[mixtupcpl]

Too much to reply to section by section... Ill just summarize.

For me, real life experience with this = absolute 0, so you are right there! It's not something I would be interested in personally, but I'm interested in learning about it. Make sense hopefully?

The reason I say cautionary, and that it is a little bit uncomfortable, is because it seems like a potential emotional risk I honestly had never thought of .

In other words, in the event that one partner falls really deeply for another person and wants to actually move to some sort of real, committed, poly thing, the other partner is potentially faced with a very hard decision. That's a little scary, which is why I say it almost makes me second guess the LS. In other words, lets say my wife were to say "hey, that guy we've been swinging with for a while. I'm really in love with him and want to move him in" That would be an absolute and definite no from me. Which would then put me in a position to have to tell her "this is across one of my boundaries so thats not happening" Which would then cause her a heartbreak which would completely suck because the whole point (to me) of this LS is to have fun as a couple.

All of this said, I think I "get it" more now after reading GoNatural's post.

In some sense, anyone who is more interested in having a decent connection when swinging (my wife and I are definitely like this) has SOME form of poly situation going if you just go by the semantics. Because, obviously, you do have feelings on some level for the couple you've connected with. But I consider this very different than the true poly scenarios discussed here where it is essentially some sort of 4 way marriage.

And I'm really not making a judgment in the sense that I'm not saying that I think there's anything wrong with this for folks for whom it works, it's just something entirely new to me that I find interesting and want to understand.

I do have *some* experience with this in the sense that my wife and I had an open marriage for a long while and she had one long term guy who she loves on some level and he loves her also. I dont want to get into the drama of it, but ultimately, he wanted her to leave and go with him. This of course didn't happen (or I'd be Status: Single, LOL), but the whole thing was kind of painful. If he had been a poly type, I guess, and said "how about I live with you two" that would have been a HUGE "NO" from me which would have had the same result.

So for my wife and I we have decided that minimizing emotional ties is the key to having this stay purely fun. So we closed the open marriage, moved to swinging, and are just looking for, essentially, couple friends we connect with that are on the same wavelength.