The Nude Life

Tell anyone else that you plan to move to a nudist resort to live clothesfree full-time, and they’d most likely react with disbelief and shock, and you’d have a lot more explaining to do before you’d be able to continue to count them among your friends. Tell the same thing to one of your nudist friends, and they not only understand, they respond with good-natured envy at the wonderful days awaiting you.

Nudists understand, on a very comfortable and familiar level, what’s important and valuable to other nudists, and so sharing dreams, plans and experiences of the nude life with our nudist friends is very easy to do. The same things that they have found wonderful and life-changing about nudism are the things that we all discuss whenever we’re together. Last night’s gathering of many of our nudist friends at a small party hosted by one couple was a perfect example. Someone inquired about the progress we’re making on our retirement plans, which include moving to Florida and living at least the better part of the year at Cypress Cove. Sharing details like that with any non-nudist friends or co-workers is out of the question, of course, so we have to keep things vague when asked the same things by others. But we can speak freely with our nudist friends, since they share a common love for the freedom and friendships that nudism has brought to our lives.

This is probably the same kind of “kindred spirit” camaraderie that all sorts of other self-similar groups offer to their members, whether it’s Alcoholics Anonymous, scrapbookers or model railroad enthusiasts. It is very reassuring to know that we are not “alone,” and that many, many other nice, sensible, friendly, level-headed people share our love of this simple way of life.

Have you had similar conversations about nudism that you can’t discuss with non-nudists? Share your experiences and learn from other nudists from all over the world in The Nude Life Forum!

Our local nudist club has themed parties and events throughout the year, with nearly every weekend offering another opportunity for nude relaxation and fun with lots of great nudist friends. During the cooler winter months when necessity forces us indoors for the season, we often schedule themed parties that have a potential for “costume nudity” where we can add to the fun by “dressing up” to fit the theme of the party. Halloween is the obvious example, but we also have themed parties for Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Christmas, and several others, where quite a few folks go out of their way to put on more (or more often, quite a bit less!) of a costume to fit the theme.

As has been mentioned earlier, nobody knows how to dress up more than nudists. But even at our annual Halloween “Un-Costume” party, which features some of the most inventive and hilarious Halloween costumes you can imagine, several attendees decided not to bother with any costume at all, and simply enjoyed the evening nude. Nude is always in fashion and always acceptable at our club’s parties, and dispensing with a costume no matter what the theme of the party is an excellent — and often-employed — option.

It is such a pleasure to not have to worry about not only what to wear, but that you needn’t wear anything at all to be perfectly in style among your fellow nudists. Non-nudists will never know the sublime comfort that comes from simply disrobing and being among friends, nude and unashamed, enjoying life and friendship without the pretension and complications and artificiality that is part of the textile world.

Nude is always an option among nudists. We found the same thing on all of the many great nude cruises we have enjoyed over the years. We’d spend the evenings at sea enjoying the ship, the casino, the shows in the show lounge, the cocktail lounges and dance clubs, in whatever state of dress or undress suited our mood — with hundreds of other nude cruisers alongside us — and no one paying the slightest mind to what, if anything, anyone was wearing. Naturally, nude was always in style aboard the nude cruises, and we along many of our shipmates took full advantage of that luxury by being nude as much as possible during the cruise.

This weekend offers another themed party in our club, and we are probably going to go “the nude route” this time since we haven’t had the time to gather and organize a proper “costume” for the theme. We expect to have a wonderful time — and that all of our fellow guests will quickly join us by ditching their costumes as the party goes on. Although nude is always an option at the start of the party, we’ve yet to attend one where everyone didn’t wind up nude by the end of the party! That is, after all, the one great advantage of attending a nudist party!

What’s your preference for a nudist party with friends? Nude, costumed or clothed? Discuss and share your experiences with other nudists from around the world in The Nude Life Forum!

Having been a nudist in a large and active nudist club for more than a decade, it starts to get routine: the very first time you meet many of your new friends, they are nude. Attending their first party, they enter through the front door, meet the hosts, get some quick introductions, and then are dispatched to the ‘undressing room’ where they make that huge — but very simple — step of taking off all their clothes — and then they walk out to the pool or hot tub or the kitchen or the family room or wherever the rest of the group is congregating at the moment. And then, their big moment: they make their introductions to the rest of the assembled group, waving and smiling, totally nude and unashamed.

