Loving Wives

[Danccc]

It's their loss if they drive people away. I can post elsewhere. Several groups fit.

I have just read all 3 of you chapters, very well done! Very erotic, huge turn on for me!

 

[metropolinational]

beat some sense into younger me for falling for her…

My first, second and third loves were fine. It was 4-6 that were brutal. I should have left all of those relationships within 3 months. Instead I stuck it out and got traumatized each time. I had to go into a death spiral before I was ready for love again. I don't think I've ever been fully whole again. The reason I write in LW is largely to exorcise the demons I accumulated over those six years of total self-destruction and torture. Writing has always been purely therapeutic for me. The artistic side of it has been a nice surprise.

 

[consistentlyrepudiated]

I agree that it's a normal reaction to occasionally think fondly of former lovers or to keep mementos of them. However, it's a huge leap to go from there to "and therefore infidelity is okay, or at least forgivable" much less "it's perfectly reasonable to spend the rest of her life wishing she was with someone besides her husband, to the point where she'd rather have her ashes scattered at the place where she and her lover from several decades before hooked up than be buried next to her husband." You tack onto that the fact that she puts the burden of this knowledge on her kids... it's not good, is what I'm saying.

She made a choice that had a corrosive effect on her marriage. Maybe it was a bad marriage to begin with; it probably was, in fact. But she first made the choice to have an affair, then chose to hide it from her husband instead of talking with him about it and trying to find a way forward together, then placed that burden of knowledge on her children after she was gone. The book's defenders will say that she chose duty and loyalty to her family over love, but she didn't; she merely pushed the aftereffects of her weakness off onto everyone else. It's a story of a selfish person who sees herself as selfless... which arguably made it the perfect book for the times. But that's neither here nor there.

So, to bring it back around to the pieces that regularly appear in LW--although arguably less regularly these days--yes, of course the "I kicked her out and ruined her life" fantasy is kind of fucked up. But I'd argue it's no less fucked up than something like Bridges or The Notebook, stories that glorify cheating as being acceptable when it's ~~true love~~. In each case, the writers want us to focus on the story they were trying to tell (the wronged husband gets his revenge or the unhappy wife/girlfriend cheats but it's okay), but that's the thing about stories: the readers get to see in them what they want.

Did I accidentally walk into a church instead of a porn site? Why bring morality here, of all places? Why would I even judge the characters? Of course it's not right - the transgression is the story; forbidden fruit is what gives erotica its bite.

Bad people doing bad things is boring. Decent people doing bad things is a story worth reading.

The title says "Loving Wives" -- wives who have fun outside their marriages. Consensual or not. They are the focus.

If you want to identify with a victim, wallow in his pain and humiliation, share his sense of injustice, rejection, and betrayal, there are other categories for angry masochists.

 

[metropolinational]

If you want to identify with a victim, wallow in his pain and humiliation, share his sense of injustice, rejection, and betrayal, there are other categories for angry masochists.

That's literally what LW is for. Other than the angry masochists part, what you wrote describes half of LW perfectly. The masochists are just one faction within that.

 

[consistentlyrepudiated]

That's literally what LW is for. Other than the angry masochists part, what you wrote describes half of LW perfectly. The masochists are just one faction within that.

Midwives with Parkinson's should be out of work.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Did I accidentally walk into a church instead of a porn site? Why bring morality here, of all places? Why would I even judge the characters? Of course it's not right - the transgression is the story; forbidden fruit is what gives erotica its bite.

I've always found that to be such a strange argument.

Any time someone makes a creative work, they take the chance of it being misunderstood or misinterpreted. I've brought up Fahrenheit 451 before as an example; Bradbury thought he was writing a story about the dangers of television, but pretty much no one agreed with him on that opinion. Eventually, even he had to admit that he'd written a story about censorship without meaning to.

If someone is writing a story intended to evoke an emotion--even if that's only lust--they always take a chance on inspiring a different one instead, especially if what they're writing about is transgressive. Whether it's someone laughing at a horror movie because they find the monster more absurd than frightening or crying at a love song because it hits different for them due to a breakup, that's just a thing that happens. Here on Lit, with amateur writers and limited editing, taking aim at various kinks? That goes double. "Super hot" to you is "fuck, that's gross" to someone else.

Bad people doing bad things is boring. Decent people doing bad things is a story worth reading.

