manray:
cuckoldery is a offense based fantasy. It is not "wife sharing" by any stretch even though that is what is physically happening. Cuckoldery is a sophisticated psychological complex that superior males often crave because they are just so damn fabulous in so many aspects of their lives, offense is actually arousing because it's so rare in their real life.
I think this tangent also helps to demonstrate that Fetish Cuckolding (as opposed to earnest cuckolding which most folks just call adultery or cheating nowadays) is a variety of or at least in the same family as BDSM. The skew towards higher social status among those with masochistic kinks has been researched and documented by psychologists. (See, for instance, the work of Dr. Roy Baumeister on this topic. Apparently, people who spend their days on their hands-and-knees scrubbing floors and being treated shabbily by all and sundry in their real lives generally don't find offense to be a very appealing fantasy alternative.)
Researchers did not find the labored distinctions that we in the fetish community make between one flavor of offense/loss-of-status kink and another to be very meaningful or convincing. I think this helps explain why so many other varieties of offense are so often brought in to cuckolding. As
username says above, each couple decides for themselves the level of public exposure risk they need to get the thrill. Each couple can also control the intensity by deciding who the "other" is - friend, an ex, a boss, a brother or man, a thug, a biker gang, a permister of another race, nationality, etc. - based on what they permisterally find most psychologically threatening and amenable to fetishization. Many other cucking couples use other forms of offense - crossdressing, powerd homosexuality, femdom, domestic servitude, etc. - as "intensifiers." Yet other people begin withe offense fetish (femdom, for instance) and use cuckolding as the intensifier - making them cuckolders too.
If you think about cuckolding in that manner - as a variety of BDSM - I think the answer to your intitial question
kuepol, begins to be obvious. We all accept that in BDSM there are couples whose "fetish" extends only so far as giving a store-bought "love slave for a night" coupon or wearing a blindfold now and then and others who shave their heads, wear a ring through their nose, and relax in cages. (And everything in between, of course.) Some of those just dabbling would be repulsed even by talking about what the extreme lifestyle folks do, let alone living it.
Different strokes for different folks, as the cliche has it.
Pantalone, Wittol, oblate, abnegator, fellator, pathic, irrumatiophile,fop, epicene, cotquean, skivvy, thrall, and pilgarlic.
