I survived New Year's. It wasn't that difficult, as we stayed home and Mary Anne wound up falling asleep at about 9:30. She had a nasty cold a couple of weeks back, and I think the lingering cough has been interrupting her sleep, so she's been falling asleep even earlier than she used to. I woke her up to watch the ball drop, and that was our big excitement. Goodbye 2004 - in retrospect, you really did suck ass. Practically every thing that happened last year started off with extreme promise and ended up as complete shit. 2005 has to be an improvement.

My emotions are in turmoil at the moment, which is unusual for me. For the most part I keep a pretty even keel. But right now I'm fairly... upset, I guess is the word. That implies anger, but I'm not angry. I'm just a little worked up by something that happened this weekend. It's not really a bad thing, and I can't quite put my finger on why it has me in such a tizzy. It's really not that big a deal, I don't know why I'm acting as if it is.

One of the things I treated myself to for Christmas was some new gadgets for my home network. I'm still waiting on one thing to be delivered, so for the time being I needed an extra laptop to fiddle with the parts that I do have and to get them set up correctly (which is half the fun of all this shit). So, I scrounged around and found my wife's old laptop, which is no longer used for anything but still works perfectly well. I dug it out and used it to do what I needed to do with it, and then I was just idly poking around on it on Saturday night to see what sort of crap was on it.

There wasn't much - except that I did find a set of old chat logs between Mary Anne and an acquaintance of ours, Jeff, from nearly six years ago. Just to be clear to everyone, these chats were from a good couple of years before Mary Anne and I even started dating, and I knew that they used to chat a lot. So it's no big deal that they were chatting, and there wasn't anything inappropriate or upsetting about the nature of their conversation. They were both - at the time - single people living thousands of miles apart, so as you can imagine there was a lot of talk about sex, but nothing that suggests to me that there was any sort of relationship there that I didn't know about (and hell, even if there was, I'm hardly one to criticize, am I?). There wasn't even any cyber-sex or discussion of a potential liasion between them at some point, although there was some mostly harmless flirting and frank discussions of sex, with the two of them swapping stories and comparing notes.

I have a serious voyeuristic streak in me, so it was a thrill to read my wife's IMs discussing her sexual history and likes and dislikes. In the process I learned a number of things about her that I didn't know before and confirmed some things that she's told me that I was skeptical about. For instance, she told me once that she'd had six partners in her life. I never fully knew whether or not she was telling the truth, mostly because I think she'd say "six" is about the ideal answer to that question for a woman in her late 20's/early 30's - too many to be labelled a prude, not enough to be a slut. But that was the same number she told Jeff (apparently I was #7 - I thought I was #6, but I think she was answering the question honestly when she and I discussed it once), and from their conversation I didn't see her trying to lower her number to be a "good girl" like she might have with me.

(Of course, my first wife, Vicki, thought she'd slept with 37 guys before she started dating me - she wasn't sure she could remember them all, so it's not like I would have minded if she was a slut - but I don't think Mary Anne would have admitted it to me if she had been a slut for a while. The ironic thing is that I would have actually *liked* it if she were sluttier.)

So what's the problem? It's the other things, the stories she told and the things she told him that she likes that just don't jibe with the woman she is today. Granted, this all dates from more than five years ago, so of course she's changed somewhat and I don't expect her to be the same person now that she was then. I guess I'm disturbed because I'd like her to be more like the person she apparently used to be. In some ways, I didn't think she could be like that - but now I find out that not only could she be, but she actually used to be! Why am I missing out on this?

Some examples. Did you know that my wife apparently really really enjoys giving blowjobs? No? Me either! In the four years that we've been together, she's gotten me off with her mouth exactly one time (which is roughly a million fewer times than any other woman that I've been involved with for any significant period of time, so it's not like I don't try to get it or I'm not used to it). So I love love love to get head and nobody else I've been with has been reluctant to give it to me - except for Mary Anne, who apparently "really enjoys" giving blowjobs. What the fuck is up with that?

Here's something else: my favorite position is to have my partner ride me (although I'm prety flexible on it - I like missionary and doggy a hell of a lot, too). Whenever I've tried that with Mary Anne, for the most part she doesn't want to be up there very long, usually complaining about her bad knee and that it bothers her when she tries to fuck like that. Well, I'm a gentleman and all, so that's cool with me - if she doesn't want to be on top, I'm not going to demand it. But what the hell am I supposed to think when she's telling Jeff that her favorite position is to be on top? (Her excuse, the bum knee, is from well before this conversation took place.)

