Episode 88

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you are I hope you have blue skies, a breeze on your back and sand between your toes. Welcome to That Other Lifestyle podcast. I am your host Jayson, leave Vanilla behind as we talk about dynamics.

This show is for adults only. We will talk about sex, relationships, the lifestyle, and Ethical non-monogamy in an honest way with lots of real talk. If you are under 18, this is your only warning to go find a different show right now. Around here, on the beaches of sex freedom, consent, education and good times, everyone is welcome, lifestyle, vanilla or the curious. Whatever your gender identity, expression, truth, flavor you are welcome here. I do my best to use inclusive language, though you may hear words like husband or wife or man or woman to keep things simple.

Want to connect? Send me at email to host@thatotherlifestyle.com. Go to my website, thatotherlifestyle.com and use my promo code TOL15 for 15% off your order at STDHero.com. Testing takes a community to make a difference so get STI tested and be safe out there. For the best lifestyle parties, check out risquelifestyleparties.com. We love their vibe, attitude and always have fun and I promise you will too.

I want to say this upfront, if this episode sounds sharp, it’s because I have been the guy hypnotized by shiny people. I have been the guy who wanted to be a shiny person. I didn’t arrive at this place from a pedestal; I arrived here bruised. Looking around realizing our community can do better in the way we treat each other and interact.

I didn’t learn about the word mezzanine until I was a young adult at a convention in a big ass fancy hotel, trying to figure out where the hell the mezzanine was so then I could locate a bathroom. When I was a kid, all of our vacations, we stayed a motels. The kind of places with exterior doors and no free breakfast.

Mezzanine. That’s a big fancy word for the walky way, the big space outside the doors of the meeting rooms in a hotel or a convention center. The liminal spaces you don’t notice as you pass through. Usually a floral pattern carpet, just enough color so your eyes don’t focus down. More liminal spaces, not elevators this time. Mezzanines.

Thinking through this, a mezzanine is a good analogy for the lifestyle, stratification of interactions, inside and outside, spaces to hold people that want to mill about outside the main show in a conference room or auditorium. People who may choose not to enter those doors because they don’t feel welcome inside that space or don’t even know there is a door to enter. People who tried the big show and opted for something quieter.

The mezzanine is the middle ground between the popular and the burnouts, the space where you can be yourself away from worry about being included in every little thing that happens. Away from the influence of shiny people.  I feel a lot of people around me are becoming mezzanine people and that could be a good thing.

This idea slapped me in the face over the weekend as most of my show topics do. My wife and I were talking about our plans for this year. We have the Fantasea Cruise in February, Luminous in May, Pulsify in October, lots of Risque parties. Maybe Naughty in New Orleans. No work trips though. Our respective employers are not sending us anywhere this year that we know of. It’s been years since I attended a work conference. Not even sure how I would act at one of those.

We were talking about how unpleasant work conventions are. Stuck in an auditorium for hours, then you spill out onto the mezzanine between sessions, make idle small talk, your boss will inevitably run up and ask about what you heard, believing in their heart of hearts that you were paying attention or giving two shits.

Some reason though the structure of these buildings start spinning in my brain. Can we look at this architecture to find useful analysis of the lifestyle? These spaces create divisions, intentionally, managing the flow of people. Those divisions create boundaries, inside and outside, combined with the human need to be included in the tribe. Knowing that there is a different space that you are not a part of where people are having fun without you. Physical delineation of FOMO. All orchestrated by those shiny people.

 Outside looking in, why? Do you want to be on the inside at all? Do you want to chase the shiny popular people on their adventures? Do you want to be included or excluded? Do you find out about parties after the fact and wonder why the hell you weren’t invited? Or maybe a group is trying to organize a meetup, and you are pondering if you should go. Will you get noticed? Will you feel out of place? Sounds way too much like an awkward high school dance.

This idea of who stands where in social organizations just like where they stand in these convention halls, unconscious strata people put others into, a system people struggle against gaining access to popularity and the shiny people, creating hierarchies either intentionally or accidentally. The social dynamics of a local community through the analogy of a convention center. This will be a weird one. Sociological shit today.

On the surface, according to media, the lifestyle is a private, secret little hobby. We gather quietly in homes on Tuesday nights for orgies before returning to our little vanilla lives. Hushed, using hand signs and hobo codes to transmit important information and connect. The infamous upside-down pineapple in a grocery basket comes to mind. Which is complete bullshit. See an earlier episode.

