“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: