The Wife-Swap Report

Love Thy Neighbor

PAUL: It’s a cliché to say that the average married couple doesn’t know what they’re missing. Cliché or not, it’s very literally true. It was certainly true in our case.

SHEILA: In other words, we thought we were happy. We didn’t realize how miserable our lives were.

PAUL: No, seriously. We did think our lives were full, that we were getting as much out of sex and love and life as we could reasonably expect to. We didn’t start with this basic feeling of sexual discontent that you hear so much about. In other words, we didn’t know what we were missing. That first night with Jan and Jeff opened up a whole new world for us, to add yet another cliché to the pile. There was a potential excitement in sexual relationships that we had not known to be there—

SHEILA: We had never been that technique-minded before, for example. We would vary positions and try different things to a limited degree, but for the most part we had settled into a comfortable groove. There were certain things we both knew that we liked, and we would do that, and there was very little interest in increased experimentation. But when we started swinging we would learn little things from Jeff or Jan and introduce them into our own relationship. And besides that, we were just more concerned with matters of technique, more interested in the whole idea.

PAUL: This is universally true, incidentally. Swingers are just better in bed than civilians.

SHEILA: That’s partly because they get more practice, of course. And because they’re sexier people to begin with. But it’s also because they care more. They don’t confine themselves to the same partner year after year after year. They make love with a lot of different people, and so they have a basis for comparison.

PAUL: And they take pride in technique. You might be surprised to learn how much skill a man or woman can develop simply through practice and application. The average person tends to think that sexual ability is inborn. That a person is or is not passionate, for instance. That the major factors are the size of a man’s penis or the shape of a girl’s body. Those are probably the least important considerations, as a matter of fact. How long a man can sustain intercourse, the extent of a man’s or woman’s muscular control, any number of oral and manual techniques — these have more to do with one’s ability or lack thereof in the hay.

SHEILA: Amen to that...

They are easier, now, with one another and with the interviewer. Before, when they discussed the manner in which the Creightons had seduced them, there was a very noticeable quantity of tension in the air, accompanied by a note of sorrow, perhaps a lament for their vanished innocence. The recollection of their reactions at the time — their confusion, the awkwardness of the situation, their doubts and fears — had introduced those very emotions as a background to our conversation. Now they have gotten past that initiation and reminisce as veteran swingers defending the life and proud of their abilities and strengths.

Over the summer, their relationship with the Creightons gradually developed and deepened. Before the summer’s end, the frequency of their sessions had increased from once to twice a week, with both Tuesday and Friday nights given over to sexual exchanges with the other couple. The social lives of both couples became so thoroughly centered upon the switching of partners that sex literally served as the focal point of all their lives.

PAUL: The change in our relationship was a very gradual thing. You have to remember that we were all of us not far removed from the novice stage in this sort of thing. The Creightons had swung with another couple, true enough, but they had never gotten any further than simply trading partners and going off to separate rooms for an hour or two of fun and games. This of course is the most basic level of swinging, and most couples move on to more involved stuff before very long.

SHEILA: And we knew what other couples did.

PAUL: Yes, that was the wild part. Between the ads in the club publications, some of which got pretty explicit, and the books which purported to tell all about swapping, we knew that what we were doing was regarded by hard-core swingers as pretty tame stuff. We would read about other things, threesomes and foursomes, all balling in the same room, that sort of thing, and I think all four of us really wanted to get into that bag but nobody wanted to be the one to suggest it. Like at a square party, for instance, where maybe all of the people there would really dig swapping for the night, but of course no one has the nerve to suggest it and so it never happens.

So the four of us got into this sort of thing in a gradual way. Looking back on it, it seems almost childish the way we would sort of stick our toes in and then look around carefully to make sure no one was overly shocked. The first testing of the boundaries was conversational. We began talking about things, all four of us together, that wouldn’t have been brought up in conversation earlier. For example, one Friday night we were at our place or theirs, it hardly matters, and we were sitting around having drinks as a sort of prelude to what would follow, and Jeff announced that he was hungry as a bear and that he intended to give Sheila the frenching of her life. She rose to the occasion with some remark about his well-trained tongue—

SHEILA: There are times when I wish you didn’t have a photographic memory for everything I say.

PAUL: Well, you said it, didn’t you? Anyway, that broke a particular conversational harder. We began talking openly about what we intended to do together, or what we had done. It made things more intimate.

