Wow! It's been a while since I rambled here...but the weather has reached 'Pool Condition 1', so I use laptop-in-the-lounger as a way of not over-napping. (Gotta pace myself!)

A recent topic that I responded to reminded me of something that has become increasingly annoying to us over the last few years - Swingers who are looking for guaranteed play.

The first rule of swinging is 'No means No' - and an extension of that is, we have always thought, 'there is no circumstance that makes that null and void'. In other words, there are no guarantees.

For example:

We do not have a 'no play on first meet' rule, and have played on first meets probably more often than not. But there have been times when we didn't..and there will undoubtedly be more in the future. We were recently contacted by a couple who said early during the 'everyone-is-who-they-say-they-are' phone conversation that their playtime was limited and therefore they were looking for people who didn't have a problem with 'playing on a first date'. My wife replied that we had no such rule, provided everyone hit it off. The husband asked, rather nastily, "what does hit it off mean...? " We had them on speaker, so G looked at me, shook her head and walked out of the room. I simply told him that we appreciated the interest, but on second thought we didn't want to run the risk of wasting their time - and hung up. The phone rang a few minutes later.. we let it go to voicemail - the wife explaining that they had been jerked around before, and her husband didn't mean anything negative, yadi, yadi. Maybe we are too callous, but if you gotta ask what that means, we are obviously on 2 different channels. We have always thought that arranging a face-to-face meet meant that everyone likes everything so far...and want to see how far it can go. Where it goes is something that both parties determine as the situation develops.

We've noticed a trend in online profiles towards less usable information, poor or no pictures and more declarations of a distaste for 'dating' as it's derisively called. Chatting online has somehow become an automatic bad thing. We don't want to do the online 'talk-dirty-to me' thing either - but it's very easy to spot when things are headed that way, and we have no problem abruptly ending such chats. "If you want to know more about us, just ask" is becoming a substitute for providing usable info in one's profile - but since they don't chat and oh-by-the-way consider more than one introductory email to be 'endless emails' (another frequently used profile term) - the only way to 'ask them' is to meet them somewhere in person. Let's see..don't know what you look like, and don't know what you are into - yet we are supposed to seriously consider you potential playmates for that night based on your word that you are a lot of fun and sexy as hell. Riiiight!

Apparently we are fast becoming out of step with the rest of the swing community -are there really people who plan on playing regardless of anything that may present itself? Really?

If we show up 50 pounds heavier than the people in the pictures on our profile?

If one (or both) of us is sloppy drunk when you get there?

If it's painfully obvious that our last collision with soap, water and toothpaste was far too long ago?

If my response to your wife's 'Hi' is "Damn, I bet you can suck some serious dick!"?

And no - these are not extremes conjured up to support my rant... they were all things that happened to cause us to say, "It ain't gonna work" to a few couples we have met over the years.

Yes – I understand that people have other things going on in their lives. Yes, I understand that most people have to make arrangements in their schedules to facilitate hooking up with others (babysitters, weekend off, etc) Yes, I understand the cost of meeting someone can get up there, making it correspondingly frustrating if no play results. But am I off-base in saying that, unfortunately, all of these things come under the category of ‘the cost of doing business’? Or have I missed a major change in swinging etiquette to ‘If we agree to meet, we gotta play’?

Damn…. I sure hope not!