Wide Open: The New Marriage

Swinging

A friend of mine inadvertently became an expert on Colley Cibber. Cibber was an English minor poet of the first half of the eighteenth century, whose chief claim to fame was the scathing denunciation to which he was subjected in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. My friend was an English major in college and did his senior paper on Cibber. When he worked for his master’s, it seemed easier to stay with Cibber than to break new ground, and for the same reason he furthered his expertise on the man in the successful pursuit of his doctorate.

At a cocktail party he was introduced to another guest with the information that they would have much to talk about, as the other guest was also intimately familiar with Cibber’s life and works. My friend replied that he never wanted to hear the name of Colley Cibber mentioned for the rest of his life, and stalked off abruptly.

That’s how I sometimes feel about swinging, or wife-swapping, or whatever the hell you want to call it. My friend had learned more about Colley Cibber than ought to be required of any man. I have heard so much about swinging, and talked so much about swinging, and written so bloody much about swinging, that I can barely watch a Tarzan movie without breaking out in hives.

This personal supersaturation in swinging as a topic for deathless prose was such that my original outline for this book made no provision for the subject. But here my friend has the advantage of me; Colley Cibber’s role in English literature is as vital as tits on a bull, while an understanding of the nature of swinging is essential to a survey of marriage in modern society.

So here we go again. If you can stand it, I suppose I can force myself.

JWW: Swinging can take many forms, and the diversity of its expression makes defining it a difficult matter. The definition I have found that best covers the subject is that swinging is mutually acknowledged recreational adultery. All of the words in the definition are important. In swinging, husband and wife are aware of each other’s extramarital activities to the point where these activities constitute a genuine aspect of their marriage. And these activities are undertaken for pleasure, excitement, satisfaction, but not in pursuit of love. Some swingers feel emotionally close to their extramarital contacts, while others maintain a purely impersonal attitude, but in any event there is a distinct difference between the feeling for one’s spouse and the feeling for one’s swinging associates.

Our concern here will have to be limited to swinging as a component of marriage and as an attempt to modify the traditional marital relationship and accommodate it to today’s world. The reasons why people get into swinging, and some of the effects it has on their lives and their sexual attitudes, is largely outside this chapter’s scope. Readers interested in a more comprehensive treatment of the subject might consult The Wife-Swap Report, a book of mine published by Dell. Where most books on swinging concern themselves with a half-dozen case histories or a couple of hundred capsulated interviews, this one is the product of a series of interviews with one couple concerning their experiences during several years of swinging, and the changes engendered in their separate selves and in their marriage. While one feels one ought to be somewhat diffident about plugging one’s own book, in this case the impulse is tempered by my feeling that I functioned as little more than a conduit for the transmission of Paul and Sheila’s own observations. The two of them have more to say about swinging than I can possibly say here, and I would only hope that you enjoy the book as much as I will enjoy receiving royalties on it.

While the temporary sexual exchange of mates is perhaps as old as the institution of monogamy, it was not until after the Second World War that swingers began to achieve numerical importance in American society. Originally, the typical swinging couple had been married for from five to fifteen years and had had relatively little premarital sexual experience. Swinging evolved out of the desire of one or both partners for extramarital sexual experience, coupled with a reluctance to endanger the marital relationship by engaging unilaterally in an adulterous love affair. Thus, extramarital sex became a joint project, and adultery was not a threat to marriage but a component of marriage.

This pattern remains the most common one in swinging, and represents a commitment to conservative middle-class values in conflict with the concept of sexual monogamy. The swinger wants to have the cake of a respectable and durable marriage while eating the cake of extramarital promiscuity. An illicit affair is unsatisfactory not only because of its potential for destroying the marriage if discovered, but also because it involves treachery and deceit; furthermore, it is generally either a tawdry consortation with pickups or prostitutes, or involves an emotional bond which is a betrayal of the spouse. People are often drawn to swinging after experimenting with extramarital affairs of this nature and finding them less than satisfactory.

In recent years, the impact of swinging upon society has been considerable. As swinging has increased in both incidence and influence, the type of couples it attracts and the role it plays in their marriages have broadened to a significant degree. Young couples now get into swinging before marrying, and instead of turning to the pastime as a reaction to the limitations of marriage, make it a part of their marriage from the beginning. There was a time when almost all swingers were between thirty and forty years old; perhaps a majority still are, but swingers in their twenties and sixties are by no means rare.

Rather than offer up more general observations on the nature of swinging, let me turn the floor over to some of its practitioners.

“I think in most cases swinging is the man’s idea. He is more likely to think of it in the first place and to be less inhibited about it. In our own case, I must say I wasn’t really aware that swinging existed before my husband started to bring up the subject. I had heard of it very vaguely, but I didn’t think it was something people like us might be involved in. I put it in a category with taking dope.

“Eddie hinted about it for awhile before he actually went and said anything direct. Left books and magazine articles on the subject where I would run over them. I knew early on what he was getting at, but I wouldn’t speak out on the subject. I couldn’t believe he would really want me to have other men. A lot of women have said the same thing. As hard as their husbands would try to get them to go along with it and give it a try, they were sure they would lose their husband’s respect if they actually went and did it.

“What decided me, I don’t know exactly. Like any decision, a little of this and a little of that, and you never know just what made up your mind for you. I got to the point where the idea excited me. Here I wasn’t used to having sex thoughts about other men, and now I was finding myself having them all the time.

“I won’t say that Eddie and I were bored with each other. We had a nice home and the children, and we were in love with each other. But it wasn’t the same as before between the two of us. You know, you start off married life having relations constantly, and everything is new and exciting, and as the years go by, the excitement goes out of it. You don’t do it so often, and you don’t get the pleasure out of it.