For newbies coming into the lifestyle, woke up yesterday decided to become swingers got your pineapple badge and stumble onto this show, the lifestyle is way fucking bigger than you think. You are not the first people to wake up and decide to try Ethical Non Monogamy within fifty miles of your house. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, then we will say 100 miles.

There is an entire ethical non-monogamy secret society out there of parties and cruises and clubs and people and businesses that exist in the background of society. You may think you are the only swinger couple in your town, I promise you are not. No one is out there advertising their interest in Ethical Non-monogamy openly, that’s the reason you have never seen it or know anyone in this. There is a perception, propagated by the media, that there are only two swinger couples per town.

As I have learned the deeper into the lifestyle we get, the longer we are in this, all of that is completely wrong. Sharing the truth of the lifestyle, most local people, based around a geographic area for instance, form themselves into communities. Some of these resemble spiderwebs, others high school. Some are wheels with spokes around people who throw parties or lead chat groups. Some are based around events. All of these can exist and layer within an area.

My wife and I are part of a couple of communities. Four or five chat groups based on events. Local chat groups for people in our area. A national chat group. That’s not even counting the dating sites which could be considered a community as well. I think I am in a few Facebook groups as well but that’s Facebook and I don’t count that because Facebook is dumb.

No one told us these existed when we started, though I feel that there has been a proliferation of chat groups and lifestyle groups in the past two years. More people entering the Lifestyle and wanting a place to belong.

We stumbled into these groups mostly by accident. We would find out about an event and then learn there was a dedicated chat group for it. Or someone would invite us. No one is running around advertising their fucking chat group unless they are desperate for numbers and members. Lifestyle people tend to keep these things secret or we should. No one should be running around waving banners and doing recruitment drives at sex clubs for people to join their super-secret chat group that everyone else is in. It sucks that you don’t even know these communities exist in some cases.

Some would call these groups exclusive, others would say discriminatory, depending on where you stand in the group.

If you are in the lifestyle but feel like you are not in the lifestyle, not in the broader community, this episode is for you. If you feel like there is always a party going on that you find out about later, this is for you. Laying this out here, I am not telling you to try harder to integrate into a community. I am saying wherever you are, feel you are, what you are, it is valid as a participant in the lifestyle community, even if there ain’t an organized meeting schedule. If you want to stand outside all the action, that is valid. If you want to be a part of everything, that is valid too. Even if you want to wander around looking at convention booths all day drinking bad coffee, never committing to anything.

Running with the convention center analogy, in the main hall, the high visibility people or I will refer to them as, the shiny people, curated invites to curated events and those who engage in status rituals. Proximity equals popularity which equals fuckery. Out on the mezzanine, the rest, the most, those who show up to network, connect. But then this can feel passive, like you are waiting for the crowd to shuffle and sweep you into the main room.

The secret side rooms where real shit gets done. I have been to enough corporate bullshit symposiums to know where the deals are done. Symposium. I hate that word. I once worked for a company who decided to host an all-employee symposium. Flew us all into a conference center on the other side of the country. Hired stilt walkers and comedians and these motherfuckers wouldn’t pay for me to get a new laptop. I may have been a little too honest on the post event survey and had a VP call me up. And I may have been honest with her. And I may not work there anymore. Symposium is a fancy word for let’s sit around a room and sniff the CEOs farts while they tell us that our work life balance is perfect and quit bitching.

Anyway, secret rooms. This is where real connection happens.  Away from the noise, the real business is done. Deals are signs, handshakes, titties. This is where you will find your people, your tribe. Lower ego over there in the smaller rooms.

Finally we have the lobby, refuge of the burn outs, the anxious, the we will go next time crowd, nervous. Jaded or scared, sipping bad coffee waiting for an invite to anything.

I am not laying all this out from a position of superiority at the fuck all. I have had and still have a touch of rejection sensitivity that comes out when I want to go to an event, but I feel unwelcome because no one directly invited me or said I want you to there. I have been the one to stand in the lobby, waiting for another person to stop and say, you, we choose you to come with us and be included. I still have this. It’s fucking human and I know everyone has a touch of it we need to name it so we can understand it.

