The Wife-Swap Report

Beginnings

A Sunday afternoon in fall. Football weather. Sheila Gordon sitting on her feet on the living room couch, dark green slacks, a gold sweater, brown suede slippers. Paul Gordon in an armchair, a drink on the table beside him, slacks, a sport shirt. The children are downstairs watching television. Periodically one appears with a nose to be wiped or a question to be answered and the conversation is held up until the child is on its way.

SHEILA: About a year after it started, after we first got involved in swinging, I remember going through a real siege of introspection. Not just me individually, it was a mutual thing. We both found ourselves immersed in a sea of questions. Where are we? How did we get here? The usual. We were honestly astonished, I think, that this had happened to us. To people like us.

PAUL: You see, we had always regarded ourselves as basically conservative types. One of the key words in the swingers’ advertisements is “liberal.” You know the drill — “modern, liberal, free-thinking couple, etc.” Of course this has nothing to do with politics. But regardless, we had always thought of ourselves as middle-of-the-road people. We hadn’t had that much sexual experience before marriage, nor had our own marriage been that highly sexed. Not that we fell asleep on the way to bed, nothing like that, but not like the stereotyped picture you might have of typical swingers who have had nothing but sex on their minds since they hit adolescence.

SHEILA: That’s how it always happens in books, isn’t it? Two oversexed kids get married and within a couple of years they’ve tried every form of screwing there is until they just don’t turn each other on any more. Then they decide that something is missing from their lives, so he has an affair with a girl in his office and she plays house with the plumber, and finally they clear the air, talk things over, and invite the next-door neighbors in for a round of musical beds.

PAUL: It does happen that way.

SHEILA: Definitely. No argument, it does. But it didn’t for us. We weren’t all that experienced when we were married. I had had one very brief and completely unsuccessful bit of sleeping with a guy I was pinned to, and Paul had had a few affairs, most of which were just one-shot things, and the two of us did make love in the few months before we got married, but that was about all, and that’s certainly less experience than the average couple brings to marriage nowadays. We had a good relationship from the start, and of course Mark and Lisa came into the picture almost immediately. Mark when we were married just over a year and Lisa fifteen months later. So in the first four years of marriage we were really too busy adjusting to changes to feel confined or frustrated or whatever. Paul kept changing jobs, and each time it meant a complete relocation for us, giving up old friends and making new ones and finding out where to shop and, oh, all the complications that accompany a move from one city to another.

So I certainly didn’t have any affairs. I wasn’t bored with my own husband, for one thing. Nor was I beset by propositions. I gained innumerable pounds with each pregnancy and wasn’t all that good about getting them off afterward, so plumbers and deliverymen were sadly immune to my raw animal magnetism.

PAUL: Once, while Sheila was pregnant with Lisa, I had relations with another woman. You couldn’t call it an affair. I was in Chicago to interview a company that had been sending out job feelers, and I was all alone there and didn’t know a soul, and Sheila and I hadn’t been able to have relations for the past month and wouldn’t for two more months. This last was more an excuse than anything else, really, although I managed to convince myself at the time that a stray piece would have considerable therapeutic value. At any rate, someone had given me this call girl’s phone number. She came to my hotel room. I was really very jittery and nervous, not that anything untoward would happen, but, I don’t know, I felt awkward about the whole thing. At first I couldn’t do anything, but the girl used a massage device to get me over the hump, if you’ll pardon the expression. The whole experience was pretty blah, but later on I found myself thinking back on it and having fantasies about the call girl. Occasionally I would think of her while I was making love to Sheila—

SHEILA: That’s known as Walter Mitty cheating.

PAUL: It’s disgustingly common, too. I think everyone does it at one time or another. Most swingers will tell you that they’ve gone through it before they got in the swing of things. There’s a joke you may know — a man and wife are making love, just going on and on at it, neither of them able to reach orgasm. And finally he stops and looks at her sympathetically and says, “What’s the matter, honey? Can’t you think of anybody either?”

SHEILA: Actually it’s a pretty sad story.

PAUL: Pathetic, really. But that one experience in Chicago, plus a certain amount of fantasizing, was as much cheating as either of us did. Or planned to do, I would say. We had what we both felt was a perfectly satisfactory sexual relationship. Oh, it goes without saying that the initial thrill had worn off. It always does, and it wasn’t surprising to us that it did. You can’t make love to the same person for a period of several years without having the experience lose its excitement. Even for couples who remain devotedly monogamous throughout their lives, I can’t possibly believe that the thrill doesn’t wear off.

