JWW: The preference for threesomes developed gradually. Bob found himself gradually getting less and less pleasure out of seeing his wife with another man, and Carol in turn found that she was taking infinitely more pleasure from her relations with bi wives than with their husbands. They noticed an increasing proportion of couple ads soliciting meetings either with couples with bisexual wives or with single bi-minded girls. At first they thought such advertisers had extra males available, extra males being a commodity in abundant supply on the swinging scene. Then they realized that the object of these ads was threesomes of two women and a man.
Their first experience as a trio, however, came not with another woman but with another man.
CAROL: The phone rang one night around dinnertime and it was this fellow we had visited with in Birmingham. He was in town overnight on business and his wife wasn’t with him, and he thought we would like to try a threesome. Now we knew he was legitimate because we had swung with him and his wife before and had had a very good time with them, in fact we hoped to swing with them again. You see, a lot of single men or men whose wives won’t swing will pass themselves off as a couple and then when they come around the excuse is that she’s sick or at a funeral or something of the sort, and then they want to have a threesome with you. We’ve never been stuck that way but we’ve heard plenty of stories.
BOB: The average swinger is a really good person, very open and aboveboard. But there are a lot of creeps, and nine out of ten times they’re married men who haven’t got the guts to get their wives to swing, or think their wives are too good for it, and they can mess things up for everybody.
CAROL: But this fellow was all right, so I asked Bob, and he said sure, invite the guy over, but I made it for after dinner because I had lamb chops on and there was no way to stretch them.
He came over and we had a fairly good time. The two men doubled up on me, one in back and one in front, and actually that’s about all we did, we spent most of our time sitting around and talking. I think he wanted company more than sex anyway, as far as that goes, and he said he always felt strange swinging without his wife and couldn’t really loosen up unless she was there.
BOB: After he left, Carol and I got to talking, and I said that as far as I was concerned, I’d rather not have a scene like that again. It was all right as far as it went, but I didn’t get much out of it, although I hoped she had enjoyed herself.
And she said that all things taken into consideration she really didn’t get that much pleasure with the other men, that for sex with men she really preferred just to do it with me, and that for her the highlight of swinging was bi-experiences with the other girl. And we tossed it around, and we came to the conclusion that as far as we in particular were concerned, the other husband was just something you put up with because he was there. That what we both really wanted more than anything else was a threesome with an extra bi-minded girl.
CAROL: The funny thing was that we had both had this in mind but neither of us would come right out and say it. I don’t know whether it was because I was afraid I would sound like an out-and-out lesbian or what.
BOB: I thought it would be pure selfishness on my part to suggest it, because I thought Carol would get a lot less out of swinging if there was no other man. I always took it for granted that this was a large part of her pleasure.
Another personal reason I had for preferring a threesome to a two-couple situation was that I really did not like contact with other men. The one time with the impotent fellow was the only real experience I had, but more and more we were noticing that couples would both be bi-minded, and the man would suggest something. I always said I wasn’t interested and that was the end of that, but turning somebody down puts a damper on things, and then of course you’re not inclined to get together with that particular couple again.
Also, even if the man isn’t bi-minded and has no interests that way, when you’re all four rolling around together there’s a certain amount of contact between you and the other man that can’t be helped. The worst part of it is that you have to keep being careful and avoiding this, so that with a lot of couples what we would ultimately wind up doing is having one of us men take a turn sitting out and watching while the other did a threesome with the two girls, and then vice versa. That way everybody can just touch whatever’s handy and not have half his mind devoted to worrying who it belongs to.
CAROL: Once we had it out in the open, how we both felt, we knew just what we were looking for. We went through the ads again and began starting correspondence. There were single girls who would advertise to meet with either couples or single girls, and we tried some of them, but we found that quite often these girls actually were lesbians and not bi-minded. They would put up with the husband in order to get to the wife, and that wasn’t what we were interested in. Then there were other single girls who wanted to swing with couples only, and that was precisely what we wanted, and it worked out very well.
BOB: There were also girls who were married and their husbands would come along with them or not, depending on how you wanted it. In fact, with one of these couples we arranged that Carol would go and party with them one night, just by herself, and that the other wife would come over alone herself the following night, so that we had a pair of threesomes but with the one couple the other man and I never even set eyes on each other.
CAROL: We tried that just the once, but I didn’t enjoy swinging without Bob at all, and he didn’t like the idea of it, and we never did it again.
BOB: It was like being the dummy all night long in a game of bridge. And not even watching the play of the hands.
CAROL: It was really no good for either of us. Without Bob along, I felt as though I was committing adultery. I felt very uneasy about the whole thing. It didn’t seem to matter to the other wife — she had done this often in the past and was completely at ease, but I didn’t like it.
BOB: Our first really successful threesome was one we arranged through the mails. This was with a girl named Frannie who lives right here in the Atlanta area. She’s about twenty-three. Her ad said she enjoyed the company of both men and women and wanted to meet refined couples for pleasant evenings. We wrote her a letter and enclosed photographs, and she wrote back with a picture of herself. She explained that she was a high school librarian, lived with her parents, didn’t go out much, and was very lonely.
CAROL: It was such a straight letter that we sort of wondered if she knew what swinging was all about.
BOB: Yes, because every once in a while there are people who put an ad in the swinger magazines or answer one, and they are just lonely people who are too square to guess what swinging is all about. They want to make friends because they are lonely, and they think it’s all like pen pals or something of the sort. We had never run into this personally but we had seen ads from time to time where you could tell the person placing the ad didn’t know what it was all about. It didn’t seem this way from Frannie’s ad, but the letter she wrote gave that impression, and the fact that she was a high school librarian living with her parents.
CAROL: Don’t forget the picture.
BOB: The picture she sent showed this little mousy girl with granny glasses wearing a dress that didn’t give you any idea what her figure was like. Now we had sent a photo of the two of us in bathing suits, except that Carol here wasn’t wearing the top of her suit, and my trunks were skimpy and you could see the outlines of my erection through them. Nothing you can’t legally send through the mails