“But I never had these thoughts before the subject came up. I would wonder sometimes that maybe he didn’t love me as much as he did in the beginning, but most of the time I thought this was just the way it was with married couples, that sex was less important as you got along in years and the novelty of it wore off. It was thinking about swinging that made me feel that maybe everything wasn’t the way it should be with us.”

JWW: Martha is in her late thirties. Her husband, Eddie, is a few years her senior. She is somewhat plump, attractive but by no means striking, and looks very much like the housewife and mother she is. She and Eddie have been swinging for eight years. Like most swingers, they seek out partners who are very much like themselves in respect to age, socioeconomic status, education, etc. While they do not belong to a club, the majority of their contacts are with perhaps a dozen couples who live within a twenty-five mile radius of one another. They were not acquainted with any of these couples prior to their entrance into swinging. Now most of their social activity involves these couples, and it is not uncommon for them to spend purely social evenings with members of the circle without having sexual relations.

“I believe that swinging is very good for a marriage. This is true in a number of ways. Of course, the main benefit is for your sex life. Not just in the course of swinging, but the changes in your married sex life.

“For ourselves, there were so many things we did not know regarding sex. I had no experience except with Eddie, and he had not had all that much. We read books on the subject, but it is not the same thing. You learn a great deal from different partners.

“Also, swinging makes a husband and wife more exciting to each other. You come to know that you are desirable to other men, and this makes you a more desirable person, and your husband treasures you more. And the same is true of the wife.

“In the beginning, I must admit to jealousy. This was funny, because I had not expected to be jealous, but thought Eddie would be jealous, and he was not. But I was. When we were just starting out, the couples would always go to different rooms, and it would bother me that he was with a woman and I did not know what he was doing. Then the first time we were with another couple and all together in one room, it was even worse, because I saw him with her and saw the pleasure he was having, and resented it. Which was so two-faced of me, because at the same time I was having my own pleasure with that woman’s husband. But feelings of this kind do not always make sense; you cannot work them out that way.

“It did not take me long to overcome my feelings of jealousy. I believe the reason for them is that so many husbands and wives feel insecure about the people they are married to, whether they have the inferiority complex or whatever it is, that they are afraid their husband will like the other woman better, or will find her more attractive or have a better time with her. But you learn to overcome these feelings, and the end of it is that you get over jealousy in other areas besides swinging. This was not that much of a problem with us before we were swingers, but was so with many other couples, where the wife would worry constantly about the husband becoming involved with someone at his place of business.

“With swingers, you are not inclined to be jealous, because you know your husband loves you and only you, and has the sexual variety he wants with other swinging wives, and so would not need to seek it elsewhere, with the chance of falling in love with another woman.

“Another benefit of swinging is that you are close to your friends in a way that is not possible with those who do not swing. There are none of the usual secrets and inhibitions which get in the way of close friendship. With non-swingers you are constantly forcing yourself not to be sexually attracted to another woman’s husband, whereas with swingers the sex is a part of the friendship and does not threaten anyone or make anyone uncomfortable.

“I would never go so far as to say that swinging saved our marriage, as I do not feel our marriage was in any trouble before we began to swing. But I would definitely say our marriage is better now because we are swingers, and that we are both happier people for it, and know each other better, and are more deeply in love than ever.”

JWW: Swinging does not necessarily eliminate jealousy, although I would say that Martha’s views on the subject are valid in most cases. Jealousy on the part of husband or wife frequently make a couple discontinue swinging after a brief flirtation with the practice, but whether or not further experimentation would have worked things out is moot. And many swingers are capable of an interesting version of double-think in this area; they are able to accept with no qualms whatsoever their mates’ sexual relations with others, but only so long as they take place in their own presence.

I’ve just recently received a letter pointing this up from a marine stationed in the Pacific. It came to me in care of my monthly column in Swank Magazine. Its author had been overseas for nine months at the time of writing, with another fifteen months to go. He is twenty-one, and he and his wife were swingers in civilian life. He has resolved to be sexually faithful to her during his absence, and is utterly obsessed with the anxiety that she might have sexual relations with someone else during his absence. Reading between the lines, I would suspect it was his idea to remain faithful. Some excerpts from his correspondence should be instructive in this regard. I doubt that his attitudes are typical, and presume much of his anxiety derives from his extreme lack of self-confidence.

Dear Mr. Wells,

... I’m twenty-one and so is my wife. We’ve been married for two years now, but are now separated by my being stationed here. I really hate being away from her...

My wife and I were both swingers before I came into the service and will probably continue to swing after I get out of this green machine. I’m curious to find out something, so please tell me what you think. I want to know if a woman can hold off for so long. I’ve been here three months now and have been true to my wife and will continue to do so. Do you also think a man can hold off for so long?

In case you’re wondering why we are such young swingers, that’s because we never had much experience with sex before we were married, and we wanted to know how to really satisfy each other, and so we found swinging quite enjoyable, and will remain swinging with other couples. We both learned so much...

I really dig swinging, but while we’re separated we have put a freeze to it until we’re back together again. My wife now has this girlfriend who is divorced. Her girlfriend has talked to her about swinging but has never tried it, and as far as I know, my wife hasn’t mentioned anything about our being swingers to the girlfriend.

My wife has asked me if I mind her going to stag movies. I said I didn’t mind as long as she goes with a bunch of girlfriends. Did I do right by letting her go? I know it will make her hornier than she is already; that is why I don’t go myself. Do you think she’ll ever go out on me, because we have friends who are swingers? She has visited the home of one couple we swung with before, and I’m almost sure she hasn’t messed with them, because I believe her very much and trust her. But can she hold off for so long and be true to me?

