Back to the beginning of wife swapping.
In the fifties the mass media referred to it as “wife-swapping.” Today it’s called “swinging,” but anyway of its name this alternative lifestyle seems to be increasing in recognition among ordinary, middle-aged married couples in the US. The popular media are paying increasing interest to the phenomenon, regularly putting a optimistic spin on the effects which swinging has upon relationships. The North American Swing Club Association (NASCA) claims there are structured swing clubs in almost all states as well as France, England, Germany, and Japan. These clubs are lucrative ventures which provide all levels of group activities for swingers including vacation plans, special vacation sites for swingers, and yearly conferences and seminars. Lifestyles, Inc., a swingers voyage bureau, booked 700 couples at a resort in Jamaica in February of 1999.
What exactly is swinging? Dissimilar “open marriages” of the 1970’s which promoted non-possessive love and tolerance of betrayal in their spouses, or “polyamory” - the love of several people at once – swinging is non-monogamous sexual action, treated much like any other social activity, that can be experienced as a pair. Emotional monogamy, or dedication to the love relationship with one’s marital partner, remains the ultimate goal. Wife swapping is typically done in the attendance of one’s spouse and requires the approval of both to the practice. 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 couple can explore their fantasies mutually without deceit or shame. By removing the necessity for deceit from the sexual life, a new height of trust and openness about all of one’s feelings is supposedly achieved without the destructive baggage of jealousy.
Swinging as an alternative lifestyle is of both practical and scholarly interest because the effort to merge sexual non-monogamy with emotional monogamy is basically “unusual” from the western model of romantic love which assumes that sexual and emotional monogamy are reciprocally reinforcing and inseparable. It has yet to be demonstrated empirically whether this alternative lifestyle actually strengthens or weakens marital bonds, but in an era where 36% of husbands and 31% of wives, sometimes so-called milfs declare to having had at least one extra-marital affair, where divorce rates for first marriages are approaching 62%, and where family instability and parental neglect of children has become a major national worry, any attempt to redefine “love” and reinforce the marital relationship is worthy of our attention. If swingers have found a way to stabilize relationships, prolong family ties, and improve 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 segment 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 general public. Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the happiness of their marriages and life satisfaction in general as higher than the non-swinging population.