“About that time, Peter and I got back together again. He had been out to the Coast, where he lived in a commune for a few months, and was rapping on and on about the closeness of it. I had had my own mixed experiences with communes and did not want to get into that scene again... He was talking communes with some friends of his, and they mentioned the idea of putting together a group marriage. They had read books on the subject and were very strong on the idea. They had tried living with another couple that way, but it hadn’t worked out, so Peter introduced me to them, and the four of us got along pretty well, and we decided to see what would happen.
“They had a huge apartment on Riverside Drive, so there was plenty of space for us to move in with them. It was better than the communes I had been involved in, because it wasn’t stuck off in the middle of nowhere, you weren’t isolated, you could see other people besides the members of the group. Also, it had more structure, it was less casual than a commune, there weren’t people constantly drifting in and out...
“Everybody was bi, and we were all completely into group sex. This would have been better if I had liked the rest of them more than I did. But I thought the other guy was very pretentious and phony, and the other girl was, I don’t know, bossy. You know, like it was her apartment, it was her kitchen. She had lived there with her husband before they were divorced, and it was still her place. Also, she had a kid, and since she worked and I was not working at the time, it was my job to take care of the kid days. I enjoyed this at first because of the novelty of it, but got to resent it. The kid was thoroughly obnoxious. I took the massage parlor gig largely to get away from the fucking kid. I didn’t really need money at the time, I still had enough to get along and was not expected to pay rent, as this chick’s alimony covered all that.
“Other people would come by occasionally and join us in sex, but nobody else actually lived there but the four of us. I guess we were together for a couple of months. Then Peter split and went back to the Coast, and then another couple joined the remaining three of us but left after a week or two, and then another guy joined up, and we were a quartet again. And I went along with this for a while out of, I guess you would call it inertia. Until one day it hit me that I was living and balling with these three people and I couldn’t stand any of them. I didn’t like either of the guys, and I had come to the point where I literally hated the other chick. Like I wished she would just suddenly die and take her brat of a kid with her. And I thought, Christ, what am I doing with all of these rotten people?
“So I got the hell out. I’ve never been involved in anything like that since. I wouldn’t want to get involved. Just the ordinary day-to-day hassles of who cleans up the mess and who does this and who does that are too much. And you get people who can’t stand the strain of living with a single other person, and they try to solve their problems by living with three other people, and instead of fewer problems, they have more of them. I suppose it’s something to go through, and you learn from it, like anything else, but as a regular way of life, I don’t think it makes any sense.”
JWW: Jeff is twenty-eight, a look-a-like for Rob Reiner, who plays the son-in-law on All in the Family. He does administrative work for a New York hospital, where his wife, Peggy, is employed as a nurse. He and Peggy became interested in the idea of group marriage before they were married themselves.
“We liked the idea but felt it would never work in practice. We had read Harrad and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and were influenced by both of them, at the same time feeling that they were utopian and idealistic and would not work in the real world. Peggy was somewhat more inclined to think that some version of a group marriage might work. I was more skeptical, but generally speaking, our ideas were quite close on the subject.
“We both agreed that it would be possible to adapt aspects of the general philosophy to our own lives. That our getting married would not mean we would belong to each other in a possessive or exclusive way and that each of us would be free to pursue other relationships. We felt that any outside relationships, if they were honest and open and loving, would enhance our marriage rather than detract from it.
“As it happened, neither of us took any advantage of this freedom. Our sexual relationship was a good one, and we felt fulfilled by it...
“After about a year, our thoughts again turned to the group marriage concept. We tried swinging, with the idea of finding a couple we could get involved with that way. Our experiences with swinging were enjoyable, but purely in a sexual way. At first we found it tremendously exciting. Then the novelty wore off, and we realized that it was completely artificial, just bodies going through the motions. Without emotional sensitivity it was meaningless. It was valuable in that we learned we were able to enjoy sex with other people, that it didn’t unhinge us, and that it improved our sexual relationship together, but there was a point where we realized we had outgrown it.
“After we had given it up, Peggy was talking with a friend of hers, and it came out that that couple had had very similar experiences with swinging at about the same time as we did. Peggy told me about this revelation, and the other girl told her husband, and when we saw them a few nights later, it was unreal the way everybody had the same thoughts but nobody was saying anything. Someone dropped a double entendre, and we all laughed hysterically, and everything came out in the open.
“The obvious thing was to swing with them, but we were all holding back, because there was this feeling of being on the verge of something bigger than swinging. The conversation turned to group marriage, with the general idea being that if only we were in a position to move to the Arizona desert we could really get into a group thing. Then we admitted that we didn’t really want to live in the middle of the desert, even if we could have afforded to, that we liked living in New York. The idea of living together seemed impractical on a. variety of counts. Not just social pressure, but more important, the lack of privacy. We all felt a living situation might be more intimacy than we were really capable of.
“We didn’t swing together that night. Everyone wanted to, but no one wanted to be the one to bring it up. Afterward Peggy and I talked about having wanted to swing with them, and they went home and had the same conversation. We got together the following evening and swung, and it was a very intimate thing, a beautiful experience. It had the excitement we had experienced early in swinging, but at the same time, it was honest and more emotionally close and felt better afterward. In swinging we would occasionally get what I can only describe as sex hangovers, the physical and mental feeling afterward that we wouldn’t want to have sex again for like a year. There was none of this now.
“We decided to consider ourselves as four members of a group marriage. They lived a few blocks away from us, and that seemed to be an ideal distance. We would get together two nights a week. It seemed awkward to make it a scheduled thing, but we felt that otherwise there’d be constant decisions to be made over and over, and worrying that you were seeing the other couple more or less frequently than they would have preferred it, and the artificiality of a schedule seemed a small price to pay to eliminate that aggravation. So we got into the pattern of seeing them every Tuesday and Friday night.”
JWW: One might argue that the relationship Jeff describes is not a group marriage but an arrangement for mutually exclusive swinging. Several elements prompt me to label it a group marriage. Most important is that the participants so considered it. In addition, the underlying philosophy derives from the group-marriage subculture, and the emotional relationship of the partners is consistent with it.