The Wife-Swap Report

Sooner or Later You Make Yourself Sick

PAUL: Sorry we had to cancel out last night. We tried to reach you, but you were out and we left a message with your service. I was afraid you might drive all the way out.

JWW: I thought I’d call first.

PAUL: If you had come, I guess you could have interviewed four people instead of two.

JWW: Oh?

PAUL: We had a couple over last night. New people. New to us, that is. A young couple. He’s a commercial artist. They don’t live ten minutes from us. Friends of some friends of ours.

We are lunching at a small, unprepossessing restaurant near his office. After abruptly canceling an interview scheduled for the previous evening, today Paul has called me in midmorning to request this lunch date. I expect that the cancellation and the appointment are related, and that he has chosen this way to tell me he and Sheila have decided to abandon the book project. I am prepared to encourage him to stay with it; I have found that interviewees commonly develop a form of stage fright somewhere along the line, and generally want only to be assured that they ought to go on.

His manner suggests that my suspicions will be proved correct. He talks somewhat disjointedly, with long reflective pauses between clauses and sentences.

PAUL: They were quite a bit younger than we are. Maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. Married just two years. They started, they got into swinging after just a year of marriage.

JWW: That seems to be more and more common lately.

PAUL: I would say so. Oh, a year is not a record, not by any means. Nowadays you’ll often see a couple come together originally as swingers, so that they’ll have partied together from their first date, long before they married. From what I gathered, these kids last night both had pretty active sex lives before marriage and a solid premarital relationship. And after a year of marriage they were ready to get with it.

They had a sort of semi-hippie look to them. Clean and well groomed, but the girl had that long, perfectly straight hair and they were both dressed very mod.

JWW: Must have made you feel ancient.

PAUL: Oh, maybe a little bit, but that’s not what I’m getting at. I’m not sure what I am getting at. It’s funny talking about this in public, in a public place like this. No one can hear us, I know that.

JWW: If you’d rather go somewhere else—

PAUL: No, I have only an hour. I suppose this was silly, getting you down here for nothing, but it came to me last night — that I wanted to talk to you, and just the two of us. Not that it’s anything I wouldn’t want to say to Sheila, but I wanted it to be while the ideas were fresh in my mind. I don’t know—

A waiter brings something. The conversation stalls. When we resume, Paul has organized himself.

PAUL: Last night the girl, her name was Barbara, wanted to do a sandwich. You know what that is? To be specific, she wanted me to screw her from front while her husband had her anally from the rear. She explained that she really liked to do this, it was her particular pleasure, and she offered to give Sheila some head during all this, but Sheila declined.

These people here, all around us. Assuming they’re civilians, can you imagine their reaction overhearing this conversation? Suppose they just managed to overhear it? Once they got past shock, do you know what the majority of them would think?

JWW: I suppose they would be envious to a greater or lesser degree.

PAUL: No question about it. They would think, well, here’s a man describing a really exciting experience. Really thrilling. Some of them would get physically excited thinking about it.

In a way, that’s part of my point. John, picture this. The three of us are on the bed in our bedroom. I am having relations with this Barbara. Her husband is trying to get in her from the rear, but he can’t maintain an erection. Sheila comes over and stimulates him and he tries again and can’t do it, and then the girl asks if we have a vibrator, so she and I separate and she works on him with a vibrator.

And more of this, you get the general idea, I forget exactly who does what and it doesn’t really matter, but what it adds up to is that this is a real production number. I mean we literally spend half an hour getting ready to treat this kid to her sandwich, and then we do it. Of course it’s a great bore. The poor husband has been so excessively stimulated by now that he ejaculates prematurely. The girl and I, on the other hand, can’t finish at all. We poke around for a while, then everybody showers and gets dressed and we go back downstairs.

Sheila makes coffee, we drink coffee, and we try to manage a conversation. The failure in the bedroom has us all unstrung by this point, especially the husband who can hardly avoid feeling inadequate. We fill a few minutes with talk of mutual friends. Otherwise it turns out that we don’t have very much to talk about. They’re decent enough kids, but aside from sex we have nothing in common with them, and would never have spent an evening with them except to swing together. Finally they leave, and that’s that.

