Loving Loving Wives

Loving Wives is, hands down, my favorite category on Literotica. That's kind of strange, honestly; the description of it, "Married extramarital fun: swinging, sharing & more" doesn't hold any attraction to me. I'm not opposed to any of those things, at least in the context of fiction. But they're also not topics I find particularly compelling in fiction either, erotic or no. Yet I adore the category, both reading and writing there.

The even stranger thing, though, is that I'm not alone in that take. In the last ten years, the most popular stories, both in terms of ranking and views, have little resemblance to the stories that made up the vast majority of the content there when the site first opened. In fact, the stories that most fit the original description of Loving Wives (LW) often struggle to make even a four-star rating or half the views of the newer style, which are mostly about the drama surrounding infidelity and divorce. And given that it's the probably second-most read category on the site after Incest/Taboo? That's a lot of people wanting content that seems almost diametrically opposed to the original usage of the category.

Tales about sexy fun times between married people and folks that aren't their spouses still exist there. They still even make up the bulk of the content. However, they seem increasingly unwelcome, to the point where authors looking for guidance on the forums are often told to put their story about swapping, swinging, sharing, or cheating married people anywhere but Loving Wives. And, sadly, that's not the worst advice.

If you look in the comments section of the "classic" type of LW stories, you'll often see decidedly negative reactions to the behavior of the characters, like the "-1* cuck shit" comments. That kind of attitude towards cheating stories isn't entirely new, but it has become more prominent in the last decade. Those types of comments have also started making their way out of LW and into other parts of the site.

But why? And why has Loving Wives turned into such a hot button topic in the Authors' Hangout, with new threads about what an awful place it is showing up every week, and with new authors being told to treat the category as if it were Tolkien's Mordor? What can be done about it? Should anything be done about it, or is this just the new face of the category? And if so, is that a bad thing?

The primary goals of this essay are threefold: to document the history of LW; to describe its present state; and to discuss how and why an author might or might not want to write there.

Before we begin, though, why should you listen to me? It's true that I've only been writing on the site for the last year, although I've been reading here since the late 90s. But in the last year, I've created or collaborated on fifty-two works--including this one--with a pretty solid level of success.

I'm nearing two thousand followers, with a large percentage of them coming from Loving Wives. Most of my stories are in Loving Wives, but I've written for a total of sixteen categories. Most stories outside of LW received a red H, which indicates a rating of 4.5 stars or higher and ten or more votes received.

In the Loving Wives category, I have published 29 stories. All of them were written in the last year; while I believe I've improved as a writer in that time, I doubt that I've improved so much that it skews the data. I've also written a variety of popular types of LW stories, from revenge stories to "dude romance" to reconciliation, and even a cuckolding story. This level of recent output--along with all the data attached to those stories that the site provides only to authors--gives me insight some other folks might not have.

Of my LW stories, eight of them sit at a rating of 4.5 or above, and all but two more have scored at least a rating of 4.15. That may not sound like a ringing endorsement, but the rule of thumb for most authors in AH is "if you post in Loving Wives, add about .5 to the score." While not entirely accurate, it's a good starting point, and I'll get into the reasons for why stories there tend to score so much lower there later in my analysis.

And that's what this essay is, or at least attempts to be: an analysis. In my day job, I'm a software developer, and over the couple of decades I've been doing it, that's meant a lot of hours spent on systems analysis: how systems do and don't work, where they've gone wrong, how they can be corrected, and, sometimes, whether any correction is even desirable.

However, this essay is also a passionate defense of the category, and that leads me to my final qualification. On the forums, I set my title to "Loving Wives SME (Subject Matter Expert)" as a joke months ago, but I've also ended up being one of the largest boosters for the category in Authors' Hangout. In defending the types of stories that are popular there, I've delved into why they're popular, how much value they provide, and why they're so misunderstood.

In a very real way, the last year I've spent as a forum regular, often defending the category and encouraging people to post in it, has uniquely prepared me to write this essay. I'd like to thank all the folks on Authors' Hangout, even those who count themselves among the most vociferous opponents of the category as it currently exists. Maybe those folks most of all, although I doubt they'd like to be acknowledged by name. Their love of their craft is laudable, though.

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The Loving Wives category has been here since the beginning, but it was always an odd duck. At first glance, almost all the stories that its description encouraged could have gone into another category--mostly Group or Erotic Couplings--depending on how the married couple paired off. After all, there are stories about married people in those categories as well, coupling both within and outside their marriages. So why even have a separate category?

Simply put, because of the focus. LW was originally intended as a place for folks indulging in an infidelity kink, in particular a female infidelity kink. Historically, if the focus was more on the group sex aspect, for example, and some of the participants happened to be married women, it would probably do better in Group Sex. However, if the focus was instead on one of the characters being a married woman and how she was doing all these things a married woman shouldn't, it did better in Loving Wives.

And, yes, it was mostly about women doing these things, usually with a man besides her husband. Sometimes a story about a wife bringing a woman to bed for her husband would show up in Loving Wives, but they didn't tend to do quite as well. The husband could be involved, either as part of a threesome with a man or in a swinging/swapping context with another woman, and those stories did fine. But the MFF stories with the wife and her best friend just weren't quite what the readers were looking for.

