But there are certain couples who run the gamut of swinging and keep going further and further as we described, and then when they find no worlds left unconquered they just give the whole thing up and abandon swinging altogether. It’s like the way certain guys’ll take up a sport or a hobby and stay with it until they reach a certain level of proficiency, and then all at once they’re bored and they drop it and start in on something new. They try swinging and see what it’s like, and after they’ve tried everything there is to try, then they give it up and start collecting stamps or something.
JWW: To get back to your experience with the Creightons, I gather that the desire to extend the range of swinging was something shared by all four of you.
PAUL: Definitely. And by the same token, we were all a little reluctant to do too much too soon.
JWW: Why?
PAUL: I don’t know. Perhaps because new experiences and new ideas do take getting used to. Perhaps because we were worried about straining our relationship or ruining one or the other of our marriages...
On that point, I’m sure we sensed even then the danger of getting that intimately involved with just one other couple. There are any number of plus factors, of course. Not just such obvious things as safety and convenience but the whole quality of the relationship that develops.
SHEILA: Thinking back, it was really an extraordinary relationship. We’ve never had anything like it since. It was like a four-way marriage, if that makes any particular sense. It was really a four-way love relationship, and that can be both good and bad. It makes for a lot of very fine feelings. So often swinging is just an involved way to scratch a particular itch in a new improved fashion, but here there was emotional involvement in addition to good nitty-gritty sex, and that can make a real difference.
PAUL: It can also make for drawbacks, too.
SHEILA: Oh, yes. You know, I think maybe that sort of relationship could work in one of those hippie communes you read about, I think they have them out in California, where everybody sort of lives with everybody else in a tribal relationship and all the children are reared in common. While Paul and I aren’t exactly hippie types—
PAUL: No kidding.
SHEILA: —even so, I have to admit I find the idea of those communes very attractive. The idea of everybody just loving everybody else. Oh, I know how it sounds when you hear the words coming out of the mouths of one of those idiot flower people, but I’m serious. In a situation like that you could really have group love and make it work.
PAUL: Maybe.
SHEILA: But for us — well, with Jan and Jeff, in a sense it was as though we were all married to one another, and in another sense it wasn’t. Because we were a part of the society we lived in, and our individual marriages were separate economic and legal units. So there was a — I forget the term, it’s the anthropological reason why every society has incest taboos?
PAUL: Something about confusion of roles?
SHEILA: Something like that. As I understand it, the real reason why you can’t marry your brother has nothing to do with recessive genes and all that. Because primitive tribes didn’t know anything about genetics, they didn’t realize that inbreeding would lead to faults in the offspring. But what they did realize was that a sister and brother would grow up relating to one another in a particular way, and then if they became man and wife they would have to relate in an entirely different way, and that the outcome of all of this was a lot of confusion.
PAUL: I’m not entirely sure I’ll buy a hundred percent of that. I think they may also have noticed that sisters who got laid by their brothers had a tendency to have babies with two heads, or whatever. You don’t want to sell primitive tribesmen short. They may not calculate with the speed of a computer, but they did have a habit of coming up with the right answer sooner or later.
SHEILA: Well, that’s beside the point anyway. I may have picked a bad example, I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t love Jeff Creighton the same way I loved my own husband, because I was married to Paul and not to Jeff, and I couldn’t maintain the marriage and divide my emotional responses that way, and — oh, I don’t know, really. The four of us were just too damned close, that’s all.
PAUL: I’m sure that could only happen in a first-swap situation.
SHEILA: Except that it wasn’t a first-swap situation for Jeff and Jan.
PAUL: Well, it was close to it. I hadn’t realized that when I spoke, though. You’re right. Still, the point is that an experienced swinging couple would not be likely to get that intimately involved with another couple in an emotional sense. We’ve even known some swingers who make it a point never to have social contacts with their swinging friends, and vice versa. Of course on the other side of the ledger there are a great many swingers who associate socially almost exclusively with other swingers. I would think either extreme is probably a mistake, and yet I can understand both points of view.
SHEILA: We would never get that close with another couple again. We never have, and I’m sure we never will.
PAUL: That makes it sound as if we regret our experience with Jan and Jeff, and that isn’t true.
SHEILA: I didn’t mean it that way. It was great while it lasted, and I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it ended badly or anything like that. It didn’t. In fact, while we were swinging with them we didn’t feel there was anything unhealthy about the situation. As a matter of fact it wasn’t until afterward, when we had had experiences with a wide variety of other people, that we even thought there was anything wrong with what we had had going with the Creightons.
PAUL: It would have ended badly, though.
SHEILA: Do you think so?
PAUL: If they hadn’t moved away, yes. I’m sure of it. And I think they knew it, too, and that’s one of the reasons why they didn’t reject that job offer and stay in K.C.
SHEILA: I suppose that’s possible.
We lapse into a pensive silence. A stack of records comes to a close and Paul turns them over. Sheila takes my glass into the kitchen and freshens my drink. Paul begins to tell an anecdote about a couple they have just met for the first time and their particular social and sexual peculiarities. The conversation meanders on, turns tangentially to educational standards in the county, to local government and politics, and then, inevitably, back to sex. I ask eventually if they had had any other sexual partners during their time they were seeing the Creightons.
PAUL: We thought of it. I’m sure they did, too, as far as that goes, but it didn’t go any further than thinking. Sheila and I would discuss the possibility. In fact we would look through the club magazines and pick out ads that we would be interested in replying to, but we didn’t go so far as to draft letters or anything like that.
JWW: What stopped you?
PAUL: Oh, a few things, I guess. Most of all the feeling that Jeff and Jan wouldn’t approve, that we would be somehow disloyal to them. Also there was the worry about postal inspectors, or that we might get involved with the wrong class of people. To put it simply, it was a lot safer and easier for us to go along with Jeff and Jan than to break new ground. We certainly didn’t know anybody else who was in the swinging whirl, and the idea of plunging straight into correspondence with total strangers was kind of scary. Exciting, but also scary.
SHEILA: Actually, the idea of having sex with strangers was both of those things — exciting and scary at the same time. Remember, we were close friends of Jeff and Jan by the time we wound up making love with them.
JWW: Then your relationship with the Creightons did a great deal to determine your whole approach to swinging.
PAUL: Absolutely. On the one hand, it kept us away from the whole central world of swinging for a long time. We missed a lot while we were with them. Face it — one of the real reasons to swing is variety and novelty — making it with new people in a new situation. By staying with the Creightons, you could almost say that we were turning monogamy into a plural marriage thing and running out of variety and novelty in the process. Instead of having one wife and an endless procession of one-shot mistresses, I had two wives, if you see what I mean.