Ryan Vermouth (20:07)
This is fine. Ignore it, it's fine. Hey, everyone, my name is Ryan and I am here tonight to talk to you about country line dancing. Don't worry, country line dancing here is a metaphor. It's a metaphor for fucking. Maybe You've been in this situation. You're out on a dance floor, you're having a great time, you're good at dancing, you like dancing. And then all of a sudden the music changes and you find yourself in the middle of a country line dance. And when you're invited to dance, you want to Say yes. Right. So at first you try to keep up, you try to fake it, but man, everybody knows the rules but you. And pretty soon you're just kind of hanging on for dear life, trying not to look like too much of a dick. Anyway, this story is about the first time my girlfriend and I attempted group sex. I'm going to back up a little bit. So right at the start of my relationship with my girlfriend Amanda, she proposed a rule of thumb for decision making. She said, if something scares you, but it's not actually dangerous, you should probably do it. Say yes. And I am not immediately so sure about this, but she's really beautiful. She's got this whole Drew Barrymore in the 90s thing. And I'm smitten and I feel like I can do anything with this woman. So I agree. Say yes. This kind of set the tone for our early relationship. So I said yes when she surprised me with trapeze lessons for my birthday, and she said yes when I retaliated by signing her up for hang gliding lessons. And this taste of danger, this taste of exploration, was really fun and it was really sexy. And pretty soon we started thinking about ways we could apply this same kind of reasoning to our sex life. And there's so many things that we wanted to try and so many things that we'd never done with each other before and where to start, right? So, okay, let's start with the basics. Let's have a threesome. The snag we hit almost immediately is that we are both fairly mostly straight and we're both pretty game. But inevitably, any, like, big first threesome that we're going to do, somebody's going to be enjoying it a lot more than the other person. And so the conversation kind of stalled at that point, and it stayed stalled until the night of the birthday of a friend of ours. Now, she and her husband are Icelandic, so for the sake of this story, I'm going to call them Ea and Thor. Ea, after the volcano, the Icelandic volcano that grounded flights in 2010. And Thor. Honestly, I couldn't bring myself to change that one. That's his real name. His parents literally named him after the thunder God, which is amazing. And it's like extra funny in his case because he is the sweetest, shyest, quietest guy, kind of like scruffy, longish hair, laid back, likes to get high. And his wife Aya, on the other hand, she is this outspoken, tall, long, blonde hair, brick house of a woman. And what she wants to do for her birthday is to get a Group together, take MDMA and go to a burlesque show. Now, Amanda and I have never taken MDMA before, but say yes, right? So we take the drugs, we go to the show, the drugs start kicking in, and just about the time we're really starting to have a good time, Thor asks me to join him outside while he has a cigarette. And he launches into this kind of prepared speech. He says, I love my wife, and I want my wife to have exactly what she wants for her birthday. And we trust the two of you. So what I'm saying is, will you both come home with us and dominate my wife? Now, this is an unexpected ask, and I'm high as shit. So I will say my listening comprehension skills were, like, not at their peak right there. And in that moment, I made two critical misunderstandings of the situation. One, although he had suggested no such thing because they're a couple, I assumed that we were going to their place for a foursome rather than a threesome. And more than that, in my blissed out state, I suddenly realized that a foursome is the best idea I have ever heard of in my life because it solves that threesome problem, right? So there's something for everybody. And I am suddenly so about this idea. The second problem is that word dominate. Now, I assume that that means be a little assertive, be a little rough. I am not treating this word with the seriousness that it deserves, and that will become important later. But anyway, I take my head full of misunderstandings and I go talk to Amanda. And I'm like, hey, guess what? Thor and Aya want us to go back to their place and have sex with them. What do you think? And Amanda looks over at the two of them, and she's got a thing for scruffy guys, right? In the great Aragorn Legolas hotness debate of the 2000s, she had no time for Legolas. And she looks over at Thor and she turns back to me, she says, oh, my God, yes. Now, the first sign of trouble came up. In the cab on the way to their place, I suddenly realized that my hands and feet are really cold. And I think, that's funny. And then I think, oh, fuck. Because one thing that I know about me is that stimulants of any kind from, like, coffee on up really screw with my circulation and with the drugs that I've taken, if