She’s living now with her mom and father with our little girl. I’m just curious if she’ll be tempted to try anything. I don’t ever want to hurt her or for her to hurt me. I know she is hornier than ever, and so am I. I know I could go for two days straight screwing if I was home. I just hope she doesn’t screw nobody.

When we were together, we decided that if we were ever horny for somebody, we would bring that couple home with us if they also had the desire for us. We promise to tell each other in letters everything we do...

JWW: In my reply, I stated that it was perfectly possible that my correspondent’s wife would remain faithful to him, and that it was also possible she would not. “It seems to me,” I went on, “that rather than worry at great length over your wife’s behavior, you would be better off realizing that it’s not all that important whether or not you and your wife are sexually faithful to each other while you are apart. As swingers in civilian life, you have both learned that it is possible to have sexual relations with others without lessening your love for each other. The same principle should hold true while you are apart. As far as stag movies are concerned, while they might make your wife hornier than ever, they might also help her to sublimate her desires. In any case, I don’t see any point in your telling her not to go. It would probably be best for you to encourage her to do what she wants, so that she won’t wind up feeling guilty and keeping things from you.”

I received a reply to my letter almost by return mail. I was interested to note that certain paragraphs from the first letter were repeated almost verbatim, relating the writer’s concern about his shyness with other women in swinging situations and his doubts concerning his own attractiveness and sexual desirability. In response to the points I raised, he commented as follows:

Dear Mr. Wells,

... I’m on maneuvers now and still would rather be home with my wife and child. I’m still holding off (it’s hard) and hoping my wife is doing the same. You said as swingers in civilian life that we both learned that it is possible to have sexual relations with others without lessening our love for each other. Yes, this is true. We have. But I know it would hurt her if while we were apart I were to have sex with other women, and it would hurt me if she had sex with another man. We always said that we would do everything together, like if I wanted to have sex with a woman, she would have sex with a man in the same house at the same time. It would hurt both of us to know that we were unfaithful, or that I was unfaithful to her while she was faithful to me, or vice versa.

Now, I want to ask you about the effects of going without sex for a whole year. Can a man my age continue his normal sex life under those circumstances? Will I be able to develop my control of holding off for long periods of time till my wife reaches orgasm? Can a man lose his potency because he doesn’t have sex for a year? I’m horny as ever and want to remain faithful to my wife. A lot of guys here have made bets saying I ain’t gonna last much longer.

I told you about my wife visiting some of our swinging friends. There’s one couple who tease her about having sex. Should she continue to visit them, or tell them to stop, or what?

JWW: One detects various undercurrents in these letters. I have the feeling, for example, that the writer would welcome advice from me to have extramarital relations for the sake of his health, or so that he will be sexually adequate when reunited with his wife. But what I find most interesting is the extraordinary distinction drawn between the shared adultery of swinging and the “cheating” of unilateral extramarital relations during their forced separation. He seems to feel that, should he cheat on his wife, she will be morally free to cheat on him in turn, and he emphatically does not want that to happen.

I’d like to know just how this couple was introduced to swinging in the first place. I suspect that the desire to learn more about sex is more a rationalization than a motive, and wonder whether it was the husband or the wife who first wanted to swing, whether the desire evolved spontaneously or was suggested by another couple. Whatever the precise circumstances, this man’s attitude points up the fact that swinging does not perforce eliminate sexual jealousy. Rather, it facilitates a medium for extramarital relations in which jealousy is not allowed to operate, while leaving the fundamental feelings of the partners largely unchanged.

To an extent, this paradox is no doubt related to the youth and relative inexperience (not to mention insecurity) of my correspondent and his wife. I would postulate that, had they been married longer and been more extensively involved with swinging prior to a separation of this sort, they would very likely have reached an understanding before the separation that each would be free to have casual sexual relations with others. Many couples, swingers or not, make a similar accommodation, and I have known swingers who replace the shared adultery of swinging together under the same roof with a sharing of confidences during periods of separation; they have sex as they please, but tell each other everything through the mails.

Is jealousy a part of the makeup of experienced swingers? In some cases it is. Consider the following:

“One thing we’ve learned to be careful with is when a couple gets involved in our general circle of friends and it turns out that they’re not married, or not married to each other. I know that a lot of swingers couldn’t care less on this subject, just so the people are friendly and attractive and there are as many women as men. But we don’t feel this way. If a man or woman isn’t married, he or she doesn’t have the same amount to lose as everybody else. A single woman could let herself get involved with another woman’s husband beyond the point of just swinging. This can be a very dangerous thing. When it’s all a matter of married couples, all of them in the same general situation, you know nothing’s going to come of it but a pleasant evening together. Of course, there rare exceptions. Everyone has stories of swinging with a couple, and then the other husband will call the wife during an afternoon and try to set up something private. To me, that’s a case of people who are not really swingers at heart and do not understand the openness that is a part of the ideal swinging marriage.

“There is one couple we see frequently who are not married but might as well be. He is separated from his wife but is unable to get a divorce, and his swinging partner lives with her widowed mother, so they cannot actually live together, not that they could anyway, because of his position in the community. However, they have been going together for a matter of years, and we consider them the same as if they were married, and do not see them as a threat to our own marriages. Also, neither of them has ever tried to start anything outside of regular swinging channels. Even so, I know we would all be happy to see the two of them get married, which they intend to do if the opportunity ever comes along.”

JWW: Another husband, a veteran of several years of swinging and group sex, was astonished to discover within himself a capacity for jealousy he had never thought existed. In the course of a business trip, he called his wife, only to have a man answer the phone. He thought the voice was one he recognized, that of a neighbor.

