I’ve been travelling for the past 10 days, a long way away from my home, my normal life, my husband and kids.
I’ve crossed so many time zones that my body is in disarray, and my 10-12 hour days are spent enclosed in a building, far away from the sun. I feel like I’m on another planet.
After each long day is over, I go back to the apartment I am staying in, alone. Simultaneously both too tired to think about shopping or cooking, and giddily free from those monotonous tasks which I have to undertake every day in my normal life, so my evenings are spent eating yogurt and cereal in front of bad TV, or on the night that there was no yogurt left, dry cereal swimming in the dregs of a bottle of Grand Marnier.
It’s boring.
And it’s lonely.
I miss having my husband to talk to, someone to touch me or hug me after a long and emotionally draining day. I need physical contact, and I need some distraction.
I have an open marriage, and have met a variety of male lovers in my home city over the past year. I decide to sign up to a popular app in Australia for people who like to “play” outside their marriages, mostly to pass the time and see what the possibilities were. I include the usual photo of myself, face only a quarter visible, lying on my stomach, bum on display. I write that I’m in town for two nights, looking for a woman or a couple to play with. I write that I’m happy to be a Unicorn – the word the swinger community uses to describe a single woman who joins an established couple in their bedroom. I feel this is safer than meeting up with a single male, given I don’t have much time at all to chat with the person I end up choosing, to get a gut feeling if they are a good match or not.