SHEILA: We thought it was a matter of getting used to sex. We didn’t realize then that what was missing was variety.

PAUL: Or if we did realize it we didn’t think about it very much.

JWW: Then the picture I have of the two of you after approximately four years of marriage is that of a reasonably contented and well-adjusted couple with no interest in adultery beyond the fantasy level?

PAUL: That’s about it.

JWW: You had no knowledge of the existence of the swinging world?

PAUL: Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

SHEILA: It’s impossible to be wholly unaware of its existence, don’t you think? There have been just too many books and magazine articles on the subject. Even if you never buy those magazines you see the titles of the articles plastered all over the covers every time you pass a newsstand. Just the name, the word “wife-swapping.” It’s enough to let a person know what it’s all about.

PAUL: But that was really the extent of our knowledge. We didn’t know any swingers personally, we hadn’t talked about swinging between ourselves, and to be quite frank, the few articles I did read didn’t make the whole thing sound that attractive to me. This may not be typical, because I’ve met a great many couples who were in a sense introduced to swinging by books and magazines — the husband would read articles on the subject and get all excited by the idea, and things would just sort of build from there. Maybe I picked the wrong articles, but what I read didn’t excite me at all. It was like reading about tribal initiation rites among the islanders of Pungo Pungo — you know, academically interesting, but not the sort of thing you could identify with personally to any appreciable extent. These just weren’t the sort of people we knew, they weren’t people like us, so I couldn’t get interested.

SHEILA: And I really didn’t know enough about it even to go that far in my thinking. For me it was just headlines, and I never gave it much thought.

PAUL: Then we got initiated.

SHEILA: You mean seduced.

PAUL: That sounds like a pretty ridiculous expression, doesn’t it?

SHEILA: It’s what happened.

PAUL: I guess that’s true enough. If you want to get really cloak and daggerish about it, it wasn’t just a seduction. It was a conspiracy. Jeff and Jan Creighton carefully plotted things out so that they could get the two of us into bed. When they eventually told us about it, we thought it was pretty hysterical. We got a lot of laughs out of it. Another time, during one of those agonizing reappraisals a married couple is apt to have from time to time, well, we had a little trouble appreciating the humor of it all. It began to seem pretty cold-blooded...

As he begins to recount the experience with the Creightons, Sheila visibly withdraws from the conversation. She sits back on the couch, lights a cigarette, smokes it in nervous little puffs and puts it out before more than half of it has been consumed. She looks at neither her husband nor the interviewer but lets her gaze flit about the room, now at a picture on the wall, now at the bookshelves, now at the carpet. She worries her lower lip with her teeth, picks at a loose thread on the couch. And yet it is obvious that she is keeping in close touch with the conversation, for she periodically breaks in with a phrase or comment.

PAUL: This was in Kansas City. We didn’t take the Chicago offer but wound up in Kansas City, and instead of taking a house we rented an apartment just outside of the city limits. A duplex, one side of a two-story home. I had the feeling at the time that we might not be staying there too long and I felt it wouldn’t be worthwhile to go into a house if we were going to pick up and move in less than a year’s time. We had as much floor space as we would have had in a home of our own, and as a temporary thing it was quite comfortable and convenient.

The Creightons were our next-door neighbors. Our other-side-of-the-house neighbors, I should say. They had been there for a year when we moved in. Jeff was a product manager with a major company. He was two years older than I, and I was twenty-six at the time, so he would have been twenty-eight. Jan was the same age as Sheila, twenty-three.

The four of us hit it off from the beginning. They were very friendly and of course we didn’t know a soul in town, so we were glad enough to be friends. They had a kid just about the same age as ours and he must have been making about the same salary as I was, and all of this helped; the more you have in common, the easier it is to connect and get acquainted.

SHEILA: It was more than that. Rapport.

