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I wholly agree with you. I believe we bump against a "naming convention" here. We all develop feelings towards the people we have around, but from what I've seen among swingers (and not only in this board), the word "love" it's what seems to be forbidden and not the feelings themselves. Of course, there are people who as soon as they recognize certain feelings they stop playing as a preventive measure. It is ok, but sometimes I wonder what could happen if they explore those feelings. I am pretty sure that a solid marriage wouldn't be at risk because of this. In the other hand, I understand that since we look for having fun, such an exploration would be "off topic", so... why you'd try? We have this couple we use to play with, they become great friends of us besides the sex. They have this approach where they dislike feelings involved, while we're open to explore our feelings as well. Some time ago I was talking with the female half of them about our friendship, and I told her "I know this may freak you out, but guys, we love you two". She gave me her hesitation look and I told her "well... we're great friends, some of us may not want to have sex anymore but I would like to have you as vanilla friends anyway, so the sex, even when great, is accessory, we both trust you two, and I cannot figure out a reason for our friendship to break apart, since whatever may happen, we all feel confident enough as to talk about it. I know the word love is freaking, but please, explain to me why it wouldn't fit". I know several members could say "ok, dude, that's great but it isn't love", they can bring me arguments to support this, but I believe that, ultimately, those arguments would be grounded in subtle definitions that are there just to prove the word doesn't fit. Perhaps the problem is that in our culture we're not supposed to talk too much about feelings. Since we're supposed to develop certain feelings only with our spouse and closest relatives, we're not supposed to have other feelings stronger enough as to develop a language useful to tell apart one strong feeling from another. It's like traveling in time to the Middle Age in Europe, where sex was so forbidden than you had very few words to describe a sexual relationship: you cannot talk about a clitoris, nor a vaginal orgasm, nor about technics for giving oral sex, just because you lack the vocabulary to make yourself understand. But we're swingers, today, and we engage in relationships that wasn't supposed to happen. We develop levels of intimacy with others that were supposed to be reserved to our spouses, and it's natural that there will be some feelings involved. However, we're in the Middle Age of swinging, and we still accept the vanilla vocabulary and stick to the vanilla language, thus finding ourselves forced to tell apart shades of colors by claiming they're white or black. Perhaps if we were having more words to describe the shades of love, it would be way more easy to deal with those issues.