It was a late night, less than a week before my wedding. My then-fiancee (yes, she is my wife now) and I were up late. She was studying for a final, and I was providing indirect support (refilling glasses of juice, backrubs, that sort of thing) though I did not need to be awake at all.
To pass the time, I was on ICQ talking to two good friends, both of whom now lived many miles away. The two knew each other as well, so it was similar to a conversation between the three of us, but since we were only using very basic messaging due to firewall problems, it was more like three conversations between three people. Or perhaps four, since my fiancee and I were both adding our input to the two conversations at my end.
The overall tone drifted into a relationship/sexual vein from both the lateness of hour and my deduction of a secret involving the two of them. Eventually I found myself discussing my own sexual leanings, relationship tendencies and so forth. A message popped up, reading something like this:
In Alan Dean Foster's novel Quozl, an alien race has been sending out spaceships to make the slow crossing to habitable worlds; Earth is one of the worlds chosen. The Quozl don't repress sex; while they may have it in private, they have it on any given casual whim. (Admittedly, they have high-end birth control technology as well.) A theme of the novel is that the Quozl are more emotionally mature than humanity. One could argue this point; it is a favorite (though not often in a sexual fashion) of Foster's.
What if we indulged? As I've said elsewhere, I'm not a big fan of casual sex/swinging. At the same time, I am rather strongly attracted on multiple levels, including the sexual, to some of my friends. I don't think I'm capable of indulging myself with anything less than a close friend. At the same time, it's obvious some tension and stress is involved in bottling up those feelings. Still, it's simultaneously obvious that emotion will come to play in any such situation, perhaps catastrophically.
But, perhaps, might we be happier?
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