The Wife-Swap Report (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  SHEILA: That sounds funny, doesn’t it? I mean you would think that when four people are swapping, that’s about as intimate a situation as you can get. But it’s not so. Even in a swapping situation, there are all sorts of progressive degrees of intimacy.

  PAUL: It wasn’t long, then, before we all four made love in the same room.

  SHEILA: God, do you remember the first time we did that?

  PAUL: Naturally.

  SHEILA: That was the most exciting night.

  PAUL: Again, this was a case of all of us having wanted to do this, but no one getting the ball rolling. Let’s face it—a very large proportion of the excitement in swinging is vicarious. The thought of Sheila getting extreme sexual pleasure with Jeff was as much a part of my enjoyment of the whole thing as what I did with Jan. That’s the one thing that the average civilian finds almost impossible to understand. People tend to think that there’s a sort of quid pro quo involved, that I’m willing to have another man make love to Sheila because I’m getting his wife in return.

  SHEILA: Even the expression “swapping” gives that impression. That you make a trade, that you give up one thing to get another. That’s one reason I’m not too crazy about the phrase. I prefer swinging.

  PAUL: I’ll say you do.

  SHEILA: I mean the word.

  PAUL: Just kidding, love. But the point is that I wanted Sheila to make it with Jeff, not just so I could have Jan with no guilt feelings but because the thought of her having her kicks was thrilling to me. And by extension I wanted to watch the two of them together, and wanted to make love to Jan in front of Sheila. I think we all wanted that.

  SHEILA: Not at first. We had to get used to it.

  PAUL: True enough. We had to get used to what we were doing before we could really want to do it all in the same room. As I said, as we’ve been saying throughout, all of this was a gradual process. Let’s face it, even nowadays, in what we like to think of as highly enlightened times, people grow up with a view of sex that is not far removed from old-fashioned New England Puritanism. Even those of us with so-called liberal attitudes, with not much bias against premarital sex and with the feeling that what a man and wife do in bed is beautiful, even so there’s an inevitable feeling that sex has to be secretive and hidden, that it can never involve more than two people, that it has to be tied up with love and hooked into the fabric of a permanent relationship. Even when you reject all of this on an intellectual level, it remains a very real part of your outlook. Now people can be conditioned to get themselves free from all of this, but it takes time. It has to happen bit by bit.

  JWW: When it did happen for the first time, the four of you making love in the same room, was it as a result of someone’s suggestion?

  PAUL: No, it just happened.

  SHEILA: It had been mentioned. Don’t you remember? We had talked about how silly it was to split up, and you said you would like to watch me with Jeff.

  PAUL: In a joking way, yes. And of course the joking had a foundation in fact as joking generally does, but that was about as far as it went. No, the way it happened was simple enough. We had the lights turned down low and were doing some dancing and necking. Very slow dancing that was more a matter of vertical petting than anything Arthur Murray would recognize. It was particularly exciting because we would switch partners every once in a while, not just for dancing but for petting as well. The thing of going from one woman to another, from Jan to my wife, had a sort of orgiastic feeling to it that was very erotic.

  SHEILA: Then I think it was Jeff who took off his shirt. He said he was too warm and he didn’t see any reason why he should be uncomfortable. I think by this time we all knew what we were building up to. In the books we had read, this sort of thing often started with a game of Strip Poker, but I really don’t believe any of us could have taken anything as childish as Strip Poker at all seriously. The whole idea of it is too silly. I know there are swingers who use it to break the ice, but I just can’t see it. In order for it to work, you would have to get past the fact that it’s basically so juvenile, and you would also have to be conditioned to find nudity erotic in and of itself. There is something erotic in nudity, but not when you have a bunch of naked people sitting cross-legged on the floor playing cards. That crosses the line between eroticism and absurdity.

  PAUL: From the sublime to the ridiculous, you might say.

  SHEILA: Just the same, when Jeff took his shirt off, the words that flashed through my mind were “Strip Poker.” We began dancing again, and he kissed me and put his hand up under my skirt. I went all weak in the knees, and when I got my strength back I pushed him away and told him all of a sudden I was uncomfortably warm myself. I took off my blouse and my bra. We started dancing again, both of us bare from the waist up, and it was something.

  PAUL: Naturally one thing led to another. I took off my shirt, and Jan took off not only her blouse and bra but her skirt and panties as well. Before long we were all four of us naked. The excitement of the situation was absolutely fantastic. I was holding Jan in my arms and looking over her shoulder at the other two. Jan was a tall girl, and I only had to bend my knees slightly in order to manage coitus in a standing position. Then Jeff and Sheila saw what we were doing, and Sheila called out that we should all look at her, and she dropped to her knees in front of Jeff and took his penis in her mouth.

  SHEILA: I wanted to do it. I wanted them to watch. I wanted to do it and for them to see me.

  PAUL: And that just tore the lid off of everything. We never did separate that night. We rolled around on the floor screwing like mad, just kept doing it all night long . . .