“I was stunned. I slammed down the phone and started pacing the floor. The idea that she would be with someone else behind my back had me livid with rage. Fortunately, I called her back almost immediately. She answered, and I started to give her hell. She didn’t know what I was talking about, insisting that she was alone in the house. Ultimately, I actually called the neighbor, who of course had been home with his wife the entire time; I’d had a wrong number the first time and had flown completely off the handle without taking the trouble to find out the actual circumstances.

“Later we wound up talking it out at length. It turned out that she occasionally would have enjoyed having sex while I was on a trip. For that matter, I’d had my share of opportunities on the road and hated to turn them down. What bothered each of us was not the idea of sex with someone else but the thought of being taken advantage of behind our backs. The upshot was that when I’m on the road we act as free agents and can do what we want, but we avoid getting involved in anything and tell each other about it afterward. It’s exciting in its own way, just as regular swinging is exciting in its particular way.”

JWW: Other swinging couples will work out still other forms of accommodation during periods apart from one another, with the general aim of eliminating jealousy and deception and avoiding anything which might threaten a marriage. The experience of two couples in western Pennsylvania provides a good example. Both couples were around forty and had been swinging for almost ten years. They had met in the course of swinging, and for quite a few years each couple had been the other’s best friends. I interviewed the two couples together and learned that they swung only as couples and only with couples similar to themselves in age, background, and marital status. Then one of the husbands explained an arrangement they had made the previous summer:

“Joe’s wife, Ulla, went over with her mother to visit her relatives in Norway. She was gone for two months, while Joe was left alone to batch it. Meanwhile, as usual, I was on the road four days out of every seven. A couple of nights a week Joe would come over here and have supper with Frieda just so they could keep each other company. Well, it wasn’t long before one thing led to another, and the two of them went to bed together. I mean, they’d been doing this for years, and it seemed ridiculous for them not to do it just because I was a hundred miles away and Ulla was in Norway.

“They told me about it that weekend, and I figured, what the hell, why not? Also Joe wrote to Ulla, and she wrote back that she was relieved to hear it, because she knew it would be a strain for Joe to go without sex for two months, and if he was with Frieda, she wouldn’t have to worry about him bringing home a disease or wrecking a marriage or any of that sort of thing. He also wrote her to feel free to enjoy herself in Norway, and she had been considering having an affair over there but had been reluctant to do anything behind Joe’s back. And in the meantime I had taken out this waitress a couple of times in one of the towns I’m in frequently, but I never let it go further than a dinner date. Now that I knew Joe and Frieda were taking care of each other while I was on the road, I felt free to bring the waitress back to the motel with me. Then Ulla came back from Norway, and things got back to normal again, and we had all of us learned that swinging didn’t have to be as rigid a business as we had made it before.”

JWW: How does a swinging marriage differ from a non-swinging marriage? What changes does this sort of organized adultery engender in a marital relationship?

Swingers are almost unanimous in holding that the practice has had a beneficial effect on the nature of their marriages, whether or not they go so far as to credit it with saving marriages that would otherwise have failed. The points most often made are that swinging has made them more open to each other, more honest with each other, more sensitive to each other and to their own inner selves.

“Before we got into this, I never really let Greg know me, and I never really knew him. It’s as if we were afraid to open up to each other. Instead of growing closer together, we were gradually growing farther and farther apart. He had his work and his bowling league. I had my housework and my reading and my women friends. We shared the children and the house and our bed, and bed was becoming less and less important to us as time went by.

“As a matter of fact, we were both aware of what was happening before we thought at all about swinging. We went through stages of trying to find an activity that would bring us closer together. We tried to get ourselves interested in various hobbies — making wine at home, taking an interest in political activity. All of these things just seemed like a phony attempt at togetherness. Looking back on it now, we can laugh at ourselves. At the time, though, it was a desperate attempt to make married life more meaningful. Neither of us wanted what so many of our acquaintances seem to have, a dead marriage where two people go on living under the same roof and caring less and less about each other as the years go by.

“Swinging, at the beginning, was a fairly traumatic experience for us. In so many ways we were forced to look at our inner feelings and talk things out. We had to figure out how we really felt about ourselves and each other, and also our feelings about sex and morality and convention and, oh, virtually everything. What I remember most vividly about our first attempt at swinging is not the time we spent with the other couple, but the conversation we had when we got back home. We sat up talking until dawn. I found myself saying things to Greg that I hadn’t even thought to myself before.

“From what people have told me, I gather that this happens with a great many people. Not all of them, of course. We’ve met people who evidently drifted into swinging without a second thought and don’t seem to have enlarged themselves at all as a result of their experiences. Those are the kind of people we try to avoid.”

JWW: This deepening of the marital bond, this heightened sensitivity to one’s partner, is reported not only by those who embrace swinging wholeheartedly but also by couples who make one or two ventures in that area before deciding that it is not for them. Cases of this sort are less likely to be reported in the literature of the field, perhaps because such couples do not remain in the subculture long enough to come to an investigator’s attention. I’ve come across quite a few couples whose negative experiences with swinging led them to abandon it early on. Some condemn swinging out of hand and offer strong negative comments on the practice and its practitioners. Others are less unequivocal on the subject, maintaining that swinging may well be valuable but that it turned out to be other than a desirable situation in their own particular case. Occasionally there is the implication that they might make another attempt at it under optimum circumstances, should the occasion arise. In any event, however, almost all of these persons feel that the experience was a beneficial one in terms of their marriage, that it matured them and helped them to discover each other. The husband quoted here gives a typical response:

“I’m very glad we tried it. It didn’t work out for us, and I don’t think we would ever be inclined to try it again, but it’s something I’m very glad we went through. For one thing, it was something I wanted to get involved in for a period of years before we actually got around to it. I had fantasies on the subject before I even thought about it as something we actually might do, and then it was a long time before I got up the courage to suggest it to my wife. After that, it was even longer before she agreed to go along with it, I didn’t put any real pressure on, I don’t think, but she was aware that this was something I wanted to try, and that was why she ultimately agreed to find out what the whole thing was all about...

