[sereneiders]

As an aside, it is remarkable how often we fall in this sort of scenarios when we're beginners.

Disregarding those couples who come here after falling and didn't come before, I wonder if we're not failing in providing advice in an early stage, for those who may seek for information but, preciselly because of the lack of experience, cannot foresight the issues they may bump against later as to feel the need to ask questions about it. So, even if they come looking for advice before trying, they wouldn't be able to figure out about some questions to take into account.

Specifically, I notice this stone making a lot of beginners stumble (and this happened to us as well): the overconfidence on the relationship skills we know we have in the vanilla world as a way to compensate the lack of confidence we feel in this new world. IMO, this is what lead the beginners to the whole "friends first" (miss)conception, supposing this way they would be able to have more control over the situations that may arouse.

There's nothing wrong about the "friends first" request by itself, unless we request this as an attempt to control an scenario full of features we're not even aware of, moreover when the other couple, even when requesting the same "firends first", is looking for sex... as we ultimatelly do, because if we weren't pursuing the swinging experience, hardly we'd pursue an unknown couple to make friends.

The problem here is, we know we may not impose a friendship over people in the vanilla world, but as the last resort, not knowing what else to do to reasure ourselves at the sight of this new experience, we forget about this detail, perhaps supposing that having the other couple the same request, each couple would be trying to impose the same and overcome this detail.

On the other hand, once you feel reasured enough, you start focusing on the sex. The whole "friend first" approach accomplished the goal for you, so your motivation to hold the friendship subsides, even when for some of the other parties the approach still didn't help accomplish the goal.

I believe the OP current situation in the exmaple for this mechanism: everyone involved except the other couple's wife is ready, they accomplished the reasurance goal, and now the OP, once confident he could enforce an artificial frienship commitment, begins to question this commitment value once realizing this other woman wasn't able to keep the peace (or that there could be other issues in her marriage that get on the way).

Once here, everyone is trapped in an emotional and ethical problem: Should the OP follow the "move on" advice, he would be betraying the friendship commitment. Should the OP and his wife turn this relationship into a vanilla one, deprived from sex, as a way to avoid this betrayal, they could find out there aren't enough shared interests besides the sex to feed the bond, wich could become a hurfull loss for everyone involved. Should the OP honor the commitment in the current situation, he'd be taking "one for the team" at the risk of damaging his own marriage in the future.

So, I believe it's worth to point out for the beginners that the "friends first" request is ok, but that they should take an in deepth look at the motivations leading them (and others) to the "friends first" request. Also, that it would be worth to discuss and find out alternatives to this request, able to provide the reasurance we're looking for when facing the first experiences, because it's easy to say the "dont do it", but unless we can provide an alternative, people wouldn't be up to a free fall but get rid of any resource at hand that they feel or believe give them some control, even when pointed out as a mistaken approach.