Those are the two things that really get me for some reason. I'm not even all that bothered by the stories about how my wife, who today is so prim-and-proper wtih sexual hang-ups that make it difficult for her to initiate anything, had the best orgasm of her life when she fucked some guy she was seeing (someone who I've never heard of) in a movie theater during a show. Then there was the time that my wife, who is so reluctant to do more than give me a blowjob for a couple of minutes during foreplay, sucked off someone she was seeing on a plane when they took a trip together somewhere (in coach, even!). And hell, I don't even know what to think about learning that one of the guys my wife fucked was 16 years older than she was (she would have been in her mid-20's at the latest, which would make the guy close to 40 - even I have never fucked a girl more than 9 years younger than me, at least not so far).

Who IS this person, and what can I do to get her back, because I'd sure as hell be a lot happier married to her than I am with who I'm with now?

I don't know. It's certainly not fair to expect Mary Anne to be as adventurous in her 30's as she apparently was in her 20's. I've certainly calmed down a lot since I was that age, and I know it changes you when you have a steady job and responsibilities to worry about all the time.

I guess I feel gypped because I feel like she isn't being honest with me about who she really is sexually. To be fair, neither am I - I certainly downplayed my whorishness when we were in the getting-to-know-you stage of our relationship because I thought that would be too much for her to handle (and I still think I was right - she's completely not open to a lot of the things I've tried and enjoyed, like the threesomes and so on I've been involved with). And some of this dilemma is of my own devising. What I should probably do is start asking her about her adventures and gradually explore the contradictions in a positive way that would help us come to a better understanding of what we both like.

The problem is that that would have to be a two-way street, and I think she's too conservative to react well to some of my answers if she tried to ask me the same questions about my past that I'd be asking her. I'm still amazed that she never asked me how many people I'd slept with before her when I got her number from her (she was #34 for me - now I'm up to 45). If I start down that road, I'll have to figure out a good number that I can admit to, and then any stories I have to tell will have to come from that number. I could probably admit to 25 or so without freaking her out too badly... but certainly none of the threesomes or most of the one-night stands and I can't very well tell her about all the times I cheated on my first wife (which takes out about 20 of the people I slept with right there). Going there would involve telling her a lot of lies and sanitizing things to make them palatable to her sensibilities, and then I'll have to remember what I told her and stick to that for the rest of my life. This strikes me as way too dangerous - the more I tell her about my sexual past, the more likely it is that she will start to realize that it doesn't all add up. This is the disadvantage to being with someone who is smart. Luckily for me, she's not suspicious. If she ever gets that way, I could be in serious deep shit.

I really would like to talk to her about this - it would really be ridiculous if she's holding back because she thinks it would make me think less of her or something like that, not realizing that I actually would prefer her a little sluttier than she will admit to being. But I don't really know how to do that - it's not like I can exactly say, "Hey hon, I ran across these old IMs on your old computer, so I read them all and I'd like to ask you about a few things..."

I guess we'll see what happens. I think for now I'm going to push a little harder on the blowjob thing. So far, it hasn't exactly worked out. We were lying in bed on Sunday afternoon and we were cuddling and all, and I sucked it up and asked her if she would give me a blowjob. We were going out to dinner in about an hour, so we had plenty of time to fool around a bit not really enough for a full-blown fuck session. Of course, she hemmed and hawed a bit, and then said maybe after dinner we'd see. Well, I knew perfectly well what that meant - we'd go out to eat, come back stuffed and not at all in the mood to fool around, then we had something we had planned to watch on TV and she'd fall asleep half-way through that. And of course, that's exactly what happened. It was completely what I predicted what would happen, but I was still pretty pissed off. So I went and spent the night in the guest bedroom, which is what I will sometimes do if I can't sleep at night so I don't keep her up with my turning and tossing.

I got up with her this morning, which I usually don't do (she leaves for work about the time I usually get up), and she could tell I was pretty down. We wound up talking about it a bit and she seems to understand that it's very difficult for me not to take it personally when she's not expressing physical affection towards me. She does seem to recognize that all is not well in that department. We wound up going back to bed and discussing how we can both work on the situation (to her credit, she's taking the approach that I've really been great putting up with her lately and she needs to do a better job showing her appreciation and affection for me). And as it turned out, even though it was a very civilized fight (it's pushing it to even call it a fight), we wound up having some pretty hot make-up sex, and we were both late to work this morning as a result.

So, I didn't get the blowjob that I was trying to get, but I got fucked pretty good, so it's hard to describe the effort as a total failure. She also says she's going to try and make more of an effort to get physical with me, and says I need to teach her how I like to get sucked. We'll see. This isn't the first time there have been intentions of trying to turn up the heat on our sex life from her end. But at the same time, there has been a pretty good amount of fucking lately (honestly, if it were just recent history, I would have no grounds to complain, but this problem has been building for a long long time), so maybe there will be actions to go along with the words this time. Time will tell.

A Return of Regular Action? - 2005-03-31
Patience Rewarded - 2005-03-29
Infidelity... It's Everywhere - 2005-03-25
3 A.M. Eternal (KLF is gonna rock you!) - 2005-03-24
A Different Twist - 2005-03-21