The Lifestyle (30 page)

About fifty of the generically named recreational swingers were greeted by a retired small-town police officer listed in the brochure as Bob, and his homemaker partner Judy who took the floor as Bob rolled the doors shut. Judy had a remarkably lineless face for her fifty-five years and was quite pretty, although, clasping her hands at her lap and wearing billowy pants, sensible flats, and a floral blouse, she reminded me more of a grammar school teacher than the exuberantly loud and laughing glamor girl I’d seen on the dance floor last night.

“We all know that partying is what the world thinks the lifestyle is, but we also know that what’s underneath the fun makes all the difference,” Judy told us, raising her intertwined fingers to her broad bosom in an almost prayerful position. The architects and engineers, pharmacists and teachers, nodded their agreement.

“Whether this is your first experience or whether you’ve been in it for a very long time,” Judy said, “we both feel, Bob and I, that the issues are actually the same. What it comes down to is that you both put your relationship first. Maybe you both don’t want exactly the same thing out of the lifestyle, but at least you’re both devoted to each other, and what you do want doesn’t hurt your partner’s feelings or damage the relationship. We’re not here to have secret love affairs, sneaking off for rendezvous with someone else’s partner.”

This statement reflected a norm I knew to be almost universal in the lifestyle: swingers may practice open eroticism, but they definitely do not have open marriages. They would never give each other permission to have an affair,
preferring to treat each party they went to as a separate event and each erotic encounter as something to be negotiated, monitored, and shared. Whether they merely danced close and socialized or got together with others, playcouples believed so firmly in the “traditional dyadic relationship” that two academics, Rebecca and Charles Palson, once declared swinging a “conservative institution.” Butler as well has always maintained that “most swingers consider themselves as monogamous.” They practiced “faithful adultery.”

“Now—all of this requires honest communication,” said the big-gutted Bob, playing Judy’s tag-team facilitator. From his toes to his bald pate he looked the part of your stereotypical country cop, with a gentle Western drawl to match. “Do you reassure each other—do you reassure both partners of the couple you’re with?” he asked. “Also, is everybody willing? And what about when you get home? And what about before you leave home? And what about if this is your first time partying? All those ways to prevent hurt feelings through open communication—being honest with your partner—is why we do this seminar. Because if one just goes along with the other without saying anything, you have one miserable person in that relationship.”

And so we began the test: everyone had to fill out a three-page questionnaire, which was about the last thing you’d expect swingers at a New Horizons convention to take time out to do. I glanced through the sheets Bob gave me. The first page was titled “What turns you on/What do you think turns your partner on?” Couples had twenty-six “activities” to rate for themselves and their partner, from: “1) not interested/ turned off;” to: “5) really turned on, enjoy this every chance I get.” The activities themselves ranged from soft swinging (“flirting,” “group nudity,” “erotic pictures”), to interpersonal swinging (“threesomes”) to hard-core limits (“sex orgies”). According to the nonscientific standards of this questionnaire,
a number discrepancy of more than two—between what you thought your partner wanted and what he or she really wanted—put you in the “danger” zone. If what you enjoyed every chance you got was in fact uninteresting and a turnoff for your partner, you both had a big problem.

“What are your sex preferences and tastes?” the second sheet asked. It focused even more specifically on problems presented by differing agendas, with preference ratings from “1) I like it” to “5) I hate to do it, but do it to please my partner.” Finally, the third sheet was titled “Sex Personality” and dealt with intimacy issues, such as how you thought your partner assessed you (“warm,” “passive,” “frigid”), how much time you spent talking about swinging, and communication cues you and your partner employed to signal boundaries while interacting at parties.

“Shhh—no sharing, and
no
peeking!” Judy called from the front of the room, holding up a finger like a schoolmarm at the couples who had begun to banter. “That’ll kill what we’re trying to do here.” She raised her chin and pursed her pertly lipsticked mouth as she surveyed the swingers, who set to working studiously for the next ten minutes.

Though these sheets of Bob and Judy’s seemed unsophisticated, they were, according to Bob, a means of making the partygoers aware if they were breaking rules that applied to two broad categories of the lifestyle: how a playcouple related within their marriage, and how they related to others while swinging. An uninquisitive reporter attending an environment like New Horizons would not perceive these rules since, as in most subcultures, they were invisible. But at their emotional core, the rules were no different from those that circumscribed flirtatious behavior among long-married couples at any suburban gathering. In fact, the emotional issues that dominated a straight marriage held fast in a swinging pair-bond.

