Discovering Lifestyle Spaces & Ourselves – Layndare Origin Story Part 2

Written by

Alina

1 / 31

By 2017 we had already discovered that we loved being nude and sharing private lifestyle experiences together.

Then one night, after an absolutely awful dinner date with a potential third, I finally said:
“Fuck it. Let’s just go to Sea Mountain.”

Lay had actually found Sea Mountain on an old Yahoo forum and had been talking about it to me for almost a year. For a long time I kept saying I wasn’t ready to go somewhere like that yet.

Sea Mountain was advertised as a place for couples and women only, where everyone was required to be nude and free to do as much or as little as they wanted. It sounded both exciting and intimidating.

It ended up being the first real lifestyle space we ever visited, and we loved it.

On our first visit, I was nervous, but that nervousness only added to the excitement. We had already played together in semi-public spaces before, but never openly in front of other people. I remember it was a little chilly that day. We were both wearing robes and lounging around the pool area.

Within an hour, I was on Lay’s cock. 🤭

I was shy and nervous, so I just looked at Lay and kept my back to everyone else. Lay, on the other hand, was super excited. At one point he lifted my robe up, and suddenly we heard cheers and applause around us.

I was completely turned on by how turned on he was. I was so wet, and I couldn’t explain it. 

That moment unlocked a whole new level of his candaulism kink, even though at the time we didn’t know the word for it yet.

After sunset we relaxed in the hot tub, where an older couple started chatting with us. They asked if we were swingers. We said no, because at the time we thought swinging meant full swap. Up to that point we had only MFM experiences.

Then they asked another question.

“Are you in the lifestyle?”

We looked at each other.

“What’s the lifestyle?”

They laughed and asked if we played with other people. We told them about using Feeld and having a few threesomes.

“So… you’re in the lifestyle.”

💡

Until that moment, we had just called it “fooling around” or “hooking up.” We had no idea there was an entire community built around it.

That night we learned the magic search words: “swing lifestyle.”

More than anything, though, I felt something unexpected – a sense of belonging. Without getting into my personal history too deeply, that feeling was new for me.

The rest of that night felt almost surreal. We had sex with each other under the stars, danced naked, and soaked in the hot tub for hours. Lay literally came eight times, and by the end of the night his cum was practically clear. 😂 At around 2am we were still going at it when one of the staff members finally told us it was time to leave.

At that point in our lives we didn’t drink or do drugs. But that night we realized something.

We were high on love and sex.

And we had found our drug.

We had only purchased a full day pass, so afterward we drove back to a hotel in a nearby town. I brought along my custom collar and asked Lay to fuck me while I wore it.

A couple months earlier we had gone to our local sex shop and tried on eleven collars. Every single one was too big for me. A little while later, my gay coworker told me about Folsom Street Fair, and I convinced Lay to go check it out with me. We went to Folsom and had custom collars made so they would fit properly. 

That moment became another important discovery for us: my growing desire for submission.

Interestingly, many of these sexy travel and playful ideas were coming from me. That first Sea Mountain trip was genuinely life-changing for us, and it’s why the place still feels so special in our story.

It also set the tone for the kind of lifestyle environments we prefer: nude daytime lounging, relaxed conversations, playful energy, and the freedom for things to happen organically.

We couldn’t stop wanting to go back.

For the first time, we experienced a place where sexuality, nudity, and playfulness existed openly in a social setting. Instead of feeling taboo, it felt strangely normal. Even therapeutic. It was also a dramatic contrast to our everyday lives working academic and desk jobs. Sea Mountain quickly became the kind of weekend we looked forward to multiple times a year.

We also checked out our local hotel takeover parties, but we discovered something about ourselves pretty quickly. We preferred the “lifestyle vacation” vibe much more than the “nightclub” vibe.

During this period we experimented socially as well. I explored girl–girl experiences, and Lay had moments playing with other women. Some things we tried stuck. Some didn’t. But every experience helped us refine what our version of the lifestyle looked like.

2018–2023: Community, Hosting & Real Life

Over the next several years, the lifestyle slowly became woven into our social lives. We also had the opportunity to travel more, and often at these new places, I would flash my boobs to Lay randomly. This aroused us so much, and I started doing this for him more and more. 

