Mamiko

“We have talked open marriage, community living and new relationships and radical sexual concepts over and over with ourselves and our friends. We have been reading O’Neil and Watts and Rimmer and even OZ magazine for ages. I think it’s about time we actually simply started doing some things,” said Mamiko.

And she was right. The other three of us sat there a bit stunned that our bluffs had been called.

“How about for tonight we swap partners. I don’t believe any of us have real moral scruples about where we have been heading. We are just too timid to follow our convictions.”

I looked across at my wife Peta. “OK,” I said, “I am willing to make a move.” <Gulp>

Andy and Peta decided after some hesitant discussion that they too were willing to spend their night together. The four of us had been close friends over our Melbourne undergraduate years. This is quite what we had been working towards. We had fucked alongside as couples in our tents camping. We had played naïve strip poker at home. We enjoyed our company.

The year was 1972, several years post “flower-power”, and all of us had been married for only a couple of years. We may not have been brave and out front, we were not the Sydney Push, but we were still pioneering a new ethic.

But of course we were barely more than kids. We didn’t manage to create our communal household. We probably didn’t know how to be communicative and clear enough to negotiate our way through to the lifestyle we envisaged. There were no models. But we were still all positively changed for the rest of our lives.

The two couples remained as couples. In fact we moved to different cities, but still remained regularly in touch. Mamiko and I kept a sexual connection running, irregular but tender and loving, for a number of years. Andy and Peta never kept that passion and spark between them in the same way, but they remained perfectly prepared to work with the love that smouldered on for Mamiko and me.

Peta

Peta and I got married while still undergraduates. Probably a mistake – but then at that moment this was the only moral we knew for living together.

We had both come from fanatic Irish catholic backgrounds. Indeed, I had spent four years in a monastic religious order before realizing my life path lay elsewhere. Our religion and our ethical thinking were being quickly and massively remodelled as we struggled to make for ourselves a legitimate sense of reality. But for then, we plunged into marrying to feel OK with the sexuality. I can be pleased to report that needing such justification soon ceased to be so relevant.

We itched after the standard seven years. No, we limped apart wounded and painfully saddened. So, were those seven years a wasted part of life, as my sister asked us? Not at all, we both replied. Peta and I were well suited for each other for that time. We loved, learned and we grew a lot. But when the hurts grew more than the joys, and our limited communication skills coped no longer, we parted. We both got entrapped in our own deep and lifelong issues. Was the breakup optional? No, at least not for me.

And many have asked us, was it the openness we lived by that destroyed our relationship? The very simple answer is NO. The reasons for the unravelling were based on the very people we were, the life and personal skills we had, or didn’t. There are some whose judgement was that our open lifestyle was “obviously” the cause of problems. They are wrong.

Peta and I worked our way through various circumstances over our years together, in Melbourne and in Canberra. She did not get from Mamiko’s Andy the love and nourishment and lust I had with Mamiko over that time, and it was really two or three years along that she “found her own wings” more completely. That began with my skiing mate Paul. They were spending many evenings together listening to music and relaxing. Then I began to suspect that Paul had got cautious and careful around me, not knowing how to handle what was obviously happening.

I have often wondered if I was out of order, but I had a gentle word with Paul one day, assuring him that I had no problem with their enjoyment of each other. Peta never knew. They proceeded with a vengeance.

And Peta took several months “out” at one stage, always intended to be of limited duration, to live with Dan at the Pialligo apple orchard commune on the outskirts of town. That one was a bit harder for me to handle, I must admit. It was hard not to worry if it spelled real trouble, the ending of what we had. But it worked. She was grateful for the adventure. I was pleased at handling it with enough sanity.

Our daughter Ruth grew up with Peta after we separated. Our child rearing feelings were poles apart, and it caused considerable conflict.

Healing Years

These became the extensive personal therapy years.

