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In the fifties the journalists referred to it as “wife-swapping.” Today it’s called “swinging,” but not considering of its name this swinging lifestyle seems to be rising in popularity among majority, adult married couples in the United States and Canada. The popular media are paying increasing interest to the trend, regularly putting a optimistic spin on the effects which swinging has upon marriages. The North American Swing Club Association (NASCA) claims there are organized swing clubs in just about all states as well as Canada, England, Germany, and Japan. These clubs are profitable businesses which provide all levels of social activities for swingers including vacation plans, special retreat sites for swingers, and annual gatherings and seminars. Lifestyles, Inc., a swingers voyage agency, booked 700 couples at a resort in Jamaica in February of 1999.
What precisely is swinging? Dissimilar “open marriages” of the 1970’s which promoted non-possessive love and tolerance of infidelity in their spouses, or “polyamory” - the love of several sex partners at once – swinging is non-monogamous sexual activity, treated a lot like any other social activity, that can be practiced as a couple. Emotional monogamy, or dedication to the love relationship with one’s marital partner, remains the principal focus. Swinging is usually done in the presence of one’s spouse and requires the approval of both to the experience. Though swingers often become close friends with other swinging couples, there are policy 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 secrecy and dishonesty inherent in one’s natural desires for sexual diversity, the couple can explore their fantasies together without deceit or guilt. By removing the necessity for deceit from the relationship, a brand new level of trust and honesty about all of one’s feelings is apparently achieved without the harsh baggage of envy.
Swinging as an alternative lifestyle is of both practical and scholarly interest because the attempt to mix sexual non-monogamy with emotional monogamy is deeply “deviant” from the western model of romantic love which assumes that sexual and emotional monogamy are mutually reinforcing and inseparable. It has yet to be demonstrated empirically whether this alternative lifestyle in fact strengthens or weakens marital bonds, but in an era where 36% of husbands and 30% of wives, sometimes so-called hotwives confess to having had at least one extra-marital affair, where divorce rates for first marriages are approaching 61%, and where family insecurity and parental neglect of children has become a main national concern, any effort to redefine “love” and strengthen the marital relationship is worthy of our interest. If swingers have found a way to stabilize relationships, prolong family ties, and improve 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 segment of the residents reported in earlier studies, but when it comes to attitudes about sex and marriage they are less racist, less sexist, and less heterosexist than the general public. Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the happiness of their marriages and life satisfaction generally as higher than the non-swinging population.