3 is not a Crowd

CAROL: Well, all I had to do was just what she had done to me. That’s how I started out, and then once I was involved in it, something happened. I don’t quite know how to put it but it was a case of instinctively knowing things about her body because it was a female body like my own, and what I was doing to her was as if I was doing it to myself. I could almost feel what she felt.

I thought the part of using my mouth on her, that I would find it distasteful. I had decided that I wanted to do it anyway because I would enjoy bringing her pleasure, but I didn’t think I would enjoy my part of it, the act of performing cunnilingus. You know, it’s beginning to sound as though I keep trying things I don’t think I’m going to like and keep finding out that I like them more than I thought I would.

BOB: That’s what happens to so many people in the course of swinging. The early experiences, as you keep extending your range and trying new things, it’s natural to approach them all with reservations, and time after time you find out that you like this new thing more than you had thought you would. With other couples, again and again the wife would tell us how much she dreaded the first time she made it with another woman, and how it turned out for the best. Except for the ones that may have been with another girl before they started swinging, but they were by far in the minority. Of the couples we have been with, I would estimate in eight out of ten cases the wife was bi, and in better than ninety percent of those cases she had her first bi experience while swinging. You never hear the word “lesbian” in this context, you know. It’s always “bi” or maybe “bi-minded.”

CAROL: The code word in the ads is “versatile.”

BOB: And you’re versatile.

CAROL: And you like it that way.

BOB: Once again, once the ice was broken we spent all our time in the pool. We got to the point almost immediately that we would only arrange meetings where the wife was definitely bi-minded. Sometimes this would involve the two of them putting on a show, or just about as often one girl would make love to the other or they would both do a sixty-nine while the husbands had relations with them simultaneously, either one’s own wife or the other gal.

With one couple, they wrote a very nice letter explaining that the wife was completely bi-minded but the husband was impotent. It was really a sad case because he had been a normal man in every respect and then he had gone and caught the mumps from his son, and when you get the mumps as a grown man it can have a terrible effect on you. Sometimes you become sterile or in extreme cases you lose your testicles altogether, they don’t function. This is what had happened to him. He had no ability to perform but had not lost his interest in sex. He had the interest but could do nothing about it.

CAROL: He was a very handsome man, too, and it was sad what had happened to him.

BOB: For this couple, swinging was a way the wife could go on having a healthy sex life and still have him be a part of it. His pleasure was to be there and watch, and also to do cunnilingus on the women. We agreed to this partly I think because it would have been cruel to turn him down in that situation and partly, too, because it sounded enjoyable to us.

CAROL: And then he decided he wanted to French Bob.

BOB: He put it in a very inoffensive way and you couldn’t really object to it, the way he put it, but it was the last thing I wanted to do. It wasn’t even a question of having to do it back to him because he got no pleasure that way whether it was done to him by a man or a woman, he said as much. I didn’t want to have any part of it, but I remembered how Carol had felt the same way with that girl the first time, and I thought, well, if you’re a swinger you ought to try everything once.

CAROL: There are plenty of things we neither of us tried and never will.

BOB: Within reason, that is. None of this tying people up and whipping them, but anything normal between people. And I knew Carol was bi and that didn’t make her less of a woman, so I figured if I turned out to be bi it wouldn’t make me less of a man. So I let him do it, just Frenching me without any foreplay because any touching would have been distasteful to me, and he did it, and he was good enough at it, but I couldn’t even get hard for the longest time. I didn’t want to disappoint him so I had his wife come over and I fooled with her while he did it, and I paid attention to her and more or less failed to take note of what he was doing to me, so that I could get my mind off the fact that it was a man I was having sex with. And that way I was able to have a climax, but even so it wasn’t good at all and I knew I would never want to do that again.