If your friend just sent you links (as opposed to posting them in your Comments section after you told him not to say anything), there's always the possibility that his actions were more innocent than you think. He may have run across the clips, recognized them as something you might like and sent them to you as a favor rather than as a way to poke at you.
In my own experience, people who are close to us respectively but who don't get the fetish just don't actually
get the fetish and the way we tend to fiercely keep it under wraps; yet they will try and connect with us by doing things like this to show a form of acceptance to what we like, even though they don't quite understand it. For a lot of us, tickling is very sexual--but to a good deal of vanillas, it's as innocent and
non-sexual as washing one's face, so they really don't see the harm in making casual references to it, thinking they're engaging in a form of friendship bonding.
A minor personal example (I think I may have written about this before once) to illustrate my point: The very first friend to whom I'd ever revealed my fetish many years ago didn't get it at all, but in what she believed to be a show of closeness and acceptance, she "adopted" a humpback whale in my name as a gift--and made it a point to let me know that she chose the whale whose name was "Feather" on behalf of what I'd told her. She thought she was doing something really good and couldn't understand my instinctive mortification. I know she meant no harm at all by it--she had no way of knowing the odd complexity of my preferences or how hard we all try to keep it a secret, because to her, tickling was really just no big deal.
I must echo the other sentiments expressed here regarding being "outed". Although you may not run across too many people IRL who share your interest, you also won't find many people who will show up at your door with torches and pitchforks because you like tickling.
😉 Keeping it a secret may be a difficult reflex to fight, but consciously relaxing and just going with it is really not as bad as you might think--and if you happen to be single, think of the new options it opens up to you in finding a partner who shares your interests as well, should any of your friends who know about it run across one you might never have met...?
🙂
Perhaps you can give him the benefit of the doubt this time, and even use the experience as a way to start getting more comfortable with one of the least "kinky" kinks one could possible have.
~ Mistress Aura
lol
