Trust, But Verify

I have mentioned a few times the swinging site I used heavily for a few years.  I am still on the site, but it’s no longer my main source of a good time.  I’ve had great fun on there and I’m still a frequent visitor, but I’m no longer actively searching or sending messages to profiles that tickle my fancy.  I’m now a passive spectator, occasionally throwing my tuppence into a forum thread or replying to a message I find interesting.

That makes it all the more interesting that I’ve recently had some very enjoyable meets from there, two of whom I hope to meet on a regularish basis, indeed one of whom I’ve met a couple of times already and had great fun with!

One of the oddities about that particular site is the verification system.  An existing member can meet a newbie and confirm that they are a real person and turned up when they said they would, looking like the photos they had provided.  Good idea, no?  Well… as with so many good ideas sometimes the key is in the implementation.

Leaving aside the shag advisor style explicit descriptions (she took so much cum she looked like a Greggs ring donut.  Treat her with respect), people can get very uptight about veris.  The quantity (how many is too many for a man who in his profile claims to not want to sleep with the whole site?), the inconsistencies with profiles (someone who won’t meet a cheat having very graphic veris from a self-confessed cheat), the exact people someone else has met (oh I won’t meet X because they got a veri from Y and I hate Y).  You name it, someone somewhere is judging people on that basis.

I love to follow a trail of verifications, but not from a sense of judgement.  I’m just dead nosy.  I’m interested to see the sort of people a potential lover has met, the type of comments they leave in return.  Nobody ever displays a bad verification, so they are all taken with more than a pinch of salt, but I find them interesting.  I don’t place huge importance on them.  One veri or a hundred, explicit or innocent, I will happily read and click through to the profile verifying to have a good look around there too, sometimes following chains of verifications, hopping from profile to profile until I can barely remember the original profile that I was looking at.

Considering the site is a swinging site sometimes the verifications can provoke a lot of jealousy.  There are off-site chat groups where things like this are discussed in great detail.  While I’m not exactly a high profile member of the site I have seen screen shots of some of these conversations and I find them endlessly perplexing.  If you’re meeting someone who is already married, and that doesn’t bother you, how on earth can you be bothered that the person you’re meeting is also meeting others?  You’ll never be their primary relationship because that’s with their spouse.  In spite of my lack of understanding this does happen.

That’s one of the many reasons I’m not bothered whether someone I meet verifies me.  I have enough verifications to prove I’m a real person, and given how much I like to chat before I meet someone my veris can add little to someone’s understanding of me, my likes and my tastes, that we haven’t already discussed in detail before meeting up.  I’d rather avoid provoking any drama around meeting someone another person feels ought to be off limits, when doing so provides very little benefit to my overall site experience.

If someone verifies me after meeting me then I’ll send them a return veri.  If I’m meeting up with someone unverified I will offer a verification (one of the message filters is to block messages from anyone unverified, so the first verification truly does matter).  If I meet up with someone and they don’t verify me I don’t see it as being in any way rude – their comments aren’t so important to me that I would request them or take umbrage if they aren’t volunteered.

My verifications don’t show a full picture anyway – even if every single person I’ve met from that site left me a veri every single time we met up, it still doesn’t show the people I’ve met elsewhere.  When someone leaves the site and deletes their accounts their verifications still show as a number in the summary but the actual text is lost.  If the verification isn’t there did we even meet up?  It’s the text equivalent of “pics or it didn’t happen”.

Imagine then my surprise when someone I’d been chatting to for a little while pointed out that I had very few recent verifications that weren’t just socials.  He asked whether I still met through the site and I pointed to the most recent verification I had (late December) as proof that I do on occasion.

When I explained that of the last four people I’d met through the site the chap who left the latest verification was the only one who left one, but I had met others who preferred to meet without verifying, the response I received was “but how will I know who you’ve met?”.  Well, you won’t.  You could ask, but I don’t really see it as any of your business so I might tell you about the funnier episodes but what I choose to share is entirely at my discretion.  What about people I meet who aren’t on that site?  Do you need to know about those people too?

It didn’t go down well and I was blocked.  A pretty good filter in fairness, we clearly hold very different views on the value of someone saying I’m a top shag (which I am, by the way, just to be clear).