“Generally,” Butler wrote, “swingers agreed that for successful swinging, a couple had to have a viable relationship based upon love.” At home that meant constant communication, respectful language, and keeping arguments free of personal attacks; at a party the number-one rule was
reassurance
. No matter how enamored marrieds allowed themselves to become with others on the dance floor, or lost in passion in bed, spouses—by touch, word, or after-sex discussion—must always strive to comfort each other with the knowledge that their pleasure was part of a comarital experience, not a progression to an extramarital love affair. Ignoring the rule of reassurance led to a feeling of betrayal no different from what straight couples experienced when they got wise to an adulterous spouse. Abiding by this rule meant putting the marriage first at all times. That is why Butler could claim that “swinging marrieds probably represent the least revolutionary of the emerging alternative lifestyles” that he examined in his book.

To nonswingers, of course, it seems incredible that one could enjoy sex with an intriguing extramarital partner and not feel anything beyond “noncommitted love.” But veteran swingers say they have learned how to put a cap on a romantic experience. “You go off privately with someone,” Jennifer Lomas once explained to me, alluding to her preference for closed swinging, “and you have a fantasy affair with a beginning, a middle, and a fond farewell; you just compress it down to an evening so no one gets hurt. There’s no midweek calls—‘Oh, I love you, I have to see you again…!’ There’s an understanding: this is happening in the lifestyle. The art of it is you feel admired and affectionate, so it’s erotic, but you let your husband know—it’s not a threat, it’s a fantasy with a friend.”

It should always be borne in mind that these are long-married, middle-aged people who are able to function this way. Most swingers will tell you that couples under thirty or couples just falling in love are incapable of combining all the
fun of a short-term extramarital fling with all the social, economic, and emotional benefits of traditional fidelity—which the social rules of the lifestyle allow. Couples in their thirties and forties, swingers say, are much better equipped than younger folks to accept that their beguiling diversions are, in a literal sense, as fantastic as a Hollywood dream. Middle-aged swingers easily step in and out of their fantasies simply because they have been around the block a few times and know how to control their hearts. Because their fantasies are bookended by a loving marriage, they are recognized as plausible only during the experience of the fantasy—not beyond. The entire “playcouple philosophy” is structured around “sharing fantasies,” in Bob McGinley’s words, and it requires the maturity to be able to strictly circumscribe the experience of the fantasy. Forbidden fantasies derive their texture and pleasure from their seeming impossibility, but swingers believe it isn’t that much of a compromise to experience them in the safety of a sanctioned environment, with the approval of their spouse. The lifestyle party provides the venue—sans the lying and hurt that an affair can cause. Overall, the rule of engagement couples follow allows them both to display the kind of emotion to extramarital partners that keeps encounters erotic and express love within the marriage to keep the encounters nonthreatening.

The other outstanding issue addressed by Bob and Judy’s questionnaire was coercion. One of the few marital rules actually written down in the lifestyle is the rule of consensuality, which in theory protects lifestyle spouses against the possibility that either the husband or wife might draw the other into an activity not previously agreed upon. “Everyone has the right of refusal,” states the boldfaced type in
Etiquette in Swinging
, the handbook of the North American Swing Club Association. “The actual sexual activity engaged in by swingers can be as varied as the people involved. Everything, however, is ALWAYS consensual.” The sociologist Jerold Meints has termed this “the
explicit rule” of swinging, and it is emphatically enforced by patrolling overseers at clubs like New Horizons, or by hosts at house parties, who are always on the lookout for partners who seem unhappy in a particular situation and who will expel a couple, or pull them aside for interrogation, if they detect they are a potential source of discontent to each other or to the party. A new couple who show up at a gathering—no matter how outrageously dressed—can count on being left alone sexually until they declare they are interested. Virtually every academic who has reported on the behavior of swingers asserts that this rule is almost never violated. The anthropologist Bartell attended dozens of parties with his provocatively dressed wife at which, he said, “swingers
assumed
we were neophyte swingers, anxious to start swinging.” Yet even when he and his wife disrobed in the midst of an orgy in order to fit in, he dis- covered he could “observe without participating…. Seldom did we find it awkward to avoid swinging.” It startles most observers to witness how the most unsophisticated husbands at a place like New Horizons behave as models of knightly decorum toward women. Even if dancing in a negligee with a man in the midst of a bacchanal, a woman had only to inform her interested partner that she didn’t have sex in mind for the boundary to be clearly respected for the rest of the evening. She could flirt with, tease, and posture to any man who caught her fancy but it was forbidden for the fellow to respond with uninvited touching of any part of her body that would be normally out of bounds at a straight party.

