3 is not a Crowd

CAROL: Once we had it out in the open, how we both felt, we knew just what we were looking for. We went through the ads again and began starting correspondence. There were single girls who would advertise to meet with either couples or single girls, and we tried some of them, but we found that quite often these girls actually were lesbians and not bi-minded. They would put up with the husband in order to get to the wife, and that wasn’t what we were interested in. Then there were other single girls who wanted to swing with couples only, and that was precisely what we wanted, and it worked out very well.

BOB: There were also girls who were married and their husbands would come along with them or not, depending on how you wanted it. In fact, with one of these couples we arranged that Carol would go and party with them one night, just by herself, and that the other wife would come over alone herself the following night, so that we had a pair of threesomes but with the one couple the other man and I never even set eyes on each other.

CAROL: We tried that just the once, but I didn’t enjoy swinging without Bob at all, and he didn’t like the idea of it, and we never did it again.

BOB: It was like being the dummy all night long in a game of bridge. And not even watching the play of the hands.

CAROL: It was really no good for either of us. Without Bob along, I felt as though I was committing adultery. I felt very uneasy about the whole thing. It didn’t seem to matter to the other wife — she had done this often in the past and was completely at ease, but I didn’t like it.

BOB: Our first really successful threesome was one we arranged through the mails. This was with a girl named Frannie who lives right here in the Atlanta area. She’s about twenty-three. Her ad said she enjoyed the company of both men and women and wanted to meet refined couples for pleasant evenings. We wrote her a letter and enclosed photographs, and she wrote back with a picture of herself. She explained that she was a high school librarian, lived with her parents, didn’t go out much, and was very lonely.

CAROL: It was such a straight letter that we sort of wondered if she knew what swinging was all about.

BOB: Yes, because every once in a while there are people who put an ad in the swinger magazines or answer one, and they are just lonely people who are too square to guess what swinging is all about. They want to make friends because they are lonely, and they think it’s all like pen pals or something of the sort. We had never run into this personally but we had seen ads from time to time where you could tell the person placing the ad didn’t know what it was all about. It didn’t seem this way from Frannie’s ad, but the letter she wrote gave that impression, and the fact that she was a high school librarian living with her parents.

CAROL: Don’t forget the picture.

BOB: The picture she sent showed this little mousy girl with granny glasses wearing a dress that didn’t give you any idea what her figure was like. Now we had sent a photo of the two of us in bathing suits, except that Carol here wasn’t wearing the top of her suit, and my trunks were skimpy and you could see the outlines of my erection through them. Nothing you can’t legally send through the mails

CAROL: Some swingers will send pornographic pictures of themselves to other people in a first letter, and then they wonder why they get into trouble. You would think people would show a little common sense.

BOB: Well, it looked as though Frannie was showing a little more common sense than usual, or else she just didn’t understand what it was all about. We were a little worried about having her over for the evening, and then one of us making a pass at her and that poor little kid going straight up the wall. So instead of getting on the phone and calling her, Carol wrote out another letter asking her if she had swung much in the past, trying to word it so that if Frannie wasn’t hip to this sort of thing, she would just have it all go over her head, but if she was, then she would know to let us know it.

CAROL: Well, she called me one morning when Bob was out. She said she was Frannie, and I said hello and how I was glad to hear from her, and then she said evidently she hadn’t made herself very clear in her letter. She had this tiny shy little-girl voice.

And while I was thinking that she was no swinger at all and it was good we had checked, she said how she lived with her folks and had this job with the Board of Education and had to be very careful about appearances. “I fuck and suck and everything,” she said, in this same little-girl voice, “but I don’t like to put it on paper.”