Shy Girl! What a doll you are for posting the post with the very best subject heading I've ever seen on this forum!
Tickling and Love.
Who can shake a stick at that phrase? Caught my attention immediately.
May I regale you with a few happy stories and one cautionary tale? I've got some experience. I'm 31, and that's a lot in dog years.
Back in the '70's I was 5 years old. It's true. My next door neighbor was also 5 years old, and her name is Karen. We played together every day, and my favorite game was Doctor. I kid you not, I tell no lie, I utter not a fabrication -- as painfully cliched as it is, I played Doctor. With Karen. One of us would lie on the couch, and the other would come into the room as a doctor and inspect the patient. The thing about our version is that the doctor would perform the cliched inspection, and THEN say "Now I'm going to send in Dr. Tickle." Then whoever was doctor would leave the room for a second and come back in as Dr. Tickle.
And you know what Dr. Tickle would do.
Did this lead to love? The puppiest of puppy love. Karen, when we were each 5 years old (not too much in dog years), became the first girl I ever kissed, and I subsequently developed the biggest crush on her that lasted throughout all of elementary school.
Okay, a little too pre-teen for you? Let's move on.
At 15, I was assistant director for our school play in a New England high school drama competition. It was the last round, and the finalists were all performing in a large theater in Boston. There were pull-enty of boys and girls there that I didn't know. One particular girl met my gaze way across the auditorium as the lights went down before one of the shows. Five minutes into the show, she was walking up the aisle and taking the seat behind me. "My friend keeps embarrassing me, I'm just gonna sit here!" she muttered to no one so that I could hear, as she sat down.
Oh, I remember this as though it were just last week.
Mere minutes after she sat behind me, her teenaged, nyloned foot appeared on my armrest. As though I had just stepped into a dream. I don't remember ANYTHING about the play that was running onstage. I spent that entire 40 minutes lightly tickling this girl's foot. At least, I started light. She would wiggle it around slowly, and I'd persistently tickle, then she'd start flexing and balling her toes, and I'd persistently tickle, then her whole leg would start vibrating with laughter and I'd hear it in her breath behind me. Then I'd take a break and massage a bit. She played with the back of my hair at those times. But then I'd start tickling again, always beginning with fingertips lightly pressing the nylon against her arch. And she never pulled her foot away.
When the lights came back up, we went out and got lunch together. Before we were served the food, we had appetizers of each other. We made out in the public of the Boston sandwich shop as though there were no one else in the world but us. I've felt such intoxicating animal attraction like that only a few times in my dog-yeared life. Back in that darkened auditorium, the combination of my tickle-power over her and the way she'd stroke my hair when I'd let her rest created such chemistry and magnetism that, if we hadn't been so immature and unripe, love COULD have been sparked. She and I dated for several months. But, again, I was 15.
I know this is getting to sound like a Sinatra song, but stay with me. This topic merits a long post. Chrissakes, is there anything more important to any of us here than the combination of love and tickling?! I think I'll speak for all of us and say 'No!'
At 18, I was over a new friend's house watching a movie. I didn't know him that well yet, and his own group of friends not at all. One of them was a girl named Heidi. There were a crowd of us watching the movie. I had a couch position. Heidi came in late and took a floor position. Uh oh, the basement floor was cold, so she sat on a pillow and placed her bare feet underneath the sitting cushion on the couch. The sitting cushion on which I was lying.
As with the story above, I can't remember what the hell movie we were watching that day because I focused on warming, massaging, and, um, lemme think, what was that other thing I did. . .um. . . OH Yeah, tickling Heidi's feet through the entire movie. And again, the tickling precursor stirred up great attraction between us. When the movie was over, we looked into each other's eyes for the first time. And we dated passionately for the entire summer. I love yous were exchanged. And felt.
I've got happy tickling stories with every girl I've dated. I want to mention a couple more, but I'll instead move on to the important one, the cautionary tale. I need to share this story with all of you because the majority of us are alike, especially the single ones, in our blinding passion for tickling. We don't do it so often, so we tease outselves with it incessantly on the web, getting all worked up so that we then want it so badly that priorities and perspective fall away. "Just give me someone to tickle!"
Some of you may have read this in another post I wrote a few weeks ago. Sorry to repeat, but if someone else learns from me, it's worth it. What Q says so succintly earlier in this thread, I'm going to say more verbosely right here.
I was there. At 29 years old, with my prime directive being "to tickle," and nothing but "to tickle," I occaisioned the dominion here in LA. My 5th or so session there was with a fairly new submissive. I bound her to the bed, face up, wrists and ankles cuffed to the corners. I stood at the head of the bed between her wrists, and I looked down into her eyes. She looked up at mine.
Beginning lightly, and getting more and more heavy and wild, our tickling session was out of this world. Entirely intoxicating for each of us. I saw her a total of three times, each session better than the last as I grew to know her body. After the second session, she asked me not to tip her, because she had enjoyed it so much. After the third session, she told me she wanted to break house rules and see me outside of the dominion.
The fourth time I tickled her, it was in her car outside of a cafe. The fifth time was in my bedroom. Soon we were living together.
Success, Shy Girl! Love from Tickling! Tickling with Love! Sound the horns! Send up the flag! I'm falling in love with a girl I can tickle all I want!
But no, Shy Girl. Alas and alak. I was a fool. My ticklelust was so strong that I was WAY off-balance, and I had found a girl who was as off-balance as I. We stayed together for a year. For a long while things were golden -- she'd massage my hands every morning, I'd massage her feet every night. She stopped doing tickle sessions at the dominion, saving them just for me at home. She and I hung out with the other dominion girls, discovering who fakes their laughing and who's really ticklish. I gradually realized NO worker at the dominion had a healthy relationship with a lover except, apparently, my honey. THEN I learned my honey herself fakes and embellishes her laugh. And then, near the end, my honey started coming home from work with bloody scabs and the largest, most horrible and blackest of black-and-blue marks on her body. "I never liked heavy sessions before, but I realize now that I love them," she'd tell me. I just wanted to tickle her, but she suddenly and abruptly wanted to be with guys who would beat her up. I had to end the relationship, and I did so through streams of my own tears, which stood out in contrast to her dry eyes. "I never loved you. I was just acting like your fantasy girl." It shouldn't have surprised me, she acts as men's different fantasies all day long in her profession. I was just the longest-running session of her career.
The point is, had I perspective and balance of mind, I would have seen this long before it kicked me in my tickler butt. I want everyone here in this forum to STAY BALANCED. Enjoy tickling because IT IS THE GREATEST FETISH OF ALL THE FETISHES IN THE SPECTRUM! There is none better, none more fun, none less gross, none more happy! Love it, frolic in it. But please don't just tickle as much as possible -- tickle as much as is reasonable. Don't lose yourself for too long, that's all I'm saying. I lost myself in ticklelust and got my heart broken, and my two little boys got their hearts broken. It wasn't the fetish's fault, it was my lack of control.
I mention it because I think there are a few people here who can grasp my meaning.
Shy Girl, TICKLING and LOVE! It's a beautiful topic, and it simply says it all. I hope my slightly dark post here is but one amidst what will be a multi-paged thread bursting with happy happy joy joy stories about TRUE LOVE and tickling!
To finally answer your original question, Shy One, no I don't believe I've ever had a platonic friendship that crossed over into romanceland once I tickled them. Not really. I knew this was the crux of your thread all along, but I wanted to say everything I just said. You struck inspiration into me with your two great words.
Tickling AND Loving,
Your Boomtown