When Peta and I were at the first Cairns/Morosi Confest at Cotter River near Canberra, we got quite involved in helping, and in experiencing everything. We were in our element. Here were so many people who thought about things in some of the radical and rebellious ways that we were struggling towards. Anti-consumption, green thinking (although the term green was still coming), alternative therapies, sexual rethinking, freedom, energy conservation.

We promised to change society, change the world. But we came to learn we had a problem in even changing ourselves!

At Cotter I witnessed Eva Reich, daughter of psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich, doing a convulsive breathwork therapy session with a volunteer. This person was able to go into a total and violent trance, releasing such a quantity of emotional conflict and pain. In public. And just by following a guided hyperventilating exercise.

I had tried counselling and some other therapies over the years when I had felt in conflict and pain. They had never worked for me. I guess I seemed to always outthink a counsellor, and so defend myself.

I vowed to remember what I had seen here. And a year or two later, a practitioner of these cathartic therapies, hot from California of course, visited Canberra. I applied. I started as instructed. I lay down, and breathed as called. I got seriously frightened and threatened as several near me erupted into loud anguish. Why was I here? I could not handle this. I was totally afraid. And … then I was away. Awash with feelings, fears and memories that had been locked away tightly for most of my life.

I was devastated, exhausted, confused. And I was aware that I had discovered a way into myself I had never thought could be found. So there were ways to go inside and heal.

I embarked on a several year campaign of attending intense breathwork, rebirthing, gestalt, encounter and other therapies. I moved to Newtown and then Glebe in Sydney and continued there. I travelled to Queensland and Victoria to find workshops. Life has never been the same since.

Hippie Years

And these were the hippie years, too.

The confests provided many new experiences. I got involved in the organising of several of them.

In the aftermath of the Bredbo festival, during cleanup, plans were being worked out for purchasing the “Mount Oak” land as a perpetual festival / therapies / alternative lifestyles property. I stayed there in my tent for a month or two. After a full property walk one day naked with Bernardette, we offered our own personal ceremonial sacrifice upon the top rock on the Mount Oak peak. “Pregnant? No it isn’t an issue. I already am.” Bernie had other friends in life beyond me!

Bernie and I were now enjoying a week together. We woke one morning quite early, with the sun shining into the tent. We lay there coupled and languorous, expecting no-one to be about yet. But then Bernie’s friend (her next door neighbour) strolled along. Seeing us together, she went to walk around. She’d been away in town for weeks, so we called her over, and she sat talking with us for about ten minutes before we decided to be conventionally hospitable. We uncoupled and kept talking for ages. Life does have unexpected incidents!

Mount Oak was bought, but the dealings were plagued with accusations and money conflict, and awful politics. It went into the courts. It was a “failed state” very early. These days I love being at Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland over New Years. The Woodford experience in many ways is what Mount Oak was promising to be, other than for the year-round activity. I do hope Woodford stays viable and ongoing.

I had a relationship at one time with Christine who lived on a commune at Nimbin. I implicitly assumed that I shared her affections with other folk on the commune. I certainly did share her with Phil, with whom I lived when I first lived in Sydney.

At one stage I invested in a paid share in the startup commune of Wytaliba, between Grafton and Glen Innis. I never did achieve my vague ambition to actually live on one of those utopian communes that were in vogue. I guess I was not really a commune person, after all.

But the wanderlust did inspire me to buy the housebus, with its nine ton frame, and its 11 litre engine. It became the terror of many a festival thereafter, and it was home for me for some years.

Some friends became RajNeeshis in order to find exploratory sex, but I was not interested in needing a guru, nor his badge on my chest, to give me my permissions. Other friends followed other Indian swamis in order to be enlightened and pure, and again, I had already had my fill of religions and cults.

Karly

Karly had grown up in Mt. Magnet in the remote centre of Western Australia, playing with the black kids in the dusty mining town streets. We had met once before, casually and perfunctorily introduced in the home of a friend.

