Back to the history of swinging.
In the fifties the newspapers referred to it as “wife-swapping.” Today it’s named “swinging,” but in any case of its name this lifestyle seems to be growing in recognition among majority, adult married couples in the United States and Canada. The popular media are paying increasing attention to the fact, frequently putting a positive spin on the effects which the lifestyle has upon marriages. The North American Swing Club Association (NASCA) claims there are organized swing clubs in more or less all states as well as Switzerland, England, Germany, and Japan. These clubs are profitable ventures which provide all levels of group activities for swingers including vacation plans, special vacation sites for swingers, and yearly gatherings and seminars. Lifestyles, Inc., a swingers journey bureau, booked 700 couples at a resort in Jamaica in February of 1998.
What precisely is swinging? Not like “open marriages” of the 1970’s which promoted non-possessive love and tolerance of betrayal in their spouses, or “polyamory” - the love of several sex partners at once – swinging is non-monogamous sexual activity, treated a lot like any other social activity, that can be experienced as a couple. Emotional monogamy, or dedication to the love relationship with one’s marital partner, remains the main focus. Wife swapping is usually done in the attendance of one’s spouse and requires the involvement of both to the experience. Although swingers often become close friends with other swinging couples, there are regulations restricting emotional involvement with non-spousal partners. While swinging involves having sex with people other than one’s spouse, its supporters claim that it enhances the relationship of the swinging couple both sexually and emotionally. By removing the secrecy and untruthfulness inherent in one’s natural desires for sexual variety, the pair can explore their fantasies mutually without cheating or shame. By removing the necessity for dishonesty from the relationship, a fresh stage of reliance and openness about all of one’s feelings is supposedly achieved without the destructive baggage of envy.
Swinging as an alternative lifestyle is of both practical and intellectual importance because the effort to mix sexual non-monogamy with emotional monogamy is basically “deviant” from the western model of romantic 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 confess to having had at least one extra-marital affair, where divorce rates for first marriages are approaching 60%, and where family insecurity and parental neglect of children has become a major national worry, any attempt to redefine “love” and strengthen the marital relationship is worthy of our interest. If swingers have found a way to stabilize relationships, extend 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 segment of the residents reported in previous studies, but when it comes to attitudes about sex and marriage they are less racist, less sexist, and less heterosexist than the common population. Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the happiness of their marriages and life satisfaction commonly as higher than the non-swinging population.
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