The Wife-Swap Report

All Things in Moderation

JWW: When you first got involved in swinging, in swapping, I know you were quite anxious about your situation. Was there comparable anxiety when you returned to swinging after six months of abstention?

PAUL: No.

SHEILA: Not really, no. They say you never forget to swim once you learn. It’s the same with swinging. You not only don’t forget how but you don’t have any trouble relearning the right mental attitude. And you know, I was expecting the guilt, the anxiety, all of that. I was primed for it, all prepared to handle it, and then it didn’t really come.

JWW: That’s very interesting.

PAUL: And a little hard to believe.

JWW: Well, perhaps a little.

PAUL: John, did you ever quit smoking?

JWW: Oh, dozens of times. Hundreds of times, I suppose.

PAUL: For any real length of time?

JWW: Usually for a few hours or a few days. But once for over a year, and other times for periods of a month or two. Why?

PAUL: Do you know how they say that the first cigarette after a long layoff tastes terrible?

JWW: I’ve heard that often enough, but in my case it’s simply not true. The first cigarette always tastes better than any cigarette after it. It’s almost worth quitting just to start in again... You know, I’m beginning to see where this conversation is headed. Do you really think there’s much of a parallel between smoking and swinging?

SHEILA: There are obvious differences, of course. Smoking is far more dangerous physically. And swinging is illegal.

PAUL: There are also some similarities. Yes, I think the parallels are significant, John. When you smoke too much, cigarettes lose their taste; you just go on out of habit. You don’t enjoy them, but you can’t go on without them. And when you quit you get past the withdrawal period through sheer enthusiasm, but you never entirely forget how good cigarettes used to taste. You get so that you only remember the pleasant associations of smoking.

JWW: So sooner or later you start in again.

PAUL: That’s right. You may vow to cut down, or to switch to a filter or whatever, but sooner or later you go back to it. And pretty soon you return to whatever frequency is natural for you. Maybe you feel guilty about it and maybe not. I suppose you have to feel some guilt, because after all smoking is bad for you. It does all sorts of physically damaging things to a human being. Swinging, on the other hand, has no bad physical effects unless you’re dealing with the sort of compulsive nut who literally screws himself into the grave, in which case he’ll have that problem whether he’s a swinger or not. Aside from those hardship cases, it’s good exercise. It doesn’t even rot your teeth.

JWW: It might have had emotional effects though, mightn’t it? It seems to have done so the first time around.

SHEILA: But that’s a different thing, John. That only happens if you’re mentally prepared for it to happen. But there’s such a thing as adjusting yourself to swinging. And when you’re able to put it in its proper perspective, it doesn’t tear you up that way.

JWW: I’m not sure I’ll buy that.

PAUL: Why not?

JWW: Because I’ve known any number of long-time swingers, couples who have stuck with the scene to such an extent that you would have to describe them as adjusted to it. And whenever I’ve known such people for any length of time I’ve discovered that they’re subject to periods of depression, that now and then they come unglued, that they will occasionally admit they aren’t convinced that what they’re doing is right—

PAUL: No argument. Everybody lives with that. I do, Sheila does, everybody does.

JWW: Then—

PAUL: But you learn to handle it. You learn to smooth out the really bad downs and the really manic highs so that you can coast easy somewhere in the middle. Even so, now and then it gets bad. Sometimes we need a vacation from swinging, a couple of weeks where we carefully avoid extramarital sex. And by the same token, there are times when we’ll feel the need for a no-holds-barred knock-down orgy. Not as a steady diet, but to blow off steam every once in a while. You know, the ancient Greeks had a way of looking at things.

SHEILA: They certainly did.

PAUL: Seriously, they did. “All things in moderation and nothing to excess”—that’s the principle, and it’s a good one. If you look at it that way, nothing is bad in and of itself, just so long as it’s kept in proportion.

JWW: “All things in moderation” seems like an unusual motto for a swinger.