PAUL: That goes without saying. No matter how much people have in common, there’s a special chemistry that has to be present or else nothing happens. It was there. I liked Jeff from the beginning. He was a good-looking, athletic guy, dressed well without looking like a male model, spoke nicely, knew how to tell a story or listen to one. Jan was a tall girl with a really fantastic figure. The Playboy gatefold type, very voluptuous, almost overblown. The sort of figure that’s likely to come unglued when a woman’s in her thirties, but she was twenty-three then and everything was right where it was supposed to be. She had a way of looking straight into your eyes when you were talking, as if she was staring right into you and getting past what you were saying to what you were thinking about. I suppose the conventional term is bedroom eyes, but it was actually something beyond that. It wasn’t just a matter of sex. It was intimacy, in the real sense of the word. That was what she projected.

JWW: You were attracted to her. Did you think about having sex with her?

PAUL: In a way.

SHEILA: Oh? Which way did you think about?

PAUL: You know what I mean. I thought about it the way any man will think about a woman he finds attractive. I didn’t make a big fantasy thing about it, and I certainly didn’t have the slightest intention of actually going and doing anything about it. But I thought about it, imagined it, wondered what it would be like. People always do this, you know. It seems to be true that men are more predisposed to do this than women, and I can think of several reasons for this, both biological and cultural. On the cultural side, women have been more carefully conditioned to think that they can only have relations with their husbands. The notion of men cheating is less shocking somehow than of women cheating. And biologically, well, I think it’s an inherent drive that makes men want variety, a basic biological urge to have relations with and impregnate as many women as possible. I have a feeling it’s all tied up with natural selection and evolution, survival of the fittest and all of that...

The point is that I had an urge, and so did Sheila. I don’t think hers was as well defined—

SHEILA: I found Jeff attractive, that’s all. And more sympathetic than most men. Generally a man won’t really talk to another man’s wife as a person. He’ll treat her as part of a couple, not as an individual. Maybe so she won’t think he’s making a pass, or so his own wife won’t be jealous. Or because deep down inside most men simply cannot relate to most women as human beings, which is sad but true, I’m afraid. Jeff Creighton made me very conscious of myself as a woman, and I felt he liked and appreciated me. How much of that feeling was sexual I couldn’t say.

PAUL: It became sexual soon enough. We moved into that duplex in February, and in May we swapped with them. It didn’t take them very long at all.

They started things off by getting as well acquainted with us as they possibly could. It was natural for the four of us to see a lot of each other, but as time went by we were constantly thrown together. The two girls were together for a few hours every afternoon for coffee and conversation, and we got together as couples at least once a weekend and one or more nights during the week. It certainly was convenient — we would drop over there or have them over to our place without the aggravation and expense of finding a baby sitter. And you couldn’t even get a sitter on week nights, so an evening with Jeff and Jan was like free entertainment — we didn’t have to plan it in advance and it didn’t cost us anything.

Sometime in April things began to get a sexual tone to them. I don’t know exactly how it started, but it got there gradually enough.

SHEILA: Jan used to bring sex into the conversations during the afternoons. She would say that she was having her period and that Jeff just couldn’t stand waiting until she was done with it.

PAUL: Women will discuss personal things with each other that two men would never dream of bringing up. It never ceases to amaze me. Men might talk about what they do outside of marriage, but women just talk about what they do inside it.

SHEILA: Once she suggested that we ought to have a mutual agreement — Jeff would sleep with me when she had her period, and she would take care of Paul when I had it. Just a joke, all very casual, but with the obvious purpose of planting the idea in my mind.

JWW: And did the idea take hold?

SHEILA: I suppose it did. Not the idea of that sort of mutual compact, certainly. Although I have heard of quite a few cases of wives setting up something like that when they had to stop having sex because of advanced pregnancy. That’s quite common, believe it or not. People start off that way and later on get into swinging once they find out that they enjoy a little variety. But I would have to say yes, it did force me to think of Jeff as a potential sex partner. When something is brought to your attention that way it’s virtually impossible to avoid thinking about it. And if you try to banish a thought, all you do is force it all the more firmly into your consciousness.

PAUL: Jeff was a little less obvious about things. He would occasionally tell me that Jan really thought a lot of me, that she had said she really liked me and felt comfortable with me, that sort of thing. “I don’t think I’d trust the two of you together”—lines like that. And then when the four of us were together, the subject of sex seemed to get brought into the conversation more and more frequently. It just came up more and more often. Conversations would have double meanings, that sort of thing. This happens with sophisticated couples as they feel increasingly at ease with each other and of course it doesn’t necessarily mean anything in and of itself, but here it was another way of breaking the ice and conditioning us for the big step.

