3 is not a Crowd

At one point I was prompted by these differences to omit Bob and Carol’s story from this book and confine it to the three threesomes already discussed. Further reflection convinced me that these very differences might serve to give the reader greater perspective on the topic of troilism.

A final argument clinched it — after all, the advertisements which the Fessendens run regularly in several swingers’ club bulletins invariably contain the phrase which serves as this volume’s title.

BOB: I guess we got into swinging in pretty much the same way most couples do. This was about three years ago, so we had been married seven years. That’s standard, isn’t it? The seven-year itch and all that.

CAROL: Except that it didn’t take you seven years to get the itch.

BOB: I don’t suppose it usually does. The average American male simply isn’t built for a steady diet of monogamy. Look at the animal kingdom. In most species, the male’s object is to knock up as many females as he possibly can. If you were a farmer and you had a bull that would only cover one particular cow, that bull would be hamburger overnight. Man is just another animal with an overdeveloped brain, and more often than not that brain gets in his way. It lets him think up rules for himself that go against his own basic animal nature.

CAROL: And if my husband’s got one thing, it’s a healthy animal nature.

BOB: Well, I’m proud of it. But the trouble is that we can’t go and live on desert islands. We’re all creatures of society. And the way society is structured, a man and a woman get married and live happily ever after. I guess it’s not hard to see that more people get married than live happily ever after. But for all its faults, marriage is necessary to our society. It’s the way things are. Sometimes I find myself sympathizing with these kids who want to tear the whole social order apart and build it over again. I’m not too crazy about the drugs they use or the way they wear their hair, but I find myself agreeing with them more than the average person in my position would probably do.

CAROL: I think swingers are generally more liberal that way. Not that their politics tend to be extreme, but that they are readier to appreciate someone else’s point of view than the run-of-the-mill civilian.

BOB: But when all is said and done, I don’t believe anybody’s going to tear down our social order. It’s changing, God how it’s changing, but certain things remain constant. And one of them is marriage. I know that, given the way things are, I wouldn’t be happy if I weren’t married.

Well, all of this is a roundabout way of getting to the point, which is that I did have a couple of affairs not too long after we were married. We were both very depressed after the baby was born and things turned out as they did, and Carol and I weren’t getting along as well as we had been, and I found myself on the prowl. I had a fling with a secretary in my regional office, and a brief affair with a policy-holder, and I spent one night with a high-class hooker at a convention in Miami Beach.

CAROL: I more or less knew he was catting around and I almost decided to have it out with him once or twice, but I swallowed my pride and kept it to myself. I knew it was common enough for men to cheat on their wives. My own parents were divorced because my father had another woman and my mother found out and made him give her a divorce. And several times after that my father told me privately that he had never wanted the divorce, that he loved Mother and wanted to stay with her and the other woman in his life never meant anything to him. He did subsequently remarry, but what he had always wanted was to stay with my mother. She never did marry again, so what did she get out of the whole thing? Just a life of loneliness, and that wasn’t what I wanted. It hurt me that Bob had to have somebody else, but I was determined that I wasn’t going to be a fool and ruin my life over it. I just waited for him to get it out of his system, and after awhile, just as I had known he was catting around, I also knew when he had stopped.

Then he started to get interested in swinging.

He was very cute about it. He brought home books and magazines on the subject and just happened to leave them around. Early in our life together he had brought home a cheap novel and just happened to leave it open to a page with an oral sex scene on it, and of course I read the scene. I had never done that to him before, but I was bright enough to take the hint and although we never mentioned the book I knew that he had left it for me with just that in mind, and he knew that the book had been where I got the idea.

So when these swinger magazines began turning up around the house, it wasn’t hard to guess what he had in mind.