PAUL: Does it? I suppose it does, but you’d be surprised; most people with some experience and with a little depth to themselves come around to the same position, although they may not put it in the same words.

SHEILA: Nobody swings twenty-four hours a day. And nobody swings seven days a week.

PAUL: Right. That’s the whole thing. On balance, swingers are not a particularly far-out group of people — except in the sexual sphere. They’re a fairly average lot, a little more intelligent than the average, a bit better off, and a little bit better educated, but outside of that they’re very ordinary people who happen to have what nonswingers would regard as an unusual approach to sex...

The discussion covers familiar ground now — the justification of wife-swapping as a logical and intelligent behavior pattern for essentially ordinary husbands and wives, a pastime wholly consistent with the Greek concept of all things in moderation. At one point I remind Paul of our conversation of a few weeks earlier, our luncheon date during which he inveighed so unequivocally against swinging and all its insanities. He replies that he told me at the time that he was in a particular mood, and that he has never denied that swinging will look alternately good and bad depending upon one’s state of mind. Sheila adds that no regimen is assurance that a given date will not be a disappointment, and that such a disappointing date is very frequently followed by dissatisfaction with swinging itself. “You have to expect a certain amount of this,” she goes on, “and gradually you learn how to avoid the worst of it and ride with the part you can’t avoid. Like anything else, it’s a matter of learning and a matter of adjustment.”

A little later on, we move around to a discussion of the form their adjustment took.

SHEILA: After our evening with Marge and Bill, it was pretty obvious that we were due for another drastic reappraisal. Obviously we had made a mistake in our plans somewhere along the line. In Kansas City we had thought that we were all-out swingers and wanted nothing more than to let loose and kick up our heels. Then later we found out that this didn’t seem to be working, and we thought a complete renunciation of swinging was the answer, and that we would never again desire that mad involvement in sex. Well, it was easy to see that we were wrong again, so—

PAUL: So back to the old drawing board.

SHEILA: Right. And what we came up with fit the general principle of moderation, although I don’t think we had the tag for it at first; I think we just worked things out and then realized later on what we had come up with. The first step in the program was to avoid programming our lives too rigidly. In other words, we had to avoid absolutes and leave ourselves room to find our own way. We had to stay loose.

Next, we realized that there was always the danger that sex would wind up playing too central a role in our lives. This was really what went wrong the first time around, that coupled with a hang-up built on the need to go a little further each time out. We decided we would absolutely limit ourselves to one swinging date a week.

PAUL: That may not sound like much of a limit. But when you realize what some couples do, then it is. And one a week was a maximum, not a set quantity. Anytime a week went by without a date, that was perfectly fine.

SHEILA: Of course it hasn’t happened that often. But it does happen from time to time, and we don’t let ourselves get upset about it.

Another principle of ours was to really get to appreciate our swinging friends as individuals, so that they would be more than a collection of organs and techniques to us. This may seem in contradiction to our determination to avoid the sort of ultra-intimate relationship that we had with our first couple, Jan and Jeff. It isn’t, really. It only means that we want to be able to relate to other couples as people. You don’t have to know someone a long time to do this, don’t have to see them all that frequently. All you have to do is know them the right way.

PAUL: Along the same lines, we stopped keeping records.

SHEILA: Absolutely, because that was something that had really come to strike us as sick, and now that we had more perspective we saw it as a symptom of our inability to relate to people, and our failure to find any real meaning in our sexual contacts. My God, when you have to keep notes on your dates — what you did and how it felt and how many times everybody got their rocks off — it’s as though that’s the only way you can hang onto it, as though otherwise you won’t be able to remember it, or to prove to yourself that it ever really happened.

Photographs are the same thing. We still have our Polaroid, but we use it only to take pictures of the children.

PAUL: You’re exaggerating a little. Sometimes another couple will request that we shoot some pictures while they’re over here, or someone will get an urge to see what something looks like from a given angle. So we do take pictures now and then, and we don’t mind if the couples we swing with want to take pictures for their own benefit. But the point is that we don’t save the pictures, we don’t use them as a way of keeping a record.

