The Accidental Foursome

If you’ve been listening to our podcast for a while, you’ve heard our After Party episodes and know that we share a lot of our lives with Phoenix Phyre & Crimson Dragonfly. We don’t talk about that relationship too much in our podcast, yet; the story will come out, in full, over time, in our podcast as we meet them face to face for the first time at Naughty N’awlins in 2019.

How were we to know that on that night in July 2019, in the lobby of the Astor hotel, at perhaps the largest swinger convention in the world, we’d meet two amazingly wonderful people who would change our lives forever?

Like most everyone else, we weren’t looking for anything more in the swinger lifestyle than finding couples to connect with and who we both enjoyed hanging out with and being with – as we all know finding compatible couples is tough enough in and of itself. With an obvious connection between the four of us, and the incredible added bonus that we only live 20 miles from each other, we made plans to go out on a vanilla date when we got back to Florida. That date was awesome! The connection, passion and intensity we’d felt in NOLA wasn’t a fluke. It was the real deal.

Quickly we established the pattern that Phoenix and I would go on a vanilla date during the week as would Tristan and Crimson (although rumor has it that their date nights weren’t always so vanilla 😉 and we’d schedule a Fri or Sat night for the 4 of us to go out together and then each couple would get a hotel room. That morphed into one vanilla date and then 2 nights a week at a hotel (a Thurs and Fri or a Fri and Sat). Within a few months, we’d all four realized that our relationships with each other as couples and with each other as a foursome was rapidly growing, deepening and changing us all … for the better. We’d fallen in love. 

We never sought a polyamorous relationship, but one found us. We call ourselves “The Square” (or sometimes the “World’s Okayest Poly Foursome” lol); in our dynamic each person is intimate with only the member of the opposite sex in the square – ie. I only play with Tristan and Phoenix; Tristan only plays with me and Crimson, etc.  Realizing that, although we were all swingers and have every intention of maintaining our ethical non-monogamy, things were changing and we wanted to begin to build some kind of a life together as a foursome.

Phoenix helped us get the podcast up and running and together we created Swinky Life. (Check out the Swinky Life website for additional information!) We were literally in the middle of signing a lease on a 2-bedroom apartment, as we realized that would be cheaper than paying for 2 hotel rooms every weekend (in Florida!), when COVID struck. We quickly pivoted and decided that the four of us would form our own social bubble, staying within the confines of our two families, while we waited out the pandemic.

This presented more opportunities to grow and share. We divided up our time between each couple’s houses, setting up work at home “co-ops” and pretending that we were all “just friends” around all of our children. We sucked at it though and it didn’t take long for Tristan and me to realize that the time had come to tell our children (and eventually my mother and sister who live in the area) about our choice to open our marriage which led to this open, polyamorous relationship. (More about telling our children and my family in the next blog post.)

The pandemic continued and we continued to fall more in love, create deeper, stronger relationships both personally and professionally, and begin to talk, now, about plans we all want to make together 3, 5, 10 years down the road. We know that this could blow up in our faces. We all know we’ve caught lightning in a bottle. We’ve. decided that the rewards we are experiencing in our lives right now are much, much greater than the risk of one day not being The Square anymore.

Flash forward to yesterday … a very special day. As a sign of our love and commitment, not only as spouses, lovers, and friends but to our relationship as The Square, we decided to get matching tattoos. A HUGE step for Tristan and me as this was our first tattoo!! We chose to copy the design that Crimson Dragonfly and I both wear as pendants – a variation of the heart and infinity sign that some equate with polyamory. Each tattoo has the same base design yet we all made them different, weaving our own personalities and meaning into our individual tattoos.  

Upper left: Myrina                                       Upper Right: Tristan

Lower left: Phoenix                                     Lower Right: Crimson 

We are so happy and, at times, still in awe of this wonderful alternative love and lifestyle that we’ve created. We don’t talk about this relationship as much, only because we don’t want new couples who find the Accidental Swingers podcast to be freaked out about the fact that Tristan’s and my journey into ethical non-monogamy, swinging, and hot-wifing, accidentally created this polyamorous Square. 

But we don’t downplay it either. This IS our life. This IS what is possible. This IS what happened and what is happening in our lives right now! And yes, we’ve had issues, and problems. Misunderstandings and disagreements. It can be MUCH harder as now we have to think about how a choice or a decision will affect not just one person, but 3 other people. 

Phoenix always says “The Square makes us better people.” and he is right. We’ve all had to force ourselves to communicate more. We’ve had to learn how to become a partner to someone new; how to include a new partner in our own lives and in our spouse’s life. We’ve had to learn how, with the love and blessing of our children, to create a new “chosen family”. We’ve had to continue our own personal growth in how we react to situations and looking to ourselves first to help define a problem or an issue so that we can better solve the problem for ourselves or ask The Square for help. 

Someday soon, we will share this journey with the world as well. But for now, we are happy to share our lives with our Community and with the Listeners who take the time to dive a little deeper into the Accidental Swingers and read our website or posts. We will explore the ups and downs of this poly relationship and, in true Accidental Swinger style, with love, laughter, screw-ups, courage, and perseverance, we will tell the story of the Accidental Square.

Some people in the lifestyle might say this relationship is not something that most are looking for. Tristan and I were not either; not even on our radar. I guess that was the point I was trying to make.

Our whole philosophy is being authentic and transparent…open to everything that comes our way…willing to risk and open up. Not everyone will be as open or accepting. Some may say we’re not really swingers anymore. But we know that we are. Even as a poly 4some, we are still 4 ethically non-monogamous, open swingers. With all the obstacles and challenges that this type of relationship brings, it’s is important to us that we share these ups & downs & absolute successes with our community, our listeners, and now with the rest of the world.

~ Myrina