Farewell 2020 – We hardly knew ya

And just like that, it is all over…

With a sad little whimper, 2020 came to a close last week. And while it is nice to say “Fuck Off!!” to 2020, as many have quickly pointed out, yes, there is a new number on the calendar, but beyond that, Covid still rages, and in the US at least, is worse right now than it has ever been; Trump is still President, for a questionably short period of time; politics is still as ugly and depressing as it has been all year; the economy is still struggling to find it’s footing amidst all the new changes; racial wounds and relations are still a source of cultural pain; and for those of us in alternative lifestyles, much of our social life, and much of our business, is still in some quasi-limbo.

So, What to Do?

How to put on the happy face, turn over the new leaf, say “Yes, we took a year to really feel the shock and disappointment of all that happened, but now, goddamnit, time to man up and move on… life must go on, somehow, someway, so let’s get to it!”

Relationships Are Everything

Here at Swinky Life, we think and talk a lot about relationships. The relationships we have with our spouses, with our children, with our parents, with our polyamorous other significant others, with our lovers, with our play partners, with our friends. But we have, within our collective, some interesting and deep thinkers, and so we also talk about our relationship with our own beliefs, desires, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. When you get right down to it, YOUR reality is simply your personal relationship with reality at large. Thinking of it from that perspective, improving anything can be approached from the perspective of improving your relationship to and with that thing, whatever it is… and 2020 is no different.

We Hardly Knew Ya…

So, how do you improve your relationship to something or someone? Well, one sure fire way is to really get to know it. Dig in, spend significant time with it, and really ask a lot of questions. Think about the answers to those questions. Get a deep, full, well rounded perspective on who, or what, you are trying to relate to. That relationship will become more informed, more educated, and more healthy. Maybe, you won’t personally like anything you find out… and maybe, you will decide that a relationship of distance is the healthiest relationship you can have with that thing or person… but that is still healthier, and may be happier, than trying to force a bad fit out of ignorance.

How to NOT Get to Know Someone

One of the fastest ways to fail at truly getting to know someone or something is to hyper-focus on some aspect of the relationship. Lets say you have a new playmate… and they are smoking hot, and wickedly perverted, and playing with them is so much fun!! So you hyper-focus on that, and fail to see aspects of their personality that other people, not having sex with them, see a mile away… a shallow disinterest in the real health or wellbeing of anyone they associate with. Sound familiar? Most of us have seen someone we know get involved with a new fling, and we think “This is not good, but they are so full of NRE that they do not see the bigger picture”… that is not a healthy relationship, and the lack of health comes from, among other possible things, the simple lack of getting a bigger, fuller, more accurate picture of who that other person is.

The Poor Misfortune of 2020

So, along comes poor 2020… and then, almost immediately, along comes Covid. This leads to an agonizing reality show-esque drama in which we all focused on the sick, dead, dying, and most importantly, the blaming and finger pointing and name calling as it transitioned from being a public health disaster into being a political feeding frenzy. This became our primary focus, and little else mattered. That of course played directly into all of the election issues. And so, pretty much across the board, we all focused on those two horrible issues, and accordingly, poor 2020 got the black eye.

The Unseen Goodness

The problem with this is, by hyperfocusing on what is bad, you miss what is good…. your relationship becomes skewed and dysfunctional. What could possibly have been good about 2020 you say?

The Accidental Swingers

Well, here is the very first thing… at the same time that Swinky Life came into being, our lovers and friends also began a sister project, a podcast named The Accidental Swingers, in which they chronical their introduction and initial escapades into ethical non-monogamy. They have tons of recorded conversations they would make on their drive home from all of their events, so listening to their podcasts gives you a backseat view, literally, of how things went for them and more importantly, how those events impacted them, their lives, and their decisions. Since our vision for Swinky Life required face to face, group, hands on interaction, which Covid completely shut down, we decided to focus our attention during 2020 on their podcast, and to our surprise and delight, it has done, and is doing, very well. The success of that is now spilling over into Swinky Life as well, as we will discuss in a moment.

Podcasting

An interesting and totally unforeseen side effect of that success is a fledgling standing in the podcasting community as well. While there is definitely a focused intersection of podcasting and adult themed content, and we are definitely beginning to gain some notoriety in that realm, we have also gotten some attention from vanilla podcasters also, and in an effort to pay back and to build community where you meet it, we are engaging in some events where we are there simply as successful podcasters, with no direct relationship to kink, swinging, or any other lifestyle aspect.

Swinky Relationships

And finally, for us, the biggest positive flying stealthily under 2020’s radar… while attending some of those podcast centric events, we have met amazing people who are also like minded, and business ventures and partnerships have begun to emerge out of those new friendships. We are very excited about this… While we were afraid that 2020 would be very harmful, if not deadly, to the Swinky Life endeavor, at the very end of the year, we suddenly look around and realize it may have been an amazingly successful and fruitful year, even though from the outside you cannot see any of that… yet. And it is too early to name names and talk about plans, but rest assured, we are very excited and will tell you all about it as quickly as we can.

The Online Pivot

It would be terribly remiss of me not to mention the influence that many of our colleagues had during this year. Swinky Life was envisioned as a source of hands on, small, intimate workshops where we could introduce people to kink in a non-threatening way, with solid instructions and examples, where people could explore with safety, and go back home with confidence. Covid hurt that idea, badly. And while the idea of doing our workshops virtually came up quickly, I resisted this idea strongly. I felt we could not offer the quality of instruction we founded our vision upon in an online context. But as the year went on, as we went to other virtual events, and watched other virtual presentations, we saw examples, both great and bad, of how this could be accomplished. Specifically, the PodFest events, PodCast-A-Palooza events, and the Tethered Together Online events, were very eye opening. And so my position has softened, and while it will be experimental for some time, I think it can be done. This shift has been instrumental in deciding to try and move forward in 2021, and so that is something else that was happening under the radar during 2020.

The Future

While much is still in flux, we see a future shaping up for us. We hope, as does everyone, that the vaccines currently being rolled out will be the beginning of the end of Covid, and that a normalcy can be resumed some time during this coming year. In the meantime, we have a lot of work to do with our new partners, to pull our technologies, and our visions, together in a way that is mutually fulfilling and supportive. And so, you can see, if we stop focusing on everything that was terrible about 2020, there were some great things going on. But our relationship to 2020 was poisoned, and skewed, and so we really did not see those things so much as they were happening… but when we honestly look back on the year, it really was not that horrible. But now it is gone… and we missed chances to celebrate the good.Do you have relationships like that? Maybe, your relationship with ideas and activities you are curious about, but unsure of? That is exactly our goal… to help you explore those kinds of things. So take this moment to look back, and reflect calmly, and maybe you will realize that often, things are not as bad as you think they are, you are just focusing on the negative. Embrace the adventure of getting to know… know more, know better, know more fully… whether it is people, activities, or ideas… and embrace 2021. Stay Swinky, and stay safe.

~Phoenix Phyre