SHEILA: That sounds funny, doesn’t it? I mean you would think that when four people are swapping, that’s about as intimate a situation as you can get. But it’s not so. Even in a swapping situation, there are all sorts of progressive degrees of intimacy.

PAUL: It wasn’t long, then, before we all four made love in the same room.

SHEILA: God, do you remember the first time we did that?

PAUL: Naturally.

SHEILA: That was the most exciting night.

PAUL: Again, this was a case of all of us having wanted to do this, but no one getting the ball rolling. Let’s face it — a very large proportion of the excitement in swinging is vicarious. The thought of Sheila getting extreme sexual pleasure with Jeff was as much a part of my enjoyment of the whole thing as what I did with Jan. That’s the one thing that the average civilian finds almost impossible to understand. People tend to think that there’s a sort of quid pro quo involved, that I’m willing to have another man make love to Sheila because I’m getting his wife in return.

SHEILA: Even the expression “swapping” gives that impression. That you make a trade, that you give up one thing to get another. That’s one reason I’m not too crazy about the phrase. I prefer swinging.

PAUL: I’ll say you do.

SHEILA: I mean the word.

PAUL: Just kidding, love. But the point is that I wanted Sheila to make it with Jeff, not just so I could have Jan with no guilt feelings but because the thought of her having her kicks was thrilling to me. And by extension I wanted to watch the two of them together, and wanted to make love to Jan in front of Sheila. I think we all wanted that.

SHEILA: Not at first. We had to get used to it.

PAUL: True enough. We had to get used to what we were doing before we could really want to do it all in the same room. As I said, as we’ve been saying throughout, all of this was a gradual process. Let’s face it, even nowadays, in what we like to think of as highly enlightened times, people grow up with a view of sex that is not far removed from old-fashioned New England Puritanism. Even those of us with so-called liberal attitudes, with not much bias against premarital sex and with the feeling that what a man and wife do in bed is beautiful, even so there’s an inevitable feeling that sex has to be secretive and hidden, that it can never involve more than two people, that it has to be tied up with love and hooked into the fabric of a permanent relationship. Even when you reject all of this on an intellectual level, it remains a very real part of your outlook. Now people can be conditioned to get themselves free from all of this, but it takes time. It has to happen bit by bit.

JWW: When it did happen for the first time, the four of you making love in the same room, was it as a result of someone’s suggestion?

PAUL: No, it just happened.

SHEILA: It had been mentioned. Don’t you remember? We had talked about how silly it was to split up, and you said you would like to watch me with Jeff.

PAUL: In a joking way, yes. And of course the joking had a foundation in fact as joking generally does, but that was about as far as it went. No, the way it happened was simple enough. We had the lights turned down low and were doing some dancing and necking. Very slow dancing that was more a matter of vertical petting than anything Arthur Murray would recognize. It was particularly exciting because we would switch partners every once in a while, not just for dancing but for petting as well. The thing of going from one woman to another, from Jan to my wife, had a sort of orgiastic feeling to it that was very erotic.

SHEILA: Then I think it was Jeff who took off his shirt. He said he was too warm and he didn’t see any reason why he should be uncomfortable. I think by this time we all knew what we were building up to. In the books we had read, this sort of thing often started with a game of Strip Poker, but I really don’t believe any of us could have taken anything as childish as Strip Poker at all seriously. The whole idea of it is too silly. I know there are swingers who use it to break the ice, but I just can’t see it. In order for it to work, you would have to get past the fact that it’s basically so juvenile, and you would also have to be conditioned to find nudity erotic in and of itself. There is something erotic in nudity, but not when you have a bunch of naked people sitting cross-legged on the floor playing cards. That crosses the line between eroticism and absurdity.

PAUL: From the sublime to the ridiculous, you might say.

SHEILA: Just the same, when Jeff took his shirt off, the words that flashed through my mind were “Strip Poker.” We began dancing again, and he kissed me and put his hand up under my skirt. I went all weak in the knees, and when I got my strength back I pushed him away and told him all of a sudden I was uncomfortably warm myself. I took off my blouse and my bra. We started dancing again, both of us bare from the waist up, and it was something.

PAUL: Naturally one thing led to another. I took off my shirt, and Jan took off not only her blouse and bra but her skirt and panties as well. Before long we were all four of us naked. The excitement of the situation was absolutely fantastic. I was holding Jan in my arms and looking over her shoulder at the other two. Jan was a tall girl, and I only had to bend my knees slightly in order to manage coitus in a standing position. Then Jeff and Sheila saw what we were doing, and Sheila called out that we should all look at her, and she dropped to her knees in front of Jeff and took his penis in her mouth.

