lifestyle friends

It is hard being in an unusual relationship that most people don’t talk about, and I don’t want to have to hide who I am, I don’t really want to be friends with someone who cannot understand my relationship I have with my husband. This has caused me to drift away from old friends, and start making new ones, ones who live like me, relate to me, or at least accept my lifestyle choices. It has taken a few months to find a couple people who related enough to us in the lifestyle to do stuff in vanilla settings, like dinner or going to the dog park.

People in the lifestyle tend to be self-protective, a bit standoffish until they get to know you, they welcome you inside the community with open arms, but are more hesitant to know you “outside” of it, in the vanilla world and be friends. Once people observe how you and are partner interact with each other, and other people together, they feel more comfortable in approaching you and getting to know you outside of the lifestyle events, but it takes a while, patience is definitely important to have… for more than just this reason! I think people are wary, want to make sure your safe and not a total wack or nut job. Want to make sure your more than just kinky sex freaks trying to get off your jollies to half naked people. Once they establish you have some substance to you, and then they tend to get pretty friendly.

The odd thing I will state about it, is I think they are “good” friends to have, they know our deepest darkest secrets, because we talk about them in the relationship groups we attend, they know all our hidden “selfs” that we hide from the rest of the world, and they share those things with us, trusting us as we do them, it leaves a good open door to a solid friendship with people who you can trust and rely on, and they feel the same way about you, it’s a good feeling, one that is often not present in most vanilla relationships. This is also why its hard to get entrance to private groups, private play parties, discussion groups were you need to meet up with them and sort of get a reference to attend the private meetings about lifestyle relationships were people share private information. We respect them, and they respect us and they are protective of the people they bring into the group so tend to be exclusive on who they invite. I think it is a good way to do it. The meetings often get deeply private, and personal, real feelings, emotions, fears, problems, and things you could not just share with “anyone.” I have to be honest and say that this type of privacy makes it easier and safer to share and feel safe, and I appreciate the atmospheres.

It was hard at first, finding these groups, and we felt a little nervous, worried that people might be doing things that were sick and twisted, and they weren’t. They were just cautious. Lots of close relationships, people chatting, friendly, happy and able to speak freely about anything without risk of it getting out to people they didn’t want to know, it was a safe and trustworthy place to be. My favorite part about it all is in Master/slave groups, its rarely very sexual, no inappropriate touching, no drinking, no hitting on others or trying to pick people up. Everyone is extremely respectful of boundaries, and relationships of others. It is a very calm, laid back and safe environment.

Because of networking, and slowly meeting people from discussion groups, and other local activities, we are slowly making friends, finding people to go to dinner with, vanilla outings, dog parks, beaches. It is nice because we can be “ourselves”, we are always in our relationship dynamics so if someone else didn’t “get” it, it is hard to be around them, or to hang out with them for long periods of time because we feel like we have to hide so we don’t offend them, and that’s not how we wanted friendship to be. It is a wonderful thing to just be ourselves without worry. Finding a community of people like us, who accept us, who appreciate us for what we are, and are like us. Thank you Master for helping us find this community.