vanillaknot

If it's us that SW is thinking of, precisely speaking it says "Property of Karl." Our relationship is M/s, O/p. She had it done for me on Valentine's Day quite some years ago.

The household is nude. We don't put clothes on ever when we can avoid it.

Scout's is the former Mountain Retreat, under new management. It's waaaaaay out in the sticks. Not a bad place (we've been there a few times) but a very different vibe from DJ's. Now run by a guy who was once a semi-regular DJ's visitor. I will never understand this...just never. If you run into someone you know, then you have new understanding of each other. What better thing to discover about someone you already know, than that they share your interests? It's not like they have something to hold over you that you do not similarly hold over them. Discretion is always paramount.

DJ's will be 13 years old this month; we've been part of it since before it was built. As SW said, it's the classiest club for many miles around. A very nice place, it's laid out as a sort of a supper club with a dance floor plus private rooms and a large hottub. You have to sign up and make a reservation online before you show up the first time, no one gets past the lobby without both. It is, in technical terms, a members-only club. This is a legal mechanism that keeps DJ's from being subject to a bunch of regulation that applies to "public accommodations," which DJ's needs not to be. Among other things, it allows nearly any state of (un)dress, except that when on the dance floor, something must be worn; but in all seriousness, sometimes that means an otherwise entirely nude woman has put on her husband's necktie. (This is because local regulation against nude dancing was intended to prevent strip clubs from moving in. So anything that makes you not entirely nude is legit.) When you show up, you sign off on your membership, pay your fees, and then you get a tour by the host couple for the evening. They'll show you around, giving you the short version on etiquette. Core principles are obvious, like "ask first" and "no means no," but they cover the bases so no one can ever claim "I didn't know." BYOB: DJ's hasn't got a liquor license, so bring your own. You drop your liquor off with the bartender, who will refrigerate things if needed, after marking your bottle(s) with your ID card number. When you want something, you tell the bartender your number and he gets/mixes your stuff. Soft drinks and tea are self-serve at the left side of the bar. The main large front space is a dining area. Dinner is included for your evening's cost, and the menu is quite nice, especially on Saturday evenings (Friday has fewer people and a somewhat restricted menu). The dance floor is part of the dining area, and the d.j. will be busy with music all evening. Early in the evening, it's quieter, as people eat dinner and are generally social; after 9:30 or so, there may be some announcements but then there is commonly Pink's "Let's Get This Party Started" played, the music volume goes up, and things get going more. There are 10 private rooms down the halls past the bar. No reservations (or early claiming) of rooms, it's just first come first serve. Each has 1 king or 2 queen beds, plus its own bathroom including shower. Some rooms have toys in them, like a sex swing, or room 9's wooden bondage frame (the "50 shades" room, sigh). The hottub is big enough to hold 20 or so, though these days I seldom see more than a half dozen at a time. There is an open room at the end of the main hall, with a single king bed and a massage table. There is a loft beyond the open room which can be restricted to couples only, and 2 more very small rooms up there which have no bathrooms. It's a great place. You can be a wallflower if you want, or you can be as social as you can stand. Fridays are lighter (in terms of how many people) than Saturdays. Depending on time of year, that means less than 100 versus upwards of, or even past, 200 people. There are theme nights. You don't have to dress to the theme, but many do. There is a dress code: Basically, no jeans on Saturdays, and no ballcaps or sneakers or other "athletic clothing" at any time. Exceptions to this are made for certain events, like 4th of July, which starts mid-afternoon on whatever Saturday is closest with a barbecue on the patio, and there is no dress code for that day. We still go maybe every other month, usually with some bunch (highly variable) of friends. You will find that groups who know each other take over several tables. Don't be surprised by this, and generally speaking it's not cliquish. I recommend an evening there; you will enjoy yourself. Introduce yourself and chat up whoever's nearby.

We cruise regularly, roughly yearly. Our next is 3 weeks from now, out of New Orleans, down to Roatan, Belize, and Cozumel, aboard Carnival Dream. We love the absolute detachment from the rest of the world for a week or so. We have done 2 actual swinger cruises, both on Royal Caribbean, in 2010 (Radiance of the Seas) and 2012 (Freedom of the Seas), and while we really like them, they're so much more expensive than we can manage when we make our own booking. So last cruise we took, November last year, we got 3 other kinky/swinger couples to join us, one of which is a couple we met on our first swinger cruise in 2010. We've got a fuzzy idea about being much more open and blunt about our interests and habits, and on the lookout during this upcoming cruise. The cruise is vanilla -- MrsVK earned a seat in Carnival's $100k Blackjack tournament -- but we certainly wouldn't mind finding some new friends to spend close time with, as long as we're spending languorous days lounging in the Caribbean sun.

