'I don't get jealous watching my husband have sex with other women - I find it attractive!' How a couple discovered a passion for polyamory after settling in the countryside

On a dull Tuesday afternoon in 2019, the businesswoman and author Evie Sage turned up at an ordinary shopping centre with an extraordinary mission: to meet the woman she and her husband had arranged to have a threesome with. It was the first time they’d organised such a thing, and Sage’s state of mind was understandably anxious.

In a Starbucks, they found the woman they’d been messaging online, and made small talk, avoiding the elephant in the room. ‘Shall we do this?’ the woman finally asked.

They agreed and headed, all three, to a Travelodge by a motorway, where they enthusiastically got down to the matter at hand.

In her eye-opening and unashamedly steamy memoir, Sage (not her real name) explains what led to that Travelodge tryst, and recounts the sexual adventures that came afterwards. She was, she writes, a high-achieving girl, who grew up in a nice house with a loving family.

But she was soon yearning for more – as a teenager she wrote in her diary: ‘Do not accept an ordinary life.’ And though she basked in the attention of boys, her first love was a girl: a classmate who was rebellious and ‘stop-traffic good-looking’.

The girls spent all their time together, doing normal stuff best friends do (clubbing, drinking, hanging out) along with quite a bit of not-so-standard stuff (kissing, buying sex toys together, falling asleep in each other’s arms).

But their bond was tested when they went to different universities, and Sage met the man who was to become her husband.

When the pair got married, he and Sage moved to a farmhouse close to his parents in the Scottish countryside, and readied themselves for an idyllic country life full of home-cooked bread and children reared in the great outdoors.

But the children never arrived – and once Sage had moved from grief about her and her husband’s inability to conceive, to acceptance, she set about building a new life: one relieved of responsibility, and bent around the fulfilment of her and her husband’s desires.

The book skips back and forth in time, and unsurprisingly, the bits set after Sage’s sexual awakening are rather more absorbing than those set before.

At a sex party in London, she leads a woman into a large cage, and has her way with her in front of the woman’s husband, as well as her own (both men end up joining in).

At another party, a white pill is presented to Sage on a silver tray; she takes it, and eventually allows an Amazonian ‘giantess’ wearing long patent boots to whip her so ferociously her mind ‘goes blank’, but the feeling is ‘delicious, clear’, she writes. At yet another gathering, she and her husband meet a couple who invite them to join their holiday in Ibiza.

The couple take them out on a boat to a cave lapped by azure waves, where Sage gets to know her male host very well indeed, and finds the acoustics of the cave to her liking.

The book tackles many of the questions you’d have if your friend told you she’d embraced polyamory.

No, Sage doesn’t get jealous: she feels her husband’s attention is usually partly on her, even if he is physically with someone else; in fact he becomes more attractive to her when she sees him attracting (and administering to) other women.

Yes, sometimes she just doesn’t fancy the people she has organised to have sex with, and it can be awkward.

No, her family doesn’t know (she is tempted to tell her kindly father, but realises she never will).

And yes, there is a split between Sage’s normal self and the self she is at orgies.

Sage and her husband run a cottage rental and wedding business, and quite a bit of the book is given over to descriptions of how they got the business up and running. Their clients have no idea what they get up to.

After one party in London, she washes her underwear in the sink and hangs it indoors, rather than let it dry outside where people staying in the cottages might see it. It’s not that she isn’t proud, she explains; she just wants the privacy ‘to explore this new adventure alone’.

All this adventuring does bring odd moments of peril.

At one rather yucky get-together in a private house, Sage is repelled by the advances of a man in a hot tub, who tries to get to work on her in full view of the house next door. (Afterwards, she goes looking for her husband – and finds him under a pile of three women. ‘Just checking he’s still alive,’ she trills at them.)

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At a hotel meet-up with another couple, a man puts his penis inside her without asking and without a condom. The violation shakes her, and she goes to the bathroom. ‘In the mirror, I see a whore, with bleary, smudgy eyes and slutty lingerie’, she writes.

These moments aside, Sage argues that her new life has freed her in a number of ways: from the responsibility of being ‘the sole keeper’ of her husband’s pleasure, from the conventional life she grew up dreading, from feelings of insecurity.

There’s nothing like striding through a packed room in your underwear to boost your ‘inner confidence’, she notes. And, she writes, she and her husband are still very much in love.

Yet she knows this sexual gallivanting won’t last forever.

Some day, she writes, when she and her husband are ‘old and tired’ and sitting in rocking chairs on a veranda, they will turn to each other and say: ‘Do you remember when…’