SHEILA: Once in a while we’ll save a particular snapshot because it happens to be a particularly good shot. Either it’s an attractive balance artistically or it happens to turn one or both of us on sexually, and so we’ll keep it around until we get tired of it. But no record keeping, none of that nonsense. And no record-keeper mentality, no comparisons and analysis of sexual idiosyncrasies, no keeping count of positions and strokes and orgasms and all the rest of it.

PAUL: Because I get enough data processing at the office.

SHEILA: Another thing we decided to do was maintain a certain number of nonswinging friends whom we would see socially. We still do this to a degree, but in actual practice it’s harder than you might think.

JWW: Because you want to have sex with the ones you respond to, and the rest bore you?

PAUL: Good guess, but not quite. Actually it’s not that simple. The most important thing, I guess, is that when you’re a swinger and you’re used to the relaxed, and I think, wholesome sexual attitudes of swingers, you find the average civilian pretty unpleasant company. Nonswingers are just a bore.

SHEILA: Not because they’re, oh, square or anything like that. It must be pretty obvious that we’re not a couple of hippies ourselves. But the thing is that the sexual attitudes of civilians really get to us after a while. It’s almost as if they’re more obsessed sexually than we are, because they don’t let loose and do the things they want to do, and as a result they’re all tied into knots about it.

PAUL: It’s the usual repression thing. The people who scream loudest about banning pornography are always the ones who get a hard-on if someone farts. They’re the ones who tell the dirtiest jokes — not the funniest ones, just the dirtiest.

SHEILA: They’re also the ones who play horrid little games of kneesies with other people’s mates. The funniest feeling in the world comes when we go to a civilian party where everybody gets into the liquor pretty hard. Sometimes I like to stay sober just to watch them. The utter hypocrisy of these people, the way they think they’re being so subtle as they sneak off with one another for a fast round of stand-up necking in the bathroom or a quick mutual frigging in the shrubbery. Or maybe they’ll actually go so far as to make a date to meet some afternoon for a quickie after the kids finish their lunch and before they come home from school again. And the ones who aren’t doing anything or setting anything up are all flirting like mad, using all the double-entendre they can and giving the impression that sex is the only thing on their minds. It’s almost as if they have to do this, the men to assert their virility and the women to prove they’re desirable. It gets ridiculous sometimes; you can’t tell which ones are playing the part but really mean it as a joke and which ones are pretending to be joking but really mean it. You can’t tell, and as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter.

PAUL: Not all civilians are like this, of course. Not by any means. In a way, you could say it’s as much a function of large parties with heavy drinking as it is of anything else. If you had a houseful of drunken swingers—

SHEILA: But you wouldn’t — that’s the point, isn’t it? Swingers wouldn’t drink that heavily. Oh, we drink, we all drink, and sometimes we drink enough to feel it. But we don’t knock ourselves out with liquor in that desperate way so many Americans do nowadays. For one thing, you can’t give a great performance in bed if you’re drunk. And since swingers know that the evening is going to end in bed, and that the success of the night stands or falls upon how the sexual side of it goes, well, drunkenness is kept to a minimum.

But other people have to get stoned in order to get through one of those evenings...

As far as being turned on by nonswinging friends, of course that happens now and then. When it does, one thing that we always do is make an effort to find out if the other couple swings. This happens a surprising amount of the time — two swapping couples drawn together by accident, or if not exactly by accident at least with neither one having prior knowledge of the other. We’ve had it happen from time to time. If you suspect it, you sort of toss out leading questions and try to make a connection. There are ways. Some of the correspondence clubs even have little pins for swingers to wear, innocent little bits of junk jewelry that enable you to zero in on each other in a crowd like members of some secret fraternity. I think that’s a little much — I mean, you would never know what sort of creep might try to connect with you that way. But you can accomplish as much by hinting at it.

PAUL: And as Sheila said, it happens a surprising amount of the time. Sometimes in the family circle.