  • • •

  They talk animatedly of the central role sex comes to play in their lives. There is now and then an air of braggadocio in their conversation, as if they are seeking to impress, perhaps specifically to shock. They describe an evening with the Creightons in which they engage in troilistic activity for the first time—the Creighton woman has expressed a desire to make love to two men simultaneously, and Paul has coitus with her while she fellates her husband. It is Sheila who takes the lead in describing the activity, doing so in photographic detail and explaining how she watched the entire escapade, how it excited her, and how she determined to enjoy similar pleasures herself.

  • • •

  JWW: It almost seems as though there was a tolerance factor operating, as though you had to extend your involvement in swinging in order to maintain the level of excitement.

  PAUL: Oh, that’s absolutely right. I think that’s the case for just about everyone.

  SHEILA: At the beginning, certainly. Until you find your particular groove, you have to keep getting further and further out. If you give it some thought, you can see that there’s nothing particularly remarkable in that. Swinging in any form consists of a violation of society’s rules for sexual behavior. Naturally part of the kick is the excitement of the forbidden, of kicking over the traces. And another part of the excitement is the sheer novelty of what you’re doing. So there’s an irresistible impulse to break more rules, and at the same time there’s a natural desire for even more in the way of novelty.

  PAUL: Sooner or later you reach a point where there are no frontiers. The kinkier things don’t happen to turn you on, and of those things which do appeal, there are none you haven’t tried. We’ve known couples who hit that plateau in no time at all—they just plunge right into the swinging society with no holds barred and they find their own level almost at once. And then there are other couples who make their way a little at a time over a period of quite a few years, getting a little teensy bit more into the swing of things as they go. Sooner or later, though, every swinger becomes a burned-out case.

  SHEILA: As in leprosy—a burned-out case is a leper for whom the disease has run its course.

  PAUL: Which happens to swingers. They find their niche in the whole scheme of things and they stay there. Or drop out—and this happens a great deal of the time.

  SHEILA: We did,
of course.

  PAUL: That was a little different. We dropped out and came back, and that’s something that I think most people go through at one time or another. Not all of them, certainly, but I would say the greater portion. People go through emotional changes, they have second thoughts . . .

  But there are certain couples who run the gamut of swinging and keep going further and further as we described, and then when they find no worlds left unconquered they just give the whole thing up and abandon swinging altogether. It’s like the way certain guys’ll take up a sport or a hobby and stay with it until they reach a certain level of proficiency, and then all at once they’re bored and they drop it and start in on something new. They try swinging and see what it’s like, and after they’ve tried everything there is to try, then they give it up and start collecting stamps or something.

  JWW: To get back to your experience with the Creightons, I gather that the desire to extend the range of swinging was something shared by all four of you.

  PAUL: Definitely. And by the same token, we were all a little reluctant to do too much too soon.

  JWW: Why?

  PAUL: I don’t know. Perhaps because new experiences and new ideas do take getting used to. Perhaps because we were worried about straining our relationship or ruining one or the other of our marriages . . .

  On that point, I’m sure we sensed even then the danger of getting that intimately involved with just one other couple. There are any number of plus factors, of course. Not just such obvious things as safety and convenience but the whole quality of the relationship that develops.

  SHEILA: Thinking back, it was really an extraordinary relationship. We’ve never had anything like it since. It was like a four-way marriage, if that makes any particular sense. It was really a four-way love relationship, and that can be both good and bad. It makes for a lot of very fine feelings. So often swinging is just an involved way to scratch a particular itch in a new improved fashion, but here there was emotional involvement in addition to good nitty-gritty sex, and that can make a real difference.

  PAUL: It can also make for drawbacks, too.

  SHEILA: Oh, yes. You know, I think maybe that sort of relationship could work in one of those hippie communes you read about, I think they have them out in California, where everybody sort of lives with everybody else in a tribal relationship and all the children are reared in common. While Paul and I aren’t exactly hippie types—

  PAUL: No kidding.

  SHEILA: —even so, I have to admit I find the idea of those communes very attractive. The idea of everybody just loving everybody else. Oh, I know how it sounds when you hear the words coming out of the mouths of one of those idiot flower people, but I’m serious. In a situation like that you could really have group love and make it work.

  PAUL: Maybe.

  SHEILA: But for us—well, with Jan and Jeff, in a sense it was as though we were all married to one another, and in another sense it wasn’t. Because we were a part of the society we lived in, and our individual marriages were separate economic and legal units. So there was a—I forget the term, it’s the anthropological reason why every society has incest taboos?

  PAUL: Something about confusion of roles?

  SHEILA: Something like that. As I understand it, the real reason why you can’t marry your brother has nothing to do with recessive genes and all that. Because primitive tribes didn’t know anything about genetics, they didn’t realize that inbreeding would lead to faults in the offspring. But what they did realize was that a sister and brother would grow up relating to one another in a particular way, and then if they became man and wife they would have to relate in an entirely different way, and that the outcome of all of this was a lot of confusion.

  PAUL: I’m not entirely sure I’ll buy a hundred percent of that. I think they may also have noticed that sisters who got laid by their brothers had a tendency to have babies with two heads, or whatever. You don’t want to sell primitive tribesmen short. They may not calculate with the speed of a computer, but they did have a habit of coming up with the right answer sooner or later.