And that, John, is the fantastically exciting evening that would have nine out of ten men in this room drooling if they heard about it. Do you see what I’m driving at?

JWW: I’m not sure.

PAUL: That it seems more exciting than it is. Oh, some evenings are better than others, there’s no question about it. Last night was particularly bad. What do hippies call it? Last night was a bummer. But every once in a while you get a night like that...

And even the good nights, what’s the real point of it all? Just the same old thing every time. New people, maybe some halfway new ways of having sex, but otherwise it’s all the same. Intimate relationships with people you don’t know intimately, people you don’t honestly know at all. People in many cases whom, if you did know them at all well, you wouldn’t want to talk to, let alone have relations with.

JWW: You don’t always feel this way.

PAUL: No, of course not.

JWW: On quite a few occasions you’ve told me you feel swinging is the only way for a married couple to live in today’s world. I believe you meant this when you said it.

PAUL: I did. That’s really why I wanted to talk to you today, while I still had this particular fix on the whole scene. To give you this side of it while it was fresh in my mind.

Look — every swinger has certain times when he sees nothing but the positive side of swinging, and other times when he sees the negative. I would say this is true for virtually everyone. But in the interviews we’ve had I constantly find myself taking the same position, and this is legitimate because it’s the position Sheila and I have come around to over the years. It’s the way we feel most of the time. So whenever we’re talking and that little machine is taking it all down, I slip into gear, as if I’m programmed to respond a certain way in an interview situation.

I thought right now I’d be primed to break the pattern and give you the other side of the coin.

He begins to develop what we have already agreed will be a purposely unbalanced indictment of swinging. He talks about the hazards of the life, the dangers inherent in the practice of having intimate relations with strangers.

PAUL: The first time we ran an advertisement of our own, we were really shocked by the response. Not the quantity — we ran the ad simultaneously in four or five club bulletins, so we knew it would draw well — but the kind of people we heard from!

Single perverts who just wanted to write filthy letters. Money-hungry perverts who wanted to sell us something — anything from pornographic pictures to their own services for a fee.

And men posing as couples, of course.

JWW: I understand that happens constantly.

PAUL: All the time. A tremendous number of men want to get in on the action but won’t enter the game on equal terms. They’re all for swapping, but they don’t have anything to swap. Some of them are single, but most of them usually turn out to be married.

Some will write to couples and offer themselves for threesomes. Most of the ads nowadays specify no single men, but if a guy is sufficiently hard up he’ll gamble a letter anyway. Or he’ll write a letter trying to set up a private meeting with the wife — we’ve had a few of those over the years. This sort of man is just a nuisance. With all the men like him compared with the small number of couples looking for threesomes with single men, I don’t think he gets much of a return for his time and effort. We just throw his letters away...

The really aggravating single guy is the one who pretends to be a couple. We have never actually gotten taken in this way ourselves, although on several occasions we’ve broken off correspondence with a “couple” when it became obvious that we were dealing with a single man. There are certain obvious tip-offs. Separate photos of husband and wife, for example, with those of the wife fairly standard professional cheesecake shots. Or letters explaining that the little woman was in bed with the flu, but that the husband would be down our way and would like to get acquainted with us in the meantime. We were lucky enough to get the message whenever we were corresponding with one of these kooks, and we just stopped writing.

We’ve known people, though, who have been taken in this way. They’ll go so far as to set up a date, either by phone or through correspondence, and turn up alone with some bright excuse. A swinging couple will generally know at this point that they’re being taken in, but swingers do tend to give others the benefit of the doubt. And since it’s too late to make other plans for the evening, and since some people figure that a threesome is better than nothing at all — well, now and then a single man with a lot of nerve can cut himself in on the action this way...

He talks of other swingers, of the apparent emptiness of their lives and of their single-minded absorption in sexual matters. I suggest that he sees them this way because his contact with them is exclusively sexual.

PAUL: It’s more than that. Swingers are compulsive. This constant desire to go further and further, to try new people, to do wilder and wilder things. It’s a compulsion.

JWW: Is swinging always like that? For everyone?

PAUL: It’s like that for everyone, I think. Everyone I’ve ever known. But it isn’t always like that.

JWW: I don’t get the distinction.

