5 Things You Need to Know about the Swinging Lifestyle
Curious about swinging? Thinking about entering the Lifestyle?
We’re Mr. and Mrs. Jones. We’ve been married for a long time and have been swingers for the last 8 years. It has made our already strong marriage even stronger and more exciting. We talk about our journey from long-time monogamy to ethical non-monogamy as paired swingers in our podcast, We Gotta Thing. We talk to a lot of people who are just considering getting into swinging together. We’re not sex or relationship experts, so we don’t dispense advice, but we do share what we’ve learned along the way in case it’s helpful to others.
Here are five things we learned early on about the swinger lifestyle.
Swinging is a Team Sport
It’s not unusual for one partner to become curious about the swinging lifestyle first, without the other’s knowledge. The partner who begins to research and wonder about what it might be like to try swinging may feel uneasy about broaching the topic with the other partner. Fears of causing hurt feelings or a rift in the relationship can be prohibitive for a lot of people. At some point, though—earlier rather than later—the idea must be shared in a thoughtful and respectful way if there is any chance of making the lifestyle a reality. We wrote about our thoughts on how to have this conversation a few months ago.
The first conversation will be one of many needed in order to successfully navigate the swinger journey together. Here’s the thing: Although one partner may initially become interested and lay the ground work, swinging doesn’t tend to work out for couples if only one of the partners is truly interested in it. We’ve found that any approach other than being fully committed partners can hurt the chance for enjoyment and success in the lifestyle and may even lead to conflict, hurt feelings, and marital trouble.
We are a team all of the time. This is not to say that we are always 100% in sync in terms of how we are feeling about a lifestyle experience or opportunity. On the contrary, we recognize that may not be the case and so communicate and check in frequently. When we are feeling differently, we move forward at the pace of whichever of us is the least comfortable and most in need of putting on the brakes, not at the pace of the one who feels the most gung-ho and wants to push the gas pedal. This may have caused us to miss a sexy opportunity here or there, but it has meant that our love and commitment to each other is strengthened rather than diminished by our experiences in the swinging lifestyle.
Fantasy is Not Reality
There is little doubt sexual fantasies about playing with others drive most people’s initial curiosity about the swinging lifestyle. We may fantasize about another man having sex with our wife, we may imagining our wife with another woman, we may think about being in the same room watching each other interact with partners from another couple, or we may wonder about being pleased by two men at the same time. All of those erotic fantasies are exciting and can bring a couple to the threshold of swinging. What’s important to know is that there is no guarantee things in real life will go as well as they do in the fantasy of the mind.
The lifestyle is fully of sexy people and sexiness and, well, sex. But it’s not a movie. It is real life. And, in real life, other people bring their own desires, their own approaches, their own insecurities, and their own ideas about how things should go. Instead of expecting things to go as we dictate in our minds, we recommend that couples spend time establishing their rules and boundaries before going on swinger dates, and talking about how to best debrief and reconnect afterward. We recommend that couples have ideas about how they will bow-out if the situation is not to their comfort level, and how they will communicate a green light or red light to the others involved.
The bottom line here: Learning about the lifestyle and having multiple earnest conversations about our own desires, limits, and concerns works better when it comes to bridging the gulf between fantasy and reality than trying to control the environment or the other couple(s) involved.
Having Sex is Not Making Love
After years (okay, decades) of being married to and being intimate with only one another, sex and making love were deeply connected in our heads. For Mr. Jones, this at first made it more difficult to enjoy watching Mrs. Jones with another man and initially held him back from being able to totally focus on another woman. He imagined that his temporary sexual devotion to someone else might be disrespectful of the deep love he had for Mrs. Jones.
It wasn’t until we experienced full-swap play several times with other couples that we began to understand and disentangle sex from love-making in our minds. Playing with another sexy person is amazing but simply pales in comparison to our experiences and feelings when making love with each other. We freely give each other to others as an expression of the unconditional love we share, but having sex with other people does not equate to making love with them. That is reserved for the two of us and we’ve found that it’s totally possible to have really sexy fun with people we like a lot and not diminish the tenderness and intimacy of our own love making.
Mistakes WILL Be Made
Yes, “mistakes” is plural. He will make mistakes, she will make mistakes and they will make mistakes. We have not yet encountered any honest swinging couple who claims that no mistakes have ever occurred. No matter how much research is done, no matter how many hours of lifestyle podcasts are consumed, no matter how many ironclad rules are made, (let’s say it together): Mistakes WILL be made! Okay, now that we’ve established that…
The most important thing about mistakes is not eliminating them but working through and recovering from them. Here’s what works for us: Allow the necessary time for self-reflection (cool down time). Then talk about what happened instead of placing blame. Share each perspective and the feelings behind them. Listen to hear and not to respond. Take however much time is necessary to talk through and figure out what went wrong and what needs to happen differently moving forward. Oh, and most importantly have plenty of reclamation and make-up sex!
Swinging Can Deepen Relationships
Let’s get personal. The decision to try the swinging lifestyle is yours as a couple. You are in the best position to know how strong you are as a couple, to know how happy you are as a couple, to know how ready you might be to give it a try. You know how much you trust and respect each other. You know how well you communicate. You know the quality of your sex life. You know about your finances, your priorities in life, and the type of balance you need in your relationship. Both of you must make this decision separately and then together as a couple. Doing what he or she decides is best doesn’t do the trick with this decision.
Yes, we decided to try the lifestyle and it has deepened our already solid relationship. We have a lot of fun and we meet a lot of awesome people. But we make mistakes, have difficult experiences, and meet some people who are in this for very different reasons than we are. We have struggles and difficult conversations. We have had setbacks but we’ve also experienced tremendous growth as individuals and as a couple.
It’s fun, but it’s a lot of work. We encourage others to keep in mind that swinging is not inherently good nor bad, it not for everyone and it is not necessary to swing in order to have a deeper relationship. Is becoming swingers the right decision for you?
We can’t emphasize this enough: The right decision to enter the lifestyle is the decision you make together.
We are Mr. & Mrs. Jones, swinger lifestyle podcasters. If you like what you read here and want to learn more about the swinger lifestyle and/or We Gotta Thing, you can find our podcast episodes and much more at WeGottaThing.com.
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