SHEILA: You’re not going to tell—

PAUL: Don’t you want me to? For Christ’s sake, honey, it’s not really incestuous.

SHEILA: I know, but—

PAUL: But what?

SHEILA: It seems incestuous, I guess. And I suppose that was part of the thrill at the time, and you can make of that what you will. But go ahead and tell John. By now he must be imagining something a lot more far out than what happened.

PAUL: To save time, what happened was simply that we went to Sheila’s hometown when there was a death in her family, and after the funeral we happened to meet her cousin and his wife, and they turned out to be swingers. Ralph was about the same age as Sheila and I gather they were very close as children, and there must have been an undercurrent of sexual attraction that they weren’t entirely aware of, and as a result the whole thing had a special spice for her. Frankly I can’t see anything too spicy in the idea of first cousins screwing, but I suppose they felt a lot of the old wouldn’t-the-rest-of-the-family-die-if-they-saw-us-now, that bit, and that made it very unusual for them. I didn’t get the full impact of that, but Ralph’s wife is a tiny thing with oversized breasts and a comfortably tight vagina, so I wasn’t going to complain, certainly. I enjoyed myself.

SHEILA: Didn’t you get just the slightest little forbidden-fruit kick?

PAUL: Only sympathetically, by sharing some of your fun. But not directly.

SHEILA: It’s a shame — you missed a good thing. But maybe all is not lost.

PAUL: How so?

SHEILA: Maybe your sister’s a swinger. I don’t know about the other, but she’s certainly a tiny thing with oversized breasts, and it ought to be kinky enough to make you happy.

PAUL: Let’s talk about something else, huh?

SHEILA: Seriously, you know, it’s possible that she is a swinger. Marty’s a pretty sharp guy. It’s possible.

PAUL: Anything’s possible.

SHEILA: What would you do?

PAUL: Are you crazy?

SHEILA: Well, what would you do?

PAUL: Let’s drop it.

SHEILA: Can’t you just answer the question?

PAUL: Look, stupid, I don’t want to answer the question. Oh, hell. Suppose your parents were swingers, honey.

SHEILA: That’s utterly ridiculous.

PAUL: Well, just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose they were. And suppose they turned up one day—

SHEILA: All right, you made your point.

PAUL: —and your dad put his arm around you and said—

SHEILA: Let’s drop it, Paul...

The interview breaks up shortly thereafter. The incest speculation has a deadening effect upon the conversation, with Paul and Sheila drawing into themselves. Later, on separate occasions, Paul will tell me that he should not have used the example he did, that he feels Sheila has always had profound unresolved Oedipal yearnings directed toward her father; Sheila in turn will confess that her provocation of Paul was ill-advised in view of his strong attachment to his sister, an attachment she suspects may have involved some sort of sexual experimentation in early adolescence.

In another interview, I ask whether a sexual relationship ever developed with the Pettits.

SHEILA: Oh, we should have mentioned that last time, shouldn’t we? I completely forgot. Actually, it was a funny thing. After things worked out so well with Marge and Bill, we didn’t feel anxious to rush things with Phil and Mona. We thought we would let things define themselves a little better before we made any efforts in that direction, and meanwhile we could establish contacts with some other swingers in the area, and see more of Marge and Bill. We still were very strongly attracted to the Pettits, but we realized that the original attraction was at least partly due to the fact that we were about ready to get back into swinging. By the same token, once we were back in the fold I stopped getting hot every time Dr. Mahler put his fingers up me.

I suppose we would have started something with the Pettits sooner or later, but it kind of got started for us. Phil Pettit tried to seduce me.

PAUL: I guess you gave him so much encouragement that one night he thought he was home free.

SHEILA: That was obviously what had happened. He dropped in one afternoon just after I’d sent the kids back to school with some story about being in the neighborhood. Said he had been thinking about me and just wanted to stop by and see how I was doing. Now this sort of thing is so utterly unknown among swingers that I didn’t even put two and two together. I thought he had just stopped over to say hello. The next thing I knew he was kissing me and pawing at my breasts and telling me that he loved me and his wife didn’t understand him.