SHEILA: I wanted to do it. I wanted them to watch. I wanted to do it and for them to see me.

PAUL: And that just tore the lid off of everything. We never did separate that night. We rolled around on the floor screwing like mad, just kept doing it all night long...

They talk animatedly of the central role sex comes to play in their lives. There is now and then an air of braggadocio in their conversation, as if they are seeking to impress, perhaps specifically to shock. They describe an evening with the Creightons in which they engage in troilistic activity for the first time — the Creighton woman has expressed a desire to make love to two men simultaneously, and Paul has coitus with her while she fellates her husband. It is Sheila who takes the lead in describing the activity, doing so in photographic detail and explaining how she watched the entire escapade, how it excited her, and how she determined to enjoy similar pleasures herself.

JWW: It almost seems as though there was a tolerance factor operating, as though you had to extend your involvement in swinging in order to maintain the level of excitement.

PAUL: Oh, that’s absolutely right. I think that’s the case for just about everyone.

SHEILA: At the beginning, certainly. Until you find your particular groove, you have to keep getting further and further out. If you give it some thought, you can see that there’s nothing particularly remarkable in that. Swinging in any form consists of a violation of society’s rules for sexual behavior. Naturally part of the kick is the excitement of the forbidden, of kicking over the traces. And another part of the excitement is the sheer novelty of what you’re doing. So there’s an irresistible impulse to break more rules, and at the same time there’s a natural desire for even more in the way of novelty.

PAUL: Sooner or later you reach a point where there are no frontiers. The kinkier things don’t happen to turn you on, and of those things which do appeal, there are none you haven’t tried. We’ve known couples who hit that plateau in no time at all — they just plunge right into the swinging society with no holds barred and they find their own level almost at once. And then there are other couples who make their way a little at a time over a period of quite a few years, getting a little teensy bit more into the swing of things as they go. Sooner or later, though, every swinger becomes a burned-out case.

SHEILA: As in leprosy — a burned-out case is a leper for whom the disease has run its course.

PAUL: Which happens to swingers. They find their niche in the whole scheme of things and they stay there. Or drop out — and this happens a great deal of the time.

SHEILA: We did, of course.

PAUL: That was a little different. We dropped out and came back, and that’s something that I think most people go through at one time or another. Not all of them, certainly, but I would say the greater portion. People go through emotional changes, they have second thoughts...

But there are certain couples who run the gamut of swinging and keep going further and further as we described, and then when they find no worlds left unconquered they just give the whole thing up and abandon swinging altogether. It’s like the way certain guys’ll take up a sport or a hobby and stay with it until they reach a certain level of proficiency, and then all at once they’re bored and they drop it and start in on something new. They try swinging and see what it’s like, and after they’ve tried everything there is to try, then they give it up and start collecting stamps or something.

JWW: To get back to your experience with the Creightons, I gather that the desire to extend the range of swinging was something shared by all four of you.

PAUL: Definitely. And by the same token, we were all a little reluctant to do too much too soon.

JWW: Why?

PAUL: I don’t know. Perhaps because new experiences and new ideas do take getting used to. Perhaps because we were worried about straining our relationship or ruining one or the other of our marriages...

On that point, I’m sure we sensed even then the danger of getting that intimately involved with just one other couple. There are any number of plus factors, of course. Not just such obvious things as safety and convenience but the whole quality of the relationship that develops.

SHEILA: Thinking back, it was really an extraordinary relationship. We’ve never had anything like it since. It was like a four-way marriage, if that makes any particular sense. It was really a four-way love relationship, and that can be both good and bad. It makes for a lot of very fine feelings. So often swinging is just an involved way to scratch a particular itch in a new improved fashion, but here there was emotional involvement in addition to good nitty-gritty sex, and that can make a real difference.

PAUL: It can also make for drawbacks, too.

SHEILA: Oh, yes. You know, I think maybe that sort of relationship could work in one of those hippie communes you read about, I think they have them out in California, where everybody sort of lives with everybody else in a tribal relationship and all the children are reared in common. While Paul and I aren’t exactly hippie types—

PAUL: No kidding.

SHEILA: —even so, I have to admit I find the idea of those communes very attractive. The idea of everybody just loving everybody else. Oh, I know how it sounds when you hear the words coming out of the mouths of one of those idiot flower people, but I’m serious. In a situation like that you could really have group love and make it work.

