Seymour Totti’s Foreign Policy

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Occasionally I get asked if I ever miss the fulfilment of a long-term relationship and the comfort of a stable home. And the answer is always no, not in the slightest. I tried the relationship thing, they’re great at the beginning but eventually I always feel manipulated and taken for granted.

Some people do find their soul mates and that’s great for them but I think the closest thing I ever found to soul mates were two women who picked me up after one of my wrecked relationships and put me back on the rails.

Sally and Fae ran a small company. I’d tried to chat up Sally in a pub one Friday night. The chat-up didn’t go quite as planned. I found myself getting interviewed as a potential freelancer that she could do business with at a later date rather doing the business with later that night.

A few days later she introduced me to Fae and I did business and the business with her first. It was a couple of weeks later, after a liquid lunch, that Sally finally asked if she could come and see my etchings. I asked her if she was sure. “Absolutely,” she replied, “Fae has told me all about them.”

The idea of an open relationship was never specifically defined, it was left to settle gently. The honesty was a bit of a shock at first but it wasn’t long before it felt perfectly natural. Over the next couple of years we all remained good friends with work-lives and sex-lives happily overlapping.

They never invaded my life, never bought me shirts, never invited me to meet the parents and never expected me to spend my Saturday afternoons trudging round shops looking at shoes. They were happy with me just as I was and because of that I felt a deeper affection for them.

Nor was there ever a hint of jealousy. Though we frequently had dinners and drinks together we never did have sex as a threesome. “You wouldn’t expect that of sisters now would?” quipped Sally the only time I floated the idea.

Sisters? I looked at her long, blonde Nordic form stretched out on the bed an then thought of Fae, who was a delicious tropical mix with the African genes getting a slightly upper hand, and decided not to pursue that line any further. This was already fantasy enough … for now.

The pictures want to click with you