“We weren’t as flexible after we were married. When we were living together, we could have a hassle and one of us would walk out and then walk back in a few days later, and it worked itself out. When the same kind of thing happened after the wedding, there was this feeling that the break had to be permanent. I can’t really explain it, but it was there.”
JWW: This particular couple lived together for five years, were married for slightly over two years, then separated permanently. Interestingly, they have not divorced, neither of them seeing any point in a divorce other than the freedom to make the same mistake all over again. Both are living together with other people now, and have been for several years.
JWW: Living together is not so much an alternative to the traditional monogamous marriage as are the marital forms we shall encounter in the following chapters. It is relevant here more in terms of the way it reflects so many changes in our perception of proper sexual behavior, of courtship, of marriage.
Twenty or forty years ago, college sophomores and Greenwich Village free spirits used up a great many man-hours talking about the desirability of free love. Just what this term meant depended upon the speakers and the circumstances, and perhaps in the majority of cases the phrase was employed largely as an intellectual argument for premarital intercourse. (When I went to college, it was said that there was no such thing as free love, not so long as you had to pay tuition.) In ideal terms, however, the phrase often pointed to a sexual utopia wherein people would live together without being married, retaining all their individual rights and unregimented by the dictates of society.
Implicit in the advocacy of this sort of free love was the understanding that it would (or should) ultimately replace marriage.
Couples who live together today practice free love to an extent that those old bohemians would not have deemed possible. If this tells us a great deal about the institution of marriage in contemporary society, I would submit that the continuing perseverance of marriage and its evident ultimate appeal to so many of these same couples tells us even more about marriage.
Again, this chapter is different in another way from those which follow it. The practice it concerns is one which is rapidly becoming the norm, much as premarital intercourse became the norm some years before.
Group marriages, swinging marriages, open marriages — these alternatives to traditional monogamy are not the norm, nor is there much likelihood that they will become the norm in the foreseeable future, the visionary statements of their staunchest advocates notwithstanding. Their significance lies less in the number of people experimenting with them than in the fact that they exist at all.
Swinging
A friend of mine inadvertently became an expert on Colley Cibber. Cibber was an English minor poet of the first half of the eighteenth century, whose chief claim to fame was the scathing denunciation to which he was subjected in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. My friend was an English major in college and did his senior paper on Cibber. When he worked for his master’s, it seemed easier to stay with Cibber than to break new ground, and for the same reason he furthered his expertise on the man in the successful pursuit of his doctorate.
At a cocktail party he was introduced to another guest with the information that they would have much to talk about, as the other guest was also intimately familiar with Cibber’s life and works. My friend replied that he never wanted to hear the name of Colley Cibber mentioned for the rest of his life, and stalked off abruptly.
That’s how I sometimes feel about swinging, or wife-swapping, or whatever the hell you want to call it. My friend had learned more about Colley Cibber than ought to be required of any man. I have heard so much about swinging, and talked so much about swinging, and written so bloody much about swinging, that I can barely watch a Tarzan movie without breaking out in hives.
This personal supersaturation in swinging as a topic for deathless prose was such that my original outline for this book made no provision for the subject. But here my friend has the advantage of me; Colley Cibber’s role in English literature is as vital as tits on a bull, while an understanding of the nature of swinging is essential to a survey of marriage in modern society.
So here we go again. If you can stand it, I suppose I can force myself.
JWW: Swinging can take many forms, and the diversity of its expression makes defining it a difficult matter. The definition I have found that best covers the subject is that swinging is mutually acknowledged recreational adultery. All of the words in the definition are important. In swinging, husband and wife are aware of each other’s extramarital activities to the point where these activities constitute a genuine aspect of their marriage. And these activities are undertaken for pleasure, excitement, satisfaction, but not in pursuit of love. Some swingers feel emotionally close to their extramarital contacts, while others maintain a purely impersonal attitude, but in any event there is a distinct difference between the feeling for one’s spouse and the feeling for one’s swinging associates.
Our concern here will have to be limited to swinging as a component of marriage and as an attempt to modify the traditional marital relationship and accommodate it to today’s world. The reasons why people get into swinging, and some of the effects it has on their lives and their sexual attitudes, is largely outside this chapter’s scope. Readers interested in a more comprehensive treatment of the subject might consult The Wife-Swap Report, a book of mine published by Dell. Where most books on swinging concern themselves with a half-dozen case histories or a couple of hundred capsulated interviews, this one is the product of a series of interviews with one couple concerning their experiences during several years of swinging, and the changes engendered in their separate selves and in their marriage. While one feels one ought to be somewhat diffident about plugging one’s own book, in this case the impulse is tempered by my feeling that I functioned as little more than a conduit for the transmission of Paul and Sheila’s own observations. The two of them have more to say about swinging than I can possibly say here, and I would only hope that you enjoy the book as much as I will enjoy receiving royalties on it.
While the temporary sexual exchange of mates is perhaps as old as the institution of monogamy, it was not until after the Second World War that swingers began to achieve numerical importance in American society. Originally, the typical swinging couple had been married for from five to fifteen years and had had relatively little premarital sexual experience. Swinging evolved out of the desire of one or both partners for extramarital sexual experience, coupled with a reluctance to endanger the marital relationship by engaging unilaterally in an adulterous love affair. Thus, extramarital sex became a joint project, and adultery was not a threat to marriage but a component of marriage.
This pattern remains the most common one in swinging, and represents a commitment to conservative middle-class values in conflict with the concept of sexual monogamy. The swinger wants to have the cake of a respectable and durable marriage while eating the cake of extramarital promiscuity. An illicit affair is unsatisfactory not only because of its potential for destroying the marriage if discovered, but also because it involves treachery and deceit; furthermore, it is generally either a tawdry consortation with pickups or prostitutes, or involves an emotional bond which is a betrayal of the spouse. People are often drawn to swinging after experimenting with extramarital affairs of this nature and finding them less than satisfactory.