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First let me thank everyone who thought this was a good post and took the time to tell me, I really do appreciate it. I want to expound on the 'friends first' idea since I knew this would be a big one compared to some of the others. I'll preface this with saying we are a 'friends' type of swinger couple. We want to like the people we swing with as people. I don't care how attractive someone is, if I don't like them as a person they are not a turn on. I'd also state that our best friends right now we met as swingers, for swinging. In short we are not a 'sex only' couple, where I'm trying to force others to accept our views on this. This being all said, expecting to be friends with a couple you want to swing with BEFORE you are swinging is unrealistic for a lot of reasons. This really stems from what makes someone a friend. Years ago I read something that said friendship develops from shared experiences. If you just meet someone, you have none of these experiences. So lets say you as a couple go on 'dates' with the other couple. To the ball game, to a movie, to dinner, etc. These are not the kind of things that promote a lasting friendship. Now add to this, the underlying tension of swinging. No one just turns that off. You are all thinking about the possibility of screwing each other. No one wants to bring it up as you are becoming 'friends' but its there. This makes things awkward to say the least. Its couples dating where the guy is trying to keep the new girl interested while at the same time be friends with her husband, with the underlying tension of you both know you want to nail his wife. No one will let their guard down, everyone is afraid of saying something thats a turn off, and the bbq you are having together is not something thats going to create a real friendship in the first place. It just doesn't work out very well for most people. As such, if we feel we COULD be friends with a couple, we will fuck in the first date Its simply not realistic to be real friends first, and we can size up a couple pretty quickly. The longer you wait to drag things out, the less likely they will come about in swinging. Now for the real bad news. For us at least, swinging alone doesn't equate to friendship. It is a shared activity, but it doesn't seem to be the type that creates the bond of friendship. We have tried to 'be friends' and the like after and it doesn't seem to click. Our one pair of good swinging friends became friends not because we were having sex with each others spouse, but because the husbands (he and I) shared a hobby we started to do together. This let us talk more about the swinging to know what each of us wanted out of it, blah blah, and we became 'real' friends who go to family parties and the like. At best from what I've seen, most people don't have more than a handful of true friends out of swinging. I don't mean people who's company you enjoy, but people who would help you move a couch type of friends. I assume the motivation for 'friends first' is not because of a need for friends but as a way to make swinging feel 'less dirty' to the newbie couple. Swinging IS about sex, there is no way to sugar coat that, its not a cuddle party, its not wine tasting, its straight up sex. You can soft it down all you want, and we too started as soft swing (lasted 2 meetings) but its sex, no matter what a former president says. Its not dirty or wrong in our books, and doing it with what is effectively a stranger isn't a whole lot different than doing it with your best friend. Until you are ready for that kind of thinking, you will find yourself frustrated in swinging. I've seen couples like this, chatted with them, gone out to dinner with them, but never once had sex with any of them. They are afraid to get certified on SLS, they have a long list of rules posted in their profiles, they are 'real' as couples, but they are not swingers, and most likely never will be until they are able to accept the sex part without feeling guilty about it.