They must cetainly feel a little self-conscious, if they are “new” nudists. But if they are used to the the whole “being naked with a bunch of total strangers” thing, they seem and in fact are a whole lot more at ease. Everyone waves and smile back, and then go back to schmoozing or yakking or whatever they were doing the moment before these two new nude folks showed up. Very shortly thereafter, the noobies will be busy meeting and making friends with their new nudist pals.

If there is a quicker or more certain way to make friends, I am unaware of it. Being nude drops all barriers to meeting and chatting up new acquaintances. No telling how many of our current friends we have first said hello to while standing, floating, soaking or sitting around in the altogether. As we have written before, there’s a good chance we’d barely (excuse the pun) recognize many of them if we saw them dressed on the street — since we have spent much, much more of our time together nude.

The point? Nude doesn’t matter. As nudists, we accept each other immediately through our shared experience as being a part of the nude life. We recognize that being nude reveals the person and cloaks the pretentions and artificiality of the textile world. No doubt that we never would have met or made good friendships with so many of our nudist friends had we not met them through nudism. It’s the equalizer. The experience that brings us all together as humans.

How has nudism changed your perceptions of friends — or helped you meet new friends? Share your experiences in The Nude Life Forum.

We see our nudist friends nearly every weekend, all year long. Our local nudist club has something on the calendar almost every Saturday, and we try to make it to as many of the club parties as we can, so we wind up spending many sunny Saturdays with our friends in the club, relaxing and enjoying life as it was meant to be lived: nude and free in the glorious Texas sunshine.

Since, by the time we greet them as they arrive poolside at each week’s party, they are already nude and heading into the pool or sun to join us, we rarely see many of them dressed. In fact, we have gone for years with some of our most active friends in the club without ever seeing them dressed for more than a few minutes. Contrast that to the hours and hours we spend with them all in the altogether, and it soon becomes downright “weird” in a funny way, to see them dressed.

There’s somewhat of a running joke in our club when we do catch sight of some members coming or going from a party fully dressed, along the lines of, “Who’s that funny-looking guy/gal over there? The face seems familiar, but the body is just all wrong!”

That just shows how easy it is for nudity to become the norm, and how simple it seems for avid nudists to become so totally comfortable with being nude all the time and especially when together with our nudist friends, that being clothed seems odd and out-of-place.

What unexpected shifts-in-perception have you found during your nudist experiences? Share your story or read the comments of others in The Nude Life Forum!

A colleague at work was recounting a cruise they recently completed — a two-week Alaska itinerary as part of a ship repositioning for the winter months. They went on and on about how much better this cruise was than any other they had taken, because for the year prior to the cruise, they had ‘met’ other shipmates via Internet bulletin boards, and so by the time the embarked, they already felt like they had a dozen or more ‘friends’ on board with them.

She regaled us with tales of all the fun they had together with their new-found friends, who had been introduced to each other only online prior to boarding, but who felt like “old chums” since they had been in touch with each other for many months in advance. They had a ball, she told us, enjoying cocktail parties, shore excursions, dinner parties and more together — even a semi-risqué “pajama party” one night.

It was all we could do to appear envious. “Welcome to our world,” we thought. If she only knew…

In fact, she has no idea what we’re used to from our 10 nude cruise vacations. Each one seems better than the one before, because in fact many hundreds of the same friendly, fun-loving people are on the nude cruises year after year, and so we have literally spent weeks and weeks at sea with many of our nude cruising shipmates. Soon after embarking (or even while standing in the terminal house before embarkation), faces from cruises past are recognized and names and warm welcomes are exchanged…hugs aren’t hard to come by, either. We have spent so many wonderful times with so many of those nudist cruisers over the years that it really is like cruising with a shipload of your best friends.

My 10-part blog about our latest nude cruise in February of this year is online here (scroll to the middle of the listing for February, 2007) — and here’s one of our group photos from that cruise, taken at the bow of the ship with a few hundred of our nude cruising friends.

It really is true that once you try a nude cruise, you’ll never go back to textile cruises if you can help it. Literally everything is better about nude cruises. More on this subject in future posts — but for now, we’re glad our work friend got a taste of some of the fun that nudism brings to cruising — without even knowing it — and perhaps, if she’s lucky, someday she’ll know the full story!

Do you have a story about how nude recreation or the nude life has changed your perception of how the “other folks” live? Share it in The Nude Life Forum!