  SHEILA: Well, that’s beside the point anyway. I may have picked a bad example, I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t love Jeff Creighton the same way I loved my own husband, because I was married to Paul and not to Jeff, and I couldn’t maintain the marriage and divide my emotional responses that way, and—oh, I don’t know, really. The four of us were just too damned close, that’s all.

  PAUL: I’m sure that could only happen in a first-swap situation.

  SHEILA: Except that it wasn’t a first-swap situation for Jeff and Jan.

  PAUL: Well, it was close to it. I hadn’t realized that when I spoke, though. You’re right. Still, the point is that an experienced swinging couple would not be likely to get that intimately involved with another couple in an emotional sense. We’ve even known some swingers who make it a point never to have social contacts with their swinging friends, and vice versa. Of course on the other side of the ledger there are a great many swingers who associate socially almost exclusively with other swingers. I would think either extreme is probably a mistake, and yet I can understand both points of view.

  SHEILA: We would never get that close with another couple again. We never have, and I’m sure we never will.

  PAUL: That makes it sound as if we regret our experience with Jan and Jeff, and that isn’t true.

  SHEILA: I didn’t mean it that way. It was great while it lasted, and I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it ended badly or anything like that. It didn’t. In fact, while we were swinging with them we didn’t feel there was anything unhealthy about the situation. As a matter of fact it wasn’t until afterward, when we had had experiences with a wide variety of other people, that we even thought there was anything wrong with what we had had going with the Creightons.

  PAUL: It would have ended badly, though.

  SHEILA: Do you think so?

  PAUL: If they hadn’t moved away, yes. I’m sure of it. And I think they knew it, too, and that’s one of the reasons why they didn’t reject that job offer and stay in K.C.

  SHEILA: I suppose that’s possible.

  • • •

  We lapse into a pensive silence. A stack of records comes to a close and Paul turns them over. Sheila takes my glass into the kitchen and freshens my drink. Paul begins to tell an anecdote about a couple they have just met for the first time and their particular social and sexual peculiarities. The conversation meanders on, turns tangentially to educational standards in the county, to local government and politics, and then, inevitably, back to sex. I ask eventually if they had had any other sexual partners during their time they were seeing the Creightons.

  • • •

  PAUL: We thought of it. I’m sure they did, too, as far as that goes, but it didn’t go any further than thinking. Sheila and I would discuss the possibility. In fact we would look through the club magazines and pick out ads that we would be interested in replying to, but we didn’t go so far as to draft letters or anything like that.

  JWW: What stopped you?

  PAUL: Oh, a few things, I guess. Most of all the feeling that Jeff and Jan wouldn’t approve, that we would be somehow disloyal to them. Also there was the worry about postal inspectors, or that we might get involved with the wrong class of people. To put it simply, it was a lot safer and easier for us to go along with Jeff and Jan than to break new ground. We certainly didn’t know anybody else who was in the swinging whirl, and the idea of plunging straight into correspondence with total strangers was kind of scary. Exciting, but also scary.

  SHEILA: Actually, the idea of having sex with strangers was both of those things—exciting and scary at the same time. Remember, we were close friends of Jeff and Jan by the time we wound up making love with them.

  JWW: Then your relationship with the Creightons did a great deal to determine your whole approach to swinging.

  PAUL: Absolutely. On the one hand, it kept us away from the wh
ole central world of swinging for a long time. We missed a lot while we were with them. Face it—one of the real reasons to swing is variety and novelty—making it with new people in a new situation. By staying with the Creightons, you could almost say that we were turning monogamy into a plural marriage thing and running out of variety and novelty in the process. Instead of having one wife and an endless procession of one-shot mistresses, I had two wives, if you see what I mean.

  SHEILA: That’s one side of it, that we stayed away from the whole scene of correspondence clubs much longer than we would have otherwise. But on the other side of the scale, we got into more sophisticated sex than we would have otherwise.

  PAUL: Very true.

  JWW: Why was that the case?

  PAUL: Let me see, what’s the best way to explain it? I suppose by contrasting our story with that of another couple, a couple of kids we were comparing notes with not long ago. In certain respects their story parallels ours—their situation, if not their story.

  They’re about our age, and they’ve been swinging for five years, almost the same amount of time as we have. Instead of getting involved through another couple, they followed the fairly common pattern of the husband reading about swinging and getting interested, and gradually talking the wife into it. I would say nine out of ten couples start this way. Maybe the percentage is higher, I don’t know. They began immediately with correspondence, and they started swinging at the rate of a couple a week. They would see certain couples more than once, but they made a big pitch for variety. For security reasons they made a point of swinging with people fifty miles or more from their home base, so it was actually easier for them to have variety than to exchange visits regularly with another couple.

  The point is that the variety and the novelty of meeting new people all the time made it more or less unnecessary for them to go overboard looking for sexual variety. As a result they were swinging for months without doing anything more out of the ordinary than changing partners and having sex in separate rooms. There was enough of a challenge in getting to know another couple and breaking the ice, and then there was enough novelty in making love to a stranger, so that the kinkier swingers’ games didn’t come into the picture for them for a long time, really.