We live an M/s, O/p lifestyle overall. On occasion, a date for MrsVK will be explicitly for the BDSM side but naturally may include sex that some might consider swinging. For her, once her headspace has been driven down to submission and service, the fact that sexual activity is involved isn't really important any more, and there is virtually no chance of her reaching orgasm. She really doesn't even want that possibility; hitting that point would get seriously in the way of the headspace she needs to remain in service. There was one particularly good, memorable date last fall, which happened at a swinger club (but that was incidental; it was just convenient), where I delivered her to him collared, cuffed, and leashed. He took her off on his own for an hour or so, after which I caught up with them and the rest of the evening was a mixture of general BDSM usage of her plus MfM. Very successful. That doesn't happen nearly enough.

I greatly appreciated the woman who said, after some intense introductory mutual sharing, "I need you inside me now."

I used to do doorman/bouncer duty at the club we frequent (now we're just regular members) and I have to say it became obvious very early on that there are indeed some cliques. But one must be careful to distinguish a genuine exclusionary "we're too cool for you" sort of clique from groups of friends who tend to show up together a lot. This is to say, it's pretty common for a few friends to arrange to hit the club on a certain evening, and they take over a typical (predictable) set of tables, and socialize among themselves. But it's not an exclusionary grouping, it's just a set of old friends that are happy to get out together, and whether there's any playing that happens among that set is almost secondary, and the fluidity is high for people coming and going in that social arena. That's different from the way-too-regular, way-too-fixed sets of folks that I would identify as a real clique who make something of a point of avoiding the possibility of being social with anyone outside their particular group.

We were on last November's cruise. It was a huge amount of fun, very sexy, met some really nice people, made a small number of genuine friends. Too bad we're from all over the US rather than from a single locale. At least 2 other couples from that cruise, plus us, are signed up for the Nov 2012 "Freedom" cruise, and we've managed to arrange adjoining cabins. I absolutely agree about the music loudness. I have little respect for people whose only way of communicating is by yelling at me, and that applies to musicians and disc jockeys who communicate with music. We didn't stay at the outside pool much because of this -- the indoor pool was far quieter. There was a certain level of snobbishness observed in the playroom. Let me be blunt: It's objectively clear that certain couples stayed away from certain areas of the big grouped beds in the playroom explicitly because folks playing in those areas weren't sufficiently in the class of Pretty People. This isn't supposition; this is from overhearing conversations more than once. The Pretty People can bite my hairy backside, 'cuz we had a heck of a lot of fun. We did a couple offshore things, but never as organized by the crew. We just stepped off the ship and made our own way -- far less expen$ive. In particular, we went to the botanical gardens in Cozumel, which was a really neat place in its own right, and we actually managed to have a brief bit of sensual fun by ourselves in a back area of these hugely-grown bushes. We spent a good bit of time in the casino in the early evenings -- we have a rather particular relationship to Blackjack -- and most of the casino personnel, and esp. one particular dealer, were overjoyed with the nature of the cruise. Apparently we actually know how to have fun, and when we lose at the tables, we don't go all ballistic about it. And reputedly we tip rather well. All told, it was a fabulous way to spend 5 days. We like cruises because it's a total disconnect from the rest of the world. This was icing on the cake.