Scene: 1978, the biggest night of the festival, a comfortable full-moon summer evening, and on the main stage the first band warming up. All the counterculture and alternative lifestyle folk had gathered in Berri in South Australia, as we had for the last few years, and this time we had taken over the huge town park on the river bend. Dark was starting to descend on the valley, and the aromatic smells of hippie living were wafting all over.

“All you folk,” came the PA, “let’s all sit on the grass in lines behind one another, and we can all give ourselves a good back and shoulder massage … OK, wasn’t that fantastic? Now turn and thank your friendly therapist. The music will start in a few minutes.”

“Oh, hello. I know you. We met last month in Canberra. I’m Karly.”

We sat together on the grass listening to the band. Presumably it was rough paddock grass in the daytime. But it was mown by Council in the last few days, and just now, in the rising moonlight and in the light thrown from the stage, it was quite the best place to sit. We swayed to the beat, aware of our loud coloured clothes, the magic of the evening, the company of like-minded people. But mostly we were increasingly aware of each other so close. Each of us was quite alone, each of us felt the presence of a very close stranger, an unknown, a mystery. But a friendly mystery.

All I knew was her name and her presence.

For twenty or thirty minutes we listened. To the music, and to the developing vibe. The air was definitely charged.

I looked across to her face in the half light, and hesitated a moment as the look was returned. Then I gently cocked my head sideways in the direction of the camping area. She smiled and gave the tiniest of nods. We stood up together and started walking back to where we all “lived” these few days, and we made our way by moonlight to my tent.

The Sean – Karly Partnership

After a few months of intermittent friendship with Karly, it became clear that we could develop a more serious relationship. So as we discussed the possibility, I proposed a relationship between us that was committed in a primary allegiance to each other, but that nevertheless left each equally the freedom to explore other relationships and our sexuality as we chose.

This of course was unknown territory in those days.

Karly thought about this for just a moment, and replied that she would be delighted to be in a pact like that. She had never been offered a “deal” like that, but she understood it instantly.

And so began several great years of love and of great and supportive growing. It was not the longest relationship in my life, but in many ways it was the most important, or certainly the most fruitful, the most creative and the most expanding.

Karly was a wild and passionate woman. She worked tirelessly in the local women’s refuge, she campaigned in various public demonstrations. She said what she felt.

One day Karly wanted to be tied out to her 4-poster bed, so I agreed. Then as our evening proceeded she panicked — she did not know how to handle the loss of control, and she called for a stop. We experimented with what was OK, and sometimes discovered what we weren’t yet ready for.

I tutored her on the adult entry tests to tertiary studies and she surprised herself by being admitted. She never did finish those studies, but it still stood her in good stead further in her life.

“You know we promised to report back honestly if anything happens that might affect our relationship? Hmm, at our women’s party last night, what started as a massage in the room, well then …” And so a new dimension was added to both our worlds.

There were some of her feminist friends who never understood why she was partner of a male, and a (rather approximately) straight one at that. But she knew, and I knew. We could lock eyes across a room full of partying people, and we always knew.

I had a friendship with a woman Jane for some of this time. Jane took some while to comprehend that everything really was OK with my acknowledged but unseen partner Karly. Karly had no such hesitation. “For heaven’s sake, get her over for dinner.” Jane was never destined to be a strong or passionate affair – there was just not enough there, in the long run. And as the friendhip with Jane was fading, she and Karly had a quick and separate fling as well. I sometimes suspect we may have been the first female and the last male in Jane’s life, and I try to believe that is not due to something unfortunate in me!

Donna

Karly and I and my daughter Ruth had been at a festival in Victoria. These were the days I lived in the housebus alongside Karly’s house, and we had taken the bus. Returning to Canberra, we had two extra passengers Donna and Rhonda, and they decided to stay over for a week, sleeping in the bus while I slept inside with Karly.

Well, it felt to me like rather poor form to proposition Donna firstly, and to use Rhonda as a fallback. They both were attractive, so I married my fantasies with my bravado and asked them both together if they would like to share a night in the bus.

