PAUL: We did clear the air. And we decided that, well, that we would do this again.
JWW: That you would continue to exchange partners with the Creightons.
PAUL: Yes.
SHEILA: It would be a regular Friday-night thing, we decided. A weekly swap. I remember I got together with Jan the afternoon after we finally decided, and I told her, and we talked about almost everything. She told me she had felt very close to me from the day we moved in, but that now that we were sharing husbands she felt infinitely closer to me than ever before. I knew exactly what she meant. I felt a tremendous amount of tenderness for her, and warmth. She said that we were sisters, closer than sisters.
Thursday night Paul and I practically had an orgy. All we could think about was what we would be doing the following night. Not the simple fact of having sex relations with Jeff and Jan but the whole idea of meeting together and systematically changing partners. I’m sure the forbidden aspect of it was part of the excitement. Forbidden fruit and all that.
Friday night, they came over to our place again after dinner. It was amazing how relaxed all four of us were. A real contrast to the scene a week earlier.
We put on records, danced a little, then turned down the lights and had a regular necking party. I sat on Jeff’s lap on an armchair and Paul and Jan took the couch, and we kissed and petted like teenagers.
Then I took Jeff upstairs.
Love Thy Neighbor
PAUL: It’s a cliché to say that the average married couple doesn’t know what they’re missing. Cliché or not, it’s very literally true. It was certainly true in our case.
SHEILA: In other words, we thought we were happy. We didn’t realize how miserable our lives were.
PAUL: No, seriously. We did think our lives were full, that we were getting as much out of sex and love and life as we could reasonably expect to. We didn’t start with this basic feeling of sexual discontent that you hear so much about. In other words, we didn’t know what we were missing. That first night with Jan and Jeff opened up a whole new world for us, to add yet another cliché to the pile. There was a potential excitement in sexual relationships that we had not known to be there—
SHEILA: We had never been that technique-minded before, for example. We would vary positions and try different things to a limited degree, but for the most part we had settled into a comfortable groove. There were certain things we both knew that we liked, and we would do that, and there was very little interest in increased experimentation. But when we started swinging we would learn little things from Jeff or Jan and introduce them into our own relationship. And besides that, we were just more concerned with matters of technique, more interested in the whole idea.
PAUL: This is universally true, incidentally. Swingers are just better in bed than civilians.
SHEILA: That’s partly because they get more practice, of course. And because they’re sexier people to begin with. But it’s also because they care more. They don’t confine themselves to the same partner year after year after year. They make love with a lot of different people, and so they have a basis for comparison.
PAUL: And they take pride in technique. You might be surprised to learn how much skill a man or woman can develop simply through practice and application. The average person tends to think that sexual ability is inborn. That a person is or is not passionate, for instance. That the major factors are the size of a man’s penis or the shape of a girl’s body. Those are probably the least important considerations, as a matter of fact. How long a man can sustain intercourse, the extent of a man’s or woman’s muscular control, any number of oral and manual techniques — these have more to do with one’s ability or lack thereof in the hay.
SHEILA: Amen to that...
They are easier, now, with one another and with the interviewer. Before, when they discussed the manner in which the Creightons had seduced them, there was a very noticeable quantity of tension in the air, accompanied by a note of sorrow, perhaps a lament for their vanished innocence. The recollection of their reactions at the time — their confusion, the awkwardness of the situation, their doubts and fears — had introduced those very emotions as a background to our conversation. Now they have gotten past that initiation and reminisce as veteran swingers defending the life and proud of their abilities and strengths.
Over the summer, their relationship with the Creightons gradually developed and deepened. Before the summer’s end, the frequency of their sessions had increased from once to twice a week, with both Tuesday and Friday nights given over to sexual exchanges with the other couple. The social lives of both couples became so thoroughly centered upon the switching of partners that sex literally served as the focal point of all their lives.
PAUL: The change in our relationship was a very gradual thing. You have to remember that we were all of us not far removed from the novice stage in this sort of thing. The Creightons had swung with another couple, true enough, but they had never gotten any further than simply trading partners and going off to separate rooms for an hour or two of fun and games. This of course is the most basic level of swinging, and most couples move on to more involved stuff before very long.
SHEILA: And we knew what other couples did.
PAUL: Yes, that was the wild part. Between the ads in the club publications, some of which got pretty explicit, and the books which purported to tell all about swapping, we knew that what we were doing was regarded by hard-core swingers as pretty tame stuff. We would read about other things, threesomes and foursomes, all balling in the same room, that sort of thing, and I think all four of us really wanted to get into that bag but nobody wanted to be the one to suggest it. Like at a square party, for instance, where maybe all of the people there would really dig swapping for the night, but of course no one has the nerve to suggest it and so it never happens.
So the four of us got into this sort of thing in a gradual way. Looking back on it, it seems almost childish the way we would sort of stick our toes in and then look around carefully to make sure no one was overly shocked. The first testing of the boundaries was conversational. We began talking about things, all four of us together, that wouldn’t have been brought up in conversation earlier. For example, one Friday night we were at our place or theirs, it hardly matters, and we were sitting around having drinks as a sort of prelude to what would follow, and Jeff announced that he was hungry as a bear and that he intended to give Sheila the frenching of her life. She rose to the occasion with some remark about his well-trained tongue—
SHEILA: There are times when I wish you didn’t have a photographic memory for everything I say.
PAUL: Well, you said it, didn’t you? Anyway, that broke a particular conversational harder. We began talking openly about what we intended to do together, or what we had done. It made things more intimate.
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.