We Joined FetLife… Just for Community

I have a habit of turning fairly simple conversations into risk assessments.

Jen knows this.

So when she said, one Tuesday evening, “What if we joined FetLife just to have a look around?”, she was probably expecting the face I made.

Not horrified.

Not even particularly nervous.

More the face of a man who has just been handed a form and discovered there are several pages of small print.

“Joined as in… joined?” I asked.

Jen looked at me.

“Yes, Alex. That is generally what joining means.”

“No, I know. I just mean, what happens after we join?”

“We read things?”

“And then?”

She shrugged. “We make tea?”

This is more or less how our adventurous conversations go.

We talk bravely at 10pm and are usually asleep by 10:15.

But underneath my overthinking was a genuine question.

If we joined something like FetLife, what did that mean for us?

Were we signalling that we wanted to meet people?

Were we agreeing to go to events?

Was this the start of some enormous change to our relationship that neither of us had actually asked for?

The answer, thankfully, was much simpler.

No.

We were curious about the community.

So we decided to join for exactly that.

Nothing more.

The Bit I Was Nervous About Wasn’t Really FetLife:

A few months ago, we were still getting used to saying things like “maybe we should try something new” without immediately becoming very interested in whatever was on television.

We’d realised that we weren’t bored with each other.

We were bored with routine.

That distinction has become quite important.

We started small, first by trying to flirt with each other again, then by having more honest conversations about curiosity and what “trying something new” actually meant to us.

The biggest lesson so far has been that curiosity doesn’t have to come with momentum.

You can wonder about something without doing it.

You can talk about something without wanting it.

And, as we worked out after talking about Swingathon, “not yet” is a perfectly complete boundary.

That mattered here.

Because my worry wasn’t really, “Should we have a FetLife account?”

It was:

“If I say yes to this, am I accidentally saying yes to whatever comes after it?”

Jen spotted that fairly quickly.

“You know we can just read, don’t you?” she said.

“I know.”

“And nobody’s going to appear at the house because we’ve made an account.”

“I know.”

“We’re not agreeing to meet anyone.”

“I know.”

We Decided What FetLife Was For Us Before We Joined:

This was probably the thing that made the biggest difference.

Instead of joining first and figuring out our boundaries later, we talked about what we actually wanted from it.

We weren’t looking to date anyone.

We weren’t opening our relationship.

We weren’t looking for another couple.

We weren’t planning to attend parties, open houses or meetups.

And we weren’t using it as a stepping stone towards any of those things.

For us, FetLife was going to be closer to a forum or library.

A place where we could read.

See how other people talked about boundaries.

Learn a bit of the language.

Notice what made us curious.

Notice what very definitely did not.

Then close the laptop and continue being us.

That made the whole thing feel surprisingly normal.

It also connected with what we’d already worked out when we wrote about being kink-curious without rushing into anything.

Being curious wasn’t the problem.

Feeling like curiosity created an obligation was.

So we removed the obligation.

Our Rules Came Before Our Profiles:

This might sound slightly formal for two people sitting on the sofa with mugs of tea, but we made a few rules before we joined.

Not dramatic rules.

Just things that meant neither of us had to sit there wondering what the other person assumed was okay.

1. We wouldn’t use identifying photos
2. We wouldn’t DM strangers
3. We wouldn’t arrange meetups or attend events
4. If one of us feels weird, we stop and talk

The First Twenty Minutes Were Almost Disappointingly Normal:

I don’t know exactly what I expected.

Possibly dramatic music.

Instead, we sat next to each other on the sofa scrolling.

Every few minutes one of us would say something.

Jen: “Oh, that’s interesting.”

Me: “That’s definitely not us.”

Jen: “No.”

A few minutes later:

Me: “Actually, that bit makes sense.”

Jen: “See?”

Me: “Don’t sound so pleased with yourself.”

At some point the tea went cold.

We also forgot we’d put washing on.

In other words, we remained two people in their early thirties trying to have a slightly adventurous evening while still being responsible for laundry.

But that normality was actually reassuring.

We didn’t finish reading with a huge list of things we suddenly wanted to do.

We didn’t feel behind.

We didn’t suddenly decide our relationship needed to become more extreme.

Mostly, we found ourselves talking.

And we’re learning that this happens a lot.

Seeing Other People’s Boundaries Was More Useful Than Seeing What They Did:

One thing I hadn’t really expected was how interested I’d be in the conversations around experiences rather than the experiences themselves.

I assumed we’d mainly be learning about different interests.

And obviously there was plenty that was new to us.

Some of it was intriguing.

Some of it got an immediate:

“Nope.”

But what stayed with me more was seeing people talk about communication.

Where their boundaries were.

How they’d changed.

How people handled uncertainty.

How they recognised something wasn’t for them.

How they talked about slowing things down.

It reminded me that a lot of the awkward questions Jen and I have been asking aren’t uniquely ours.

Things like:

“What if I’m curious but I don’t actually want to do it?”

“What if you like the idea and I don’t?”

“What if something sounds exciting in theory but uncomfortable in reality?”

“What happens if one of us changes our mind?”

None of those questions mean you’re failing at being adventurous.

They’re just relationship questions.

And reading other people’s experiences gave us more questions to ask each other.

What Helped Us Keep It Comfortable:

We’re very much still figuring this out, but there are a few things we’d repeat if another couple asked us how we approached joining an online community like this.

1. We said why we were joining
2. We set boundaries while nothing exciting was happening
3. We stopped treating “maybe” as “eventually”
4. We checked how things felt, not how adventurous they looked
5. We talked afterwards

What We’d Do Differently:

I’d probably spend less time trying to work out whether Jen and I were having the “correct” reaction to everything.

At first, when she found something interesting and I didn’t, I noticed myself wondering if I was being boring.

Then the reverse happened.

I found something interesting.

Jen looked at it and said:

“Absolutely not for me.”

I waited.

Nothing terrible happened.

Our relationship remained intact.

She ate a biscuit.

It was strangely educational.

Different reactions don’t have to become relationship problems.

Sometimes one person says yes, one says no, and the answer for the couple is simply no.

That’s actually quite peaceful once you stop trying to negotiate yourself out of it.