Two stories. First: There was for many years an annual New Year's get-together of old friends dating back to high school, plus spouses/kids/friends that were picked up along the way. At peak, 30 or so people would occupy a couple timeshare condos for 5 days after Christmas in various parts of the country. These are mostly fairly conservative folk, and I've never (knowingly) let most of them know our predilections. The day before 1999 started, several of us were sitting around a condo living room, perusing the timeshare catalogs for where we should go for the big end-of-century event. A couple people were advocating beach-based resorts, and a particular one was pointed out. One woman that I'd known almost 2 decades by then looked at the listing and said, "Oh, that one has a nude beach, and I just don't think we should associate with That Kind Of People." We stopped going to the New Year's get-togethers after that, due to both that particular comment and a couple others made within a day or so of that. No one actually called out anything they might have known about my and MrsVK's lives, but made it clear that our lives didn't intersect well with theirs. So when the pre-announcement about end-of-century planning was sent around the next October, and we didn't respond, the organizer (literally my oldest friend -- we've known each other since we were 4) wrote me privately to ask what was up. All I could do at that point was to say that it had become clear last time that we are all very different people than we were 20 years before, and I no longer felt very welcome. Second: A couple years later, my ex (divorced 10+ yrs) let her life fall down the crapper and we developed a custody issue because she literally wasn't caring for the kids. I finally felt the need to file a petition for outright change of custody. During the process leading up to the hearing, a guardian ad litem was assigned who had to interview everyone involved and render a recommendation. My brother contacted him, sent him a letter, in which he basically laid out every nasty (to him) thing that he'd ever known about me, including the preference to go nude, BDSM, the works. The guardian was legally obligated to share this with us, and with the court, but he told me that Ohio courts had worked for 25 years to avoid letting such personal crud be taken into account, and he was shocked that my own brother was trying to deprive me of my own kids. In court, when the guardian introduced it with me on the stand, he offered it in a way which overtly baited me into being able to dismiss it as irrelevant. He had let me know it was coming, and how he would present it. He was just fulfilling his legal duty. I just asked the judge if her kids knew anything about her sex life ("why, no...") and then said that my kids don't know squat about mine, either. We won -- what we had technically asked for was a mere inversion of "residential/non-residential" status, but the judge actually terminated the existing "shared parenting plan" outright and granted me sole, full custody. Brother and I haven't got a whole lot of relationship left. I tell people as I see fit and don't worry about it much. There is occasional fallout. But those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter. That includes family.

About 10 minutes. Hm, well, no other swinger club, but there's one strip club; we haven't been there yet and it doesn't interest us much. {That's "discreet", unless you are speaking as a mathematician.} We find the usual "we have to be discreet" a bit odd and off-putting. The usual formulation is that anyone else that you see there whom you already know is there for the same reason you are...so what's the big deal? We go looking for friends, not trying to avoid finding/making them. Seriously, is the problem "someone will know we swing"? Yes, and you will know they do, too.

We met our GP at our local swinger club. :-)

MrsVK gets compliments along such lines now and again. Last summer, spending a weekend at a campground in far-western New York, we were enjoying time in a tent with a new couple, and the other fellow actually said to his woman, "You should take notes." Now, that sort of observation actually makes her uncomfortable, because she fears she is about to find herself in the sights of the other lady (and not in a good way, ahem), but it is certainly testament to her skills.

I've scanned through the thread, and I think a lot of good points were made, but I wanted to come back to just this. You were drinking. It's not clear if you started before The Incident began, but I would wager a day or two's salary that you did, and I consider my odds on that bet to be very good indeed, and clearly it went on at considerable length after The Incident was underway. Drinking more than modestly puts everything -- AB SO LUTE LY EV ERY THING -- in question. I for one am sick to death of having to deal with drunks at swing events, to the point that I've made a policy for us that if more than 1 person is drinking to an extent that I personally regard as "beyond modestly," we won't stay. Alcohol is the best manufacturer of drama that I know. Drama is for theatre classes. Stop drinking heavily when you go to swing events. If you "need" to drink substantially, something else is Wrong and you are overdue to re-evaluate. A drink or two is one thing, but "too much drinking ( heavy drinking)" is a clear indicator that you were no longer in control of yourself, probably (based on experience) from well before the time that The Incident began. If you avoid drinking so much, your head will stay clear enough for you to handle a normal emotional load, able to evaluate and interact as an adult. [Obligatory observation, once again, that I formerly did doorman/bouncer duty at a swinger club, and have escorted nasty/angry/crying/generally stressed drunks out the door more than twice. I've got an attitude the size of Montana that comes from direct personal experience.]

To echo others (semantically, if not literally), you worry about the wrong things. Ten days ago, we played at our club with a very nice woman, S, who nonetheless developed an inferiority complex about her bust size, when compared to MrsVK, who is as busty as any woman you will ever meet in the normal world. I told S then, several times, that she worries about the wrong things. Women as a class worry about a huge number of the wrong things. "I'm too fat" "My curls will come down in the hot tub room" "I can't dance well" "This dress isn't fashionable enough"... But men do so, too. Worry about penis size is right at the bottom of the list of things with which to concern yourself. If you really are concerned about it, STOP, DO NOT PASS GO, and do not attend any swing event, because you are shining a bright, gigantic red light whose luminescence is rated at approximately 23.7 million candlepower. Sooner or later, every single man except one will encounter someone more largely endowed than himself. Do you seriously think this is consequential? Is your woman so shallow as to think that this is the definitive qualifier in a lover? Come on. Seriously, if you think cock size is the leading question of importance, you have much re-thinking to do.