Here at Literotica there is probably no category more heterogeneous, and occasionally controversial, than Loving Wives. Unsurprisingly, it is also one of the most popular. It doesn't take a whole lot of research to discover that for a great many men there is nothing hotter than a married hottie.

The vast majority of Loving Wives stories have the common theme of wives in sexual situations involving men other than their husbands. That, as a quick glance at titles will tell you, is where the similarities end.

Loving Wives story themes range from one extreme to the other, from willing cuckoldry to bitter revenge, making every stop on the way in between. Both the stories themselves and the comment responses to them make a fascinating study.

In nearly all the Loving Wives stories I've seen which are written in the first person and the narrator is male, he is a husband and not the "other" man or men. It's probably safe to say that male readers tend to make the same choice of the character through which to make a vicarious connection to a story. That is probably why a lot of the comments on Loving Wives stories get very, very nasty when things don't turn out for the husband the way some readers would like them to. Nowhere is this more apparent than the charges that the character is a "wimp" if his reaction to his wife's frolics with other men falls anywhere short of shoving a shotgun loaded with cayenne pepper up the asses of all concerned and firing.

A related theme in comments is condemning the story for what is deemed immoral behavior on the part of the wife without a sufficiently satisfying comeuppance. It's a damn good thing that Mario Puzo didn't let that kind of thinking deter him from creating a suitably ruthless Don Vito Corleone who despite his sins dies naturally and peacefully.

So, what kind of husband has a wife who fucks other men?

The answer to that hinges on one magic word: motivation. Why does she fuck other men? Let's look a the "bad" cases.

The husband might be a cuckold with an emotional need to be shamed and humiliated, or maybe he has simply had the misfortune to marry someone who gets off on shaming and humiliating him and he can't bring himself to extricate himself from his emotional prison. Or maybe she just doesn't give a damn. Such characters and stories about them are as worthy as any others as the stuff of fiction; however I don't find such characters very interesting and haven't had the inclination to create them.

At the other extreme is the cheated-on and vengeful husband.

Haven't most of us fellas whose adolescent years have faded well into the rear-view mirror of time gotten skinned up at least once or twice, "done wrong" by a woman leaving us ready to employ just about anything, including tactical nuclear weapons, in an effort to bring enlightenment to her and the individual responsible? Since such methods are generally not recommended, one alternative is to read, or even write, a story depicting a deliciously contrived emotional peine forte et dure, and there are plenty of those to be found on Literotica.

One story I read here recently led a wife through a series of temptations and failings culminating in her husband constructing a psychological dungeon in which she would spend the rest of her life enduring whatever torment he might feel like inflicting upon her. Overall the story deserves credit for good writing, but before long all I could see in the words was anger, by which I mean the author's anger, not the character's. I can only speculate, of course, but I got the strong impression that for this writer the story was created for catharsis, perhaps for something painful in his real life, and if so, I hope it helped discharge the pain and anger.

Personally, I find this theme more depressing than the crime. In real life there's probably nothing that promises more and delivers less than the lust for revenge. The nice thing about fiction is that it can defy real life and deliver the satisfaction a protagonist seeks, that is, if the reader both wants it and is willing to believe it. That may work for some, and if you are one of them, you are welcome to it; it doesn't work for me, even if the wife's misbehavior is callous or indifferent to her husband; that is all the more so if it isn't.

I haven't yet been inclined to create any of those characters either. If I do, they will most definitely not be sympathetic characters.

In between these two extremes might fall a simple romance about a straying wife who returns to the straight and narrow and is reconciled with her husband. (I suppose a story where it's the husband who goes wrong instead might fit in the Loving Wives category as well.)

One type of man I find most loathsome is the predator who targets a married woman for seduction, filling her head with glitter and grand expectations (with other kinds of filling as well) before casting her aside to move on to the next conquest, leaving behind the emotional wreckage of a woman who may have been completely dedicated to her husband and their marriage until a slick Lothario sold her a pack of lies, leaving behind the jarring realization that she is now an adultress.

I wrote a story about someone like that, and it got a lot of bad commentary, mostly because it sucked. It was hastily written and largely implausible, and it's gone now. However, a few of the criticisms gave me the impression that the commenters identified with the predator and didn't like the way he came out on the losing end of the story. Well, if I decide to write another story that includes such a character, a better-written story this time, the predator, and any would-be predators reading it, won't like that outcome either.

So far, the wives' motivations have ranged from basic human vulnerability to temptation to out-and-out heartless depravity. The common trait of these motivations is that they are selfish: she chose her actions for the sake of her gratification, and hers alone. It is that one-sided motivation that makes infidelity as painful as it is.

Does it always have to be that way? What if the wife's motivation is not selfish and one-sided?

Many, if not most, Loving Wives stories involve husbands who get a real kick (the nice kind) from their wives' sexual adventures, often not at first, but later, after they warm up to the idea as the story progresses. Expressed or implied, the wife's motivation is really their motivation, for something that they both find exciting, regardless of who actually participates physically.

That seems to be something a lot of comment trolls in Loving Wives can't seem to get their heads around: that a wife motivated by the mutual, loving trust she shares with her husband can bring him as much pleasure as she brings to herself, maybe even more, when she kicks up her sexual heels in some way or another that they both like. A reader who can't imagine a man with a wife like that not being a wimp suffers from a limited ability to imagine. I don't mean necessarily imagining himself being such a husband (or herself being the wife of one, as the case may be), just accepting that it's perfectly healthy for others to be that way if they want to.

Perhaps, in general, some people get riled when they've invested the time to work their way through a story (particularly a long one), only to find it ends up in a way that disappoints or disturbs them. I suppose it would be nice to find a place where we could all be guaranteed only work that fits our own personal notions of what is satisfying art, but it should take only a moment's thought to realize no such place can exist, certainly not an eclectic library like Literotica.

There's a good reason why the expression whatever floats your boat is so often applied to sex. Every one of us has a unique boat; what floats it is as individual as ourselves. Thank God we aren't all born with the same boat.