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I don't believe that Vanilla couples aren't connected. Many of them have strong relationships. Go into any church on a Sunday morning (or Temple on Saturday) and you'll see so many loving happy people. Of course I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of couples with problems. Perhaps *as a percentage* LifeStyle couples are more solid, but as a net number, there's plenty of vanillas whose marriage is tremendous.

Would somebody please explain exactly what a "girl ganging" is???

The date should have ended at the 'oh, I forgot the condom' part. Over and out, never to return again. If you can't play by the rules, you can't play at all.

Point taken. The world has vastly more vanilla folks than LS people. Many vanilla couples have durable and intimate relationships. We are lucky to count some among good friends. As for houses of worship, we know several LS couples who are devoted to their faiths, attend worship services frequently and so on. Thus we would not estimate any vanilla gathering with a particular representation of vanilla or LS couples. The original post was a (perhaps clumsy) attempt to explore a different idea, namely that modern life has so glued (many of) us to screens of various sizes and isolated (many of) us from community. We see this in so many young people, often having underdeveloped social skills and retreat to the anonymity of the internet. That is emphatically not an "attack on millenials" but rather a concern for their future marriages and growth as couples. Part of the calculus of the LS is that couples have to invest in wide open communication and a willingness to work through sometime unpleasant feelings such as envy, jealousy and so on. The conventional wisdom is that the reward for the investment is play. What we were getting at is whether the relationship work that is prerequisite to swinging might have substantial benefits beyond playtime. There are already abundant --and still more accumulating-- data that isolation and loneliness predispose to premature death and other illnesses. We wonder whether the social skills of "dating" in later life, the negotiations that couples go through, the intensities of those experiences make a difference in their happiness --as individuals and as a couple.

We've been married for almost 48 years now. Two different times I our marriage we were involved in swinging for about 3 years each time. During the 40 or so years we were vanilla, we did discuss vanilla things but were always sort of careful about sexual topics. During the six or so years we were playing, we had much more open and honest discussions. I strongly feel that a couple who plays together has a much better relationship with each other.

No more solo play. Forgetting the condom mandatory rule is a deal breaker for me. Your wife is at fault here too. I have never had a problem speaking up and reminding someone. Of course the other male knew but conveniently forgot at the moment. BS. The other female showing up and going to the club sounds pre planned. This level of dishonesty isn’t worth the conversation with them, I would just move on.

When me and one or all of my girlfriends go out we dress conservative most of the time. They're beautiful young women, they get bombarded with massive amounts of unwanted attention even when they dress conservative. Dressing sexy the unwanted attention is far worse.