Tuesday Talks: Veterans, Brotherhood, and Lifestyle Community

Transcript

Speaker1: This podcast is intended for adult audiences. Over the age of 18, it contains adult language and situations. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this podcast belong solely to us, and not of any employer, organization, committee, or other group or individuals. This podcast is not intended to be taken as professional advice. Welcome to the Swing Nation Podcast, a podcast by swingers and for swingers, where we look to educate others and push back on the negative stigmas and misconceptions associated with our lifestyle. Come with us and share our pineapple journey as we travel the globe. Interview the activists, learn and grow together. Join the activists. Learn and grow together. Join the nation. So Lacey, people are asking, how do they get to go to a party or an event with us? They check out swingersociety.net, you create a you sign up for an event and you come hang out with us super easy that's right if you want to party with us and the other faces and names that you know from social media and tiktok head on over to swingersociety.net can't wait to see you there Tuesday Talks Just send your questions So Dan and Lake said Tuesday Talks Swing Nation got you Feeling sexy hey there pineapple people and welcome to the swing nation podcast we are your hosts northern guy southern girl and today we are back with another rendition of tuesday I'll see you next time. pineapple people and welcome to the swing nation podcast we are your hosts northern guy and southern girl and today we are back with another rendition of tuesday toss we're talking tuesday with dan and lacy um all right so today's question you actually you have not listened to yet no um so before we came on you asked me what i said no i think you brought it up you're like do you want to hear the the question and i said is it controversial and because last week's was like not controversial maybe that's not the right word but it was a little out of our norm so you just wanted to know that so like you could prepare your brain or what yeah okay yeah not this one should be pretty not controversial okay i think i don't mind talking about the hard questions i just need to be like mentally prepared you have to be in the right headspace yeah okay well this should be a non-controversial tuesday talks but let's go to the phone line and see what this week's question is. Good afternoon, Dan and Lacey. My name is John. I'm calling from California, San Francisco Bay Area to be specific. And one of the reasons why me and my partner decided to listen to your broadcast, your podcast, pardon me, was that you, Dan, are a veteran veteran and as i am one myself united states marine corps 1977-1985 cold war veteran that's one of the things that got me interested and while my partner and i are straight and monogamous and have been so for 25 years, we nonetheless find your podcast entertaining, especially the Tuesday talk about the disability. As my partner, she's been blind since birth. Question I'd like to ask for your Tuesday talk, and it regards to how you, Dan, have been able to transition from the military into civilian society and how the lifestyle has helped you and how in some ways it can help other veterans especially those that are with couples that might find it interesting i know from my own experience that it does happen in the military a fair amount anyway so i'd like to thank you for your time for your program which i find amusing entertaining and informative so a farewell to the fair lacy and to my brother veteran dan welcome home brother so a little different question this week yeah so we're talking a little bit about being a veteran so if anybody does not know um i went about two years ago, retired from the United States Army. So, that's what he's referencing there. So, first of all, thank him for his service. Yes. But his voice. His voice is amazing. Yeah. He sounds like, if he's not doing like a radio show or TV or narrating books or something like that, he probably needs to get, he missed his calling. He used to tell like scary stories or something yeah like a podcast i don't like scary stories well i don't either but his voice just kind of gives that like a mystery true crime true crime yeah that'd be good that'd be good yeah you like true crime i do you listen to a lot of true crime i do actually all right so his question is specifically um about the military and how transitioning out of the military and into the civilian world maybe the lifestyle community can help with that and i honestly that's an interesting question and not something i'd probably ever thought about prior to him asking that um so if you don't know people you know so i was in the military for 21 years so basically I joined the army between my junior and senior year of high school so the army was the only thing I really knew yeah for the the bulk of my adult life um and so transitioning out of that is a I think a weird time um for a lot of people that have served in the military uh because you You go from somebody telling you where to be and what to do and when to get up and you know planning your whole life for you to now all of a sudden you have all this freedom it's kind of like one of those I don't know what to do with my hands yeah situation well I think you're unique too because you you don't work a traditional. You don't go into work nine to five, where a lot of people transition to some sort of career, a second