Who would have guessed that a person who lives so far above the baselines of vanilla society and is so advanced in communication and pursuing pleasure on their own terms would feel compelled to spin such a harrowing tale of drama, betrayal, and wolves in sheeps clothing?

I was with anonymous until they started shitting on married people practicing ENM. gtfo with that reductive, small-minded shit.

@1 Spot on. I'd also like to chime in on the defense of vanilla. It is one of the most complex flavors we have, not to mention how insanely time and labor intensive it is to cultivate, and therefore expensive AF. Stop using it to mean plain or boring or beneath you. You wish you were that good.

gen pop eye roll.

Fucking Europe

My best friend Jenny and I fucked our way across Europe. I know, there’s probably some Gen-Z-er who is rolling their eyes right about now saying, “OK boomer, here goes another boring story about how you backpacked across Europe back in the day.” OK Zed, we agree it sucks no one gets to fuck freely anymore, but all that pandemic shit was not our fault.
I met my best friend Jenny in grad school, I know, that’s the cliché opening line of every cheesy lesbian romance novel ever written, but just because we met in grad school doesn’t automatically mean her and I groinked each other, except for that time at burning man back in ’96 when we dropped acid and pulled a four way but that doesn’t count because that was before it burning man turned into the corporatized tech-bro Disneyland it is now.
After we finished our master’s degrees we decided to “Do” Europe and yeah, we used backpacks and yeah, we had Euro-rail passes, and yeah on the flight into Heathrow, we may have gotten a little drunky-poo and wrote up the ground rules. The rules were that we could’t move on to the next country until we each boinked at least one person from the country we were in. And for it to count as a fuck, it did not necessarily have to involve penile vaginal penetration, but there had to be at a minimum oral-clitoral stimulation involved. And granted, the second thing was partly to appease me, but Jenny agreed it was a good call because of France. We also agreed that we would allow for two fucks each in Italy for obvious reasons.
After we got to the hotel in London, and sobered up we both agreed it was a joke, we didn’t really mean it, we were just being goofy. But we did decide that while we were in Europe, we would tell everyone our names were Jenelle and Donella because we thought it made us sound sexier. Later we went out to this fun night spot in London and Jenny met this guy Kier and I met this girl Gillian who was visiting from Wales, and well, on the train ride to Paris we joked, I guess we’re doing the game after all. We dismissed it as just a lark.
At the Louvre I kept running into this girl Chloe’, she was total smoke, the three of us went out later and Jenny met Gabriel who looked like Gerard Depardieu, not my taste but you go girl. We partied at his place, and well you get it.
What started as a joke kept happening, Barcelona, Alejandro and Mario, Florence, Liona and Danielle, Rome, Fabio and Dante. Skiing in Switzerland we met Hans and Karl, we smoked weed with them on the gondola, I guess we started doing it in sync and it caused the one of the wheels to come off the cable and they had to back the whole thing down to fix it. When we got off there was a big crowd there and I guess the word got around and we got a big round of applause as we got off the gondola.
Berlin took all of 4 hours, German efficiency, but honestly if you went to a disco in Berlin in the 90’s it was a miracle if you don’t get laid.
In Amsterdam we smoked some kickass weed and sort of got stuck there for a long time. Jenny met this guy William, and I started hanging out with this Flemish girl Gisela, who I met at the Van Gough museum killing time while Jenny was shtupping William over and over again.
Gisela and I really hit it off, we would get high and hang out in cafés and go on canal cruises and well, I guess both me and Jenny started falling in love with our new friends. And by now we were starting to feel like the game was sort of stupid anyhow.
We were supposed to fly out September 1st but the next thing we knew, we woke up and it was October, our parents were getting worried. We’d call and they would bitch at us to get back here. We knew they were right of course.
Goddam Amsterdam. We should have just groinked someone fast and gotten out of there. We did finally end up saying our goodbyes, but it was tough, I really liked Gisela, we would sit in this one café on the Amstel and write poetry together, me in English but she had a gifted tongue… and could write poetry in three languages and looked so damn sexy doing it. She had short sandy blond hair and deep dark eyes I would get lost in. She was tall and thin, like a model, small breasts, narrow hips and sweet lips. Her voice had a whisper to it when she spoke, not quiet but it would make people stop and listen, it was so sexy and smooth.
Me and Jenny finally ended up flying out of Copenhagen, we didn’t do anyone in Denmark. I guess we were done with fucking Europe. Another month or two and we probably would’ve never left. I sure didn’t want to leave Gisela. I still have the note she gave me when we said goodbye.
She folded it up like a little envelope, I thought that was so adorable. The last time I saw her, she handed it to me, touched the side of my face lightly and kissed me sweetly, smiled, turned, and walked away.
Donella,
The ocean is wide,
Will we cross it.
I saw you there,
A mystery to solve.
So hard to reach.
Our hearts touched,
One night revealed,
Something you hide,
Behind a quip and a laugh,
A pain buried deep.
I know my love, you know,
I shall never forget you.
Au revoir,
mon jeter l'amour.
Gisela

Sounds like someone's kink is whining to me.

@7: Nailed it! It's also very No True Scotsman. You see, it's not that her observation and experience in the poly community is telling her that non-monogamists are selfish sluts who want to bang their way through town, but also get emotional benefits from relationships, while not providing reciprocal emotional support. It's not that they're bad at communicating (often because there's too many people to text). They're definitely not disinterested in serious committed relationships, because why put in the work when things get tough, if you can just chase after the next hot ass that walks by, and monkeybranch, or because they realize that you really can only have one serious committed relationship once things like kids and/or mortgages are involved, so that's their spouse, and everyone else is just a fun wank. Those are all the fake non-monogamists.

SHE and the half-dozen fantasy non-monogmists she's looking for are the True Non-Monogamists, and they are wonderful, sexy, attentive, devoted partners, who are also great communicators, and put serious work into maintaining long-term serious relationships - just with multiple people at once. And gosh golly gee, if all these fake non-monogamists could stop crowding the dating pool, she could find all those True Non-Monogamists who are definitely out there, and date them.

Cheap, meaningless, non-monogamous sex is harmful to the participants and harmful to society. Luckily it appears that young people are growing more comfortable with conservative views on sex (wait until marriage and then have lots of babies who will contribute to Making America Great Again.)

@7 I also can't help but notice I,N went out of their way to bag on divorce, as if guaranteeing that serious commitments (parental, financial, etc.) will be untangled soberly and enforceablely, is somehow less than whatever it is that they do when they commit.

@7 I also can't help but notice I,N went out of their way to bag on divorce, as if guaranteeing that serious commitments (parental, financial, etc.) will be untangled soberly and enforceablely, is somehow less than whatever it is that they do when they commit.

@7 I also can't help but notice I,N went out of their way to bag on divorce, as if guaranteeing that serious commitments (parental, financial, etc.) will be untangled soberly and enforceablely, is somehow less than whatever it is that they do when they commit.

Vanilla is actually pretty easy. There's pretty much one standard template. Non monogamy has to have every detail negotiated carefully.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Some Russian Guy