Despite the lifestyle being incredibly welcoming, people can still get in their heads and think they are not welcome in a space, no one wants them there, no one likes them. Honestly that is why I prefer events with a cover charge. I paid my money, I am allowed and okay to be in this space or at least that is how my lizard brain works. I have found there are two kinds of people in this world. Those who have this and those who find this rationale inconceivable.  But Jayson, you sound so confident about attending events.

Half spousal courage and half masking. My wife is the source of 95% of my courage and I know if she is there, I have a person with me who wants me there. Ha! Using marriage to our advantage here. And masking. If you walk into a room like you belong there, no one argues.

I share that to say we are all human, we all have a touch of this feeling of being excluded or on the outside or not confident enough to walk into the main event by ourselves or with our spouses. Another reason I like throwing house parties. It can’t make me feel unwelcome in my own house where I pay the mortgage and all my stuff is here. Okay that can happen too, has happened, getting sidetracked.

I don’t like to walk into parties alone. I get self-conscious. After all these years, wearing my shiniest sexiest outfit possible still feels weird to walk in, just me and my wife. I will find people to walk in with us. I will offer to walk in with other people. I pretend it’s for them but it’s for me. Its this feeling of going from the outside to the inside, the transition from a public to private space and my brain spins up on whether I am welcome in that space.

As lifestyle folk, we stand outside the big convention room, seeing the shiny people inside, beckoning us, come join them. Join their fun, join their group or their party. We see how many people are surrounding the shiny people and we think for a moment, if we could be near them, we could be popular too or we could draw in people too. Or possibly you are intimidated by the shiny people.

Do not mistake popularity within a social community for confidence and do not be intimated by the shiny people. Shiny people. I am coining a new term because I have a show and I can do that. Shiny people are the popular, usually attractive people who seem unattainable, create social groups around themselves with their own gravity. You know who I am talking about. The sexy people who everyone fawns over and measures their own self-worth based on proximity, either physically or socially to these lucky few.

And now to drop the hammer. Shiny people are not real. They are constructs of the system that they create to elevate themselves. Shiny people can create a high school dynamic around themselves full of cliques, gossip and bullshit. Shiny people are not elevated by the will of a group, they rise up based on their own self promotion and visibility. These are the couples that will drop a picture in a group twice a week, showing everyone else how much fun they are having or self-aggrandize themselves to the point of absurdity.

Newbies see shiny people and think they know some great secret of the lifestyle. Based on their popularity, they must know what they are doing and if we can get close to them, then we can figure out these secrets too. There is no great secret to being social in the lifestyle. Don’t be a dick, that’s about it.

Popularity often gets mistaken for connection in the lifestyle. What do I mean by popularity? Popular in the lifestyle is not based on number of sexual partners. There are people banging every weekend and no one knows who they are. I would say popularity in the Lifestyle is visibility, people know of you, they know who you are. Popular people are this shiny new toy that everyone wants. Like a nickel in a parking lot.

 If you happen to know a shiny couple, do you actually know them? You know of them, you may know of their adventures and who they are fucking but do you actually know them? Have you had more than two conversations of depth with them? Do we really know anyone in the lifestyle? No Jayson, do not go do that path today. No questioning reality.

Shiny people do serve  function in the lifestyle ecosystem. They tend to be the ones who organize things, they create life around them. They run chat groups or gather people together. They do the hard work of nurturing connections between people. Shiny people meet a lot of people, they invite a lot of people to their events and parties and by virtue of you being near them, you meet more people.

Shiny people stand in the door of the convention main hall, like little beacons of fun. Join us they wave, join our fun, join the fun that we own and have created around us. They rely on critical mass to make others think that the spaces they inhabit are fun as well.

I apologize if I sound bitter. I am not. I am calling this out. Something I have seen over the years and want to shine a light, ha on the shiny phenomenon. Look just because someone appears to be popular, does not mean they are the right connection for you. Just because they seem like they know a lot of people does not mean you need to know them. Just because it appears they are always having fun, based on the pictures they themselves are sharing, does not mean that it is your kind of fun. The lifestyle should nourish us and shiny people can be empty calories.

Have I ever wanted to be a shiny person? Yep. I tried and failed and gave up. Now I want something different from the lifestyle. I think everyone wants to be a shiny person to a degree. Everyone wants to be popular in this, whatever that popularity looks like. Maybe popularity leads to more fuckery, or you think it will lead to more invites. This is not a condemnation on myself or any person in particular, it is looking at this system and saying enough. We should not conduct ourselves in this manner any longer.

