Back in my hotel room, I sent a message thanking a man for inviting me to spend time with his wife. His reply corrected one important detail: she wasn’t his wife. She was a married friend he sometimes saw on the side.
By then, I had already had sex with her. The introduction, the invitation, the entire arrangement had come from him. I had walked into the room believing I was joining a married couple. Only afterward did I learn that her husband wasn’t there at all.
I was away for work and had put an advertisement on a site for couples looking to meet another man. This wasn’t my first experience with swinging. I’m married, and my wife and I had participated in that lifestyle both together and separately. There was a significant difference between our separate encounters, though: she didn’t know about mine. She only met other women.
So I wasn’t arriving with a spotless record of openness. My own marriage already contained information I was keeping to myself. That matters to this story, because it would be convenient to describe the evening as a situation in which I was the only person being misled.
The man contacted me about fulfilling a fantasy for his wife. He had a room near mine and wanted me to come over in about half an hour. The short notice gave me pause. I had my own room, and the proposed arrangement was unusual: the woman and I wouldn’t see each other’s faces, and there would be no conversation at the start.
I agreed. At the time, I treated the encounter as low risk. I had accepted his description of the people involved without knowing either of them. A nearby room and a clear invitation had made the logistics straightforward; they hadn’t established anything about his relationship with her.
He met me at the hotel elevator and took me to the room. The Super Bowl was on television, and it was halftime. The encounter went ahead, with him present, under the arrangement he had described. Afterward, he told me I was done and wished me a good night. I estimated that I had been there for about thirty minutes.
I left without knowing the woman’s version of the arrangement. The explanation I received afterward came from the same man who had made the invitation.
His reply changed who I understood the man in that room to be. He hadn’t been a husband inviting someone into an arrangement with his wife. According to him, he was another man seeing a married woman whose husband knew nothing about it. I had his account of that marriage, just as I’d had his account of his own relationship with her.
I had gone over believing I knew which couple I was meeting. Back in my room, I learned that the husband I thought I’d met was somewhere else—and, according to the man who had invited me, entirely unaware.