“If nothing else, the fact that we tried it managed to get the desire for it out of my system. I’m sure I would otherwise have gone on being preoccupied with the idea indefinitely.

“Besides this, our experiences drew us together to a great extent. I’m not sure if I can explain this sensibly. A part of it was the feeling that we had shared something, that we had gone through a particular ordeal together. That makes it sound as though we survived a shipwreck together or something. That’s not exactly what I mean. It was more that we had struck a new level of intimacy. Seeing my wife having sexual relations with another man, seeing her perform certain acts with this total stranger that she had previously performed only with me, gave me a very warm feeling toward her. I think I grew to see her more as a sexual being in her own right than as an extension of myself, as a human being instead of as someone labeled ‘wife.’ Also the knowledge that she was doing this primarily for my benefit, to please me, made me realize how deeply she loved me and made me aware how I treasured her.

“Another effect was that our sexual relationship with each other became more intense and meaningful after we had tried swinging. We really got over our inhibitions with each other and became far more experimental sexually. We would look at pornography together, we started experimenting with sexual toys like vibrators and that kind of thing. We like to say that we’ve become swingers, but a special kind of swingers who need only each other. I think what happened was that after we had been through a scene like that, we knew neither of us had to worry about shocking or disgusting the other, and we were able to bring fantasies to life without sharing our bed with anyone else.

“Sometimes as a prelude to sexual relations we will talk about a couple we’ve met and engage in a verbal fantasy of swinging with them, telling each other what we would like to do with the other couple, etc. This fantasy won’t represent a real desire but will be a conscious method of stimulating ourselves through fantasy.”

JWW: What comments of this sort suggest, among other things, is that experimentation with swinging functions much in the manner of an encounter group, forcing participants to tear down various defenses and be more honest with themselves and with others. Thus it may have some of the dangers of the encounter group — i.e., our emotional defenses generally exist for a reason, and it can be dangerous for us to discard them wholesale.

Awhile ago I was interviewed on an Ohio radio station on the topic of swinging. Also interviewed on the same show was a clinical psychologist from Cincinnati whose experiences with swinging were wholly negative; in contrast, I reported that the majority of couples whom I’d interviewed reported distinctly positive experiences with swinging. This all seems natural enough. People for whom swinging worked out well do not find themselves seeking a psychologist’s help, while people who have been severely upset through such experiences do not wind up telling me their troubles.

There are two obvious ways in which swinging improves a marital relationship. First, as we have been discussing, it may foster the growth of intimacy and honesty between the partners. Second, it may eliminate the frustration of wanting extramarital sex but being unable to reconcile such sex with the concept of marriage.

The charge is occasionally leveled against swinging that it divorces love and sex and reduces sex to a purely physical activity, or makes of it a social device similar to a bridge game or cocktail party. One can hardly deny the charge, since it is fundamental to the whole concept of swinging.

In this connection, it might be worthwhile that the whole point of swinging, for most of the people who engage in it, is distinctly sexual. This may well seem obvious, but in the midst of thoughtful discussions of swinging’s role in opening up marital relationships and bringing partners closer together, one can easily lose sight of the fact that couples swing out of a desire for new sexual partners with whom they can perform sexual acts.

Having established this, we can then consider what the existence of swinging tells us about the way sex and marriage are perceived. Obviously, the swinger continues to see a monogamous marriage as the most desirable life style, while finding strict sexual monogamy confining. He takes it for granted that a man will desire women other than his wife, that a woman will wish to have sex with other men besides her husband. And while he may feel that swinging itself is not yet socially respectable, he feels that the desire for such activity is virtually universal.

“There are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who swing and the ones who wish they did. I’ve heard guys say that they’ve never desired another woman besides their wife. Well, there was a time when I said much the same thing myself. Maybe I believed it, maybe I just liked the sound of it, but it was a load of crap. And when I hear other men say it, I’m convinced it’s just as much a load of crap now as it was when I said it. It’s natural to want other partners. It’s a normal biological thing. You take a healthy male and show him a good-looking female, and he is going to respond to her. A wedding ring on his finger won’t keep him from getting a hard-on, unless he’s simply made himself so uptight that he’s wearing that wedding ring right around his balls.”

JWW: By the same token, the extension of sex beyond the marital relationship is seen as proof that the marriage is more than “just sex.”

“Sex is something we have with each other or with other people. Love is something we have between ourselves. Now we’re in a position to see the difference, and to know how much more complete love is. That doesn’t mean pure sex isn’t worthwhile, but it’s on another level entirely.”

“Our first experiences with swinging were pretty tame by current standards. The whole idea of it was so far out for us at the time. In the course of the first four months we had five, maybe six meetings with other couples. These were couples we met by answering ads in the magazines. The format of our dates with these couples was virtually identical. After a few exchanges of letters and photographs, we would go to their home after dinner. One couple suggested we all meet first for a drink at a cocktail lounge to look each other over, and then we went to their home from there. Anyway, we would have a drink or two and get to know each other conversationally. Then there would be something to break the ice, dancing or strip poker or dirty password or some parlor game or other, and then we would pair off with each other, and one of us would go to a bedroom with one of the others, and the other two people would stay in the living room. We would have sex in private, then get dressed and all get together again for coffee and some more conversation. Once or twice we left almost immediately after the sex was finished because of a generally uptight feeling and wanting to be alone, but usually we would talk for a while, and the conversation at those times was a lot looser and easier than before the sex.

