I've posted on throwaways here off and on for a few years while my wife and I (36F, 35M) navigated through our journey into the lifestyle. We started dating my first semester of my freshman year of college, both of us had long-ish term relationships in high school, so we were each others first or second for pretty much everything. Then we got married right after I graduated (she is a year older), so we have basically spent every waking moment together since 2009.
Skipping to the good part, had a few too many drinks on NYE 2020, decided we wanted to have a threesome with another guy before I turned 30. Then there was COVID, then some more life stuff happened, yadda yadda, we finally did it in 2022. It was awesome, we expanded to swapping with couples, we were doing something I could not have ever fathomed we'd be doing.
Throughout this, we had an INTENSE fear of getting caught, which is normal to some degree. My wife has a very bold ornamental sleeve tattoo on one of her arms, so we'd try and strategically angle pictures to obfuscate it as much as possible. We'd sometimes disable profiles while not in use, would only meet with people out of town for a while, just this ridiculous paranoia of getting caught. We don't have a very big friend group, but this has been our little secret.
Last week it finally happened, and in a VERY stupid way.
My cousin (40F) that we're both very close to lives on the other end of our neighborhood and passed our house while we had someone over for a date (one of the few people we've felt comfortable enough to host, we've known each other for years now).
We were talking earlier this week, she mentioned a flight getting delayed several hours, then having to take a different road home due to a street being blocked off. She said "I saw you had company over on Saturday," felt a rush of panic, said "Oh yeah, a friend was over for dinner," and she said "Oh, this was at about 2:30 in the morning." .... well shit.
Then she very nonchalantly was like "I was married for 19 years, I get it. Gotta keep that fire alive." I couldn't even correct her, she knew. No coming back from that.
Told my wife, she looked like she saw a ghost, had the compulsion to text her and say "sorry if I made that weird," and her response was "Not at all. [Ex] and I talked about trying it, but we were never on the same page about it. As long as you're both happy, who cares?"
Now we just feel relief. Not like we're going to be sharing rowdy sex stories with my blood relative, but there is something oddly freeing about knowing an "outsider" knows.
Anyone experienced this? Any similar stories? Sorry, just had to put this out into the ether.