my hands and feet are this cold, nothing is happening down here tonight. The sort of bigger issue starts when we actually get to their place. And I realize pretty quickly the depth of my Misunderstanding of the situation, Thor takes Aya to the middle of the living room, immediately, strips her naked, wraps her up in this Japanese rope bondage harness, and says, okay, do whatever you want. Yellow is slow down, red is stop. Have fun. And I'm a little taken aback, and I turn to Ea and I say, okay, so, like, do you want us to. He says, no, don't ask her anything. Do whatever you want. She will tell you if she wants to stop. And then he goes off to his bedroom to smoke weed by himself, and the door closes behind him, and he is not coming back because he is fully trusting in this moment that he has left his wife in the capable hands of two people who know exactly what to do in this situation. This trust is misplaced. There's a lot that I want to game out right here, and I want to talk to Amanda about it. Like, is it weird if we take our clothes off? Is it weird if we don't take our clothes off? But we're kind of supposed to be in character at this point, and I don't really feel like we can talk. We have no practice negotiating consent in this kind of setting. I mean, listen, we know how to have sex, not to brag. We even know how to have rough sex. But the thing is that we're adventurous, but we're still actually pretty vanilla. And this is something outside of sex for us. This is ritual. This is line dancing. Meanwhile, Ea is standing there like some naked statue of a Viking queen, and she's incredibly sexy. And so, you know what? Okay, I'm saying yes to this. I'm going to try something. I go around behind her, I grab a fistful of hair, I pull it back, I reach around, I grab a breast, and she gasps in what I briefly mistake for pleasure. And then I remember that my hands are fucking freezing. Oh, my. Jeez. I'm sorry. If you're looking for that good, dominant dirty talk. Oh, geez. I'm sorry doesn't really make the list. So let me just sum up the situation that we're in here. Amanda and I are standing in front of a beautiful naked woman, and we don't know what the rules are, and we don't know how to ask. I don't have a boner because of the drugs, and Amanda doesn't have a boner because she's straight. And now I don't feel like I can use my hands either until they warm up. And they're not gonna warm up. So we just kind of start circling this poor woman like two menacing Sex ghosts going. And just when this whole thing is about to collapse under its own weight, we are saved by a prop. Amanda sees a flogger. She's good with floggers. Why? Because we took a. And this little petite Drew Barrymore of a woman has never looked more powerful than she does in this moment with her good, good friend, this Norse goddess, naked, bent over in front of her, and she is just wailing on her ass with this flogger. She's making these beautiful figure eights. And there is just visible relief on all three of our faces for, like, a little bit. Because, look, you can only flog someone's ass for so long before it turns out into something else or it turns into nothing. And we're kind of out of things to go to at this point, so the whole thing kind of peters out about then. And Thor comes back in from the bedroom, and he and I and Amanda all sit fully clothed on the couch, and Aya, still fully naked, sits on a dog bed on the floor. And we're kind of making small talk, but in my head, all I can think is, they don't have a dog. And after a little while, it just seems polite to leave. So we do, and we walk out into the dawn. And for the first time in hours, Amanda and I feel like we can talk. And I say, that was awkward as fuck. And she says, yeah. And then she says also. And I say, yeah. And she says, that was kind of awesome. And it was. Because as badly as we botched almost every step in that whole interaction, we had said yes to that moment. And I look at this woman, and I see that this is somebody that I can explore anything with that is going to say yes to things, because she understands that fucking up really badly is still better than not trying to. So about a year after all this happened, I asked Amanda to marry me. And she said yes to that, too. And that's another thing that we haven't tried before. And a couple of things have stuck with us from that night. One is, if you're just going to wander into somebody else's sex life, you don't know what you're going to find in there. So that means talk first. Like, for real talk first. And also, a little preparation never hurts. There are amazing classes in this city. There are killer parties. There are so many experiences to have, and we're exploring those together, which. Which, first of all, is fun, but also means that we're going to be that much more prepared the next time we find ourselves in a situation that we didn't totally plan on being in because you just never know, right? You never know when you're going to be out on that dance floor and the music changes and the universe invites you into a country line dance. When that happens, say yes. Thanks.
