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The Husband's Story

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Note 1:

This story contains no explicit sex.

Thus it has been submitted in the Non-Erotic category. It is, however, about a husband and wife, both of whom commit adultery.

Note 2:

The story tends towards the deep-and-meaningful.

It has psychological and philosophical references. If you're not into that kind of thing, it might be best to give it a bit of a swerve and look elsewhere for a story more to your tastes.

**********

Preface

My first story, Lue to Lucy and Back, was submitted as a five-part series in 2015. It was followed by One Wounded Seagull. They attracted some interesting comments, which led to the original five-part series being edited and re-submitted as a single story. They are both now archived as Loving Wives stories.

Lue to Lucy and Back chronicles Lue's version of her extra-marital liaison with a workmate Ray. Then, a couple of years after Lue's affair came to an end, her husband Don had a brief sexual relationship with a young woman, Kylie. One Wounded Seagull tells Lue's side of that story.

What follows is Don's side of both stories. It is written first-person in Don's voice, although it's not him putting fingers to keyboard and words on screen. It has, however, been thoroughly edited so there's nothing there he'd be unlikely to say.

Don's story can stand alone without the need to read the earlier ones. It's here mainly as an antidote to the many stories infesting the Loving Wives category in which a wife decides to have an affair for no apparent reason. That is, of course, nonsense. There is always a reason. What motivates a wife to form a relationship with a man who is not her husband is likely to be complicated and to have developed over time.

As well as that, the husband in this story doesn't react with any of the more common LW story responses. Don doesn't feel that he has 'lost' his wife, so he doesn't retaliate, seek revenge or demand retribution, and there is no need for reconciliation. Nor does he descend into subservience or submission. He just rationally evaluates the situation and makes his decisions.

Lue, on the other hand, has more difficulty in accepting her husband's dalliance. It took time for Don to develop the beliefs he holds, and it will take time for Lue to come to a similar conclusion. She does, but later.

We'll start Don's story in the same place Lue's started, and then fill in the details before and after as perceived by him.

**********

Lue has a man who is not me, her husband, in the marital bed

I had an early start on Monday morning and I needed to be gone by 05:30. I jumped out of bed, had a quick shower and dressed. Today I was visiting a warehouse so I didn't need a jacket. But I did need a tie and when I got my clothes together last night I had forgotten that. Damn. My ties were hanging in the wardrobe in the master bedroom and last night I had slept in the spare room.

I went out to the kitchen, made a couple of pieces of toast to eat in the car on the way to the warehouse and downed a glass of orange juice. Then I walked quietly back and opened the door to the bedroom, hoping to get my tie without waking the couple in bed.

There was a little early morning light coming through the window, so I made my way over to the wardrobe and reached inside to take a tie off the rack. There was a stirring movement in the bed. They were awake.

I looked over at the bed. It had been a very warm night and they had only a sheet covering them, making it rather easy to see the outlines of their two bodies pressed firmly together. Lue was lying on what would normally be my side of the bed, with Ray pressed closely against her back. His movements looked as though he was trying to back away. Ah well, maybe they had been awake for a while and I needn't have worried about disturbing their sleep. I had probably interrupted something much more active and intimate.

I walked from the wardrobe around to where Lue was lying. I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. "Sorry Lue," I said, "I forgot to get a tie when I took my things last night. I'm off now. I'll see you later this afternoon."

"OK Don," she replied, amusement in her voice. "Seeya then."

I closed the door behind me and made my way down the hall and out through the front door to my car. No doubt most people would see what had just happened as an unusual situation. And if somebody had suggested to me twelve months ago that I should agree to my wife sharing the marital bed with another man, while I slept in the spare room so they could have the big bed, my response would have been at least one of incredulity.

But that is what I had done. She had asked my permission last night and I had granted it.

A year before, we were husband and wife who, to all appearances, led a reasonably happy and rather ordinary family life. What we were doing now was far from ordinary. The year leading up to this situation had been a most interesting one.

**********

Falling in love with Lue; where my story starts

What I have related here happened a bit more than half a lifetime ago. I was 37, Donald, husband of Luellen (forty years later, still am), father of three children aged 4 to 7 (who have since made us grandparents several times), self-employed consultant.

My life up to that time had its ups and downs, but mostly ups. I did OK at school but couldn't afford to go straight on to university, so I went through a few very ordinary jobs until I lucked in with a job as a technical officer and a boss who took me under his wing. He pushed me to achieve and gave my career (and my life) a new direction. I started a part-time university degree and worked to build a career, working a forty hours per week job and attending sometimes five evenings per week uni lectures.

I was into the third year of the six-year part-time degree when I met Lue. She was a full-timer and had two years to go until graduation. Her lectures were mostly daytime, but she had one subject that was available only as an evening lecture.

Friday nights; end of the week. Statistics; dull as dishwater. If ever there was a recipe for dozing off in the middle of lectures, Friday night statistics was it. But when I went into the first lecture for the semester I saw this cute young lady sitting down the front of the room and I just happened to find a place reasonably close. If ever there was a reason to stay awake, she was it.

