“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.
The Games Swingers Play
A Sunday afternoon, the air crisp with the smell of burning leaves. Paul and Sheila are in particularly good spirits. Last night they went to another couple’s home for a party at which a total of a dozen persons were present. The evening seems to have been an unqualified success. They discuss it with a disarming lack of inhibitions, not so much as if to savor the experience as to convey to me the pleasure they took in it and the ease with which they are able to talk about it.
I suggest that perhaps they might discuss some of the ways they keep their swapping experiences fresh and varied. To an extent swinging does represent an attempt to avoid the presumed monotony of monogamous marital relations, and I wonder aloud whether or not the same aspect of monotony does not similarly threaten swingers. Paul agrees that this is so and points to it as a factor in precipitating their original disenchantment with the life.
SHEILA: Of course that’s the whole point — that you have to be careful not to substitute one routine for another. You have to keep things new and varied, and at the same time you have to avoid going overboard to the point where every date has to go a step further than the preceding one. I think we discussed all this before, didn’t we? It has a familiar ring to it.
JWW: Yes, but I was thinking of a different aspect. What I’m getting at is the question of how you manage this balance, this mutual avoidance of monotony and excess.
SHEILA: You have to be inventive, that’s all.
PAUL: That’s a big part of it. They say necessity is the mother of invention; well, if that’s so, then the father is monotony. But I think you make a mistake to credit inventiveness with making swinging stay interesting. More important than the new things you think of is the mental attitude you develop.
Face it — there are only so many ways to have sex. This may be more obvious when you’re limited to the same two people in a marital relationship, but it’s just as true in an orgy. There are only so many ways, so many sensations, so many methods of obtaining that happy little orgasm. If a person becomes obsessed with the need for variety, it can only turn out to be a hang-up. It’s more important to learn to enjoy what you’ve got than to be constantly yearning for more.
SHEILA: I think John is more interested in the actual methods of varying things. Aren’t you?
JWW: I think it might be of interest.
SHEILA: Well, anything to make our readers happy. It’s hard for me to believe that somebody is actually going to read all this, you know. I suppose if I really believed it I would have to weigh everything I say, or I would freeze up entirely or something...
There are certain things that a great many experienced swingers will do. I suppose you could call them games. First of all there are the icebreakers, and games of this sort are a sort of swinging version of the icebreaking games that civilians use, and to tell you the truth I think they make about as much sense.
The obvious ones, like Strip Poker or Strip Scrabble, are really too silly to talk about. I read about them all the time in phony books on swinging, but I don’t know anyone who makes much use of them. After all, once you get beyond the first stages of sexual freedom, you find out that nudity in and of itself isn’t that much of an aphrodisiac. I can’t get delirious at the thought of seeing another man’s penis, not after I’ve seen enough of them.
There’s a swinger’s version of Post Office and one of Spin the Bottle that works pretty nicely. And I would have to admit that these games serve a purpose when you have a large number of people together for the first time. A crowd of strangers is always inhibiting to certain people, and when you use this sort of game to develop a sort of round-robin petting match, it gets people into the spirit of the thing in a gradual way. Of course the ground rules vary according to the group. Sometimes it’s just a plain kissing game with the players naked. Other times different rules will be followed.
These games are usually used as icebreakers, but they also serve to vary the pace in groups that have been meeting together for some time. In the clubs, you know, you have to guard against falling into a set routine, and there are a lot of games that are used not because anybody’s absolutely crazy about them but just to break up the pattern.
PAUL: Which is one of the basic problems with clubs, and a good reason not to join one.
SHEILA: We felt that way, but not everyone does. Remember, there are advantages to a club. None of the dangers you always have in correspondence, for example. No worrying about meeting with people who will turn out to be a drag — and that happens pretty often no matter how you try to avoid it. And for some people a club helps to keep swinging in proportion.
JWW: I’m not sure I follow that last point.
SHEILA: Well, when you make all of your own arrangements, it’s very easy to find yourself going off the deep end, making so many swinging dates that you can’t keep up with your own schedule. Almost everyone seems to do this at one time or another, mainly because the average person can’t believe that there’s such a thing as too much sex.
PAUL: The clubs have set meeting times — once a week, twice a month, whatever. So you can regulate yourself that way. I don’t think that means much, to tell you the truth. If people are determined to overdo it, they can still make dates on the side.
SHEILA: From our experience, I would say that the clubs are far more oriented toward games and contests than people who meet privately on a couple-with-couple basis. Of course part of this is purely mathematical — you can’t really have much of a contest unless you have enough people to make it interesting.