We Did the Mash – We Did the Poly Mash

I was working in my lab, late one night…

This turned out to be a long one – Bear with me, because the context matters.

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Ah, boundary stretching – we meet again.

Today was not my best day in recent memory. I’ve been feeling under the weather, and it was confirmed that I have ye olde tonsillitis, which is a common consequence I come across as a smoker. Smoking sucks; I’m working on it.

What I’ve learned today, and what I continue to learn, is that boundary stretching experiences rarely take place in lab conditions. There are so many confounding variables in any given situation, that things are just not going to go as you plan or expect.

This all comes back to that expectations and idealism that I’ve gone over a lot in my previous posts. It’s my biggest sin, every time.

So, today was the first time that I agreed to leave the house without any actual plans so that my husband and a partner could specifically have alone/sexy times.

The original plan was that they would be seeing each other between 4pm and 6pm and that I would be home at 6pm after “festivities” had ended. He even set an alarm for 5:40pm to make sure that things were wrapped up by 6. Our definition of “wrapped up” was never clearly communicated, and you’ll see where that ended up taking us as the story progresses. In case you can’t tell already – things did not work out as I expected.

At a little after 3, hubby gets a text that his new partner is on her way, so I hustle to gather up my coat and purse and get out of the house before she arrives. (We have not met yet, and springing me on her when she’s first arriving to initiate sexy times would be uncool).

So already we’re off to a rough start – I was not planning on leaving until shortly before 4, and here I was leaving a little after 3. Hubby still wants to enjoy their time until she has to leave (which is 6). Sooo, instead of finding distractions and things to do for 2 hours, it’s now for about 3 hours.

First stop for me was the Patient First, as over the past two days, my left tonsil had become exceptionally swollen, and I knew it was tonsillitis, as I’ve been down this road before. So, I get to the Patient First, and it looks like this is totally going to eat up a ton of time! Not bad!

Nope. I was out of there in just shy of an hour.

At this point, I’d started feeling very lethargic and significantly more “sick” than I was previously – I had a slight fever when they took my temperature. This made the prospect of staying out and finding more things to do really annoying – but I knew that hubby and new lady have limited time, and I didn’t want to intrude, even though all I wanted to do at that moment was nap.

Okay… so… what to do now?

Second stop became an oil change! That should eat up some time. I thought to myself “I bet there’s a long line with people gearing up their cars for holiday travel!” I got there, and it seemed to be the case, with a full garage already and 3 cars ahead of me! Woohoo!

Yeah, I was in and out of there in 45 minutes…

So at this point, I still had an hour left to kill.

I headed to the WaWa right next door to the oil change place, grabbed a coffee and sat in my car staring at the clock for a while.

And for almost all of this, I was chain smoking cigarettes like crazy. My car smells hideous right now.

I drove back toward the house around 5:15, and decided to stop at the Royal Farms nearby the house. I gassed up my Prius (which didn’t take long), and then I sat in the Royal Farms parking lot listening to Podcasts, drinking my WaWa coffee and staring at the clock some more. (You may note here that I did not get gas at the WaWa, and that it was really weird for me to stop at one gas station and then shortly thereafter another… but I really was just trying to come up with things to do as I headed toward the house – don’t judge me).

It was about 5:30 at this point.

I started to play Farm Heroes Saga. That eats up another 15 minutes.

Checked Facebook. Texted boyfriend back and forth.

5:59pm.

At 6:00pm on the nose, I figured I would have heard from my husband giving the all clear, so I text him an “Are you decent?”

He then tells me that he is, and then asks me if I’d like to meet his new lady.

I mention that I’m exhausted and just went to the urgent care and am just not in the best state to meet. I’m getting upset at this point, because I was SOOOO ready to be home. There was no actual discussion about meeting her prior to this. Plus, in our initial conversations I said that I really didn’t want things to run over the 6 o’clock mark.

He understands and says she needs to gather her stuff to leave, and he’d text me the all clear.

10 minutes go by, and I get a text that’s likely meant to be light-hearted but pissed me off about how she’s just chatting away and he’s trying to nudge her toward the door.

At this point, I’m so over this waiting game and angrily text “Fuck Dude, I’ve been sitting in this Royal Farms parking lot for almost an hour!”.

He gets the hint, and about 5 minutes later he gives the all clear.

I am in a terrible mood when I get home. He’s in the shower, and I just crawl into bed, super upset and exhausted.

He comes out of the shower and doesn’t understand why I’m upset. Initially I do not want to talk, but he lays down in the bed and just continues talking to me and asking ridiculous nonsensical questions until I get to the point where I’m cooled down enough to explain why I’m so upset.

What it boils down to is that I thought we’d agreed to specific things, and then it felt like none of them were adhered to. The time frame was shot to hell on both ends. There was no discussion of meeting and I expected to be home at 6 with her having already left.

In reality, the only thing that was really dumb was that my husband brought up the possibility of meeting me to his new lady at around 5:30pm, and she said that would be alright, and he forgot to close the loop because he assumed I’d be okay with it. He had forgotten that I felt awful and just wanted to take a nap (which I’d texted to him while at the Patient First). He got caught up in conversation after asking her, and forgot to get the other person involved in this meeting (me) on board. If he’d asked me around 5:30, I might have made the effort, but when he asked me at 6, when I was expecting to be at home, I was not in any mood because I’d already felt like the boundaries of what we’d agreed to were violated.

After about an hour of conversation and discussion, I started to feel less awful – at least about the situation (I still feel sick).

As I write this, I feel stupid for being so upset. I definitely overreacted (though I didn’t yell or threaten or anything – I mostly just whined). I’m not generally on my best behavior when I’m feeling sick, and I spent the last 2 hours of my “trip” wanting nothing more than to take a nap, but being unable to do so because I was exiled from my home. And then when the moment arrived that I was supposed to be free to go home… it was snatched away from me, and I had to wait an additional 20 minutes. Which is an eternity when you feel like hot garbage.

Boundary stretching experiences are not guaranteed to occur under the best case scenario or circumstances. Just like experiments outside of the lab, you are likely to come across a lot of confounding variables that may taint your view of the boundary, but really have nothing to do with it. But coming across those variables is extremely valuable if you take the time to separate them from the actual experiment.

I think this whole thing would have been absolutely fine if I hadn’t felt so sick and shitty. And if my husband hadn’t have been so dumb and forgotten to ask me if I was in any state to meet his new lady. But that probably also wouldn’t have been so upsetting if I hadn’t been desperate to get home and curl up in bed due to being ill.

So… at the end of the day, what I learned is: Don’t try to stretch your fucking boundaries when you’re a whiney sick baby.

Just kidding (sort of).

The real lesson is that taking the time to separate the incidental shittiness from the broader experiment is key in stretching your boundaries in a healthy way. I could very easily assume that this is a hard boundary for me if I were to forget to remove the confounding variables of my illness and my husband’s forgetfulness.

Don’t give in to the idea that a bad experience is bad and should never be attempted again because of the boundary stretching – look closer and see if it’s not something else entirely.