During the break we got talking. All her lectures until now had been daytime ones and she was a bit worried about catching public transport home in the evenings. So wasn't it lucky that I lived only a couple of suburbs away from her parents' place and was able to give her a lift home?

Lue was (and is) a true romantic. Nothing makes her happier than to see two people expressing their love for each other. She cries at weddings. She is over the moon when I remember our wedding anniversary. (I have about 75% success rate and she forgives me when I don't.)

I was totally goal-oriented. I needed a good honours degree to take the next step in my career and I worked to achieve that goal. I saw Lue as an incredibly desirable young woman and I worked to win her love. I succeeded in both endeavours.

We became a boyfriend-girlfriend couple, totally in love, despite what were then considerable differences. She was outgoing and confident, I was reserved and a bit shy. I had workmates, of whom only a couple were friends. She connected with people quickly and easily and had a wide circle of friends at uni and in her locality. Her friends readily accepted me into their circle as Lue's boyfriend.

I was her first real boyfriend, as she was my first real girlfriend, but from the time we became a serious couple we never thought that anything would ever happen that could break the bond between us. We knew we were together for life.

I was possessive and a believer in the right of a man to be the dominant member in a male-female relationship, just as my father was in his relationship with my mother and as Lue's father was with her mother. Lue clearly went along with this view of male-female relationships, or so I thought. She willingly accepted my help with her assignments at university and took my advice on most other things. We did things together and it was mostly me who decided what we did.

But one incident in our lives will stay with me until the day I die. We had been together a couple of years and it was a few days before my birthday. We were catching a bus to go to a George Shearing concert. Lue stepped in front of me and paid our fare to the bus driver. I was mortified. We took our seat. "Don't you ever do that to me again," I fumed.

She just sat there, silent.

It's the man's place in this world to open the doors, pay the fares, pull the chair out from the table for the lady to sit. A woman doesn't humiliate her partner by stepping in first and doing the things he should be doing.

A few days later, my birthday presents included a small flat package. I opened it. A 45rpm single. Leslie Gore's You Don't Own Me.

The immediate rebuff was pretty obvious. Even I saw that. But I can't say that the whole message sank in at the time. There were a few tense days before the evening when we talked through our differences. I drove down to the beachside and we looked out at the moon rising over the bay. We talked. Lue said that she didn't intend to be dominated in our relationship or, for that matter, in any other. I told her that in this world men and women have different roles and that's the way society functioned. We talked, but settled nothing. Despite that, we climbed into the back seat and made love. Not just make-up sex; genuine love. Boyfriend and girlfriend loved each other enough to believe that we could resolve our differences.

We didn't speak about that episode again, but little by little our differences faded and we became more and more understanding of each other. We had at least confronted the problem, and had each become aware that there was an issue.

I didn't realise it then, but it was my beliefs that would do most of the changing. Lue didn't realise it either and she changed too. All she knew back then was that she didn't intend to be subservient - she wanted equality. As time went on, we came to believe that equality is only the starting point. A couple can have equality and be equally demanding of each other so that neither partner gets what they really want. To be equally understanding, and equally accepting of each others' needs and wants takes a lot more doing.

There were lots of things that happened over the following years before I settled on a set of beliefs that I felt comfortable with. Among the thoughts I experimented with were the ideas of gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, most famous for his 'Gestalt Prayer':

I do my thing and you do your thing

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

And you are not in this world to live up to mine

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other it's beautiful

If not, it can't be helped

I went very close to believing it, before concluding that was a step too far. That was independence. Independence is not equality as I wanted it; nor as Lue wanted it. But sometimes you have to explore extremes before you realise what is right for you.

**********

Worklife, homelife, and meeting some interesting people

Lue finished her degree course and started work in a commercial laboratory. She was lab technician in the research section of the company and she loved the work. Two years later, I also graduated and was promoted into a senior on-the-job trainer role in the company I was working for. The work fascinated me, as there was a large trouble-shooting component to the work as well as assessing people's skills and devising development programs to help them improve those skills.

It wasn't long before I realised that most of the situations I was dealing with in my job were brought about by people not working together well rather than their lack of skill or the technical problems I was being brought in to help solve. The 1960s was a time of great experimentation and advances in thinking about relationships at work, and relationships in society generally. I read and studied everything I could find on the topic and put as much of it as I could into practice in my work with my employer.

People at work are supposed to behave rationally and logically. They don't, of course, but they are supposed to. Companies are all built around the idea that they should. I was doing a lot of work on the responsibilities people had in their jobs and was having some successes working with people and helping them to accept responsibility for achieving results.

I think it's fair to say that a person's work occupation affects the way they see the world more than most other things in their life. An artist sees the world and the people in it rather differently to the way an engineer sees it. So it was with me. I started wondering about my own responsibility for things in my life both within and outside the things I was doing at work. The ideas that most impressed me were the rational-emotive theories of Albert Ellis. I had been looking at people taking responsibility for what they do. Ellis proposed that you should also take personal responsibility for how you feel.

