Back to the history of wife swapping.
In the fifties the media referred to it as “wife-swapping.” Today it’s named “swinging,” but not considering of its name this lifestyle seems to be growing in popularity among typical, adult married couples in the United States and Canada. The popular media are paying increasing interest to the fact, regularly putting a encouraging spin on the effects which swinging has upon relationships. The North American Swing Club Association (NASCA) claims there are organized swing clubs in just about all states as well as France, England, Germany, and Japan. These clubs are lucrative businesses which provide all levels of group activities for swingers including vacation plans, special vacation sites for swingers, and annual gatherings and seminars. Lifestyles, Inc., a swingers travel bureau, booked 700 couples at a resort in Jamaica in December of 1997.
What precisely is swinging? Dissimilar “open marriages” of the 1970’s which promoted non-possessive love and acceptance of unfaithfulness in their spouses, or “polyamory” - the love of several sex partners at once – swinging is non-monogamous sexual action, treated much like any other social activity, that can be practiced as a pair. Emotional monogamy, or commitment to the love relationship with one’s marital partner, remains the ultimate goal. Wife swapping is usually 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 rules 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 privacy and untruthfulness inherent in one’s natural desires for sexual variety, the pair can discover their fantasies together without dishonesty or shame. By removing the need for cheating from the sexual life, a new stage of confidence and honesty about all of one’s feelings is apparently achieved without the destructive baggage of suspicion.
Swinging as an alternative lifestyle is of both practical and academic interest because the effort to combine sexual non-monogamy with emotional monogamy is fundamentally “abnormal” 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 relationships, but in an era where 38% 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 62%, and where family insecurity and parental neglect of kids has become a major national worry, any attempt to redefine “love” and fortify the marital bond is worthy of our interest. If swingers have found a way to stabilize relationships, extend 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 earlier studies, but when it comes to attitudes about sex and marriage they are less racist, less sexist, and less heterosexist than the broad public. Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the happiness of their marriages and life satisfaction generally as higher than the non-swinging population.