My wife and I have been slipping into this lifestyle for about the past 2 years. We've had one excellent encounter, but it wasn't until we abandoned our initial process. We really didn't like the endless chatting. It became such an inconvenience. We're trying to be diligent and ask the right questions, but so far its either strung out endlessly in chat, or we fairly quickly chat one day and the next meeting is for business. Nothing really ever meets the "spec" we thought we had. Its not a bad thing, its just learning pains, but we do talk about it all the time. How long did it take to find your balance of time for familiarity and time for fun? How long do you chat before moving to the next phase? Why do you prefer more or less time becoming familiar? For those of you who prefer to spend more time talking and feeling others out, do you tend to have longer-term bulls? Lastly, if we just wanna have hit-n- run encounters how do go about vetting the person in shorter time? I guess we've always felt like we should get familiar with the others, but that didn't seem to work for us. Whereas, we've never been the one- night stand kinda couple either, but so far that's worked. What's your take?