Further Than You Expected to Go
This month’s article is a little bit of a different twist. For this month we wanted to highlight a new novel from one of our long-time friends. We are proud to introduce you to him and his debut work, Balance: a novel.
Take it away M Kirk…
My wife and I started as swingers. We found the lifestyle the way many couples do – through curiosity, a strong marriage, and a willingness to ask the question most people are too afraid to ask out loud: what if the rules we inherited aren't the only rules? We weren't broken. We weren't bored. We were just honest with each other in a way that the standard-issue monogamy script didn't accommodate.
What we didn't anticipate was where it would take us.
The lifestyle contains multitudes. Couples who play together, always, and couples who don't. Soft swap and full swap, club nights and private parties, cuckolding and hotwifing, BDSM, and every variation in between. There's a whole spectrum between "we had a great Saturday night with another couple" and "these people are now genuinely important to us," and plenty of people live happily at every point on it. None of it is more legitimate than any other.
But here's the thing nobody puts in the brochure: sometimes the people you meet through the lifestyle become your friends. And sometimes your friends become something more. Not because you went looking for it, not because you made some grand philosophical decision to restructure your emotional life, but because compatibility is compatibility. When you find people you genuinely connect with – in bed and out of it, over dinner and in the group chat, and at two in the morning when something goes wrong – the connection doesn't stay neatly inside whatever container you built for it. Our geometry, over time, became a six-way. Multiple relationships, different configurations, different depths. These are people who have keys to our house. People woven into our kids' lives, who show up for Sunday night dinner and the random Tuesday when everything is falling apart. People whose presence in our family is so ordinary now that explaining how we met feels almost beside the point. You probably know someone with a similar story. You might have one yourself.
The novel I've written, Balance, tells one slice of one configuration inside that kind of world. It's a V – one woman, two men, each relationship distinct. It's not a swinger story exactly, though the world it comes from is this one. It has elements of reluctant hotwifing in its DNA: a long-term male partner navigating his partner's deep connection to someone else, trying to hold that without losing himself or her. He didn't sign up for polyamory. He signed up for the woman he loves, and she turned out to be more expansive than either of them knew.
This book is not about us – not collectively, not individually. The characters are an amalgam, assembled from all six of us, from couples we've met at parties and on vacations and in every corner of this community, from people at every stage of their ENM journey. Some of them don't know they're in it. The experiences are lived and witnessed, filtered through imagination, reassembled into something I hope rings true from the inside. If you're in the community, I want it to feel authentic. If you're not – if you're the curious vanilla housewife – I want it to make our world a little more legible.
Genre romance has a whole polyamory subgenre now, but it tends toward fantasy: everyone's attractive, there are curiously a lot of vampires, no one's insecure for long, and jealousy resolves in a chapter. The non-fiction shelf is excellent, but it can only tell you what to think about your experience. Only fiction can make you feel it from the inside.
The lifestyle teaches you this if you stay in it long enough: everyone on the other side of the arrangement has skin in the game too. The transactional version of swinging allows you to keep people at arm's length – and that's completely fine. Sometimes you only get a first name from a pile at a party, and that's the whole story, and it's a good one. Sometimes you swap numbers, build a little orbit around each other. Sometimes you end up on vacation together, standing at an airport gate wondering how none of this was in the original plan. All of it is valid. All of it is the lifestyle working exactly as designed.
But wherever you land on that spectrum, the work underneath is the same. You have the conversation about boundaries – what's okay, what isn't, what you think you can handle. Then something happens, maybe exactly what you agreed to, maybe something adjacent, maybe something that technically stayed inside the lines but didn't feel like it did. And you have to talk about that too. The rules that made sense in the abstract need revisions once they meet reality. The thing you were certain you'd be fine with, you weren't. The thing you were terrified of turned out to be nothing. You update. You renegotiate. The original agreement was never really the point – the willingness to keep talking was.
Those skills compound. You learn to say "that didn't work" and mean it as information rather than indictment. You learn to hear "I want something more" without translating it as "what we have isn't enough." Somewhere in that practice, without intending to, you become someone who can hold more – more complexity, more connection, more people than the default settings ever made room for.
You start with a rules conversation and end up having a feelings conversation. You start with a playdate and end up at someone's kitchen table on a Sunday morning, coffee in hand, laughing about something that has nothing to do with sex. The rules that made sense in year one need revisiting in year three.
The book is about that drift. About what happens when the skills you built in one context quietly expand your capacity for everything else. About the moment a configuration you thought you understood reveals itself to be more complicated, more costly, and more worth it than the original plan ever accounted for.
I've published it under a pen name – partly because the market for romance novels written by fifty-two-year-old Volvo-driving white guys is not exactly untapped, but partly because the stigma is real. We joke about our "recreational hobby," and the jokes land because the shame underneath is still there, even in rooms full of people who know exactly what we're talking about. ENM is more visible in the culture now, but I'm not convinced we're at prime time yet. The understanding is still shallow. The curiosity often outpaces the empathy. Maybe this book helps with that.
It turns out the rules were never the point. Neither was the sex, exactly – though nobody's complaining about that part. What you're actually building, whether you know it or not, is trust. The rest follows.
Balance is available now on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
https://www.amazon.com/Balance-novel-M-Kirk/dp/B0GS75LMNX
You can also follow me on Instagram at @mkirkwrites