But, to be fair, there was a lot of stuff there that the readers weren't looking for but would still put up with.

Even from the beginning, the category was used "wrong." Doing a search of Loving Wives using an "a OR the" query--which will pull almost every story in the category--only goes back to June 23, 2000. Earlier stories still exist, but they aren't indexed by the search engine. This slightly limits what I can reference, but it still gives a wealth of information. Stories which have been deleted from the site also don't show up there, but that still leaves plenty of results for showing general trends.

In the first page of results--in addition to stories fitting into the intended "swinging and sharing" categories--one can find the following:

* multiple stories about cheating on an unknowing spouse

* a "hard" cuck story where the husband is expected to put up with his wife's infidelity or face repercussions, which, at the time, would better belong in Fetish

* an enraged husband learning about his wife's infidelity

* stories where no infidelity exists at all, i.e., literal "loving wives" in a monogamous sense.

One thing I see a lot on the forums is a wish for the category to "go back to what it used to be." It's always been messy in there, though, with a lack of focus that one doesn't usually see outside of "genre" categories like Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Erotic Horror, or catch-all categories like Fetish, Novels and Novellas, and Erotic Couplings. The messiness is baked into the category, because it's never had the strong focus of something like Anal or BDSM.

It's also the only category where, during its natural evolution, factions sprung up with diametrically opposed tastes. The explanation for that can be seen in the evolution of some of the other categories on the site.

For example, Anal saw a transition that went from "here's a story with anal sex in it" to "here's a story that's about anal sex." Nowadays, anal sex can show up in just about any category on the site, and it usually does, so the stories specifically in the Anal category are "about" anal sex, with a special emphasis on it.

"Vanilla" anal sex has culturally gone from being a somewhat taboo act to a practice that almost half of all adults in America have engaged in at least once. The people reading in Anal want stories to really focus on it now, so content involving pegging and analingus regularly shows up there, when those topics largely would have gone in Fetish back when the site opened.

Another example, and arguably one even more useful for this discussion, is Interracial. The early Interracial category featured a number of "big black cock" stories, just as the current one does. However, one could also find numerous stories that were, essentially, either Erotic Couplings or Romance stories about two people of different ethnicities. That simple difference was enough for people looking to scratch their particular itch.

Those latter ones don't show up in Interracial very much anymore, and they tend to be poorly rated when they do. They just go to Romance or Erotic Couplings now. Instead, the majority of the stories are about "black-owned" white women, with a (usually willingly) cuckolded white husband as the POV character, or, alternately, "big white cock" stories with Asian women and often their husbands begging to be dominated by a white man.

And that's where we come back around to Loving Wives.

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Kinks are transgressive. That's what makes them kinks; if everyone liked them, they wouldn't be kinks. They tickle the part of our brain that says, "this is extra naughty, and you shouldn't like it, but you do." Anal sex has stopped being seen as really transgressive by almost anyone under about 50 years old that's likely to be on Literotica; they might not like it, but it's just a thing.

Back when the site was founded, anal sex culturally occupied roughly the same spot that oral sex did for the generation before it: your girlfriend or boyfriend might balk at doing it, but they wouldn't think you were an awful pervert just for asking. These days, oral sex is pretty much mandatory, and anal is a thing that's not particularly transgressive. Now, pegging and analingus occupy that same liminal space between transgressive and accepted that "regular" anal sex did in the late 90s and early 2000s.

In Interracial, the transition to mostly cuckolding stories has largely been embraced, but that's partially because the BBC type of story--the one where a sexually dominant black man comes in and "claims" a white wife or girlfriend--was always a part of that category's DNA. And because people wanting to read "sweet" interracial stories can basically go anywhere reading materials exist--since interracial romances are thankfully no longer taboo to any but the most assbackwards of people--it leaves a void to be filled in the Interracial category.

Loving Wives never had that kind of transition. Instead, it just became more crowded and, eventually, contentious. In the early days of the site, softer swinging and sharing stories, those with enthusiastic participation by both husband and wife, were the norm. "Cheating" stories--stories where the wife was unfaithful without the husband's approval--existed, but they stayed in the minority, and they often transitioned into a swapping or sharing structure, to make things "fair" between the couple. "Harmless" infidelity, the kind where everyone was eventually on board, was the order of the day.

One of the most compelling things, to me, about Loving Wives is how much it exists as a conversation with itself. Most of the "kink" sections of the site simply became "more" of what they were before. "Oh, anal sex isn't cutting it? How about pegging?" "BBC not doing it for you? How about a Black New World Order story, where a conspiracy exists to wipe out white men?" And, no, I'm not making that last one up. Go do a search for the "bnwo" tag."

In Loving Wives, however, the answer to, "Oh, so willingly sharing your wife isn't doing it for you anymore? How about being forced to share her?" was, at least in part, "No."