PAUL: Maybe.

SHEILA: But for us — well, with Jan and Jeff, in a sense it was as though we were all married to one another, and in another sense it wasn’t. Because we were a part of the society we lived in, and our individual marriages were separate economic and legal units. So there was a — I forget the term, it’s the anthropological reason why every society has incest taboos?

PAUL: Something about confusion of roles?

SHEILA: Something like that. As I understand it, the real reason why you can’t marry your brother has nothing to do with recessive genes and all that. Because primitive tribes didn’t know anything about genetics, they didn’t realize that inbreeding would lead to faults in the offspring. But what they did realize was that a sister and brother would grow up relating to one another in a particular way, and then if they became man and wife they would have to relate in an entirely different way, and that the outcome of all of this was a lot of confusion.

PAUL: I’m not entirely sure I’ll buy a hundred percent of that. I think they may also have noticed that sisters who got laid by their brothers had a tendency to have babies with two heads, or whatever. You don’t want to sell primitive tribesmen short. They may not calculate with the speed of a computer, but they did have a habit of coming up with the right answer sooner or later.

SHEILA: Well, that’s beside the point anyway. I may have picked a bad example, I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t love Jeff Creighton the same way I loved my own husband, because I was married to Paul and not to Jeff, and I couldn’t maintain the marriage and divide my emotional responses that way, and — oh, I don’t know, really. The four of us were just too damned close, that’s all.

PAUL: I’m sure that could only happen in a first-swap situation.

SHEILA: Except that it wasn’t a first-swap situation for Jeff and Jan.

PAUL: Well, it was close to it. I hadn’t realized that when I spoke, though. You’re right. Still, the point is that an experienced swinging couple would not be likely to get that intimately involved with another couple in an emotional sense. We’ve even known some swingers who make it a point never to have social contacts with their swinging friends, and vice versa. Of course on the other side of the ledger there are a great many swingers who associate socially almost exclusively with other swingers. I would think either extreme is probably a mistake, and yet I can understand both points of view.

SHEILA: We would never get that close with another couple again. We never have, and I’m sure we never will.

PAUL: That makes it sound as if we regret our experience with Jan and Jeff, and that isn’t true.

SHEILA: I didn’t mean it that way. It was great while it lasted, and I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it ended badly or anything like that. It didn’t. In fact, while we were swinging with them we didn’t feel there was anything unhealthy about the situation. As a matter of fact it wasn’t until afterward, when we had had experiences with a wide variety of other people, that we even thought there was anything wrong with what we had had going with the Creightons.

PAUL: It would have ended badly, though.

SHEILA: Do you think so?

PAUL: If they hadn’t moved away, yes. I’m sure of it. And I think they knew it, too, and that’s one of the reasons why they didn’t reject that job offer and stay in K.C.

SHEILA: I suppose that’s possible.

We lapse into a pensive silence. A stack of records comes to a close and Paul turns them over. Sheila takes my glass into the kitchen and freshens my drink. Paul begins to tell an anecdote about a couple they have just met for the first time and their particular social and sexual peculiarities. The conversation meanders on, turns tangentially to educational standards in the county, to local government and politics, and then, inevitably, back to sex. I ask eventually if they had had any other sexual partners during their time they were seeing the Creightons.

PAUL: We thought of it. I’m sure they did, too, as far as that goes, but it didn’t go any further than thinking. Sheila and I would discuss the possibility. In fact we would look through the club magazines and pick out ads that we would be interested in replying to, but we didn’t go so far as to draft letters or anything like that.

JWW: What stopped you?

PAUL: Oh, a few things, I guess. Most of all the feeling that Jeff and Jan wouldn’t approve, that we would be somehow disloyal to them. Also there was the worry about postal inspectors, or that we might get involved with the wrong class of people. To put it simply, it was a lot safer and easier for us to go along with Jeff and Jan than to break new ground. We certainly didn’t know anybody else who was in the swinging whirl, and the idea of plunging straight into correspondence with total strangers was kind of scary. Exciting, but also scary.

SHEILA: Actually, the idea of having sex with strangers was both of those things — exciting and scary at the same time. Remember, we were close friends of Jeff and Jan by the time we wound up making love with them.

JWW: Then your relationship with the Creightons did a great deal to determine your whole approach to swinging.