career. So I know a lot of my friends, when they got out of the military, went straight into government contracting or became a government employee in some way, shape, or form. So basically, took their uniform off and but basically did a very similar uh job where from being in the the army to throwing swinger parties and hosting a podcast that is a very it's quite a transition a unique transition um so it's interesting that he brings up well how could how the lifestyle community help you and i've never really before. So, so one of the things I, I enjoyed most about the military is it really is a community, you know, military members take care of each other. They take care of each other's families to take care of each other's kids. I can think, you know, when, when my ex-wife now had her babies and stuff, you know, it was other service members or other service members, wives that wives that really stepped in you know because you don't have your mom doesn't live down the road or you can't just and you were deployed right and or you know well both times i had my children um i left within a couple weeks actually to deploy so yeah there's not you don't really have the normal built-in networks to help you so the military community really becomes kind of your family in a lot of ways. And I think that is similar about the lifestyle community. When you look at the lifestyle community, people take care of each other in a lot of ways. Your dad just passed, and we said several times during that, that community really stepped in. They have, yeah.'ve sent us food and and flowers and there were so many phone calls or texts um we just got a card this week with gift cards and yeah sweet stuff in it so it's it they've been very thoughtful around that you know i don't i don't want to compare but much more support probably from what i would consider our lifestyle friends yeah than maybe what you would consider vanilla friends yeah the only flowers i got were from lifestyle people i mean not that that matters i mean they're all just friends it shouldn't be lifestyle or vanilla but they're definitely show out when you need them like and i think that if like our car broke down or our cows caught on fire or like a really bad thing they would be the first ones there to help us in need if we needed it yeah and i don't do you think that's because we're just closer with lifestyle people now or do you really think that there's a difference in community i don't know it's hard for me to explain i do think that these people are seeing our true authentic selves right they're seeing like the good and the bad and like the truth and to me that makes us friendships seem a little bit more real or feel a little bit more real yeah does that make sense no it does so when i was in the military you know since we're doing this comparison in the military it is a brotherhood and it's very much you know when we go overseas together like i have your back you have my back you know you're you're risking your life basically every single day and so i think that that creates this bond that we're we're in this together and then should something bad happen i know that my friends around with me would make sure that my my wife and children were taken care i mean the military eventually will take care of them but really you know you trust your friends right you trust the people around you and so you know that if something was ever to happen that your friends would make sure that they got taken care of and i think in the lifestyle community because we're all it's not the same right we're not risking our lives but we are taking we're in this community together and there is a risk right and there is some risk that you know this is we're all keeping this secret together and you know if any of our friends got out it it could it could ruin their careers and ruin their lives in a lot I don't know. there is a risk right and there is some risk that you know this is we're all keeping the secret together and you know if any of our friends get out it it could it could ruin their careers and ruin their lives in a lot of ways and so i think there is this kind of common bond that we're all in this together yeah um you know it's probably on a different level than the military but it is kind of similar to that and i think because we all are taking this kind of risk together that it does bring us closer yeah and there are people in the lifestyle i think we got an email or text or something i was reading it the other day that some guy said his wife only wants to hook up with somebody one time and then move on and that's kind of like her thing and honestly that's pretty common you hear that quite often they don't want to make honestly if you go back and listen to the first dozen episodes of our podcast you'll find podcast episodes where we talk about how we don't want to form an emotional connection with the people that we swap with now fast forward all these years later like that's the opposite of what we're saying right now some of our best friends are people that we've met in La lifestyle and who are you know we have this special connection with so and that varies on different levels depending on the situation we don't like personally we don't bring our kids around anybody in the lifestyle not that we wouldn't we just never have it would be in a unique situation if we ever did and i think a big part of that is we're afraid of the scrutiny that comes with that and because you know we both have exes and our kids