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...