When that came, it was sort of a one-two combination. It started on a Friday night. We were over at their place, their side of the house, and we had had the usual quota of drinks to celebrate the fact that the work week was over. I guess I was on my way back from the john or something and I ran into Jan in the kitchen. She and I had been exchanging these looks all night long. She told me I had a spot on my tie, and I couldn’t find it. She came over to me to show me. I was staring down the front of her dress when she suddenly raised her eyes and caught mine. The next thing I knew we were kissing. I’ll never know which one of us made the first move, but it hardly mattered. She seemed to resist at first, if only for a second, and then her mouth opened and she was breathing hard and moving her body against me. It was unbelievably exciting. I knew that Sheila or Jeff could walk in at any moment and catch us, but even so I couldn’t stop kissing her. The thought that we could be caught almost added to the excitement. Then finally she pushed me away and the two of us stood staring at each other. I felt excited and guilty and foolish and drunk, everything all at once. I didn’t know what to say, and so I didn’t say anything and we drifted back to the other room.

Later that evening she would catch my eye now and then and give me a secret smile. It was... well, I suppose disconcerting was the only word for it. I didn’t know how to feel, how to react. I drank more than usual that night and passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

All the next day I couldn’t think about anything else. I felt guilty, not because I had particularly done anything but because I knew this would always be there between us, this attraction, whether I ever got around to doing anything about it or not. And I really wanted to make love to Jan. I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. That Saturday I was doing the usual weekend things, playing with the kids and working around the house and looking at television a little, and throughout it all I would get these vivid images of making love to Jan and I kept having erections like a teen-ager. It was really crazy.

Then they came over that night. I made everybody’s drinks a little stronger than usual, mainly because I felt the need of getting a little tight and I didn’t want to be the only one. I was really torn up, in the sense that I was afraid something was going to happen and I both wanted it to and didn’t want it to. As the evening wore on, Jan and I were more and more conscious of each other. The attraction was so strong you could feel it in the air, like static electricity.

SHEILA: The two of you were pretty obvious about it.

PAUL: I didn’t know whether we were or not. I couldn’t tell.

JWW: How did you feel then, Sheila?

SHEILA: I don’t know. A little jealous, but not entirely that, really. The calm before the storm is the cliché that comes to mind. It was like that. You know the feeling the air has on a hot day just before it pours? It was like that on an emotional level. The air was charged with something but I don’t think I knew consciously what it was. And of course it’s impossible now to know how much of this is being filled in by hindsight and how much I recognized at the time.

PAUL: I was particularly uncertain as to how I felt about Jeff. That’s where the real guilt was — not that I would be cheating on Sheila but that I would be betraying my best friend. I was making drinks when he came in, and I said something properly inane, and he said, I forget the exact words, but something to the effect that if I enjoyed kissing his wife I would probably want more than a sample.

I was just stunned. Literally that, because I didn’t know how to react. He said what an angry man would say in his place, and yet he didn’t seem angry. I started to apologize or explain it away as the result of liquor, but he didn’t let me get started. He put a hand on my arm and gave me a smile. “Save it,” he said. “Jan and I are too broad-minded to be jealous. The two of you like each other. She’d like to go to bed with you. You’d like to go to bed with her. That’s fine with me.” I just stood there with my mouth open while he moved past me and went on back to the living room.

I took my time fixing the drinks, trying to digest what Jeff had said. All I could think was that he was giving me carte blanche to make love to his wife, and it was as though once he had given his permission no other considerations could possibly stand in the way. The fact that my own wife might object, or that it might put a crimp in our marriage, somehow didn’t enter into things. I could only think that Jan and I wanted to make love and that nothing stood in our way.

When I returned to the living room there was slow music playing on the hi-fi and Jan and Jeff were dancing together. Sheila was sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette. I put my drink down and held out my arms for her and we danced. I felt very warm toward her, very warm toward everyone. I knew something extraordinary was going to happen but I couldn’t think too clearly about just what it would be. I was very happy and exuberant, I remember.

As the record ended, Jeff and Jan moved alongside us. Jan said, “Why don’t we try changing partners?”

