By Indigo
It’s hard to believe the summer is over. I spent the last two weeks of August traveling throughout Los Angeles and San Francisco, California on a creative, sexy poly adventure without my partner. Sara and I often travel together but since she won her International Leather title, I knew there would be times we would travel on our own. Our August travels would be the first time we would be separated for more than a week by coast. Being poly, we knew we would be having sexual encounters with others.
The dynamic of sleeping with others while you’re primary is out of town can be complicated. On one hand, I love hearing about Sara’s sexy fun times on her travels. Sara is not only my lover and partner, but she’s my friend and I want to always encourage her to have hot, safe sex (mostly so we get to gab about it later!). But when she travels, the distance makes me miss her and sometimes I’m too frustrated to hear how much fun she’s having. Something that helps relieve the tension is re-establishing our ground rules and boundaries before we are apart. We also set up times to talk by phone so we knew when we would hear from each other.
We reviewed our boundaries before our travels and hoped we could maintain our promise to call each other daily. Our travel plans were crazy: Sara attended a contest in LA while I stayed in New York with plans to meet in her on the West Coast a week later. I went to my first event on my own (The Floating World) and I flew out to LA for a brief meeting with Sara before she left for Portland, Oregon to judge a leather contest. Soon after, I flew out to San Francisco and Sara met me out there for a weekend. Last week we flew back to New York together. Welcome to the life of an International Title holder!
Clearly our schedules were hectic and unfortunately, there were a few days we missed our promised phone calls. Most of the time we were both having so much fun, by the end of the day, we were too exhausted to talk to each other. Even so, it takes something to maintain the spark in a relationship with is affected by distance and time. The longer Sara and I were apart, the more important it became that I hear from her daily. During our conversations, we made sure we talked about any perspective partners we were thinking about playing with and checked in with each other to see how the distance was affecting us. Our travels reminded us of the year in our relationship where we were long distance. It was hard but we made it work so we could give distant partnership a chance. Our temporary West Coast adventure was no different.
Though I missed Sara deeply, there are some perks to being separated for a brief period of time. I gained some much needed confidence navigating a play event and play dates on my own. I learned to ask for what I want and communicate the way I want to be treated in and outside the bedroom/play space/dungeon. I found enough peace and quiet in California that kept me writing and creating for days. In between writing, I had amazing sex, ate delicious fresh food and spent time with my new and growing Poly and Leather families. The trip to California was the first break I have had as a handler/IMsL wife since Sara won the contest in March and I had a blast.
Now that we are back in New York and planning our next round of travels, we are better prepared for distance. We are learning that sometimes our original plans to communicate can fall through. As a result, we agreed to keep an open mind about renegotiating our plans throughout our travels to keep the spark in our relationship going.