Back to the history of swinging.
In the fifties the magazines referred to it as “wife-swapping.” Today it’s named “swinging,” but anyway of its name this non-monogamous subculture seems to be rising in popularity among majority, adult married couples in America. The popular media are paying increasing attention to the trend, often putting a optimistic spin on the effects which swinging has upon relationships. The North American Swing Club Association (NASCA) claims there are structured swing clubs in more or less all states as well as Canada, England, Germany, and Japan. These clubs are profitable enterprises which offer all levels of social activities for swingers including vacation plans, special vacation sites for swingers, and yearly conferences and seminars. Lifestyles, Inc., a swingers tour bureau, booked 700 couples at a resort in Jamaica in February of 1998.
What precisely is swinging? Unlike “open marriages” of the 1970’s which promoted non-possessive love and acceptance of unfaithfulness in their spouses, or “polyamory” - the love of many people at once – swinging is non-monogamous sexual activity, treated much like any other social activity, that can be practiced as a pair. Emotional monogamy, or dedication to the love relationship with one’s marital partner, remains the major goal. Wife swapping is typically done in the company of one’s spouse and requires the consent of both to the experience. Though 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 followers 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 diversity, the pair can explore their fantasies mutually without dishonesty or guilt. By removing the necessity for dishonesty from the marriage, a brand new stage of reliance and honesty about all of one’s feelings is supposedly achieved without the negative baggage of jealousy.
Swinging as an alternative lifestyle is of both practical and intellectual interest because the effort to mix sexual non-monogamy with emotional monogamy is basically “deviant” from the western model of idealistic love which assumes that sexual and emotional monogamy are mutually reinforcing and inseparable. It has yet to be demonstrated empirically whether this alternative lifestyle actually strengthens or weakens marital bonds, but in an era where 36% of husbands and 31% of wives, sometimes so-called hotwives declare 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 main national worry, any effort to redefine “love” and strengthen the marital bond is worthy of our interest. If swingers have found a way to stabilize relationships, extend family ties, and enrich 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 section of the population reported in past studies, but when it comes to attitudes about sex and marriage they are less racist, less sexist, and less heterosexist than the broad population. Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the contentment of their marriages and life satisfaction in general as higher than the non-swinging population.
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