They retired to consider. They then approached Karly to discuss their quandary. Did she know? “But of course,” she said. “Sean’s already talked about that with me. Have fun.”

But fantasies and reality don’t always match. We were all nervous and a bit awkward. This was a first time of multiple sex for all of us. But we did survive with everyone’s good feelings intact.

Donna and I were to weave in and out of each other’s life for a couple of years, a few weeks in Melbourne with her sometimes, and she’d come to Canberra at other times. Donna had another lover in Melbourne, but that was fading.

Sometime after Karly and I broke up, Donna developed a stronger need for a commitment with me – and I was not ready for her at that time. She went to live in Jakarta disappointed.

Donna had been a woman of the most delightful and open, almost naïve, sexuality. I had introduced her to a vibrator – she hadn’t used one before. On that occasion, after I had tired of our lovemaking and got up for the day to do other things, she had stayed in bed in the bus playing in lustful ecstacy for several hours. The houseshold had brought her out some lunch, and she took that thankfully with no trace of embarrassment or modesty.

So back home in Australia, it dawned on me eventually that this beautiful woman had slipped past me. I regretted in silence for months, and then impulsively followed her to Jakarta to ask for her love back. But she had moved on with her life – she was no longer ready for me. She did suggest her lonely Indonesion housemate would appreciate a sleeping partner, but I declined.

Could we have been great, supportive and open lovers? The potential was certainly there. Sometimes success is all in the timing. We didn’t have the timing. Donna stayed in Jakarta for many years and raised a family with a Javanese man.

The Lost Years

So much had happened. By the late ‘80s I got lost. I ran a solo software business, but it did not prove viable enough. I was unwilling to expand it or employ others. I got to the point of being totally broke. Nothing in the bank. An old car that begged a little fuel. Work commitments that were ongoing but which promised inadequate reward.

I had a skirmish with herpes. That was a savage blow to my confidence, my self image. And the newly arrived risk of AIDS added then to my sense of caution – sex was killing people!

Relationships became sporadic or non-existent. I didn’t want to go out much – I was pathetically busy. I no longer had many people around me who were of my thinking. Few people around, period. No support. I was becoming the loner I can too easily be.

Peta my ex-wife wanted a trip abroad. Ruth had grown up with Peta, but could Ruth now stay with me for a few months in Sydney, please?

Poor Ruth was booked into my local state school, and I looked after her with virtually no funds. My girlfriend of the time, a wonderful woman, decided I was not the right person for her. She was right, of course. It hurt.

I sold off the IT contract to a colleague for a song – it was worth little else, and I took a regular job in Manly. They treated me poorly – I guess that was my own vibe being returned.

Another friend/colleague knew of a possible corporate opening for a smart maverick type that I could be a match for. I decided I wanted it. I bought a suit and tie. <Gasp!> Life hadn’t been working, so it was about time to do it a different way.

I had the job by lunchtime.

Rebuilding a Life

I launched myself into the new job. I was in Tokyo for technical training within the fortnight. In fact I was to be in Japan and other countries every 6 or 12 months for the next decade and more. I learned the product and took on the R&D and training and documenting functions for a reseller network over Australia and New Zealand. The teaching qualifications from my monastic years and the engineering training from college years were now to the fore.

Quite abruptly, I had pride. I worked hard. I had money (from a base of zero of course). I gathered respect and reputation here and across a world dealer network of the product. That all does wonders for self image!

I had many strong years with that company before I felt myself burning out. I was ready to move on. But I am getting ahead of the story line.

By about a year into my new life, I had bought into a share in an old terrace house in inner Sydney. But I had had no love life whatever for about 15 or 18 months. It was time to meet people again.

Lynda

I had a (rare for me) “no touch” girlfriend Janet living a few streets away, and we occasionally went on the town together just to have company. So one Sunday we attended a jazz party held by a specifically non-smoking social group. Non-smoking venues or events in those days were hard to come by. I guess I was the new bloke on that scene, as I was flattered by the attention of several females, and was propositioned by Lynda, one of the group founders, to a dinner date.