I want to be clear that I'm talking in terms of trends here, not individual stories. Yes, there are hard cuckolding stories early on the site, but they don't start showing up in force until later. Yes, there have always been revenge and reconciliation stories, but they were in the minority. I'm sure that, for each of the subgenres I'm about to discuss, people can present counterexamples that predate them, but they didn't move the needle at the time in terms of the larger context.

One could watch the shifts in the conversation occur through the words that started to crop up in stories and then, later, in tags. Cheating stories became more common in the early 2000s, ones where the husband either didn't find out or couldn't, wouldn't, or didn't retaliate in any way, but also didn't see any satisfaction in either participating or watching. That eventually led to an increase in pure cuckolding stories, which had previously mostly existed in the Fetish category.

The word "cuck," used as a term of humiliation in a story, first showed up in December 2002, then eight times in 2003, fourteen times in 2006, and thirty-seven in 2010. As of this writing, the word appears in over 200 stories in 2023 alone.

With that rise, other users pushed back. In some cases, people wanted to read and write the softer swinging stories. However, the category also saw a rise in stories where the husband fights back against the wife's infidelity, sometimes through simple through divorce and sometimes something more extreme. The word "revenge" shows up in stories all the way at the beginning of the search index, but almost entirely in the context of "wife gets revenge on husband for his cheating by cheating with his best friend" types of stories.

Tags at the beginning of the stories are not great; before about 2005, they were weird mishmashes of words plucked from the stories by some sort of algorithm. Even now, they're often either poorly applied or not applied at all. However, tags are often more accurate than simply searching for a common word inside a story. A one-to-one statistical comparison of word to tag usage would be a mistake, but for assessing trends, tags can be more useful. Therefore, I'll be searching the tags for the word "revenge," which is more often associated with a husband's revenge on his wayward wife.

The tag "revenge," used in the context described above, first showed up in 2003, but only once. However, in 2005--notably the year after the harder cuckolding stories began to appear in the category--it showed up in tags on dozens of stories where a husband gets revenge on his wife for her cheating. These still aren't the majority of the stories told in Loving Wives; that shift never actually occurs, even though they seem to cause the most handwringing amongst certain types. But it becomes a major archetype at that point.

Things accelerated from there. All the story types mentioned before still showed up, the swinging, swapping, sharing, and cheating stories, as well as the relative newcomer of revenge stories. Dedicated "reconciliation" stories began to show up, too. They shared a similar structure with the revenge ones--wife cheats, husband discovers, there's a confrontation, stuff happens--but they end in the husband and wife either staying together or getting back together. Reconciliation stories never became as popular as revenge ones, but the tag started appearing in 2005 and maintains a modest presence to this day.

Then BTB showed up.

BTB or "Burn the Bitch/Bastard" is a form of story where a simple divorce isn't enough for the aggrieved husband. Instead, the husband wants to cause harm to the wife and the affair partner. Physical violence towards the wife is rare, but the affair partner getting the crap kicked out of them--at the very least--is generally expected in these stories.

Instead of violence, the wife is usually humiliated, left destitute, loses the respect of the kids, and so on. She often begs to stay with the husband, realizing too late her mistake, but sometimes she's a vicious monster from the beginning to the end. The one constant is that the revenge is way over the top, often to the point of cruelty to impartial observers, and the husband is almost always blameless and lauded by others in the story. There's a reason for this, but I'll get to that later.

"BTB" showed up in the tags once in 2007, but then disappeared until 2013. When it came back, though? It hit the ground running, with about 350 stories bearing that tag altogether. Even though "reconciliation" showed up first, back in 2005, and appears steadily from then on, it still has about 100 fewer entries in the tag search than "BTB." That's an eight year head start, and it still didn't manage to keep its lead.

Why? Probably because of the "cuck" tag and its associated stories.

This is another place where the data gets messy. The "cuck" and "BTB" tags occasionally show up on the same stories, but only perhaps a dozen times, and usually to signify "the main character gets cucked, but then he gets his revenge." However, a "cuck NOT btb" search yields over 450 results, most of them around and after the time that the BTB tag started to pick up steam.

There is a direct correlation between these two types of stories--cuckolding and BTB--their readers, and the prolonged turf war going on in the category to this day. That turf war has led to low ratings in the category, no matter what type of story a person writes. But it's also meant a huge number of views, comments, and followers for the writers that lean into either or both subgenres, or those willing to forge their own path to create something that can appeal to fans of both types of stories in some measure.

In fact, in more recent years, that seems to be the path that a number of writers are trying out. There are only so many clever revenge schemes and so many cock cages to go around, so various writers are trying their hand at other styles. Folks telling these stories have always been around, but now we're even seeing former hardcore BTB and cuckolding writers try their hand at stories that are more nuanced and emotionally evocative.

However, this does lead to a new question: why did the BTB stories and their successors, the "earned reconciliation," "moving on," "post-divorce dude romance," and other types of male-POV relationship drama get a toehold here in the first place? And why did the writers and readers of those stories not simply pick up stakes and move to another category that might be more aligned to that type of story, rather than one explicitly earmarked for "extramarital fun" stories?

Simply put: there are plenty of places to find erotica of the kind described, but for the folks that want the new types of stories Loving Wives offers, there's no other place to go.