3 is not a Crowd

I was terribly shocked. I knew the bare minimum about swinging, or wife-swapping as it was generally called in the magazine articles. I had read a little about it in women’s magazines, nothing very detailed or accurate, and then there were the standard nightclub jokes, usually some variation of the idea of a suburban party where the husbands draw keys from a hat or something like that.

None of this had ever seemed real to me. I could just imagine a group of our friends at the country club swapping wives and going to each other’s homes that way. It was so completely impossible. I never took it seriously. I supposed there were people who would do this, but certainly not nice people, not normal people.

And the idea that Bob would want me to have relations with other men. This really shocked me. I was a virgin when I met Bob, although I did sleep with him before we were married. He had had plenty of experience before he met me, which I felt was desirable, but I was always just as glad that I had been pure for him.

BOB: You never felt you’d missed out on anything?

CAROL: Oh, sometimes. In a vague general way. But I didn’t sit around sulking, and for the most part I was glad of the way things had happened. And I never considered having an affair after we were married. I did think about it when you were running around — the idea that sauce for the goose might be sauce for the gander, that it would be a way of getting even with you. But it seemed a childish way to do it. What would I be proving? And there was nobody I knew that I wanted to go to bed with anyway.

But now, seeing these books and magazines, I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to talk to him about it but I didn’t know how to begin or what to say or what I would say if he came right out and said this was what he wanted. So I put off talking to him, and in the meantime I read the books and articles.

Well, this did make a slight difference in my thinking. For one thing, it gave me a much better idea of what swinging was all about. I was thinking just in terms of games with the keys at this point, of swapping partners with friends of ours, and so I had a very narrow view of the swinging scene. I learned for the first time, for instance, that the typical swinging date was with some strangers you met through the mail, and that you went to their house or they came to your house and you had a pleasant social evening and then switched partners. This somehow made it seem far more palatable to me. I couldn’t see myself getting involved in this with someone I knew socially, but with a stranger who was in the same boat, I could see how that might work.

I also began to realize that the average swinging couple were people in the same general situation as us. Couples who had been married for a few years or more and who had gradually had the excitement go out of their sexual life. And I couldn’t deny that this was happening with us. In the books, couple after couple told the same opening story, the same pattern. I thought about how much less often we had sex these days and how so much of the time it was just the same as always. The freshness and excitement wasn’t completely gone, but it was going fast.

Now some of the books he had left around for me were nothing much more than pornography. Very crudely written and obviously stories some writer had made up. They pretended to be case histories but you could tell that they weren’t. And there was one that was supposed to be the autobiography of a swinger, but it was just one sex scene after the other with lots of description. Some, though, you could tell were true. They might have excessive descriptions because I guess that’s how books are sold, but the truth rang true. One was a book about swinging by a married couple in California who were swingers themselves, and who told their own story as well as the stories of some other people they knew.

And in this book in particular I was impressed over and over by the way couples explained that swinging not only brought excitement into their lives but improved their marriages. I had a little trouble believing this at first. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

One other thing I’ll have to admit is that the books got me hot. Partly the sexy descriptions themselves, and partly the whole idea of doing this, of swinging with another couple. I got very hot, and I would find myself thinking about this more and more, and when Bob got home I met him at the door wearing a sheer nightgown and carrying two martinis, and we had the drinks in the bedroom and I just about raped him.

BOB: She was really wild.

CAROL: It was the best we had been together in ages, and I wasn’t fool enough to doubt that it was reading those books that had made the difference. So while he was lying there getting his breath back to normal, I asked him just what he had in mind with the swinger books.

BOB: I guess I hemmed and hawed.

CAROL: I just guess you did.