I tend to agree; for me, however, it's less the things they're doing and more what comes before and after that I find interesting. When is infidelity forgivable? What are the limits to that forgiveness? How do people react to betrayal, and when is anger justified? When does it go too far? How do you rebuild trust, or is it even possible? That's the kind of stuff I find really interesting.

It's not smut, I admit, but other people here, readers and writers both, seem interested in it. And if people can put stories in the Romance category that have 30K words of slow burn followed by three paragraphs of tame, euphemism-laden sex, I don't really see the problem with a similar ratio in LW.

The title says "Loving Wives" -- wives who have fun outside their marriages. Consensual or not. They are the focus.

Sometimes? A lot of the sharing stories, both the stag/vixen and cuck/hotwife stuff are largely male POV, sometimes with the husband only imagining what the wife's doing. Hell, in the cuck stories, the focus is almost entirely on the husband's torment most of the time, albeit intended to be erotic rather than/in addition to being pathetic. Very often, the wife is little more than a sketch in these.

There are also plenty of swinging stories where the couples go to separate rooms, with the husband again only imagining what's going on in the other room while focused on the woman he's hooked up with. Admittedly, sometimes that's also another man's wife, but even then, it's rarely "about" that wife, instead being about the husband and his, for lack of a better term, use of the woman; a gross, but often unfortunately accurate way to put it.

In the cheating stories? Yeah, the wife is mostly the focus, although sometimes the story will follow the clueless husband around in his day-to-day to amp up the reader's interest.

So, no, not always. Arguably not even most of the time.

If you want to identify with a victim, wallow in his pain and humiliation, share his sense of injustice, rejection, and betrayal, there are other categories for angry masochists.

"Victim" is an interesting choice of word. In most of the stories that are about the repercussions of infidelity, the men don't usually come off as victims; they're actively fighting back or trying to work through the breach of trust, not passively taking whatever happens to them.

Bruce1971 has a series of fascinating essays analysing the marital drama/conflict subgenre's tropes and structures that argue that the reason the wife is such a cartoon in BTBs is due to their role in the story, i.e. that they an antagonist that the reader shouldn't care too much about. Much like in the cheating stories that are meant to be hot, where the husbands are usually non-entities described in the broadest strokes to invoke a specific reaction (clueless or sweet to amplify the heat; distant or abusive to absolve the wife's actions), the paper-thin characterization is a feature, not a bug.

That said, in most of my stories, the woman is a full-fledged, well-fleshed-out character of her own. I think reconciliation doesn't work out unless that's true, for one, and while only a minority of my stories (roughly a third) end in reconciliation, it's important to keep the reader on their toes; if reconciliation isn't on the table, then where's the conflict, right? For me, exploring the repercussions is only interesting if you also look at the causes, too.

 

[IWroteThis]

Did I accidentally walk into a church instead of a porn site? Why bring morality here, of all places? Why would I even judge the characters? Of course it's not right - the transgression is the story; forbidden fruit is what gives erotica its bite.

(Not really) sorry, but ethics and morals are not limited to religious groups. They just spell them out in more detail than most other people.

Bad people doing bad things is boring. Decent people doing bad things is a story worth reading.

Good people stopping bad people from doing bad things is a story worth reading as well.
Good people getting beat down before rising triumphant is also a story worth reading.

The title says "Loving Wives" -- wives who have fun outside their marriages. Consensual or not. They are the focus.

Actually, as I mentioned elsewhere, the focus is the wedding ring. That's really the only thing that separates Loving Wives from all of the other categories. Take away the ring, and all of your stories drop into other categories.

So, what is the significance of requiring that ring if that ring is not significant? The very existence of the category demands that the ring be significant, which means marital drama in the story, not just happy-go-lucky fucky-fucky. There are other categories for that.

If you want to identify with a victim, wallow in his pain and humiliation, share his sense of injustice, rejection, and betrayal, there are other categories for angry masochists.

Actually, you've described the start of a very popular hero's arc story line. This might surprise you, but the structure of Star Wars is basically the same as your typical BTB. So is Harry Potter, for that matter. I mean, Harry literally burnt Professor Quirrell to death, after all.

As for those angry masochists, they tend to like the willing cuck stories. You know, the ones where the pain, humiliation, injustice, rejection and betrayal are never challenged, much less overcome.
So, you're actually right, Fetish is the category for them, not Loving Wives.