3 is not a Crowd

BOB: Well, I was still recovering from your greeting, and the question took me by surprise.

CAROL: I told him I had read all the books, and that I wondered if that was really what he wanted for us to do. He said he just thought the books were interesting, that the whole idea was interesting. I said it looked to me as though he was more than just interested.

BOB: I asked her how she felt about it. She said she didn’t know because it was such a completely new idea to her. She wanted to know if I wouldn’t be unhappy at the idea of her with another man.

CAROL: He said he would be pleased for me to be enjoying myself that way. And that it would be better for both of us to do this sort of thing openly than to carry on affairs on the sly.

BOB: To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Carol being with somebody else. It did bother me to a degree, but I found the whole idea of swinging so exciting, so attractive in so many ways, that I wanted to give it a try and see what my feelings would be.

CAROL: We talked about all of this for hours. It was at this time Bob confessed to me about his three affairs, although the one night with the prostitute... you couldn’t really call that an affair. But in a way that part bothered me the most, that he would need variety so much that he would have to pay money to a whore who would just go through the motions of sex with him.

BOB: That gal went through some pretty good motions, honey.

CAROL: I was glad that we were talking about these things because they had been on my mind for so long. And talking this way made us both feel closer and more loving. We wound up that night getting some of the magazines, including a club bulletin that I had not yet seen, and we went through them looking at the advertisements and just speculating which ads we might answer if we did decide to give this a try. There were several ads that looked promising, couples around our own age and in this area who seemed to want the kind of thing that we wanted, a quiet evening of two couples.

BOB: I suggested that maybe we might get in touch with one of them and explain that we were newcomers, and that we would like to get together with them and discuss things, but with no strings attached. That way if either of us felt that it went against the grain, or if something about the other couple didn’t appeal to us, we would have a ready-made out.

CAROL: I liked that idea. We decided to sleep on it, and we made love for a second time that night, which was something we hadn’t done in I don’t know how long. The next day I got so excited thinking about the whole thing that I surprised Bob by writing a letter to the couple that sounded best from their ad. I had it all ready when he came home, along with snapshots of ourselves.

And we sent it off — you probably know how that works, you put your letter in an unaddressed envelope and then put that in another envelope and mail it to the club, along with a dollar forwarding fee. The clubs make their money forwarding letters, and some of the better ones do make an effort to police their lists and clear out objectionable people.

We sent the letter off, and after that we were tremendously anxious to hear from the couple we wrote to. Bob would call me every day when the mail came to ask if I had gotten a letter from them. And finally — it took about two weeks — we received a letter from this couple in Charleston with a photograph of the two of them and a very nice letter.

Now it’s only since then that I’ve realized how lucky we were.

BOB: Absolutely a first class case of beginner’s luck. We sent out one letter and got an answer to it, and it doesn’t usually work that way. A large percentage of the ads are just from jerks who want to get letters, or people who back out at the last moment. Or else an advertiser will get swamped with letters and he can’t possibly answer them all. Or you’ll get an answer, but it’s an old or unattractive or vulgar couple, or a single man posing as a couple, or any of a number of things that can go wrong. But we lucked out. This couple was truly charming, and reading their letter I was impressed how much like us they were. They had been married about as long, and he had a Chevrolet agency in Charleston, and they had been swinging for a little less than a year. He was a tall good-looking guy and she was a knockout blonde built like something straight out of the pages of Playboy. She was just wearing the bottom half of a bikini in the photo they sent along.

CAROL: Bob was practically drooling.

BOB: Let’s just say I was impressed. I was even more impressed by the letter because it was obvious that these were intelligent and civilized people. They understood completely that we wanted a no-strings arrangement and suggested that we come to their house so that we could leave easily if that was what we wanted.

As far as I was concerned, I knew that I wanted us to swing with them.

CAROL: I felt pretty much the same way, but I was a little less certain.