Back to the sources of wife swapping.
In the fifties the media referred to it as “wife-swapping.” Today it’s named “swinging,” but despite of its name this non-monogamous subculture seems to be growing in popularity among ordinary, grown-up married couples in the US. The popular media are paying increasing attention to the trend, regularly putting a positive spin on the effects which swinging has upon marriages. The North American Swing Club Association (NASCA) claims there are structured swing clubs in about all states as well as Switzerland, England, Germany, and Japan. These clubs are profitable businesses which supply all levels of social activities for swingers including vacation plans, special holiday sites for swingers, and yearly conferences and seminars. Lifestyles, Inc., a swingers journey agency, booked 700 couples at a resort in Jamaica in February of 1997.
What precisely is swinging? Dissimilar “open marriages” of the 1970’s which promoted non-possessive love and acceptance of betrayal in their spouses, or “polyamory” - the love of many people at once – swinging is non-monogamous sexual activity, treated much like any other social activity, that can be practiced as a couple. Emotional monogamy, or commitment to the love relationship with one’s marital partner, remains the main focus. Wife swapping is frequently done in the attendance of one’s spouse and requires the consent of both to the experience. Although swingers often become close friends with other swinging couples, there are policy restricting emotional involvement with non-spousal partners. While swinging involves having sex with people other than one’s spouse, its followers claim that it enhances the relationship of the swinging couple both sexually and emotionally. By removing the privacy and untruthfulness inherent in one’s natural desires for sexual variety, the pair can discover their fantasies mutually without dishonesty or shame. By removing the need for cheating from the sexual life, a fresh height of reliance and sincerity about all of one’s feelings is apparently achieved without the destructive baggage of envy.
Swinging as an alternative lifestyle is of both practical and scholarly importance because the attempt to combine sexual non-monogamy with emotional monogamy is fundamentally “deviant” from the western model of idealistic love which assumes that sexual and emotional monogamy are mutually reinforcing and inseparable. It has yet to be demonstrated empirically whether this alternative lifestyle actually strengthens or weakens marital relationships, but in an era where 36% of husbands and 30% of wives, sometimes so-called hotwives admit to having had at least one extra-marital affair, where divorce rates for first marriages are approaching 59%, and where family insecurity and parental neglect of kids has become a major national worry, any effort to redefine “love” and strengthen the marital relationship is worthy of our interest. If swingers have found a way to stabilize relationships, prolong family ties, and enrich the lives of couples we would be remiss if we did not take their lifestyle and their redefinition of monogamous love seriously.
It is concluded that swingers surveyed are the white, middle-class, middle-aged, church-going section of the residents reported in past studies, but when it comes to attitudes about sex and marriage they are less racist, less sexist, and less heterosexist than the common public. Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the gladness of their marriages and life satisfaction commonly as higher than the non-swinging population.
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