The phrase rang in my head, over and over. Why don’t we try changing partners? It was more than double-entendre. It was just a direct sexual suggestion, and at the moment I was all for it. At any rate, I began dancing with her and Jeff danced with Sheila.

Jan danced with her whole body. We pressed together at once, and I felt the pressure of her large breasts and the heat of her loins, and I got excited immediately. She began breathing heavily. I was afraid she would notice that I had an erection, and at the same time I wanted to press it against her, to let her know how I was responding to her. Then she touched it with her hand and whispered, “Oh, how nice!” and started rubbing herself against me. I danced her off into a corner and kissed her, and this time her mouth opened immediately and we kissed deeply, furiously.

SHEILA: I could see what they were doing. Not all the details, but I could certainly see that they were involved in more than a friendly session of social dancing. I’ve always wondered how I would have reacted if I had been cold sober. The drinks did make a difference. They gave everything an unreal feeling. It’s hard to explain just how I felt about it. I was angry, and hurt, and oddly excited, and — well, confused, as much as anything else. I was sort of waiting for Jeff to cue me as to how I should be reacting. His wife was making out with my husband, and if he had gotten furious I would have done the same. I waited for him to lead so that I could follow.

PAUL: When the record ended Jan said she had to check the children. “I’m afraid to go there alone,” she said. “All the way next door. You don’t mind if I borrow your husband, do you, Sheila?” We didn’t wait for an answer. I went along with her and we went out the door and let it close after us. The fresh air sobered me for an instant, and I almost turned and went back inside, but then she was in my arms and I was kissing her again. She was very passionate.

We went into their half of the house. There wasn’t even any pretense of checking the children. She led me upstairs to their bedroom and we kissed again. Of course I knew we were going to make love. I couldn’t really believe it, but I knew it.

We sort of tumbled onto their bed, clothes and all. There was really no time for foreplay. The whole thing was far too urgent. We just got enough clothes off to get at each other, and then I was on her and inside of her and I thought, God, it’s actually happening after all, then I couldn’t even think any more...

SHEILA: When they walked out of the house together I couldn’t believe it. I honestly couldn’t believe it. I stood staring after them, and then I turned and stared at Jeff. It’s as if I was incapable of reacting on my own.

He said, “Do you know where they’re going, Sheila?”

I shook my head.

“They’re going to bed,” he said.

I didn’t say anything!

“Jan and Paul,” he said. “They’re going to make love. And now I’m going to make love to you.”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “Because you’re beautiful and I want to fuck you.”

I had absolutely no will of my own. None. If he had said he was going to kill me I suppose I would have gone along with that, too. We stayed there in the living room with the same idiot record playing over and over. He took off all my clothes, then undressed himself. I remember looking at his penis and thinking that it was the first penis other than my husband’s and my son’s that I had seen in years. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

We made love on the couch. It must have been incredibly boring for him at first, unless he had a thing for necrophilia. I guess I did a fairly good impersonation of a corpse. I was just numb. I lay there on my back while he touched me and kissed me.

He was very patient. He went down on me and just did that very gently for what seemed like ages, and my mind relaxed and got loose, until finally my stupid body put two and two together and realized that something exciting was going on. I got excited, very excited, and he stayed with me and I had an orgasm that way.

Then we had intercourse, and I had another orgasm, and so did he.

PAUL: When Jan and I finished, I think I must have blacked out. Not for very long, but for a few minutes, anyway. When I came out of it I didn’t know where I was for a moment. Then I saw her face and felt her body under mine and got my bearings.

I was suddenly very sober and very much shocked about the whole thing. I thought back to what Jeff had said in the kitchen, and it seemed now that he hadn’t really given us permission to do this at all, but that I had read things into his words. And of course I was completely torn up at the thought of what Sheila was going to say.

Jan told me to relax. “Jeff knows we’re together,” she said. “And he doesn’t mind.”

I asked her if she was sure of this. She said she was, and that as far as she and Jeff were concerned, this sort of thing had no adverse effect on their marriage. She said in fact that it kept their marriage strong, because they didn’t get bored with each other and weren’t tempted to do any secret cheating. She said Jeff knew she loved him and that what she did in bed with me or anyone else wouldn’t affect the love she and Jeff had for each other.

