How We Got Involved in Swinging

I'm sorry this is so long. I know that long posts tend to lose people's attention rather quickly, but I've pared this down as much as I possibly can.

We're often asked how we got involved in the Swing Lifestyle. After a few years of telling the story over and over again, I finally decided to sit down and write it out, in full, in the hopes that it will satisfy not only the curiosity in others, but in ourselves as well. What do I mean by that? Sometimes by writing things down in an organized manner, I can better understand my own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Organizing my own thoughts, as it were.

Let me preface this by saying that swinging is NOT for everyone. We know this, and accept it. We are in no way attempting to sway anyone's thoughts, decisions, or emotions, nor are we attempting to 'recruit people' or justify our own actions. This is simply an explanation of how we got involved in swinging to begin with. Let me also say that safe sex is a must. We only have one body, and we have to take care of it. If you can't wrap that rascal, keep it in your pants!

Lin and I met while we were both in the US Army, and were married in 1988. From the beginning we've had a very active, and very satisfying sex life. Let me stop here for a second and tell you that I'm the kind of guy that gets excited by genuine female excitement. I feed off of it. If the woman isn't really enjoying it, neither am I. Nothing in this world is more exciting to me than seeing Lin orgasm. To that end, all of our foreplay, sex play, and discussions are centered on her arousal - I get my arousal that way.

We've always been relatively open with each other, and are now able to freely discuss anything that's on our minds. When we first married, however, she was pretty reserved. As my new bride, she was a bit hesitant to openly explore various fantasies with me, no matter how much I encouraged her to do so. Over the years, she relaxed quite a lot, and began to open up to me a lot more - once she figured out that I meant it when I told her that she could tell me anything at all, and that I wouldn't be upset with her.

We had both been married previously, and both of us had been left by our former spouses for someone else. That fact alone gave us an extra layer of mutual respect, in that both of us having been on the receiving end of that equation, neither of us wants to be the one to cause the other that much pain again.

As our marriage progressed, she felt more comfortable in discussing some of her fantasies with me. Some, but still not all. I sometimes had to approach a subject with her, because she was still very hesitant to make the first move. One thing we had in common from the start was a love for erotic stories, letters, and written forms of sexually explicit material in general. Now I'll admit I'm sometimes not the quickest on the uptake, so it took me a while to notice that whenever I brought home a new magazine, she would immediately turn to the stories or letters that involved one woman and multiple men. I didn't ask her about it at first, but rather just left her to her fantasies, and enjoyed the benefit of her arousal.

After about 3 1/2 years of marriage, I finally did approach the subject with her. She was understandably hesitant to talk about it at first, but eventually did open up to me completely. She told me that it all went back to her first marriage. She had been married to a very domineering man for 15 years, and he was the sort of man who thought that foreplay was a waste of time. His attitude was they were there for intercourse, so why bother with anything else? As a result, Lin wound up being left frustrated more often than not. When he was finished, that was that - end of story. In order to help arouse herself, she began to fantasize about another man in the room, ready to take over when her husband finished, thus allowing her to climax as well. That fantasy evolved from one man to several men, each waiting their turn to have sex with her as each previous man climaxed inside her. This fantasy helped her immensely, and became her favorite even after they separated, and we got married.

At first I just listened and asked a few questions here and there, never considering it to be odd or anything like that. I knew that lots of women had similar fantasies, and that this was simply a normal thing. I started gearing the magazines, adult videos, and stories toward that fantasy. There's no lack of such erotica out there, so I purposely looked for it. She's always loved sex toys, and we had a selection of dildos and vibrators that I began to use on her, sometimes talking to her about 'the other man' as I did so. We teased and talked to each other about the nameless other man, and it never failed to stimulate us both to huge climaxes.

Our sex life went from great to fantastic, partly because of the erotica that I brought home, partly from the teasing and talking, and partly because she saw for herself that I didn't consider those kinds of fantasies to be any sort of threat to our relationship. On the contrary - I thought of it as a wonderful enhancement to what we already had.

After about 6 months, I began to have thoughts about actually trying it for real. I must stop and say right here that during this 4-year period, we had transferred duty stations twice, going from the US, to an overseas assignment, then back to the US again. I got out of the army in 1991, after the Gulf War, and followed her while she stayed in. All of my initial discovery of her fantasies took place while we were overseas. It was once we were back in the US and settled into our new assignment that I began to have these thoughts. I didn't talk to her about it for quite a while - close to a year. A few months after I began to have these thoughts, Lin was sent to a 3 month long school out of state. During our time away from each other I began to do some very deep soul searching.

My thoughts ran the gamut from figuring out whether or not I'd be immediately jealous that somebody else was actually touching my wife, to how the heck I could even approach the subject with her. At first I agonized about it, then the more I thought about it, the less of a dilemma it became. I began to use what I considered at the time to be logic. It went something like this…

Wouldn't this be the same as cheating? No. Cheating, in our opinion, involves lies, fraud, or some other form of deceit. If everything is out in the open, with no secrets or subterfuge, how could it be cheating? Isn't this just adultery? In the strict sense of the word, I imagine it is, but if every one is agreeable, what harm can come from it? Who would benefit from it if we did it? All of us, obviously. Who would be hurt by it? Potentially, all of us again - unless strict guidelines were agreed to and adhered to from the beginning. I then moved on to the more emotional issues.

Who did she love? Me. Would she love the other person? I don't know - no, probably not - in fact, certainly not. Who would she come home with at the end of the day? Me. Would the other man be taking anything away from our relationship? That was the tough one. I had been raised to believe that sex was something that people who were in love did. Even as a teenager I equated sex with love. It wasn't that the thought of sex as a recreational thing was foreign to me, it was just that it wasn't anything I had ever thought of. I knew there were people who called themselves swingers (or wife-swappers at the time.) And I thought I knew what that meant. I now know that I didn't know a thing - I just thought I did.

The big question was, could I separate sex from love to the point that I could allow another man to have sex with my wife? I really thought long and hard about that one. I discovered that over time, the more I thought about it, the more the thought excited me. I finally decided that I could. The thought of Lin having sex with someone else while I was there, and the excitement she would be experiencing, became more and more exciting to me the more I thought about it.

Would I be jealous? That was the big one, and probably the hardest one to put into words. Yes, I would be jealous - but how would that jealousy manifest itself? I'm not a violent person, so I knew that wouldn't be a factor. I'm not a manipulative person, so this wouldn't be used as leverage to get my way down the road for something else entirely. I'm not good at keeping thoughts and ideas to myself, so Lin would know something was wrong. How would I handle it? Again, my mind wandered down the road of what, at the time, I thought was logic: "This whole thing is your idea, dude. You'll handle it by going through it and discussing it with her after the fact, and going from there."