Taking things a little out of the order we originally intended, Jack and I have recently signed up for two websites (Lifestyle Lounge and Kasidie).
Thus we found ourselves at 1:00 in the morning agonizing over what our username should be. It seems like a simple enough detail, but it took us 40 minutes to think of something we liked. I wish I could offer some advice on how to come up with one, but to be honest, I’m not sure that I have any useful suggestions. We looked at song titles and Shakespeare sonnets, and came up with a wide variety of lame usernames (although, as we learned after we signed up and looked around, there’s probably nothing wrong with having a lame username; they’re pretty common). When we finally did stumble upon our username, it seemed so obvious that we were both surprised we hadn’t thought of it earlier.
Since we were starting with the Lifestyle Lounge, the next step we had to worry about was the essay questions. LL staff review all membership applications to verify their authenticity. My husband was under the impression that these essay questions were just meant to verify us as actual people and would not be visible on our profile. I assumed they would be visible on our profile–turns out I was right (this is the part where I get to say, “I told you so”).
The two questions are essentially “Who are you?” and “What are you looking for?” Like the username, this sounds simple enough, but it gave us some trouble. Being new to this whole thing, we’re still in the process of figuring out what we want. And there was the issue of not wanting to sound like idiots or assholes, and of trying to figure out how to describe ourselves and in how much detail. Our not-very-thorough answers still took us nearly another hour to complete. The good news is that, once your membership has been accepted, you can edit your answers to these questions. After looking at some other member profiles, we decided that we needed to flesh ours out a bit. We’ve already performed some edits, but our profile still needs work; I fully expect we’ll be making more alterations in the future. Given that we’re not at a point where we’re actively looking for partners yet, I think it’s probably ok that our profile is not as thorough as it could be. I also suspect it’ll be the sort of thing we’ll be continuing to make changes to as we progress in the lifestyle.
The other site, Kasidie, required less angst to get registered. We already had our username, and there were no essay questions to answer.
Both sites have a variety of optional information to fill out. Both have a list questions about your sexual preferences. What kind of action are you looking for? (For the time being, we’ve decided, we’re only looking for other couples.) Kasidie also asks you to quantify your desires (boy-girl play, girl-girl play, flirting, kissing, oral, etc) on a 0-5 scale. LL offers a variety of user-submitted inquiries that you can pick and choose from, which range from the sexual to the benign.
We didn't fill out any of this additional information until the next day, opting instead to go to bed once we'd been through the registration process for both sites. I had some difficulty figuring out how to answer some of the questions. Girl-on-girl? Well, there have definitely been specific women I've been attracted to. I'm open to the possibility. I can't really say how I'm going to feel about it until I've tried it, I guess. Guy-on-guy? I know it's something Jack has some interest in. I'm not at all sure it's something I would enjoy watching. I'd like to say I'm so enlightened that I have no problem with it. It's certainly something I'd like him to have the opportunity to try if he wants to. But if I'm honest, I have to admit that the thought of watching my husband with another man makes me a bit uncomfortable at this point.
There are myriad possibilities to consider, and filling out the profiles so early in this adventure may turn out to have been a good thing, because it points out all the issues that Jack and I need to discuss and make sure we're in agreement on for the time being.
As of the writing of this blog post, we've already received a few messages, despite the fact that our profile is not awesome and we have no pictures posted yet. One came from a single guy, the rest came from couples, most of whom were somewhere around 15-20 years older than us. We've politely declined them all; we're not quite ready for the dating phase just yet anyhow. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to doing some localized searching and seeing who we might want to contact in the future.