We returned to Sea Mountain several more times, attended a few local parties, and eventually began hosting our own gatherings in 2019.

Around that time we were doing well financially through a mix of engineering work, property investments, and a side business. We realized we could LEANFIRE our life and focus more on what we actually wanted.

And what we wanted most was simple: more time together.

I like to joke that I seduced Lay away from academia and the tech world.

Our lifestyle parties were fun evening parties, but our dream was to create something like a lifestyle retreat, inspired by places like Sea Mountain. Ultimately, we wanted to create environments where people could connect the way we had. At the end of 2019 we paused our parties to build a pool, because our vision included hosting nude daytime gatherings as well.

Then COVID happened.

Like many people in the lifestyle community, we took a long break from social events. We occasionally invited a few trusted partners, but otherwise we kept things quiet.

During that time, Lay had still been sharing pieces of our life anonymously online. In 2020 we made a big decision.

We decided to show our faces publicly.

We knew once we made that choice, there was no going back. But we set one rule for ourselves from the beginning: if we were going to share this part of our lives openly, it could never be about money.

If people wanted to support us, that was something we could appreciate, but we didn’t want to depend on it for our everyday lives. The moment it became about monetization, we knew it would start to take something away from the experience.

We had already taken one leap of faith by leaving our professional careers. Why not take another?

That’s when we truly leaned into Layndare.

Originally, Layndare was just one of the names we had brainstormed for our lifestyle parties.

Now it became something else entirely – our digital playground.

When we began posting under Layndare with our faces visible, we already had years of photos and videos from our adventures together. Suddenly we had a place to share those memories more openly.

Opening that door publicly, however, turned out to be a much bigger experience than we expected. Along with the excitement came an entirely new emotional and psychological journey for both of us. We found encouragement, curiosity, criticism, and sometimes outright toxicity.

Learning how to navigate that world together, while staying grounded in our relationship and intentions, became a story in itself. It’s a chapter of our journey that deserves its own blog post.

For me personally, this period was also about understanding something deeply important: my submission to Lay was a choice.

I needed to know that I had the freedom and agency to discover this dynamic for myself. 
I wasn’t the ‘submissive Asian woman.’
I wasn’t trying to stop my husband from leaving me. 
I wasn’t soothing my childhood trauma. 
I was choosing the dynamic that felt right for me.
And what I ultimately discovered was that I only enjoyed being submissive to Lay, not to anyone else. 

Another important piece of our story is that the lifestyle has always been a relatively small portion of our overall lives. On average, it only took up a few evenings and weekends each year.

Because of that, and because of my own comfort levels, I gradually learned to keep my emotional focus primarily on Lay while treating other experiences as moments of connection rather than long-term expectations. This helped me avoid my tendency to overthink future relationships or friendships.

I became comfortable with the idea that sometimes these interactions were simply beautiful, fleeting moments shared with good people.

Interestingly, most of the people we met weren’t very interested in the deeper why behind our choices. Conversations were usually about the what.

What we liked.
What we were curious about.
What we wanted to try.

But life wasn’t only parties and travel.

During these years we also navigated COVID and experienced some difficult family losses. Those moments reminded us that the lifestyle wasn’t just about sex.

It was about connection.

When we eventually returned to the lifestyle socially, we came back with a slightly different perspective. By that point, we were also semi-retired, which gave us significantly more time and freedom to explore it in a more intentional way.

We wanted to focus less on random encounters and more on meaningful connections with like-minded people.

But the biggest shift in our lifestyle journey was still ahead of us.

What started as curiosity and playful exploration would slowly evolve into something deeper and more social than we ever expected.

Lifestyle travel and new dynamics began to shape our experiences in ways we hadn’t anticipated. Along the way, we also started realizing that some of our connections didn’t fit neatly into the traditional “swinger” label.

Over time, our lifestyle began to look less like occasional adventures and more like shared experiences with people we genuinely cared about.

In Part 3, we’ll share how our journey evolved into something closer to social swinging, chosen lovers, and connections that sometimes blurred the line between play and friendship.