“Then ultimately we swung for a second time with one of these couples, and they were more experienced swingers than we were, and we went to separate rooms as usual but afterward sat around naked, the four of us together. Then we very naturally drifted into a scene where I made love to the other guy’s wife while he made love to Kathy, all four of us in the same room, and in a sense you could say that that was when we really became swingers. What we did before then would fit the old-fashioned term of wife-swapping, because we were trading partners and having the same behind-closed-doors sex of an ordinary husband and wife. But now we have developed the new attitude of extending ourselves sexually and getting into new things, and as far as we’re concerned, that’s what swinging’s all about, that’s the name of the game.”

JWW: Most initial swinging experiences are as described above, with activity confined to couples in separate rooms. And in most cases the swinging repertoire gradually opens up, usually going through a series of stages. First the couples will have sex in front of one another. Then group activity will occur. Female homosexual relations are often the next stage. Male homosexual relations occur in a smaller percentage of cases, but could be said to represent a further evolutionary step in the progress of a swinging couple.

“I think it’s very natural to keep progressing this way. I know it’s a standard way people develop sexually through swinging. Once you’ve taken the first big step of having sex with another couple, it’s easy to start doing a lot of other things society regards as perverted. When you try one thing and discover it’s a tremendous source of pleasure, it’s only sensible to start wondering what other things might be pleasurable in the same way.

“Gradually your curiosity begins to get the better of your hang-ups. You start by realizing that a certain act is all right for other people. Then you get to the point where you know you desire it but are still a little reluctant to take the plunge. Then finally you say what the hell, why not, and you go ahead and give it a try, and it turns out to be a kick. Each time it gets easier to go through those changes in a shorter period of time, because your experience up to that point has made you a less repressed and less inhibited person and you’ve learned to open up readily to new forms of enjoyment.

“In our case, Kathy was a long time letting herself get into a bi scene with another girl. It would come up almost all the time, it seemed like, but swingers know how to take no for an answer, and there was no pressure involved. A few times she was told by girls that they wanted to, you know, go down on her, and wouldn’t expect her to do anything in return. She just couldn’t bring herself to go along with this.

“Then one night we were at a scene with maybe three other couples, and Kathy caught up in a tangle of bodies, and she looked down and saw this girl stroking her thighs. And she was going to say something, but she didn’t, and she stopped looking in that direction, and a minute or two later the girl started going down on her. Just knowing it was a woman doing it made it exciting for her, but she was able to accept it because she was also involved with a man at the same time, and besides, she had not encouraged the girl or even agreed to it formally.

“That same night, she was able to get into the bi scene completely. Another girl made a tentative pass at her, and she had grown enough from the earlier experience to be able to participate fully, with each of them taking an active part.

“In my own case, I would say that my own attitudes changed at least in part because of Kathy’s experiences with bi activity. I found that I gradually reached the point where I was constantly wondering what it would be like to fellate another man. Not that I would look at a guy and have the desire to go down on him, but more that I would have this abstract urge to suck a cock.

“One night we were at a swing with a lot of strangers, and there was some male bisexual activity going on along with everything else, and I decided what the hell, why not. I simply went over to this guy who had been performing with another man earlier — so I knew he wouldn’t have any real objection — and I went down on him without a word. It was incredibly exciting for me, probably because of the way I had built it up in my mind. I enjoyed the experience completely, then walked away from him without saying anything.

“Kathy hadn’t seen this, but later that night I told her about it. I think I expected her to disapprove, though I don’t know why, as I had never disapproved in the slightest over her own bi acts. When she approved, I was able to be a lot more cool about it. From that point on I would have sex with other men when the opportunity presented itself, and gradually came to where I not only enjoyed the act, either active or passive, but also was able to relate to other men sexually, to be attracted to a man physically instead of being involved merely in a sexual act with his genitals. Along the way, there were times when I had doubts about whether this was right or manly or whatever, because of the prejudice our society builds into us against male homosexual activity, but I gradually outgrew all of this and now consider myself a genuine bisexual. I prefer sex with women, and I wouldn’t want to have a relationship with a man except in a group sex context, but I’m basically fully bisexual.”

JWW: I’ve quoted this account at length because I think it does a superb job of illustrating the manner in which sexual horizons are broadened in the course of extended involvement with swinging. This is not to suggest that all swingers extend their horizons to this degree. A considerable majority of swinging wives do experience homosexual relations sooner or later, while a majority of swinging husbands do not. (The reasons for this dichotomy are beyond our scope here, but are discussed at length in The Wife-Swap Report and Women Who Swing Both Ways, among other places. And my observations indicate that the gap is diminishing; male bisexuality is definitely increasing among swingers in general.)

However far this progression may carry, it almost always exists. The swinger moves slowly or swiftly from sexual fidelity to permissive adultery and on into the more esoteric reaches of sexual expression, with the ultimate goal being that stage of sexuality which Freud called “polymorphous perverse,” and which swingers call “sexual liberation.”

A search for new frontiers in sex is a logical consequence of divorcing sex from emotional involvement, though I doubt that it is an inevitable consequence. And I think the view that sex can provide ultimate pleasure and satisfaction is very much an attitude of our times, and one which is very much a part of the growth of swinging. That couples turn to swinging when a marital sexual relationship goes stale is not the whole story; one must appreciate that contemporary men and women expect more of sex than previous generations did.

What is the final result of this search for the last word in sexual expression, this quest for the golden fleece of absolute orgasm?

