The Nude Life

Two of our good nudist friends moved to the US after several years living overseas. Knowing no one in our Dallas/Ft. Worth area, but as active nudists in their former country of residence, they knew they’d be welcome and meet a lot of fun people as soon as they could find and get involved with a local nudist club.

They got in touch with our club very soon after settling in, and started participating immediately. Being easy-going, fun-loving folks as most nudists are, they had no trouble at all meeting and making friends with everyone else in our club. Just a month later, one of them remarked that they knew that after moving to Dallas, they’d have to find a nudist club to join, because it meant “instant friends.”

It is so easy to make good friends from nudists you meet. The converse is not true: it is very difficult to make nudists from existing non-nudist friends. One of our members puts it very well when she says, “It’s easier to make friends out of nudists than nudists out of friends.“

We never had so many friends as we have met from nudism. When I tell folks at work that we had 60 or 70 friends over at our house for a pool party, the blink in disbelief. I doubt any of them has more than a handful of people they would consider friends; even fewer if work-related acquaintances are excluded. Nudism brings people together like no other pastime or lifestyle I know of. That alone makes it a wonderful way of life, because what is life without the love of friends?

Although single male nudists decry the apparent low numbers of single female nudists, we haven’t found that to be the case in our local club. By carefully maintaining some simple standards that make sense for a social club like ours, we have been able to retain and attract a healthy mix of both single males and single females as a complement to the majority of our members who are couples. Currently, for example, our roster includes four single females and six single males, and 75 couples.

What kind of simple standards? Easy: singles (of either gender) are not admitted without the recommendation of an existing member. That simple policy statement allows us to decline the huge number of inquiries we get from single males who find us on the Internet. If not for that policy, we’d have a huge and disproportionate number of single males in our club, which would not be desireable for the majority of our members who are married couples. The single females who do inquire about our club are usually already practicing nudists or know one of our other members, found out about our club through those channels, and can then be recommended for membership by one of them.

We’ve heard first-hand of other local clubs that fell apart because the male-to-female ratio went too far in the male direction because they had either an “admit-all” policy or no well-conceived policy at all on the question of how to maintain a good social mix of membership.

For single males who complain that we are ‘discriminating’ against them, we plead guilty; then we remind them that our club is a voluntary social group that sets policies as it sees fit to keep the club fun and active for our members, and if they aren’t happy about that, then they are free to go out and start their own nudist club like our founders did 20+ years ago, and they can set up any kind of policies they like.

By the way, we also discriminate against pedophiles, sex offenders, underage minors, members who don’t pay our annual dues, members who don’t follow our club’s etiquette rules, people who don’t want to take their clothes off at our events, and so on. Discrimination, after all, is what makes any club what it is: a group of like-minded folks who wish to associate to share a common interest.

Two friends from our local club are getting married on Saturday (as many people are on that special day), and like most of the rest of them, our friends will be having their marriage ceremony while fully clad.

We call ourselves full-time nudists. But there’s full-time, and then there’s full-time. Right now, we are in the former category.
Meaning that we spend as much time as possible nude at home, with our nudist friends at weekend parties with our local club, asleep (of course!), and on as many vacations as we can manage to nudist resorts, nude cruises, and the like. Yet, we can’t live fully nude as we both still have jobs (for just another year), and have a circle of friends who aren’t nudists and don’t know that we are, and we don’t live in a nudist resort.

All of those things will be changing by this time next year (2008) if things go to plan. We aim to sell the house, quit our jobs, move to a nudist resort in Central Florida, and really become full-time nudists. Along the way, we’ll go ahead and spill the beans to our non-nudist friends — giving them either a lot to think about, a good laugh, or a totally astonished reaction — or maybe all three.

So this year is really our last living in the fully “textile world” of non-nudists, as we aim to join the ranks of the true full-time nudist world next year. We’ll be in good company, since we have already met so many great, friendly, interesting people along the way in our first 13 years or so of practicing social nudism.

We look forward to downsizing in a major way. We’ll get rid of about 95% of the clothes we own, of course, but also about 95% of the things we have spent 30 years accumulating in the way of furniture, gadgets, books, and an endless collection of knick-knacks, junk and the other effluvia of a typical American.

As we ease into it, both of us are excited. We’re ‘practicing’ as much as can be done by wearing nothing as much as possible when at home, and of course taking full advantage of the busy summer pool party schedule with our local club. If retirement as full-time nudists is only as much fun as we are having now being full-time home and social nudists while still working full-time and living in a textile community, we can’t wait to make the big move to “Full-Time Full-Time!“