PAUL: Absolutely. On the one hand, it kept us away from the whole central world of swinging for a long time. We missed a lot while we were with them. Face it — one of the real reasons to swing is variety and novelty — making it with new people in a new situation. By staying with the Creightons, you could almost say that we were turning monogamy into a plural marriage thing and running out of variety and novelty in the process. Instead of having one wife and an endless procession of one-shot mistresses, I had two wives, if you see what I mean.

SHEILA: That’s one side of it, that we stayed away from the whole scene of correspondence clubs much longer than we would have otherwise. But on the other side of the scale, we got into more sophisticated sex than we would have otherwise.

PAUL: Very true.

JWW: Why was that the case?

PAUL: Let me see, what’s the best way to explain it? I suppose by contrasting our story with that of another couple, a couple of kids we were comparing notes with not long ago. In certain respects their story parallels ours — their situation, if not their story.

They’re about our age, and they’ve been swinging for five years, almost the same amount of time as we have. Instead of getting involved through another couple, they followed the fairly common pattern of the husband reading about swinging and getting interested, and gradually talking the wife into it. I would say nine out of ten couples start this way. Maybe the percentage is higher, I don’t know. They began immediately with correspondence, and they started swinging at the rate of a couple a week. They would see certain couples more than once, but they made a big pitch for variety. For security reasons they made a point of swinging with people fifty miles or more from their home base, so it was actually easier for them to have variety than to exchange visits regularly with another couple.

The point is that the variety and the novelty of meeting new people all the time made it more or less unnecessary for them to go overboard looking for sexual variety. As a result they were swinging for months without doing anything more out of the ordinary than changing partners and having sex in separate rooms. There was enough of a challenge in getting to know another couple and breaking the ice, and then there was enough novelty in making love to a stranger, so that the kinkier swingers’ games didn’t come into the picture for them for a long time, really.

We, of course, were just the other side of the coin. We didn’t have the variety of partners, so our thing became more and more sophisticated from a purely sexual standpoint.

To put it another way, for them the steady kick was doing the same thing with different people, while for us it was doing different things with the same people.

SHEILA: We certainly did plenty of different things.

PAUL: That’s for sure.

JWW: What pattern did your experimentation take?

SHEILA: A sort of Rorschach inkblot pattern, spreading out in all directions at once.

PAUL: At first, when we were just trading partners for simple sexual intercourse, what we did in swap sessions was basically what we did in our own marriages. We had already experimented with fellatio and cunnilingus as well as with most of the basic coital positions. Naturally we had a more distinctly experimental attitude when we started swinging because of our increased interest in technique. Also I think we got somewhat more oriented toward oral sex.

SHEILA: Because it feels so groovy.

PAUL: Cut it out! Seriously, this seems to be universal among swingers. One of the major reasons is that an individual is always physically capable of performing orally, while this isn’t true of coitus. The increased sexual activity swingers enjoy is such that a man has more opportunities to make love than he can shake a stick at — or that he has a stick to shake at, if you follow me.

But I seem to have gotten off the track. As I was saying, we became more oral-oriented than we had been, and I gather this was true for the Creightons as well. We also got into anal intercourse. Jeff and Jan had had no experience at all with this. Sheila and I had tried it out early in our marriage, as a matter of fact, and she hadn’t cared for it.

SHEILA: It hurt, damn it! Later on I found out that a person can learn to relax the sphincter muscles so that it isn’t painful. And using the right lubricant makes a difference, and if you can learn to get excited in that area — well, that underscores the whole point, really. There are techniques involved in anything, and when you get with swinging you’re apt to become increasingly aware of technique.

PAUL: Let me see, Then we began to get into threesomes and all that, and that was particularly exciting. I suppose if you had to draw a line, that was where we began to get to the kinky stage.

JWW: I notice you use that word a lot — “kinky.” Just how do you mean it? Obscene? Perverted?

SHEILA: Perverted, but in a nice way. Right?

PAUL: Beautiful. That hits it on the nose...

SHEILA: But I think you would have to say we hit the kinky stage before we started with the threesomes. We began with pictures before then. Jeff had a Polaroid, and once we got to the point of all making love in the same room, it was just a short step to taking pictures of each other. Of course you know that the Polaroid camera is God’s gift to swingers. Well, the pictures we took could only have been taken with a Polaroid, since none of us had a darkroom.

PAUL: Pictures, and threesomes, and from there on in I’d be hard put to say just what we did and when. Let’s see — we first made it with them in May, and sometime in August or September we stopped going to separate rooms, and a month or two after that we were swinging with pictures and threesomes and almost anything we might have read or dreamed up and wanted to try out. Contests, that sort of thing.