Here are two perspectives on the subject. The first speaker is a woman in her early forties who has spent just over a dozen years as a swinger:

“For a long time, swinging was a very stable activity for us. Our first contacts were with several couples here in town, and they let us know that there was a group forming for swinging. There were six couples in the group when we joined it, and it finally grew to a maximum size of a dozen couples. We would meet once a month, have drinks, possibly watch a stag movie together, and then draw partners and go to the wife’s house for two hours of sex.

“It probably sounds very strange that we had such a completely confined type of swinging scene, with everyone just having contacts within the group on a once-a-month basis. You have to realize that we were completely isolated. In our town, it was impossible at that time to obtain any of the correspondence magazines, and even books on swinging were hard to come by. We knew that there were a lot of other people out there who were into swapping, and we knew they had a wilder scene going than we did, but we didn’t know how to get in touch with anyone, and there was a general reluctance to experiment. One major factor, I guess, was that everyone in our group was really worried about the possibility of exposure, so it was easier to go on as we were.

“Then ultimately we got out of all that and began engaging in correspondence, and before long, swinging became the most important thing in our lives. It was really an insane time for us. We were swinging at least once a week, and often would swing both Friday and Saturday nights. When we missed a weekend we thought of it as an opportunity we had let slip by...

“There was this constant sense that something new might happen, that we might go a little bit farther each time. For a long while we crept along in stages, talking ourselves up for each new experiment, and then we seemed to hit a point where we all at once became hard-core swingers, and then you didn’t have to talk us into anything, you had only to suggest it. We got into mild sadomasochism and bisexuality and all kinds of group scenes. There’s no real way to describe it beyond saying that we did everything.

“The next stage we hit was when we had done everything, and we found that our kick was to turn on people who hadn’t gone so far yet. It seemed we had just finished being pupils when we became teachers. We learned to be very deliberately seductive. Looking back, I’m ashamed of that stage, because we were quite calculating and dishonest in getting younger couples to try something they hadn’t done before. I don’t think we did anyone any harm, but I’m ashamed all the same.

“What came about finally was the realization that swinging couldn’t be life itself, that it could be only a part of life. And that you couldn’t engage in it that intensively without harming your feelings toward yourselves and toward others, and even toward sex in general. You could say that we outgrew the kind of swinging we had been doing, and began to settle down...

“Our present pattern is almost like a return to the way we started out in the first place. Namely, we have a circle of a dozen or so couples that we see from time to time, not all at once, but one or two other couples every once in a while, with occasional contacts with new couples who are friends of someone, or whatever. We have group sex on these occasions, and once in a while we’ll all agree to act out some sort of fantasy situation or other, but basically it’s a much lower-keyed sort of affair. There are times when we miss the special excitement of the time when sex was everything to us, but by and large we’re glad those days are over.”

JWW: Another informant described through a series of letters a similar progression from plain to fancy swinging. An emotional crisis subsequently precipitated a complete withdrawal from swinging activity. He wrote:

“If we had it all to do over again, I would make damn sure that swinging never again assumed such proportions in our lives. We thought of ourselves as truly liberated spirits, the vanguard of a Bright New World of sexual freedom, when actually we were nothing more or less than two people for whom wild sexual activity had become an absolute obsession...

“I find myself looking back nostalgically on those days when we first began to get caught up in swinging. Perhaps it is an illusion, but they seem to me very dewy and innocent in retrospect. It is hard for me to say that I regret having gotten into this in the first place. It has been advantageous in certain ways, a mistake in others. Perhaps it will be possible one day for us to resume swinging, although I doubt it greatly. I cannot say that our marriage is better or worse for what we have been through, as there is no way of knowing what it would have been otherwise. Too, I suspect that the credit or blame for what has become of us may be attached more to our individual selves than to the institution of swinging; it, like everything else, is probably what you make it. But I am quite certain that, for better or for worse, it is a closed chapter in our lives.”

JWW: The patterns we have been discussing are those of swinging in its purest and most traditional forms, and we have thus far confined ourselves to that form of swinging in which love and sex are purposefully separated from each other. Couples may be friends or may carefully remain strangers except in a sexual sense, but in either case sexual promiscuity is combined with emotional fidelity.

In recent years a new type of swinging couple has begun to emerge. This couple is young, probably under thirty, and may or may not be married.

What distinguishes such couples from traditional swingers is a desire to experience not merely sexual but also emotional intimacy with others. They see love not as something to be reserved exclusively for one’s husband or wife but to be bestowed upon anyone with whom one desires to have sexual relations. Often they will seek swinging contacts with the stated desire of establishing a group of couples who will function almost as an extended family, and the possibility of ultimately uniting in one or another form of group marriage is frequently considered and often discussed.

We will examine some of the forces operating in group and plural marriages in subsequent chapters, but I think we can consider this type of swinger here in the specific context of swinging. Certainly a great many more young couples get into this sort of swinging than ever become serious about the idea of group marriage, let alone take concrete steps toward achieving the actualization of the idea.

“We first got into this spontaneously. We were very close with this other couple in the building, saw them a few nights every week, and one night we were all stoned, and a sex thing developed. The outcome was that I balled the other girl, and Ruth went downstairs with the other guy, although they didn’t wind up actually making it together.

“Well, the other couple couldn’t handle it. Ruth and I were very easy about it, but when we saw them after that, they were like uptight about it, didn’t want to discuss it at all, and we started to see less of them. We weren’t especially surprised when they moved out.

“We talked about it a lot, though, and rapped about how love wasn’t an exclusive thing or anything, and how under ideal circumstances it ought to be possible to have a really complete relationship with another couple. We came to the conclusion that when you’re friends with another couple there’s almost always a mutual sexual attraction operating, and you have to go through the phoniness of suppressing it, or else you ruin the relationship. Which means that you have to pretend that the attraction doesn’t exist, and that makes it impossible to be as close as you could be otherwise.