She asked if I would mind if another man made love to Sheila.

I said I didn’t know. She asked if I would mind if Jeff made love to Sheila. “We had our fun,” she said, “and they’re having theirs.” All at once I had this strong mental picture of Jeff and Sheila in our bed, making love. A really vivid photographic image of this. And the feeling that rushed through me was one of relief. That was exactly what I felt. I had nothing to feel guilty about now, because Sheila and Jeff were doing what Jan and I had done, and the two acts canceled one another out.

“You don’t have to worry about a thing,” she said. “I love Jeff and you love Sheila. You won’t ruin your marriage, Paul. Your marriage will be stronger than ever before. But think of all the fun we’ll have, Paul. We can do this once a week. All open and aboveboard, and we won’t have to worry about anyone finding out. No sneaking around, no hiding.”

I was too rattled to say anything. I thought we would straighten our clothing and go back to join the others. I didn’t know what we would say or do, but I figured I could play it by ear. But Jan wasn’t through. She wanted another turn — and I can’t really blame her, the first didn’t last too long. She stood up and took off her clothes. I stared at her. She had a really exceptional figure.

There were any number of things I wanted to ask her, but it was no time to talk. I got out of my clothes, and while I made love to her I imagined Jeff with Sheila, and the whole experience was exciting in ways I couldn’t even begin to understand...

We did finally get dressed and go back to the party. I would have barged right on in, but Jan stopped me and knocked on the door, and I guess that gave them time to get their clothes on. Jeff opened the door. “I hope you kids had as much fun as we did,” he said, grinning.

Until he said that I don’t think I completely believed that he and Sheila had really done it. Hearing him say it gave me a very funny feeling.

Then he said that he was sure we would have a lot of questions, that he knew there must be a lot we would all have to talk about, but that it would keep until morning and that Sheila and I would probably want to be alone for the time being. He told us everything was going to be great and not to worry about a thing, and then he and Jan went out the door and left us alone with each other.

SHEILA: Neither of us knew what to say.

PAUL: That’s an understatement We got through it by saying as little as possible. We just went upstairs and got undressed and into bed.

SHEILA: I could smell her on him. Her perfume. More than that — her smell. I asked him if she was better than me. “Just different,” he said, and I knew exactly what he meant. Because Jeff was different from him, and it was different being with Jeff than with Paul. Not better or worse. Different.

I said, “But it was more exciting, wasn’t it?” He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I knew it was more exciting for him because it had been more exciting for me. Four years of making love to each other and to no one else — it isn’t a question of getting stale, of the romance going out of a marriage. It’s just that you can’t possibly have that first-time thrill when you’re doing it with someone for the five-hundredth time. So I knew.

We didn’t talk, but we were close together. We held each other, and he told me he loved me, and I guess I cried a little. And then — and this may seem strange — then we made love.

PAUL: That happens more often than you might think.

SHEILA: It almost always happens with people who go into swapping with their eyes open, as a matter of fact. In our situation I think it was a little unusual.

PAUL: It probably was.

SHEILA: It was also very satisfying. I don’t remember what I thought at the time. I probably thought about myself with Jeff and about Paul with Jan, but I don’t honestly remember. But it was very exciting and satisfying.

JWW: And in the morning?

PAUL: By a sort of unvoiced agreement, neither of us mentioned it in the morning. This was pretty weird, actually. I kept finding myself wondering if it really happened or if maybe I dreamed the whole thing.

SHEILA: I had the feeling that you might have blacked it all out. We were all drinking fairly heavily, and I thought maybe I remembered it all and you didn’t.

PAUL: That’s a funny notion.

SHEILA: Hysterical.

PAUL: Well, to get back to the subject, we didn’t really discuss it at all until the Creightons came over. They turned up on our doorstep in the middle of the afternoon. We sent the kids outside to play and Sheila put up a pot of coffee, and they filled us in on the whole situation. For the most part they just talked and we listened, throwing in an occasional question here and there. Jeff carried the conversation, with Jan functioning as a sort of echo.

