Limits

As promised, here is the Limits post.

When Monica and I first started talking about swinging we assumed that we would likely only be into same-room, soft swap and FMF threesomes and maybe, soft MFM threesomes.  We were pretty confident that we would be okay with that but were hesitant to go any further.  We set some initial boundaries too, like no kissing (which is a pretty common limit, as I understand it.)

Once we got into the scene we quickly found that the limits that we had been setting didn't make much sense when applied to the real world.  The first rule that was right out the window was the no kissing rule.  Monica had made this one and we weren't twenty minutes into our very first FMF encounter when she asked me to kiss the girl that we were with.  So that whole idea was immediately right out the window.  I never thought that kissing would be a problem and she found that watching me kiss another girl was a turn on and she found that she needed kissing to "work up" to more things - it was an essential component of her foreplay routine.  So that limit was eliminated before things even got started.

We had other limits that slowly faded away as well.  When we moved on from FMF to MFM, eliminating another limit right there, we were not sure how either of us felt about vaginal penetration.  I didn't know how I would feel and she was a little nervous about letting other guys inside of her, but, like the kissing, she went from sucking to fucking during our first MFM in no time and we felt silly having even worried about it.

The next limit to drop off was same room playing.  Pretty soon we tried playing in different rooms - why would what you do five feet from each other be different than what you do thirty feet from each other?  Once separate room was comfortable, pretty quickly so was playing alone.  Playing alone allowed us to play with a much better variety of people with much greater frequency as we did not need to coordinate as many schedules and it eliminated most of the "can't find a babysitter" problem.  That significantly aided in enabling our play time.  We also found that we really enjoyed playing alone, not just the person who did the playing but the one who got to hear all about it later.

One by one basically all of our limits dropped away.  If you really step back and look at the entire concept of swinging it really is about a combination of trust and exploration - neither one of which works well when there are limits imposed upon them.  Having limits implies a lack of trust and actually, I think, makes the process much harder. 

As we essentially have no limits we are able to be so much more relaxed and free.  We don't have to worry about crossing lines or having actions misinterpreted.  It allows us to be far more open with each other and more intimate with our paramours.  The experience is enhanced on both sides.

One key limit that we have kept and continue to recommend years after all of our other limits have dropped away is that we focus on our swinging activities as being additive sex rather than substitutional sex.  That is we make sure that sex with others is always extra sex, above and beyond what we normally have with each other never replacing that sex.  That's a bit of a grey area, of course, as you have no way to know definitively how much sex you would have with each other and often swinging sex activities wears both of us out and reduces our energy for sex with each other.

How we address this is not to be concerned with getting sex with each other in necessarily after every group or swinging encounter - often we are both exhausted and just want to go to bed.  We also recognize and accept that sex with each other might be met with a certain degree of "well, we can do that tomorrow" whereas sex with others might be a special occasion worthy of extra effort and is likely to involve additional arousal simply from the exotic nature.  Where we really focus the effort is when we are playing alone or separately that the party who was not involved in the swinging activity always reserves the unquestioned right to get all the sex that they want when the party who was out playing returns or as soon thereafter as is physically reasonable (the idea is not to prevent playing to exhaustion or soreness with others - that happens frequently.)

So now, two years into full out swinging, we've found that the ideas of limits so common, effectively ubiquitous among swinging newbies, has been gone since nearly the very beginning and we could not be happier.  If you need limits I think that it is important to consider if swinging is really something that is right for you.  Swinging is not an activity recommended for people with trust or jealousy concerns.  I'm not saying that newbies just getting started shouldn't have limits as they attempt new things - it is a bit like a safety net.  Swinging can be an emotionally jarring experience and can uncover issues that neither party was aware even existed.  So having limits as you explore the lifestyle, I think, is fine and smart.  But limits with the intention of keeping them may not be.