SHEILA: Even the expression “swapping” gives that impression. That you make a trade, that you give up one thing to get another. That’s one reason I’m not too crazy about the phrase. I prefer swinging.
PAUL: I’ll say you do.
SHEILA: I mean the word.
PAUL: Just kidding, love. But the point is that I wanted Sheila to make it with Jeff, not just so I could have Jan with no guilt feelings but because the thought of her having her kicks was thrilling to me. And by extension I wanted to watch the two of them together, and wanted to make love to Jan in front of Sheila. I think we all wanted that.
SHEILA: Not at first. We had to get used to it.
PAUL: True enough. We had to get used to what we were doing before we could really want to do it all in the same room. As I said, as we’ve been saying throughout, all of this was a gradual process. Let’s face it, even nowadays, in what we like to think of as highly enlightened times, people grow up with a view of sex that is not far removed from old-fashioned New England Puritanism. Even those of us with so-called liberal attitudes, with not much bias against premarital sex and with the feeling that what a man and wife do in bed is beautiful, even so there’s an inevitable feeling that sex has to be secretive and hidden, that it can never involve more than two people, that it has to be tied up with love and hooked into the fabric of a permanent relationship. Even when you reject all of this on an intellectual level, it remains a very real part of your outlook. Now people can be conditioned to get themselves free from all of this, but it takes time. It has to happen bit by bit.
JWW: When it did happen for the first time, the four of you making love in the same room, was it as a result of someone’s suggestion?
PAUL: No, it just happened.
SHEILA: It had been mentioned. Don’t you remember? We had talked about how silly it was to split up, and you said you would like to watch me with Jeff.
PAUL: In a joking way, yes. And of course the joking had a foundation in fact as joking generally does, but that was about as far as it went. No, the way it happened was simple enough. We had the lights turned down low and were doing some dancing and necking. Very slow dancing that was more a matter of vertical petting than anything Arthur Murray would recognize. It was particularly exciting because we would switch partners every once in a while, not just for dancing but for petting as well. The thing of going from one woman to another, from Jan to my wife, had a sort of orgiastic feeling to it that was very erotic.
SHEILA: Then I think it was Jeff who took off his shirt. He said he was too warm and he didn’t see any reason why he should be uncomfortable. I think by this time we all knew what we were building up to. In the books we had read, this sort of thing often started with a game of Strip Poker, but I really don’t believe any of us could have taken anything as childish as Strip Poker at all seriously. The whole idea of it is too silly. I know there are swingers who use it to break the ice, but I just can’t see it. In order for it to work, you would have to get past the fact that it’s basically so juvenile, and you would also have to be conditioned to find nudity erotic in and of itself. There is something erotic in nudity, but not when you have a bunch of naked people sitting cross-legged on the floor playing cards. That crosses the line between eroticism and absurdity.
PAUL: From the sublime to the ridiculous, you might say.
SHEILA: Just the same, when Jeff took his shirt off, the words that flashed through my mind were “Strip Poker.” We began dancing again, and he kissed me and put his hand up under my skirt. I went all weak in the knees, and when I got my strength back I pushed him away and told him all of a sudden I was uncomfortably warm myself. I took off my blouse and my bra. We started dancing again, both of us bare from the waist up, and it was something.
PAUL: Naturally one thing led to another. I took off my shirt, and Jan took off not only her blouse and bra but her skirt and panties as well. Before long we were all four of us naked. The excitement of the situation was absolutely fantastic. I was holding Jan in my arms and looking over her shoulder at the other two. Jan was a tall girl, and I only had to bend my knees slightly in order to manage coitus in a standing position. Then Jeff and Sheila saw what we were doing, and Sheila called out that we should all look at her, and she dropped to her knees in front of Jeff and took his penis in her mouth.
SHEILA: I wanted to do it. I wanted them to watch. I wanted to do it and for them to see me.
PAUL: And that just tore the lid off of everything. We never did separate that night. We rolled around on the floor screwing like mad, just kept doing it all night long...
They talk animatedly of the central role sex comes to play in their lives. There is now and then an air of braggadocio in their conversation, as if they are seeking to impress, perhaps specifically to shock. They describe an evening with the Creightons in which they engage in troilistic activity for the first time — the Creighton woman has expressed a desire to make love to two men simultaneously, and Paul has coitus with her while she fellates her husband. It is Sheila who takes the lead in describing the activity, doing so in photographic detail and explaining how she watched the entire escapade, how it excited her, and how she determined to enjoy similar pleasures herself.
JWW: It almost seems as though there was a tolerance factor operating, as though you had to extend your involvement in swinging in order to maintain the level of excitement.
PAUL: Oh, that’s absolutely right. I think that’s the case for just about everyone.
SHEILA: At the beginning, certainly. Until you find your particular groove, you have to keep getting further and further out. If you give it some thought, you can see that there’s nothing particularly remarkable in that. Swinging in any form consists of a violation of society’s rules for sexual behavior. Naturally part of the kick is the excitement of the forbidden, of kicking over the traces. And another part of the excitement is the sheer novelty of what you’re doing. So there’s an irresistible impulse to break more rules, and at the same time there’s a natural desire for even more in the way of novelty.
PAUL: Sooner or later you reach a point where there are no frontiers. The kinkier things don’t happen to turn you on, and of those things which do appeal, there are none you haven’t tried. We’ve known couples who hit that plateau in no time at all — they just plunge right into the swinging society with no holds barred and they find their own level almost at once. And then there are other couples who make their way a little at a time over a period of quite a few years, getting a little teensy bit more into the swing of things as they go. Sooner or later, though, every swinger becomes a burned-out case.
SHEILA: As in leprosy — a burned-out case is a leper for whom the disease has run its course.
PAUL: Which happens to swingers. They find their niche in the whole scheme of things and they stay there. Or drop out — and this happens a great deal of the time.
SHEILA: We did, of course.
PAUL: That was a little different. We dropped out and came back, and that’s something that I think most people go through at one time or another. Not all of them, certainly, but I would say the greater portion. People go through emotional changes, they have second thoughts...