JWW: Contests?

PAUL: This was an idea we got from what we read. They do it in the larger clubs. For example, you divide into couples and the object is to see which girl can make her partner have an orgasm first. That would be one type of contest, but it could work any way at all.

JWW: I see. The sort of party games that large groups of swingers often use.

SHEILA: And they work fairly well in groups, but with just four of us they were pretty silly, actually. We tried them out, though, because we wanted to try anything.

I wonder if I can find the right words to explain this. It’s very easy to get a wholly false impression of those months. When you read about something like this in a book the message seems to be that the people are compelled by a hunger for stronger and stronger kicks. Like a heroin addict who has to have more and more of the drug in order to get high or whatever it is that they get. Is heroin like that?

JWW: To an extent. Amphetamines are a better example, or barbiturates.

SHEILA: I’m afraid we’re not up on the drug scene. Swingers are more apt to stay away from things like that, you know. Some people try sex stimulants, but more of us tend to stick with high-protein diets and health foods. The only drug everybody takes is birth control pills...

She talks briefly about the impact of birth-control pills and other technological advances upon the sexual revolution in general and the society of swingers in particular. The discussion ranges far afield, touching too upon the various paraphernalia which swingers have taken to using in the past few years — artificial phalluses and vaginas, vibrators for vaginal and anal massage, French ticklers and coronal extenders, etc. Ultimately Sheila returns to her point — that their turn toward increasingly “kinky” activity was more than a symptom of dissatisfaction and the need for ever-more enervating stimulation.

SHEILA: Here’s what I’m getting at. You have to realize that this whole swinging scene, all of it, was a completely new world for us. It was absolutely new, and we found ourselves getting tremendous pleasure out of everything we did. Even those stupid party games, even things like that were a thrill as a novel experience. And because of this of course we wanted to try everything once.

We hardly ever watch television. Paul likes the sports and the kids watch their shows and I look at documentaries now and then, but outside of that we don’t have much use for the TV. Well, a year ago Christmas we replaced our old portable with a color console. Paul bought a really good set and we had a special antenna installed and got excellent color reception. Well, let me tell you, for the first couple of months we found ourselves watching anything that moved. You would think we had never seen colors before, we were that enthusiastic about watching color television.

Admittedly color television is something the squares would never get as nervous about as they do about swinging, but in a sense it was the same situation. We found swinging so exciting that we couldn’t get enough of it, and we had to try everything. It wasn’t because we were getting jaded. It was just the reverse.

JWW: Did you reach a point where you were doing things that seemed too kinky? I know that usually happens sooner or later.

PAUL: It always happens, except for some of the really raving perverts you meet, and brother, you do meet a lot of them if you’re not careful. I mean real maniacs who don’t draw any lines at all. Excepting those kooks, it’s inevitable that you find out where your own particular line is, and you find out by crossing it inadvertently and then stepping back over it again. But it didn’t happen for us at the time, with the Creightons, because we didn’t go that far. I think we might have, sooner or later, but we didn’t.

SHEILA: I thought we did at one point, but then I changed my mind.

PAUL: When was that?

SHEILA: With Jan.

PAUL: You mean the two of you? Oh, of course. You know, that’s funny; that’s been so much a part of the scene for us since then that I’ve almost forgotten that you had a mixed reaction to it at first.

SHEILA: Mixed is the word for it.

JWW: I gather you had homosexual relations with Jan?

SHEILA: That’s right. And this, I must say, was a definite exception to what we said earlier — that all of us looked forward to everything we did. For my own part, I learned early from what I’d read that Lesbian relations seem to be almost universal in swinging.

PAUL: While male homosexual contacts, on the other hand, have always been extremely rare. This isn’t as true as it once was, actually; especially on the West Coast, male swingers are apt to be bisexual. But the proportion of wives who have gay contacts is still far, far higher.

SHEILA: So the books all said. And I read all of this, and I gathered that the idea of Lesbian relations between myself and Jan was going to be brought up sooner or later, and I wasn’t all that certain as to how I felt about the whole thing. I’m being perfectly frank now in saying that I had never in my life had a conscious homosexual impulse, let alone an actual experience. I tried to detect desires for Jan in my mind, and I couldn’t, and then I worried that I was repressing a strong latent streak, and, oh, all the sort of crazy things a person can think of.

When the subject came up among the four of us, I wasn’t surprised. I had been expecting it. But I didn’t know quite how I felt about it, or how I ought to handle it—