“So we came up with this ideal image of a friendship where we would all have sex together and all be really true friends, and even all love each other. We were confident enough of the way we felt toward each other so that we were never really concerned that it could interfere with the thing we have going for ourselves.”

JWW: As an initial experiment, this couple contacted prospective partners through an underground newspaper. Other contacts were made at a bar which caters to swinging couples. The results, while not wholly unsuccessful, were not what they were looking for.

“The novelty of doing this made it very exciting, I got a tremendous thrill the first time I saw Ruth in another guy’s arms, getting pleasure from him and giving pleasure to him. And we liked the idea of being able to cut through the usual phony conventions of relationships and have sex out in the open. What put us off was that these people did not really want to know us. They just wanted to ball us. They were holding themselves back. Well, a certain amount of that is probably inevitable at first. You’re naturally uptight about putting it all out in front with someone you don’t know yet. But the thing was that they didn’t want to get to know us. I mean, one time I was having a really great time with this girl, kissing her breasts and giving her a nice lazy finger wave, and I looked up at her and said, ‘I love you.’ Because I had a great feeling of tenderness and love for her at that moment. Well, she went all pale and told me never to say that, and that just killed the whole thing for both of us. She couldn’t really respond because she was afraid I was going to fuck things up by falling in love with her, and I couldn’t really get into anything with her because I knew how she felt, and I kept picking up all her negative vibes, and it was a very bad scene. We ultimately did screw, probably more out of a sense of obligation than any real desire, but she had screwed up what could have been a really together experience, and I knew that as far as she was concerned, I had screwed it up.

“After that, I stopped telling women I loved them, but it was always the same kind of scene. And also we would meet a couple and after sitting around with them for a few hours we would know that we didn’t have much in common and would never be really close friends, but the situation was so structured that you had to go ahead and have sex or you would be putting them down. It was all very stupid, because we were getting just what we didn’t want, finding ourselves locked into balling people we didn’t even like, or guarding our emotions with people so as not to do bad things to their heads.

“So we gave the whole thing up, but we still liked the idea of it. Our last shot was with a couple who wrote an ad that appealed to us. The ad implied that they wanted only to meet people with their heads together who wanted a really meaningful relationship. This looked great on paper, but it turned out that for them the definition meant we would all smoke dope together and be bisexual. The dope was cool, but we weren’t sure about the bisexual part, and also, they were no more into the idea of emotional intimacy than any of the others, so we turned off to the whole scene.

“Then there was this couple we became friendly with, Dan and Judy, and one time Dan and I were alone together and we were talking about something to do with sex, and for some reason or other I told him about our experience. I didn’t have it in mind that they would be interested. I just felt open enough with Dan so that I felt I could talk about these scenes we had been involved in.

“It turned out that he and Judy had gone through a lot of the same changes, but hadn’t done anything about it to the extent that we had. The closest they came was when a college roommate of Dan’s was staying with them for a few weeks, and the roommate balled Judy one afternoon while Dan was at work, and they told him about it when he came home; and after a certain amount of getting it all together, they worked out a three-in-a-bed scene which they stayed with until the roommate split for the Coast.

“We worked it out that I dug Judy and he dug Ruth, and that we would discuss it with the girls and see what happened. What happened was that we all balled the next night. One thing I have to admit is that now that we had this intimacy that we had always wanted, I came very close to freaking. I heard Dan and Ruth telling each other how they loved each other, and I got a stab of jealousy that I couldn’t believe. But then it just got washed away by this tremendous feeling of well-being, this sense that everything was really right for the first time. Of the four of us, everybody genuinely loves everybody else. The important thing isn’t the sex. It’s the way the sex is a part of everything else and it all goes together so completely.

“At the present time, we’re considering another couple. The guy works in Dan’s office, and the six of us have been together quite a few times, and Ruth and Judy and Dan and I agree that we have the right kind of feelings toward them. And we think that three couples would be better than two. The big thing now is deciding how to broach this to them. I think their heads are in the right place, but we’ve never gotten into the topic of love-based friendships with them and don’t know for sure how they’ll handle it. We don’t want to be laying any trips on them. What we may do is let it come out in conversation that the four of us have this thing going, and see where it goes from there. Actually, we’re just about at the point now with them where it’s artificial to keep them from knowing what kind of scene we have going. We know them too well to have that kind of secret from them.

“Sometimes the question of group marriage comes up, but none of us can really see that, not in our case. As close as we are, Dan and Judy are a unit, and Ruth and I are a unit. We prefer it that way. It’s important to belong to your friends, but it’s also important to belong in a special way to just one other person. For us, anyhow.

“The feelings we all have for each other, it all makes every other friendship we’ve any of us ever had seem like nothing at all. And you just can’t compare our situation to meeting strangers in a bar and taking them home and fucking them and then never seeing them again. It’s so completely different in every respect.”

JWW: A great many swingers see themselves as riding the wave of the future, and certainly the growth of the custom has been dramatic enough. I sometimes suspect, though, that our attitudes are evolving toward a point where swinging will ultimately become obsolete. Based as it is on the principle of emotional monogamy, it cannot logically outlive that principle. I’m sure that the sexual relationship described above has far more attraction for the idealistic young than the emotionally sterile swinging seen elsewhere in this chapter.

As we have seen, the swinging marriage makes extramarital sex a function of the marriage itself. Another new style in marriage similarly facilitates extramarital sex, but in a way which replaces togetherness with the acknowledgment of the rights of privacy. Partners in a permissive marriage subscribe to a concept of matrimony which allows for extramarital sexual relations — and even extramarital love — within a fundamentally monogamous framework.