’s linking his fingers through my hair as he looks down, watching me. I’m getting into the moment, and the desire to be taken in this room under the light projecting waves on the ceiling is blossoming in my body.  

We’re at that moment where foreplay gives way to the need of it. I reach for one of the magnums that’s sitting on the nightstand.

“Those won’t fit me,” he says. “I should have brought mine.”

My husband walks into the room to grab something, and I ask him if he has any of the custom extra large ones he ordered. He rummages through his play bag and hands me one before leaving the room. The man and I start to pick the moment back up after the interruption. We kiss as I hold the condom in my hands, ready to feel his immense body on mine. 

“I need water,” he says, stepping back. The mention of water makes me realize that I also feel thirsty. If I’m going to take a man this big, I’m going to need a lot of water. 

“Me too, can you bring me a bottle?” I ask as he walks naked out of the room. I lay back on the bed and wait for him. I stretch and watch the lights dance on the ceiling. I work on relaxing my body, and I wait for him. I continue to wait for him as the minutes start to blend together. Eventually, I get irritated and decide I’m done waiting. I don’t want this anymore. I go downstairs, and I see him. He’s fully dressed. He doesn’t say a word to me before he walks out the door and leaves. 

This has to be a first. Starting to date again as a married woman has definitely had its share of frustrations and disappointments, but up until now, nobody has ever literally fled from me. Nobody has left me naked and thighs spread on a bed, totally and completely unfucked. 

I don’t take a moment to contemplate the situation objectively. I don’t ponder over his reaction to the mention of a condom after I made it clear it wouldn’t fuck him without one. I don’t stop to consider all the other reasons why he may have left. 

Instead, I cave into myself, into that place where I feel less than, that place where I feel unwanted, a place that has been so active lately. Luke is somewhere else having fun, and so I sit down next to the man I should have pulled into that room, the only man other than Luke who feels safe, and I put my head on his shoulder and fall inside myself where I’m caught by wings of darkness, those old, long buried demons that awakened this last summer. 

“I don’t know how to explain the depths of blackness that my heart has turned into. My soul is black. Sometimes I feel like I’m dying inside” (journal entry: August 1st, 2008).

Opening our marriage has not only served to force intentionality and growth within our own relationship; in many ways, it has made us aware of those dark places within where the most vulnerable versions of ourselves have been hiding, buried crevices deep inside where wounded animals roam. 

“I was just not important enough. I was not her, and that it seems is my fatal flaw…I  feel so broken, so not special. My everything was nothing. He ravaged my heart, and now I feel as though I have nothing” (journal entry: November 11, 2008). 

The last few months, I have been falling prey to the wounded animal within myself. A rough patch in my marriage this last summer involving Luke breaking a boundary of ours with a lover and then lying about it triggered the awakening of this old wound. I wrote about the experience in “The Skeletons’ Dance.”  I ended that story on a positive and optimistic note. It was the right ending at the time because in terms of our relationship we were back to a good place. 

However, what I didn’t realize when I wrote that story was just how much that moment in our relationship had dislodged a deeper wound from where it had been locked up and buried deep inside myself. 

Feeling that another woman had had such a pull of desire on Luke that he broken our contract and then lied about it mirrored my past wounds just enough as to awaken them. That awakening brought my old feelings of brokenness and rejection from my first relationship and sexual experience to the forefront of my emotions. If those wounds hadn’t been there in the first place, my reaction to Luke’s mistake would have been less. It would have hurt, but it wouldn’t have caused the earthquake in my feelings of security and safety that it did. 

“I just feel like a replacement. Someone who could never be as good as the real thing (her). Someone not worth fighting for, or sacrificing for, or truly loving enough to want to try and keep” (Journal entry: November 12, 2008).

And so, I’ve found myself struggling the last few months, far more than at any other point during our journey into an open marriage.  I have been falling to the temptation of going to dark places where my fears and my shadows reside. I have been extra sensitive and have been feeling extra vulnerable. Luke’s experiences have increasingly evoked emotional, fear-based spirals about his side relationships becoming more important, more intimate and satisfying than me. These spirals hit mostly when he’s gone with one of his lovers, and I’m left to my feelings, to my imaginations of what he’s feeling. 

“I was not special enough — not even after all I had given him. It was all nothing — I think perhaps there is something wrong with me. Something that just makes me not special or desirable. I wish I knew what it was and I would cut it out” (Journal entry: November 12, 2008).

Luke has said more than once that he can take a break and stop seeing the several women he’s developed steady, ongoing connections with. His calendar has been full while mine has wavered close to empty because I haven’t felt up to opening myself up to new connections.

I told Luke not yet. I wanted closing our relationship to be a last resort because I know that in the end, his experiences aren’t the real problem, and to blame them for my uncomfortable feelings would only be a path guided by a fear of my unresolved traumas. Scars that in subtle ways have shadowed many of my experiences in life. Closing now would simply be another way in which they rob my life of beauty, such as all the positive things that come from being open. 

The uncomfortable things in life can be opportunities for growth if we choose to let them. In his book, The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer argues that we have to become comfortable with the discomfort of pain because otherwise we will avoid it out of a fear of it, leaving it trapped inside. He says, “You will come to see that any behavior pattern based upon the avoidance of pain becomes a doorway to the pain itself” (Singer, 170).  Living a life afraid of pain will not make you happy and free. You’ll be trapped by it. Instead, Singer argues that we must face those things that we fear will cause us pain, and then release what is locked inside that made us fear it in the first place. 

“At times the world seems like a place where only pain dwells, and the hope of happiness is only like a cruel mirage in a dry and dusty desert. If at all you are lucky enough to get near it, it only slinks away into the dark abyss of misery” (Journal Entry: October 1, 2008)

But this is not a story of darkness, despite its title and bleak journal entries. It is instead a story about light and healing. The thing about darkness is that once illuminated, it cannot exist

Recently,  Luke was spending the night with one of his girlfriends, and so I took the night for self-care to do battle with my darkness because I could feel the way it had been feeding off of itself and growing inside of me. I could either face it or let it consume me and the things I love. 

I did a meditation to “heal your shadow self” recommended to me by my London Dom, Master Charles. That itself was a healing process of introspection. Then I pulled out my old journal from the time my scars were originally formed and read. Reading it was like a light shining into my fears, letting me see my scars from a different angle. 

It also helped me see my fears for what they are — phantoms that are not my current reality. The only way they can become my reality is if I breathe life into them by holding onto them and using them as the lens in which I interpret my life. 

I have always been someone who closes inward, who buries and locks away, but life, and this beautiful, wild journey of opening our marriage are teaching me that I need to learn to release, to let go of and move forward. 

That night, I started the process of releasing all of those trapped feelings, and the next day, I felt a world better. It was a step in the direction I need to be moving. When Luke came home, we spent time connecting. He gave me a massage, and the tears started flowing once more. Then we made love, and they flowed even more through deep, healing sobs as parts of that old wound cracked off and passed through me. The fears and anxieties and heartaches have mostly vanished, like turning a light on a dark room. 

But I won’t end this piece of writing on the same “All has been resolved” note as my last story on the subject because I know I still have a lot of growing and healing to do. There is more that must be released, but the shadows have retreated enough for me to now see the place I want to be. It’s a place where that deep wound of my early experience no longer leaves any part of me numb or extra sensitive, a place where I fully inhabit my body and all the pleasure it’s capable of experiencing.  It is a place where love and light and a zest for life are my compass. 

I hope that you also find a path to that place if you aren’t already there.