Chapter One
The Mama Bear Legacy
The Spark — Before Team Insatiable
Long before there was a Team Insatiable, there was just Teri Hartley — a girl who spent most of her childhood being told that her body was the explanation for everything wrong with her. A cold, a backache, a bad day: doctors had one answer, and it was always her weight. By the time she was an adult, she'd learned to avoid medical care unless she had no other choice — not out of carelessness, but because the rooms that were supposed to help her had taught her, over and over, that she'd be dismissed before she was heard.
The anxiety she'd carried since childhood didn't disappear on its own either. She self-medicated with alcohol — she was the first to say so, matter-of-factly, without apology or drama. Vodka cranberry, every day, starting at four o'clock. Not before: she held that line through her work hours without fail. And it didn't eat her life. She paid her bills on time, kept her credit excellent, showed up for everything that mattered. She was, in her own words, a functional drunk — which is different from a drunk who is drowning.
Eventually, Teri made a decision for herself: gastric bypass surgery. She'd always had a high libido — and had always taken risks with it. That was who she was well before the operating table. What the surgery changed was everything around it: the confidence she'd never been given permission to have, and with it, a wider range and more diverse variety of experiences than she'd had access to before. That expansion came with real concerns. Some of what she was doing wasn't safe, and she knew it. She went to her doctor not to celebrate but because she was genuinely worried about herself — a level of self-honesty that should have been met with real care.
She was told she was a sex addict. She went to the meetings. She got the book. For a while, she carried real shame about it — partly because the rooms she was sent to had almost nothing to do with who she actually was; she was a woman looking for connection and pleasure, grouped in with people who'd caused real harm to others. It was a label that fit nowhere, and it cost her a kind of dignity the system owed her in the first place.
What actually changed things wasn't a diagnosis. It was a community: a network of swingers and poly folks who treated consent, safety, and communication as the whole point rather than an afterthought. Teri realized her appetite wasn't a flaw to manage — it was a part of her that needed the right structure, built on honesty instead of shame. She would later say that finding that community probably saved her life. Knowing how her story ends, she wasn't wrong.
By the time we met in January 2019, she'd already done the hardest part of that work. She'd found her people, found her safety, and found her own definition of what it meant to take care of herself. I didn't meet a woman in crisis. I met a woman who'd already fought her way to peace — and who was about to spend the rest of her life making sure other people could find that same peace faster than she did.
The Foundation — January 2019
I'm Jeremy — Jeremy Schaffer, though on Kik and most of the platforms I used back then, people knew me as James. Teri and I had crossed paths on a handful of dating sites over time without anything ever clicking. It wasn't until I found her in a Kik chat room that we actually started talking. What I found there was someone worth meeting in person, so when I heard about a party her friend was throwing, I showed up — not by accident, but because Teri was going to be there. It was my first lifestyle party. I'd always assumed this world was something Hollywood invented — a fantasy, not a real community of real people. What I walked into that night was the opposite of that: people who were genuine, intentional, and nothing like the caricature I'd had in my head. She was there with her boyfriend at the time. That same night, he showed a side of himself that made the decision easy for her: she ended things with him before the night was over.
The night went the way nights at parties like that sometimes do — and by the end of it, we both knew there was something worth following up on. A few days later, we met for lunch — nothing dramatic, just two people getting to know each other in the middle of a regular workday. That simplicity is part of what made it real. There was no whirlwind, no high-stakes first date; just enough ordinary moments, stacked up, until we were officially together.
We never sat down and had "the ENM conversation." We didn't need to. We were both already looking for the same things, and it came out naturally — in conversation, at the venues we started going to together, in the small moments where something felt a little off and we just talked about it instead of letting it sit. That became our blueprint: not a set of rules handed down on day one, but an ongoing, honest conversation that never really stopped. Even years in, even as her person and her soulmate, jealousy showed up sometimes — and we navigated it the same way we navigated everything else. We talked. We decided. We moved forward together.
It was around this time that Teri decided she wanted to do more than just live her life well — she wanted to use it. She'd found her own safety inside this community, and she wanted other people, especially the ones with appetites the world had only ever taught them to be ashamed of, to find it faster than she had. She'd already given it a name: Team Insatiable.