PAUL: It’s hard to believe, but civilians really talk that way. “My wife doesn’t understand me” — as if that’s such a hardship to bear! There are plenty of times when I wish to hell my wife didn’t understand me.

SHEILA: I was really stunned, John! Stimulated and excited but also a little disgusted and contemptuous at the same time. I didn’t want to have a quick tumble with him, it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to avoid. But I did like him, and he was frustrated and I didn’t want to leave him hung up like that. And it wasn’t as though I intended to keep it from Paul. I planned to tell Paul right away.

So I told Phil that if he would just cut it out with the love garbage I would be perfectly delighted to go to bed with him.

That made it his turn to be stunned. He was at a loss for words, but fortunately words aren’t necessary in bed. And Phil was very good company in bed. Just straight intercourse and not too imaginative, but very nice, and I had a lovely time.

It’s funny how you feel inhibited with a nonswinger. Afterward we were lying there together sharing a cigarette, and I looked down at his penis and had a very strong desire to take it in my mouth. But I was worried that he might think this was a perversion.

PAUL: You know, swingers aren’t the only people who suck, honey.

SHEILA: I know that, but — oh, forget it. Anyway, I had to get the point across to Phil that I wasn’t interested in afternoon quickies, but that Paul and I were very definitely interested in him and Mona. I considered and rejected all sorts of subtle approaches, and then he turned to me and smiled and said we would have to do this again.

So I said, “I’m game, but not in the afternoon. How about Friday night?”

He said, “How are we going to get rid of Mona and Paul?”

“Why don’t we just let them screw each other?” I said. “Paul and I are swingers, Phil. Wife-swappers. We do this all the time.”

Well, you could have knocked him over with a feather from a hummingbird. He thought wife-swappers only existed in books. You know the pitch — we couldn’t possibly be wife-swappers because he knew us and he didn’t know any wife-swappers. Then when he finally believed it he said he was sure Mona would never go for it.

“Oh, come off it,” I told him. “She was practically wetting her pants dancing with my husband.”

I suggested that he go home and talk her into it. I gave him some of the paperbacks to show her, but all he did was read them himself and call me the next day with a complicated plan. He couldn’t tell Mona himself, but he wanted me to get Paul to seduce Mona, and then they would all work it out together.

PAUL: It struck me as unnecessarily complicated, but what the hell. I picked an afternoon, told Phil to stay away from the house, and dropped in on Mona. The poor kid happened to have picked that day to have her hair in curlers. I made a pass at her, a straight physical pass, and she turned out to be easy enough. I found out later on that she wasn’t just easy for me. She put out for deliverymen and door-to-door salesmen whenever she got the chance.

She fucked like a mink.

Afterward I got her hot again and told her that Sheila and I were swappers.

“I sort of thought you were,” she said, perfectly matter-of-fact about the whole thing. “I suspected it. I’ve always wanted to try it, but do you think we can get Phil to go along with it?”

SHEILA: So many couples go through life like that. Both of them fooling around and keeping it a secret from each other. And both of them secretly anxious to try swinging, but each one convinced the other wouldn’t go for it.

PAUL: Once they understood what was happening, Phil and Mona were natural swingers.

SHEILA: And improved the quality of their marriage in the process. I hate to sound like one of those messianic swingers who makes it sound like a cure-all—

PAUL: Prevents divorce, cures cancer, cleans up pimples, ends bleeding gums—

SHEILA: Lord, doesn’t that just have a familiar ring to it? But it does help some people stay married. Whether it’s literally true or not, both Phil and Mona are convinced that they would have eventually gotten a divorce if we hadn’t turned them on to group sex.

PAUL: They still may, you know.

SHEILA: It’s possible.

PAUL: That marriage wasn’t exactly made in heaven, I don’t think.

SHEILA: No, I don’t suppose it was.