The shiny people trying to push you into their convention hall, their kind of lifestyle experience, only have power if you let them. The shiny popular people do not control your personal lifestyle experience.

I think I have been a shiny person at one point. I don’t want it anymore. Its a lot to deal with with very little benefit. You don’t get laid nearly as much as you think you will or people assume you are. Let’s say you are the organizer of a big hotel party. You ain’t getting laid that night. You will be busy dealing with bullshit all night and have no time for sex.

You notice how much people will use you, use your connections to their own benefit. People orbit but they don’t stay. They want to be included but rarely reciprocate. This is the truth by being a shiny person, you actually get invited to less. Not sure why and I don’t feel like pondering it right now but that has been my experience.

 I wouldn’t call it work being shiny either. I have done actual manual labor like digging ditches and picking up heavy things repeatedly. That’s work. This is shining up your own ass so people can see their reflection in it. It’s mental exhausting. People look to you to be the organizer and the leader and fuck me, that’s a thing. I know a guy. He started a text chat group to organize friends during a big party. Someone made the mistake of calling him the leader and he deleted the group immediately. Some people don’t want it. They don’t want to pay the price, have the responsibility or the power.

If you do, great. Go for it. I can’t say being shiny is rewarding. Not sure if my brief time as a self proclaimed shiny person was worth it. Might be for you. You have to ask is it worth it? Is it worth the time and effort for you? Anyone can do it. Go to a bunch of events, meet a lot of people, start a chat group, organize an event. Boom everyone knows you and you can polish your own ass.

Chasing the shiny people will lead to burnout. You can’t chase these people. By virtue of personality or available time, they can go harder in the Lifestyle than you can sometimes.  This will lead to burnout in the lifestyle because you are constantly bleeding energy into relationships that will never pay off. If you are always trying to break into their convention rooms, it will not end well.

The mezzanine. This is where the real lifestyle happens. This is where most people exist in the lifestyle, happy in the middle ground. At work conventions between sessions or reasons to be somewhere, people mill about. They meet, talk, network, visit a booth or two. This is where real business happens. The conference rooms at conventions are for people who want to listen to themselves talk, mezzanines are for people who want to talk to each other.

This crowd, in a lifestyle sense, are the ones just trying to have fun. They don’t need an organized meetup to meet people, they are capable of starting a conversation with anyone. They tend to be busy. They have vanilla lives to juggle so they can’t devote every waking minute to the lifestyle and all the distractions it brings like shiny people. The mezzanine is where the lifestyle truly breathes since this is the space for connection and relationships.

To join the shiny people you have to audition, you don’t have to do that to stand on the mezzanine. Do you fit their shiny mold? Do you fit their vibe and what they think a swinger should be? And yes this could apply to physical appearance. You should not have to audition for a spot in a group or a room or a party. You should be able to be yourself and find a tribe that you click with. And you find that out with the crowd not sequestered away in a conference room. I just realized that you, as a listener have never been to a conference center, this whole story may be falling flat. I apologize. I was excited when I thought about this and I just keep writing it.

Past the mezzanine, is the the lobby. This is for newbies who have no idea which escalator to take up to the action or the burnouts who took the escalators down to escape. Everyone starts and ends here and goes back for another round. Newbies join the lifestyle, unsure of what to do or where to go or who to talk to. They are easiest to sweep up on the hype and radiance of shiny people. Oh, if I follow these people who look like they are fun and knowledgeable then I will receive a benefit and possibly become a shiny person myself. They sprint up the stars, sucked in by social magnetism.

The burnouts sit in the lobby for a reprieve. Burned by an encounter, a night, a person, a couple, a reason, a desire. They are looking for a little bit of peace away from the noise. Away from the action.

I feel everyone goes through a burnout phase. I may be in one right now. We all have moments where we feel disconnected to the lifestyle community. We feel disconnected from others either by choice or accident. That doesn’t mean someone violently ripped out the cords, maybe they just feel out the plugs. Maybe the old ways you did the lifestyle don’t work for you anymore. Maybe you are looking for something, someone new, a new tribe, a new way to experience the lifestyle. That’s still burnout with your current configuration and that’s okay to question it, quietly down there in the lobby.