you know me and you don't have any kids together so they're the exes and exes opinions kind of matter in the way we parent our kids so we're very careful that we don't want to give our ex-spouses an excuse to try to cause problems but other people do like other people vacation together they like that they're they go places on the weekends because they're you know all have kids around the same age and so it it can be as a big of a community as you really allow it to be and i think it can be it can be beautiful if you allow it now something happens in that friendship or whatever you want to call it falls apart you know that's an issue so is is it a would you say it's a different level of friendship because you're being intimate with each other i think so and i don't know if intimate's the right word but because you're connecting on a sexual level yeah with your friends does that does that make that connection stronger it feels like it does if that's not what it is it's hard for me to pinpoint what else it is because it definitely feels different um and i think people don't realize that you can separate the two you can be like naughty and kinky behind closed doors but then when you're in a public setting and there's people around or kids around or whatever you can be very much like friends it's almost like ingrained in us to to do that and so i don't know what i'm saying i lost my train of thought but does that make sense what i'm saying i agree there is a misconception that swingers are always being sexual or that the whole idea of swinging is just to be sexual yeah um where i don't where i i believe what we're saying here is the lifestyle community really is a community and it's a place where you can go and you can meet people and you can form connections and friendships and those connections and friendships can be sexual but they can also be very vanilla you can go like you said boating and yeah out to dinner and you know family cookouts and things like that and that's part of the lifestyle these are lifestyle friends but you can do a lot of things that isn't necessarily in the bedroom yeah where i think overall when people think about swinging or the swinger community or the lifestyle community they think about all the things that happen in the bedroom yeah can i say something that i've noticed that i've observed as your wife from you leaving the military too i feel like you have moved every three or four years of your whole life and so like for me i have these lifelong friends that i've known since i was like a child i don't feel like you really have those friendships because you moved away at 17 and then have been bouncing around all over the country and so i feel like the lifestyle once you ended with the military you kind of like like you always had built-in friends with the military because every time you moved there were people there you worked in you worked with and stuff like that i feel like the lifestyle has kind of like replaced that for you like all of your friends now because you moved to my hometown where i live so you would have no friend you know nothing i feel like the lifestyle has kind of given you those built-in friends and you've been able to explore those friendships within the lifestyle that's true yeah no i agree with that yeah i think in a lot of ways the lifestyle is now our community where before the military was very much you know my community and then the last couple years your community uh but i definitely think that that has transitioned to most of the people we know most of our relationships most of our friendships are kind of all built around well it's kind of hard as an adult to move to a new city and you have to go out of your way to meet new people especially if you're not working in a traditional office setting like if you're remote or you throw swinger parties you know but i mean if you're not doing something out of like it that would be very hard you would have to purposely go out of your way to make friends and so i think the lifestyle just kind of like it's easy to make friends within the lifestyle and this is probably separate from what we're talking about but because we're so public about being swingers it makes it hard to form friendships with vanilla people we kind of almost have this you know stigma people you know people probably are a little more cautious to get close to us because they feel like we're going to try to their partner you know or they don't want other people to think that they're swingers yeah so i think because of that we we are in this weird position where it's hard to i don't even really want to go talk to my neighbors and become friends with them because i'm afraid yeah of the problems that that might cause you know yeah and i don't want to have to hide our lifestyle from them but then i don't want to tell them and have it be weird so i just kind of avoid that altogether yeah which i don't know if that's good or bad but i don't know the answer either but we we do we don't normally talk to strangers that are vanilla because it's like i don't want to have to try to explain everything to you yeah it's pretty it's pretty weird um so i hope that answers his questions i hope so um you know i'm really proud of my time in the military and uh i i do miss it on some levels uh there's times like getting out of bed at 5 o'clock in the morning to go run when it's 20 degrees outside. I do not miss that at all. I don't miss getting a phone call on a Friday and saying, pack your bags.