PAUL: What I’m saying is that every couple gets caught up in that kind of whirlwind. A cycle where you just go on and on from one thing to another. We were like that toward the end of the time in Kansas City, and then for a few months after we moved to Louisville.

It got... well, very bad. Very wild. I don’t know if I can get across to you how absorbed in this we both were. We were reaching a point where we hardly thought about anything else. My job — this was in Louisville — I was in a new job and I came very close to blowing it. I just didn’t seem to care about my work any more. It was a good opportunity, an important opportunity, but I had trouble keeping my mind on it, and if things had gone on that way I’m fairly sure they would have let me go before too much longer.

Swinging just became everything. We hardly ever made love, just the two of us. A couple of times we tried, and it didn’t work. We couldn’t do anything, and I guess that scared us both. The implications. So instead of facing it we made excuses for ourselves, and even told each other that it proved the value of swinging, because otherwise we would have no sex at all. You can’t even attempt to find logic in this. We ceased to behave logically, that’s the whole thing.

Around this time I became a very compulsive record keeper. I got a Polaroid and we both went nuts trying to keep a complete record of what we did and with whom. After a date — we dated at least two nights a week, sometimes more — we would write up the night’s entertainment. We made lists of what we had done and what the people had been like. Lists to go with the photographs.

Crazy.

I knew it couldn’t go on like this. I knew that it had to peak.

JWW: Did you think about slowing down?

PAUL: That’s the whole point. The sort of thing we were caught up in, it was impossible to slow down. Absolutely impossible. We couldn’t gradually put the brakes on. We were driving a car without brakes and heading downhill. The only way to stop was to crash.

JWW: Do you know why that was so?

PAUL: We were looking for something that wasn’t there...

I keep thinking of nymphomaniacs. A girl who enjoys sex very much, very intensely, but who never quite comes completely, who always feels that maybe the next orgasm will be the really big one.

We were like that. For a time we kept waiting for it to burn out the way the urge for bigger and better varieties of sex had done. We were really past the point of looking for more extreme kicks by this point. We had found our level in that respect. But the extent of our involvement in swinging, the role it played in our lives — this didn’t level off.

I don’t know why this was. Secret guilt, hidden perverted desires, I don’t know, I’m no psychiatrist.

The waiter refills our coffee cups, We have stayed past Paul’s lunch hour. He glances at his watch, says that he ought to be getting back, then hastens to assure me that another few minutes will make no difference. He lights a cigarette, smokes thoughtfully.

PAUL: I can’t pinpoint it. We both knew that some sort of crash was coming, but even so we had trouble discussing it. Whenever one of us brought up the subject the other would take the opposite tack. Almost as if we were deliberately balancing one another out.

We began getting along badly. There was talk of divorce — the word came up in the course of arguments, as I suppose it does with any couple going through a rough time. In a sense that was what we were, a couple going through a rough time, but swinging was at the heart of this because it was at the heart of our whole lives.

As for what finally did it for us, what turned us away from swinging, I’m not sure I know. Of course the actual incident was Sheila attempting to kill herself. She took pills. It was close...

Afterward all I could think of was how close I had come to losing her, and the entire swinging scene, the whole pattern of our lives, was just disgusting. Completely disgusting. All I wanted to do was make a clean, sane life for us. We had to rebuild our lives.

The suicide, the attempted suicide, was the crash. I don’t know if there was any single thing that actually made Sheila do it or not. I don’t really think there was. I suppose it was a combination of things, all getting to her at the same time, reinforcing each other.

It happens, in swinging. It doesn’t have to be violent, abrupt, but it does happen. Sooner or later you make yourself sick. For some people it’s gradual — they find themselves losing interest, turning down more and more dates, limiting themselves to a few old friends, until gradually they’ve become inactive. In our case the break had to be immediate and complete. Taking a knife and just chopping everything away.

We settle the check, walk together out of the restaurant. On the sidewalk he apologizes for dragging me to such a depressing interview. I assure him it has been time well spent. “I gave you all the bad side,” he said. “Blame it on my mood. If I told you the same story tomorrow it would sound completely different. In the right sort of mood I could make anything sound bad. And after all, we went back to swinging. We did go back to it.”

His smile stiffens slightly, “I never thought we would,” he says. “I never thought we would.”