I married Lynda two years later.

That was a totally difficult decision. It took two years to get to that decision. Hey, I was never going to be legally married again. I was smarting still from the breakup of 13 years or so earlier. And I did not believe in the marriage concept, did I?

Moreover, Lynda was sexually rather quiet, and she was explicitly and unmovably monogamous by instinct.

But the problem is, I learned to love her dearly. I told her alarming tales of my past. We met up with several of my earlier lovers. “We are incorrigibly incompatible,” she told me over and over. Yet she simply wasn’t leaving if I didn’t – she loved what she did find in me.

I was in a pickle. Here was a woman who loved me enormously, whose emotions and responses I knew I trusted, who learned to enjoy good and hearty sex.

I knew my most base weakness – the years of therapy had flushed that out. Fear of abandonment. It was a central theme of my early prim and paranoid socialising and my early school experiences. It helped destroy my first marriage, and made the healing thereafter very difficult.

Lynda was a stayer. Lynda offered an emotional security and loyalty that I was unlikely to find easily again. But she had little instinct for the experimental, the sexually adventurous, the fantasy. So should I break us up and look elsewhere?

I opted for the loyalty. That was eighteen years ago. And I still love her passionately.

Married Bliss

So, as everyone should, we:
• Lived together faithfully and lovingly.
• Worked hard and successfully for years in good corporate jobs.
• Bought a house with mortgage – a 70 year old cottage in WASP land.
• Suffered a lot of stress over work.
• Saved lots of our earnings, as we were both instinctively non-spenders.

Sean (on brief weekend holiday in country Mudgee): “This coffee shop / poet’s haunt is cute – Why can’t my life include such leisures? ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’”

Lynda (after quite a stressed day at work): “Sweetie, that old housebus you used to own – How much would one of those cost us?”

And so, on the premise that (just marginally) enough wealth is perhaps all we really need in life, we planned and budgetted to pull up stumps totally. We then travelled in a caravan around Australia for the next five years.

Our city friends still ensnared in their family and job and mortgage lives told us variously:
• You are so lucky.
• It’s not right. You should be contributing to the economy, not sitting out.
• You must be rich.
• You will be poor.
• It’s not good to be idle. You will be unhappy.
• You are too young (55 and 42 actually).
• I would love to do that, but I do not dare to.
• You will be too close to each other. You will drive each other crazy.

We funded ourselves. We have had amazing adventures in wonderful places. We have met fabulous people. And we found lots of skinny-dipping sites around Australia!

Lynda: “I think it is time I want to settle. Not back in Sydney – too hectic and too expensive. But I need a community to call our own.”

Sean: “I would continue travelling. I think I have been looking for something. But I don’t know what that is. And I guess in that case I am unlikely to find it! OK, where shall we live? We have seen so many great places.”

And the winner is … The Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

The Inside Story

So, where is the problem?

1. I love Lynda. I want her and the loyalty and the passion and the growing old together if available.
2. I ache for the sexual fantasy and experimentation and kinky adventure and growing and adrenalin and variety, and simply sex and love with others.

They are both me.

But I won’t cheat or lie. I would not be OK in myself that way.

I believe we both knew plenty enough about each other as we started out. We knew the wide differences. Explicitly we did not have any negotiated solution. We simply agreed to commit to a relationship and just “make it work.” Naïve? Hey, be kind to us, just call it love.

Her monogamous feelings were explicit enough, so I guess that implicitly I accepted to live that way. And I have lived that way.

For me, the ongoing security and loyalty has been a marvelous healing factor for my demons on emotional abandonment. The price has been suppression of my wilder sexual needs, my fantasies, a brazenness, the bright and dark excitements of life, the truths of my belief systems.

