Back to the beginning of wife swapping.
In the fifties the magazines referred to it as “wife-swapping.” Today it’s named “swinging,” but despite of its name this swinging lifestyle seems to be rising in popularity among mainstream, middle-aged married couples in the United States and Canada. The popular media are paying increasing attention to the phenomenon, often putting a encouraging spin on the effects which swinging has upon marriages. The North American Swing Club Association (NASCA) claims there are organized swing clubs in about all states as well as Canada, England, Germany, and Japan. These clubs are rewarding enterprises which offer all levels of social activities for swingers including vacation plans, special retreat sites for swingers, and annual gatherings and seminars. Lifestyles, Inc., a swingers journey agency, booked 700 couples at a resort in Jamaica in January of 1999.
What precisely is swinging? Not like “open marriages” of the 1970’s which promoted non-possessive love and tolerance of infidelity in their spouses, or “polyamory” - the love of numerous people at once – swinging is non-monogamous sexual activity, 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 major focus. Wife swapping is usually done in the company of one’s spouse and requires the approval of both to the practice. Though 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 adherents 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 diversity, the couple can explore their fantasies mutually without cheating or shame. By removing the necessity for cheating from the marriage, a new level of reliance and openness about all of one’s feelings is supposedly achieved without the negative baggage of envy.
Swinging as an alternative lifestyle is of both practical and academic interest because the attempt to mix sexual non-monogamy with emotional monogamy is fundamentally “deviant” 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 really strengthens or weakens marital relationships, but in an era where 37% 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 62%, and where family shakiness and parental neglect of children has become a main 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, 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 population 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 public. Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the contentment of their marriages and life satisfaction commonly as higher than the non-swinging population.
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