Swing Shift Volume 8- Swingers Websites

Just Another Married Guy sent me the following message last week:

Hubman,
So far, the few people I’ve asked all point to you,  Apparently you are one of the premier resources of swinging info on the blogosphere. whether you like it or not. Congratulations, I guess, lol? What I am looking for is some direction on websites to find other people who are interested in swinging! You have talked about it many times, but you, (and a lot of other people) never actually mention the sites by name! My wife and I are interested in easing into the lifestyle, but theres no clubs nearby without a few hours drive. So we thought we’ed try getting involved in some of the websites, maybe see whats going on in our area, but I am clueless. You and Veronica seem  to have a lot of success in that area. Could you give us some ideas of sites to check out, or at least ones to avoid?

Premier resources of swinging info?  We’ve got him fooled!  Seriously, thanks for the compliment, we’re happy to share our experiences, good and bad, in the hope that others might benefit from our experience and misadventures.

Before we talk about the websites that we have experience with, it’s important to remember that what are “good” websites in our area may not be “good” in other areas.  There definitely seems to be a regional phenomena to swingers websites.  If anyone has a contrary opinion about any of these sites, if I mess up any facts, or knows of other sites worth mentioning, please feel free to comment!  This is our take on swingers websites in the New England area.

Adult Friend Finder- this is were we got started.  Or rather, Veronica did, when she was looking for a girlfriend for herself.  We never tried to look for a couple on there.  But if you ask Veronica, AFF wouldn’t get high praise from her.  There was no way to block single men, so her in-box was constantly cluttered with men who clearly didn’t read her profile, which clearly stated that she was NOT looking for a man.  Some websites offer the ability to block certain groups, for example Swappernet (see below) allows us to block messages from single men, but AFF does not have this feature.  The website, from what I recall, is generally easy to use, as is the mail function.  One big annoyance, however, was the e-mail system blocked messages that contained external e-mail address, IM user names and even phone numbers.  For whatever reason, they want to force you to communicate with others only with their system.  In some cases, Veronica would wonder why someone wasn’t responding to her, only to learn that the system deleted her message.  After 5 months, she had one first date [nothing remarkable, never went beyond her first girl-girl kiss] and lots of flakes. Of the 3 we’ve used, this is also the only one that isn’t specifically for swingers, as there are a number of singles on there.

Swinglifestyle aka SLS- at the first swingers meet and greet party we ever attended, this website was highly recommended and we joined the next day.  For a while we were very happy with SLS, both the ease of use of the website and the people on it.  We especially like the “Friends” feature, which basically allowed us to bookmark a couple that caught our eye.  So if I was browsing a site and wanted to remember a couple to show Veronica later, I just marked them as a friend [the other couple is not notified] for future reference.  On the downside, the e-mail system is a pain in the neck to use, with separate folders for new, opened, replied, sent, and deleted mail; it was not intuitive at all.  After a while, we found the crowd on SLS to get “stale” in that there were less and less couples who caught our eye.  Another plus was the cost, just $69 for a year.  There is a free membership category, but there is no ability to view profile pictures.  Since it’s all about attraction, that’s a bit of a drawback.  There is the ability to have multiple photo galleries, so we have photos that show our bodies, dressed and undressed [mostly old HNTs, actually] in the public photo gallery that all members can see, then our face pictures and a few explicit shots are in a private gallery, that we control access to on an individual basis.  Importantly, permission to view private galleries can be withdrawn, if necessary.

Swappernet- once SLS started to get stale for us, we decided to give this one a try, as another couple we met told us about it. It’s quite a bit more expensive, $120 for 6 months, compared to $70 a year for SLS.  But I think the cost is actually a good thing- for one, there is no free membership category, and the cost limits the number of knuckleheads who join with no intention of actually meeting people.  So it’s a more ‘serious’ crowd, if you know what I mean, and less wanna-bes.  Similar to SLS, there are public and private photo galleries, allowing you to control who sees how much of you.  As opposed to AFF, which practically forces you to use their e-mail system, Swappernet allows you to add your Yahoo Messenger or AIM ID to your profile, making it easy to move to webcam or chat, if so desired.  We have found a number of members who are on here and on SLS [just like we are!], sometimes under the same name, sometimes not.  In general, we’re much happier with this site and will probably let our SLS account die when our membership is up next month.

One thing about each of the above websites- they all have a bunch of other features, including chatrooms, a built in webcam utility, party listings, info on area clubs, etc, but we never took advantage of any of those, which is why I’m not commenting on those features.

A Google search for “swingers personals” will yield a ton of results, but to the best of my knowledge, the 3 above are the big names.  I’ve heard that in the Baltimore/Wash DC area Adult Playground is popular, but beyond that have no knowledge of it.   Our friend Southern Vixen has highly recommended Swingers Date Club, but as an example of regional differences, we’ve heard nothing about that in our area.  For those more into BDSM there is Alt.com and of course there is also Ashley Madison and Craigslist.  Veronica answered several ads placed by women seeking women on Craigslist, every one of whom turned out to be a flake, which is an example of “you get what you pay for”, I suppose.

Veronica: The nearest party in your areas is ‘hours away’ Eeek!  Now the next time Hubman and I move not only do I have to worry about whether or not they have good schools and if I can find decent bagels, but now we have to scope out the swinger scene.  In addition to the websites mentioned above,  I would also Google the name of your town and ‘swinging’ or ‘swapping’ or ‘group sex’ and see if you get linked to anything.  Seriously though, I really have nothing to add.  Except for the fact that Ashley Madison is a complete waste of time if you are looking for couples to swap with, as it is a website for affairs.

If anyone has any questions about the sites I’ve covered, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer it.  And as always, if anyone has questions about the lifestyle in general, we’re always looking for questions for future Swing Shift columns!  Leave your questions in the comments or email me at hubman38 at gmail dot com if you prefer.

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