SHEILA: We were only the second couple they had done this with. Now this is funny — at the time I was really surprised to learn that they had ever done this before, which shows how naive I was. But later I was more surprised to think that they had carried out this elaborate seduction with so little experience as swingers. In any case, we were the second couple on their list. The first couple had been the previous occupants of our apartment, believe it or not. There had been no seduction then. The other couple had been reading about wife-swapping, and the four of them got to talking about it and studying books on it, and they decided to give it a try. All open and aboveboard, and pleasing for all concerned, except that the other couple had moved to the West Coast after a few months of fun and games.

What they did, mainly, was explain the effect that swinging with this other couple had had on their marriage. They went to great lengths to sell us on the idea that swapping did more to hold a marriage together than to break it up. They emphasized that swinging with the other couple had livened up their own sexual relationship, that it had kept them from getting urges for affairs with outsiders — all the standard rationalizations that swingers have. Maybe “rationalizations” is a bad term, because most of these arguments are true enough, and quite valid. The only thing is that they don’t really explain why people stay with swinging.

JWW: Which is?

SHEILA: Because it is exciting...

PAUL: They didn’t just talk to us. They also left us a satchel full of literature. They were more anxious to pass out pamphlets than the religious nuts who go around ringing doorbells, and the books and magazines they gave us were a hell of a lot more interesting. There were the usual books on swapping, plus a variety of swap-club magazines and newsletters.

JWW: Then the Creightons had been active in swap clubs?

PAUL: No, they hadn’t. They had sent for the literature just as a matter of interest, and after their friends moved out they had planned to try to find new friends through correspondence, but they had never quite gotten around to taking the plunge. It’s a big step, you know, actually writing letters and arranging a meeting with total strangers. I’m sure they would have gone through with it sooner or later, but then we moved in next door to them, and they were strongly attracted to us, and so they decided to see if they couldn’t get something started with us before they got involved in correspondence.

SHEILA: Remember, this was back in the days when the postal inspectors did a lot of entrapment of swingers. That’s stopped now, but at the time it was a very good reason for staying away from the correspondence clubs.

JWW: How did you react to all of this?

PAUL: It was almost too much to absorb. At first it really wasn’t a question of reacting. We were too busy trying to digest all this information, to figure out what sort of people our friends were and what sort of world this society of swingers was. We talked to them all afternoon, had dinner, put the kids to bed, then had them come over and talk to us some more. And then we stayed up half the night reading the books and magazines and discussing what we read, and, inevitably, getting excited from the reading and conversation and making love.

JWW: Just the two of you, that is.

PAUL: Yes.

SHEILA: That whole night and the next few evenings as well served as a tremendous emotional catharsis for us. I think over the year or two prior to that time we had begun shutting each other out. People tend to do this, you know. Even in a good marriage there’s a tendency to build walls between the partners, to lead semiprivate lives. This experience, jarring as it was, got us to open up to one another and talk about a lot of things we had barely thought about before. Our whole ideas, not only concerning sex, but about, oh, lots of things — marriage, love, life.

I was able for the first time to talk about the affair I had had before I began going with Paul. There were aspects to that affair, I won’t go into them now, but they needed talking about and I had kept it all locked inside. And Paul told me about the girl in Chicago, which was something he really had to get out in the open but which he could not possibly have talked about before this. Nor could I have listened, as far as that goes.

PAUL: We did clear the air. And we decided that, well, that we would do this again.

JWW: That you would continue to exchange partners with the Creightons.

PAUL: Yes.

SHEILA: It would be a regular Friday-night thing, we decided. A weekly swap. I remember I got together with Jan the afternoon after we finally decided, and I told her, and we talked about almost everything. She told me she had felt very close to me from the day we moved in, but that now that we were sharing husbands she felt infinitely closer to me than ever before. I knew exactly what she meant. I felt a tremendous amount of tenderness for her, and warmth. She said that we were sisters, closer than sisters.

Thursday night Paul and I practically had an orgy. All we could think about was what we would be doing the following night. Not the simple fact of having sex relations with Jeff and Jan but the whole idea of meeting together and systematically changing partners. I’m sure the forbidden aspect of it was part of the excitement. Forbidden fruit and all that.

Friday night, they came over to our place again after dinner. It was amazing how relaxed all four of us were. A real contrast to the scene a week earlier.

We put on records, danced a little, then turned down the lights and had a regular necking party. I sat on Jeff’s lap on an armchair and Paul and Jan took the couch, and we kissed and petted like teenagers.

Then I took Jeff upstairs.