Like so many others at this time of year, we hosted a holiday open house for friends and family. Like so many others in the lifestyle, however, we also have spent most of our party time at clubs or swinger parties over the past couple of years.
I also suspect that like others in the lifestyle, Mrs. Duncan and I have also talked about presumably vanilla friends that we think could be in the lifestyle. A corollary of vanilla friends we wouldn’t mind having in the lifestyle as we think it would be fun to play with them. These discussions usually happened on the way to a lifestyle club/party after discussing the likely guests and where they fit in our plans or hopes for that night (‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’, ‘try to get to know better’, ‘try to play with’, etc).
Is it any wonder then, that as the open house wore on, I found myself being more flirty and touchy with my female guests, especially those who were on the ‘could be’ or ‘wish they were’ swingers lists? It’s not like I intentionally behaved that way. It just happened. We were at a party, there were a lot of people talking, laughing, drinking, mingling and I just fell into my primary party paradigm of late with folks on the happy lists.
Now, it’s not like I went around behaving inappropriately. There was no escalation beyond basic flirty talking and a hand on an arm, shoulder or around a waist, but still, it was more flirty and touchy than I am normally. At some point during the party I caught myself doing this and came to the conclusion that I was having more fun and folks didn’t seem to mind. Some even seemed to respond positively. It should also be noted that my ‘a little more flirty’ is not any different than normal behavior from our more touchy vanilla friends.
That got me thinking, is this another lifestyle generated step in my social evolution? I had already noticed I was more socially at ease since we entered the lifestyle. This was simply due to having social muscles more in shape having exercised them at parties and clubs. Many of these muscles had not been stretched out in quite some time. I have simply been more at ease engaging folks in discussion having done so at parties. Was I now becoming more comfortable engaging friends in flirty behavior having done so at parties as well?
Either way, I now had to consider if this was a good thing or not. From my point of view, it is definitely good. I had more fun. I didn’t get any direct push back. If anything, everyone seemed to have a great time and many of us talked about the need to get together more often (we then bemoaned our busy schedules). During cleanup, Mrs. Duncan and I discussed what a successful party it was and she agreed that everyone had a great time.
It will be interesting to see if we get any post-party feedback either directly or indirectly via changes in folk’s behavior towards us or towards me in particular. The fear is that folks were put off and I will need to be more cognizant of my behavior and dial it back. And before I type the next line, I want to make it clear that I am not trying to convert anyone, but… There is also always the hope that we find out some of our vanilla friends may have a bit of spumoni in them.
Happy Holidays All! May 2014 be a great one!
1 Comment
It is a paradigm that I feel a lot of progressive swingers run into, and not just at a party level. We tend to surround ourselves with sexually open minded people, and more, swingers. Conversations in public gets that realization as well. Or even conversations with vanilla friends who may not expect our openess, although find it intriguing and go ahead and insert themselves into the conversation. So far, we have been lucky that it has not led to uncomfortable situations. We have found ourselves accidentallt “trolling” for lack of a better word, at vanilla parties until we realize “this isn’t aswinger party, is it?” Maybe one day, every party will be a swingers party.