See that’s the rub you don’t know you are in a burnout phase until it is done. And when you are sitting down in the lobby, hearing all the fun upstairs, you have to wonder. Do you go back up? Do you rejoin the crowd? Or do you leave? Walk out the doors and never look back? Whatever choice you make is up to you and acceptable and okay.

I promise that if you go upstairs, the crowd will be different. New people join the lifestyle everyday. My theory is the Lifestyle cycles every 8 months but I don’t have concrete evidence on this. The shiny people who are shiny today will fade tomorrow and someone else will replace them. That’s another hidden truth. No one stays shiny forever. No one can. The ability to maintain the façade is too hard to keep going forever.

I hate to see people decide to walk out the doors and quit. I really do. But I get it. And you have to make the right choice for you and your marriage.

It fucking sucks that it is human nature that when we create social groups, some jackass will decide to settle everyone into hierarchies and other people will accept these hierarchies or divisions. The only reason they exist is because people give them power. It is perfectly acceptable not to engage or to engage. It is okay to not participate in a community or social group. You can be a part of every fucking chat group out there that will take you or be in none. The real friends you make in the lifestyle won’t care one bit what groups you participate in. They just want you to be their friends. Hang out, be present, be kind.

If you start looking at other people and think, oh it looks like they are having so much fun without me or why wasn’t I invited or you feel like you are missing out, remember this is not your story. That’s their story. That’s their night and you don’t have to be part of every story.

You don’t have to be part of everything to be happy in this. You just have to be a part of your own story in your own way. You are fully empowered to have your own fun. Gather your friends and hang out. You don’t need permission from shiny people to do that, even though I have found shiny people sometimes have opinions on what the non-shiny people are doing, fuck them. You have freedom in this to occupy whatever level of engagement you want. And there is no wrong answer.

I talk to people who share that they don’t feel like they are a part of the lifestyle because they don’t go to parties or they don’t know a lot of people. To which I ask, are you ethically non monogamous? That’s the identifier. We are a community of people who engage in ethical non monogamy, not the other way around. This is an individual and well married couple hobby first, the community of the lifestyle is a by product of that.

You are not a bad swinger if you don’t have a lot of friends in the lifestyle. You are not a bad swinger if you only go to one party a year. You are not a bad swinger if you miss an event that all your friends went to because life gets in the way. None of those variables matter. Don’t trap yourself in an idea of what a swinger should be when the definition could be so liquid and personal.

Don’t get yourself trapped in a conference room at a convention in the shadow of a shiny person either. I have been in business type situations where 200 people are all facing front, you got a speaker talking about corporate stuff. And you want to leave. But the group pressure exerted by all those people, not wanting to embarrass yourself, not wanting to have everyone watch you leave or divert attention, keeps you firmly stuck in that chair for the full three hours.

You are not stuck in one social group in this. You are not stuck in one community or one way to experience the lifestyle. You could be full swap today, soft swap tomorrow, then switch to separate play the day after as long as you and your spouse are on the same page.

One nefarious aspect of shiny people and not all shiny or popular people is that you can get stuck in their sphere of influence on the way the lifestyle should be enjoyed. To give an example. There may be a group that is very opposed to bisexual male play for instance. Nothing inherently wrong with being a bisexual male. But if the social group is opposed to that, then by being a member of that group you are limiting your ability to explore that side of your sexuality.

Another example. Bisexual women. There are communities that propagate the myth that all women are bi in the lifestyle. Which is not fucking true. But the group can create a perception, especially for newbies, that sort of behavior is encouraged. If you are in a community or group, step back and ask if the values of this group actually align with what you want from the lifestyle and how you want to experience it.

No point being in a gangbang social club if that is not your thing. If you don’t want to do gangbangs, probably not the best chat group for you to be in. Just saying.

Thank you for listening and tuning in every week. Make sure you tell a friend about the show. Thank you to the love of my life, my wife who is on this wonderful lifestyle journey with me.

If you want to reach out, ask a question, suggest a topic, send me an email to host@thatotherlifestyle.com. My website is thatotherlifestyle.com.

My personal disclaimer, I am not a medical professional nor a trained and certified .

educator of any kind in any way. I am a guy with a microphone, sharing my personal experiences with you. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only and please join us for the next episode. difference.  Go to STDHero.com, use my promo code TOL15 for 15% your order and get tested.

Whatever you may do today or tonight, I hope you do it with enthusiasm, consent, curiosity and a little bit of spice. You are appreciated, loved and I will see you for the next episode.