When something happens that affects our feelings we often say 'this happened and it made me feel good' or 'I felt bad because of that'. Statements like these are saying external events are responsible for how we feel, rather than us being personally responsible for those feelings. If, on the other hand, we say that it is our beliefs about things that determine our feelings, perhaps we should examine them and dispute the beliefs that cause us to be unhappy.

I knew that my beliefs about male-female relationships had changed from the days when I upset myself so much over Lue paying the bus fare. I could see how silly and possessive my beliefs and behaviour had been back then. And I was at least at the stage of saying 'I upset myself' rather than 'Lue upset me', but how much further I could change those beliefs would be severely tested over the years to come.

Lue and I were married five years after we met and, as we had both been saving and working hard in quite well-paid jobs, we were able to take out a mortgage on a house and settle down as husband and wife. We planned on having a family, so it was a large house. Life was good.

We had been married about a year when Lue came home one evening with some news. "I got a new boss today" she said. The company had set up a new research project and Lue was to become assistant to the project chief.

A week later, she came home on the Friday evening and told me that she and Bruce, her new boss, had been out to lunch together. "I won't need much for dinner tonight," she said. "Bruce and I had a very long lunch today. He took me out to talk over the project and how we will be working together on it. We start on Monday."

She explained as much as she was able to about the project, but said that it was commercially sensitive and she wasn't permitted to say too much. She also said "There's going to be quite a few times when we will be running trials that need to be monitored for sixty hours straight, so what we will have to do is take a couple of rooms in the motel down the road from the lab so that we can work it in shifts between the two of us."

This would be something new. We hadn't had a night apart in the year we had been married. It's not uncommon for somebody's job to take that person away from the family for a period, and that would certainly be my situation in a few years time, but I hadn't considered that Lue's job might keep her away too.

So, when it happened the first time, it felt strange being the only person in a large house when I came home from work. Eating dinner alone and then being by myself in bed that first night felt strange. Lue phoned from the motel to tell me how things were going with the project and we talked for an hour about how much we were missing each other.

Lue phoned again late on the second evening. The trial had struck problems and had to be abandoned. She and Bruce had finished up and were both staying at the motel for the night. "Why not come home?" I asked. She explained that they'd had a couple of drinks to drown their disappointment, and they would have to go back to the lab in the morning to tidy up the loose ends.

"I'll be home early tomorrow", she said. I told her I would see her tomorrow evening when I came home.

Bruce and Lue ran their trial again about a month later. During one of her evening phone calls Lue said "Are we doing anything next Saturday night? I thought I might invite Bruce and his wife over for dinner so that you can meet him and we can both meet his wife."

I agreed that would be a really good idea. Lue makes firm friends very quickly and easily, and it was already clear to me that she had formed a genuinely close friendship with Bruce that was more than just a working relationship that a lab tech would have with her chief.

We spent Saturday afternoon preparing for dinner. We had a fondue set given to us as a wedding present and we had tried it a few times before having dinner with friends. We had found it to be a fun way to serve a meal and to entertain and socialise, and so it turned out to be when Bruce and his wife Anneke came on Saturday evening.

They were a handsome couple in their mid-thirties, several years older than I was. Bruce was slightly built, with a lively and expressive face, its expressiveness emphasised by a small ginger goatee beard. Anneke was a tall blonde woman with a willowy figure, who spoke with an accent we later discovered was from her having been born in the Netherlands and living there until her mid-teens. Our conversation ranged over the work Bruce and Lue were doing, to our various backgrounds, and by the end of our time at the dinner table I felt that we were on our way to forming a firm friendship.

Anneke was a non-drinker, fortunately, as she would be driving home. Bruce, Lue and I were fairly well lubricated by the time we had finished the flambé dessert and adjourned to the lounge room. I went to get the coffee and when I returned I found Lue and Bruce seated together on one lounge and Anneke on the other, patting the seat beside her indicating that I should join her.

We talked on for about another hour before Bruce decided that it was getting late and they should make their way home. The hour was indeed getting on and after they departed Lue and I fell into bed without much discussion of the evening's events.

Our Sunday morning conversation roamed over all the things that had happened and we had talked about last night. "They really are an unusual pair." I said. Lue agreed, and said that she had told me Bruce was not like any boss she had ever had before. They, with their young daughter Liberty, had set off with a caravan around the country and had then settled for a while with two other couples on a farm up on the north coast before returning to the city where Bruce became employed in the company he and Lue now worked for.

"They were hippies long before the hippies came along," said Lue. "Bruce had a full beard and long hair, and they made him trim it short before he was given the job in the laboratory. But he really knows his stuff and that's why he was put in charge of the new project. And he and Anneke still have an interest in the farm and they go up there every chance they get."

"I thought Anneke was a bit on the touchy-feely side," I said. "Sitting next to her I had her hand on my arm or on my knee each time she said something to me. It's a strange feeling having somebody move so close to talk to you. Maybe it's a Dutch thing, but I like a bit of space."

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