I tend to let drama really get to me... all the more reason to avoid it like the plague. This whole thing with the local social has really gotten to me. When we first started going the host asked me to be on the planning committee to basically help give him ideas and bounce ideas and thoughts off of. Looking back, I never should have agreed to do it, especially not that early. Him putting me onthe planning committee when we'd been to maybe 2 socials (just because he knew my experience withthe lifestyle) is tantamount to me asking a brand new member here to be a moderator just because I know they've been in the lifestyle for years. Before anyone else can have any respect for me or my opinions they also have to get to know ME.

In the end, this turned out to be a bad idea on multiple levels. The first being that the other members of the planning committee never really knew who I was. They saw my name and I'm sure wondered "who the hell is she and who does she think she is" whenever I added my thoughts or opinions on anything. Then add to that that overall my opinion doesn't really match with theirs or the hosts 90% of the time. Everything I say or do is considered "negative" by them. Overall, we are just different types of people. For the most part the group as a whole are just not the type of people that we mesh with as friends or as swingers. We have continued to go to the socials over the last year mostly in hopes that we might get lucky and meet some new people, and the last time we went, we did actually meet a really cool couple, but it was their first time at the social (and probably their last - because they didn't care for the group or the location).

The group took a trip to Nashville a few months back and we went along deciding it would be the perfect opportunity for us to do something we had avoided up to that point - check out TSC. There was another separate incident that stemmed from that weekend. The restaurant we all went to had terrible service but we dealt with it and I really didn't say anything until we got home and I saw that they had double billed me. After seeing that I posted to the group to let the others know to check their bills.

So that was when things started obviously going downhill. Then about a month ago, the host sent out an email to the planning committee asking us to try to get some conversation going in the group. Knowing that they hate anything resembling debate (thus the reason there is little discussion.. no one wants to be the "negative" one), I tried to start a very innocuous discussion of what people are into... and got slammed with the "well you can find that already in the database". Ok, whatever, I didn't know there was such a database and I'm obviously not in it, so I'm sure others aren't either.

Then the latest... the whole Nashville clubs going off-premise issue. When I read about it on the Menages group, I posted about it to the group of the local social, mostly as an FYI.. I know I appreciated the heads up before I showed up. Of course, when I posted about it, I was under the impression that BOTH clubs were going off-premise. This is where the issue went flying. Of course, TSC had decided not to go that direction, and of course since this particular local club and the host prefer TSC, then obviously TSC is in the right and Menages is just being stupid and over-reacting. I didn't bother to go into some of the inside details that I do know with them or with the host, because I could tell it would not matter. In their eyes, the owner of TSC is the most experienced GURU of swinging on the planet and therefore he knows all. The reality is he's all about his wallet and a lot less about doing what is right... but that's another issue.

So basically,the same person who said that I was a negative bitch about the whole restaurant over-charging me thing, then decided that what I had posted about the Nashville clubs just never should have been posted because we should not expose the newbies to these negative sides of swinging. WTF!!?? I had my say, expressed why I felt they were wrong, and privately let them the social host know my thoughts on how too many clubs (including his own) are not making the proper efforts to make sure they are staying legal and covering their own butts.

No response. This tells me that my thoughts that he had not ever bothered to look into whether or not he was doing things correctly were correct. After thinking about it, I emailed him and told him to take me off his planning committee, for the reasons I mentioned above. I didn't feel like I was really able to contribute. A week later I get a response from him telling me to "chill out that he needs multiple opinions". He may need multiple opinions, but quite honestly, being a part of that has just given me more stress than anything else. And it's made us feel like we "have" to go to that social.

I'm DONE! D-O-N-E with these people. I got an email from another member of the group that had written me a couple of times about various issues (including the Menages thing, thanking me for posting it), asking me about another local social that we are signed up to go to and also telling me that they felt like every time they posted anything to the group it was blocked as either irrelevant or negative therefore they didn't want to post anything anymore (they had no knowledge of what I'd been dealing with over there). After reading that I finally knew I wasn't alone and Pet made the suggestion to email the host and just let him know what others (and myself) were saying and feeling. So I did so privately. In turn he replies to me shouting but not just to me, he included the entire planning committee in the reply. His reply was in no way the sort of "well what do you think of this?" but a total slam of the "well if anyone thinks they can do this better they can have it" crap. If you can't take some constructive criticism you don't need to be running any sort of group, IMO. If you are going to sit there and complain about lack of activity on your group then block half the posts from being made, you're not going to increase activity either.

That was it for me. My last response to him was only to let him know that I did NOT appreciate my private comments to him being turned public in the way that he did it and that we were done with the group. We'd show up if and only if there was nothing else to do. I'm done with the BS and the drama.