Being Swingers Requires Trust
It’s the bedrock of all we do in the swinger lifestyle.
If you have listened to our podcast at all, we hope one thing is abundantly clear: We are crazy in love with each other, even after 30+ years.
The basis of love, appreciation, and experience we built up as a couple allowed us to move into swinging together with a basis of trust that has, perhaps antithetically, permitted us to sexually enjoy others while staying strong and true to one another. This is not to say that younger, newer couples cannot possibly have or develop the kind of trust necessary for happy, successful swinging. It is more to emphasize the king-sized role of trust in that pursuit.
In episode 90, we talk about the importance of trust in the swinger lifestyle. We thought we would share some of the key take-aways from our conversation about trust here, as well.
Trust in Ourselves and Each Other
Successful swinging couples put their relationship and each other first, always. We don’t think there are any successful swinger couples who can honestly say that they never experience jealousy or self-doubt. We’ve never met a successful swinging couple without some “we made a mistake” stories. But the successful swinging couples we know operate from a firm basis of trust that they will each, separately and together, do all they can to honor the sanctity of the primary relationship and the heart of their beloved partner.
If jealousy or self-doubt creeps in, they confront it and discuss it and ferret out its origin. If mistakes are made, those mistakes are acknowledged and discussed. They maybe change their swinging habits going forward to accommodate the needs and feelings of the other, or they pause their activities and work through the basis of those feelings until there is no need to change. The start of this kind of success in swinging is the certainty that each partner is the other’s ride-or-die.
Trust in Our Relationship
One of the first questions we asked ourselves as we considered entering the swinger lifestyle was, “Is our relationship strong enough to withstand a big mistake, if we were to make one?” Knowing how long we’d been together, what we’d weathered as a couple already, and how safely we’d protected one another’s vulnerabilities over time and many big life trials, our answer was a resounding “yes.” Yes, even if we make a big mistake, we’re confident we can work through it and come out even stronger on the other side.
Maybe one of the toughest parts of this assessment is the necessity of being honest with one another and ourselves as a couple about the state of our union. If we didn’t have full trust in our relationship, if we had not weathered adversity together very successfully in the past, if we had kept secrets from each other and/or held back our thoughts and feelings from one another—well, we wouldn’t have been able to say “yes” so resolutely. And, if we had said “yes” without actually meaning/feeling “yes,” it could have gone very very badly.
Trust in the relationship means taking a very long, hard, honest look and being up front with ourselves and each other about where the relationship really stands.
Trust in Others
Especially when we are new in the swinging lifestyle, this can be a quagmire. We simultaneously want to protect our privacy and be discreet while also forming connections with others. That’s hard to reconcile.
From our perspective, staying 100% private and also forming meaningful connections—having it both ways—is not really possible. To get the meaningful connections, we have to be at least a little open and vulnerable to other people. Therefore, it becomes a matter of being smart, selective, and strategic about how we meet up with people and how quickly we jump into sexy playtime with them. We all know already that building trust with others takes time, and that’s true in the swinger lifestyle world as much or more than it is anywhere else.
No one needs to share their most intimate information or details with another couple to successfully connect with them; however, revealing some things about ourselves is usually necessary for connection and chemistry. Gaining trust with other couples is a give-and-take thing. As we talk and flirt and share, we reveal who we are and some details about our lives…and they do the same.
The fact that we meet up through couples dating sites or swinger meet-and-greets or other nonmonogamy events helps: Simply knowing that we’re all here means we all have a similar level of vulnerability. There is protection in the idea of “mutually assured destruction”; that is, each couple has something important or valuable to lose if the other couple isn’t trustworthy. By maintaining a balance of what kind of things we share/reveal back-and-forth with each other—where neither couple is giving away the keys to the kingdom while the other is withholding all—it helps to establish trust.
Trust in Who We Are Becoming
One thing the swinger lifestyle does is to strip away and deconstruct former thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. In other words, it brings change in our perspectives on ourselves and the world in which we operate. This means that being a couple in the swinger lifestyle requires us to allow ourselves and each other to change and grow, sometimes at the same rate and time and sometimes at differing rates and times. It means that sometimes things feel uncomfortable initially, and we have to trust that it will become more comfortable as our preconceived notions are challenged and new ideas form.
What we have found is that being in the swinger lifestyle has asked us to trust that we are becoming our authentic selves after years of denying it based on societal constructs handed down to us without question for most of our lives. It has asked us to trust that we are growing into and becoming who we were actually designed to be.
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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