“May I have your attention!” Bob announced at the front of the room. “Everybody had a chance to finish…? Okay, guys! Go ahead and start sharing answers!”

At Bob’s okay the crowd exploded into gossip, the decibel level creeping up as excited husbands and wives compared what sounded like an hysterical catalogue of desires. I took advantage of the general uproar to have a peek at the questionnaire of the
woman on my left. She immediately covered it up, her cheeks glowing red as if with every available drop of blood drawn from her shoulders to her scalp. “I wouldn’t show this to my psychiatrist,” she laughed, “and I don’t even have a psychiatrist.”

“Pia’s terrified of what she wants,” her husband cracked. “She’s terrified she’ll get it.”

“How long have you been in the lifestyle?” Leslie asked my standard question for the weekend.

Pia looked at her watch. “An hour?” She giggled and sat back, trying to pull down her short leather skirt. “We just drove up. This is our first time to a club. How about you?”

“We’re sort of around the lifestyle,” Leslie said. “My husband’s writing a book.”

Pia was a nurse, and her husband, Earl, was a physician. As Leslie, Skala, and I had noticed, the health professions were well represented at this convention. “Have you guys been to the Annex yet?” I asked.

“Actually, we just had the tour,” Pia laughed. “What a place! Wow! It’s like a theme park!”

They’d been raised in a small town as Christians, were now in their mid-forties with two teenagers, and had been together since ninth grade, married twenty-seven years. They’d each had one adulterous affair in their lives—and their marriage had almost broken up over it. “Whose suggestion was it to come here?” Leslie asked Pia.

Pia looked at Earl, cocking her pretty, teardrop-shaped face. “I’d say mutual, wouldn’t you?” she asked, but then turned back before Earl could answer. “I suppose my reason’s on my homework sheet,” she laughed again, folding it into quarters on her lap. Eventually I would discover that she was conflicted over her bisexual and group fantasies, which she hadn’t even begun to admit to herself until she’d turned forty.

“One of the things my terminally ill patients always tell me,” Earl said, “is this: ‘The only thing I regret is not doing
what I really wanted to do in life. If I’d’a only stopped and smelled the roses.’”

“You’ll find lots of roses to smell here,” Leslie said.

“Okay! May I have your attention again!” Bob called. He rapped the table in front of him with his ring. “We’d like to—Okay! Hey, folks,
folks!”
he shouted, trying to quell the banter that had been growing ever louder, threatening to break into an open party. “So—did you guys get each others’ feedback?”

“Yeah, Donna’s attitude to men is very unbiased,” a fellow cracked. “She wants
all
of’em.”

“Well I should have known,” Donna said. “Only answer private questions in private.”

“Okay,” Bob said, “what we’d like to find out now—Have you listened to what your partner was saying? Any major surprises—anybody like to share?”

“We had a hundred percent compatibility!” said a non-swinging woman, Dr. Jean Henry, holding up sets of questionnaires in both hands. She would shortly become the associate director of the Center for Research on Women’s Health at Texas Woman’s University near Dallas, and was now following the same convention route I was on, comparing the subculture on the Coast to the one in the Lone Star State, where there were no fewer than twenty-one NASCA-affiliated clubs and dozens more unaffiliated ones. One of these, the Inner Circle, had been raided two evenings before. In her master’s thesis Jean had focused on “female self-image” and, as I’d learned during an interview with her at the pool, she would have liked to have received a grant to conduct an official study of lifestyle women. But, as usual, no one besides the police wanted anything to do with middle-class swingers, so she’d driven up here on her own hook as part of her summer holidays.