Now, the story, as always, has more twists to it. Lynda’s deepest demon is emotional and bodily panic under stress, and fear of the unknown. It was the debilitating episodes of panic stress that had been disrupting her corporate career as she climbed to jobs of greater demand, and it was essentially protection of her health and sanity that urged her to retire so early.

And emotional panic was her response over most of our years to any attempt by me to open up sexual areas like wild fantasies, open relationships, erotica, and the like. “Why am I not enough for you? What is wrong with me? I’m not good enough. If you were with someone else, I would never cope, it would be the end. I have changed a lot in your direction, but however much I change, it will never be enough. And I don’t want my bed filled with people from your head.”

And each such episode, maybe once or twice in a year, would end in bitter tears for both, and stalemate. Negotiation was not an option. My only response then was to let it blow over, wear the sadness, and get on with living and loving together. And do be assured there were really great sides to our relationship, in fact in virtually all areas except the sexually wild ones. We make great mates!

For the most part, I learned to keep my wild needs, thoughts, fantasies and memories to myself. This always seemed the better choice overall, but a hard choice, of course.

Now, the body grows mercilessly older but the soul within still throbs with the same life. It becomes so hard to keep believing in your own wholeness when you have installed the closet deep in your own soul.

Breaking Through

In our travels, we spent several of the dry seasons (mid year) in tropical Darwin, and it was customary for Lynda to do a couple of months secretarial work there to top up our funds, while I often did a bit of freelance software.

Four years ago, the Darwin work was stressful to the point that Lynda suffered a major breakdown, and undertook considerable psychological therapy and rehabilitation. I know from my own checkered history that this is no shame and no unfortunate thing. It is instead a time of cathartic self learning and healing. In many ways it was long long overdue.

The chastened new Lynda is a far stronger, more coping and self aware person than I ever knew before. I love her for it.

For a couple of years now, Lynda has asked, “It is time we learned to deal with my periodic outbursts. Can we BOTH seek counselling to work out how to handle the issues?” And for quite a while I declined. I was now afraid. We knew very well the old mode of coping, with the lid of Pandora’s Box nailed down. It seemed a fairly stable mode, in its own damaged way. If we (meaning of course I) lifted the lid off that box it might well mean the destruction of all that we have. Would I be the scapegoat, the villain? If I viewed and felt all my daydreams strongly and openly again, could I ever put them back away if needed, could we ever go back to where we were?

But I did agree eventually, and we chose a psychologist/counsellor we thought may suit us both. We got that right.

Angela started with one session to scope out our issues. We were in tears within the minute.

“Firstly, I would call you a classic partnership of monogamy and polyamory, and there are just some people built each way. Secondly, my business is to help relationships work if possible, and preferably not tear them down. Thirdly, I do a lot of work like this.”

Hey, I just learned they had coined a new word while I have been away – Polyamory.

So What Now?

We have now had many, many counselling sessions, firstly dealing with anxiety and panic and sex on Lynda’s side, and then with me spilling out my total life history, my dreams and feelings. There have been lots of tears and lots of thinking. For me, cushioned outpourings of cherished memories and of outrageous lustful aches.

We have both been reading and researching, and there is a wealth of material both printed and on the net that relates to issues like ours.

We have made no decisions, except confirming that we are on the right road. Lynda still claims she stays convinced as monogamous. I have to accept that at face value, and of course it is hard. I am in no doubt I am instinctively somewhat wayward and not monogamous. I now see and hear of people so like me it is unnerving. I am not a loner pervert after all.

And the wonderful part is – I can now increasingly talk about what I remember and yearn after and believe, and there is little or no panic outburst from Lynda. There is just sometimes a loving plea to walk, not run too fast. I try not to overload her – I can get so carried away. But she lovingly refers to me simply as her “polyamorous mate”, and that is very validating.

Where to from here? We don’t know yet.

But I have already won so much. I have my integrity back. It makes me weep. That compromised castrated secret pain is melting away.

Sean Damonn (Jan 2009)

Some of the names
may have been changed
to protect the survivors!

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