Over coffee they asked us if we would like to come back to their place, and Bruce and I exchanged glances and agreed that we would. We drove back in separate cars, and Bruce and I hardly exchanged a word all the way there. I felt very excited, and very apprehensive, all at once.
We had a couple of drinks to break the tension. Then the wife asked Bruce if he would like to see the upstairs of the house, and they went off together, and I found myself alone with a man other than Bruce for the first time in my life. It could have been a very nervous situation but he didn’t give me a chance to be nervous. He sat next to me on the sofa and began to make love to me.
The kissing was the strangest part, probably because I had not spent that much time visualizing it. In my mind I guess I had dwelled more on the more obvious aspects and had not wondered how it would feel to be kissing a strange man. At first it just felt funny. Then it felt marvelously exciting in a way kissing hadn’t been in years. When you’ve been married to a person for a long time, kissing by itself is just not that exciting a thing. You’ve done it so many times, and so often it’s just a loving gesture with no sexual implications, a kiss good-bye before he goes to the office, that sort of thing, completely asexual. And even when it’s a passionate kiss, after a while it’s just a prelude to lovemaking and it’s not really exciting. But this was like kisses with Bruce early in our relationship, before we were married, before we had been physically intimate, because the man I was kissing was a man with whom I had not yet been intimate.
He made love to me on the couch in the living room. He was a very slow and thorough lover, undressed me an article of clothing at a time, told me over and over again how beautiful I was, how much he was attracted to me, how he liked the various parts of me. “You have such magnificent tits,” he said. I remember him saying that over and over.
It was very exciting to know that I was attractive to him. While he still had his clothes on he took my hand and put it on his cock. He had an erection, and this thrilled me beyond belief, not just the excitement of his hard cock but the confirmation that I really was exciting to him.
When I was nude he got out of his own clothes and I looked at him and thrilled at the sight of his body. His penis was actually slightly smaller than Bruce’s, but at the time it looked larger to me, probably because I was seeing him as the essence of manliness, of virility, and I associated this with a large sex organ, and so his penis appeared larger to me than it actually was.
He began making love to me again, and I felt the most extraordinary freedom. I don’t know exactly how to explain this so that it’ll make sense. I felt that I wasn’t supposed to be experienced, that he was the teacher and I was the pupil, and so I was able to relax completely and just follow his lead. I could go with his lovemaking instead of worrying about what should happen next.
Also, I wasn’t afraid of failing. And this surprised me, because up to this moment I had had a great many fears along this line. But now the fear was gone. Maybe the evidence that I had excited him was reassurance enough.
He made very slow, sensitive love to me. He moved from one stage of lovemaking to the next very smoothly. He spent a long time kissing my breasts, then moved his hand to my loins, then gradually did more there with his hand and less on my breasts with his mouth, then almost before I was aware of the transition he was going down on me.
He ate me for ages, and it was fantastic. It felt wonderful, and at first I just enjoyed it, and then I was waiting for him to mount me and have intercourse. Then I realized he wanted to make me come with his mouth, and I tried to hurry myself along to a climax, and of course that’s self-defeating.
He looked up at me with this very gentle smile and said, “Just let yourself go with it. Just float with it and let yourself enjoy the way it feels.”
And all of a sudden I was free. All I had to do was enjoy his tongue on my clitoris and his hands inside me, his finger in my ass and his other fingers in my cunt, all I had to do was feel all of this and enjoy it, and I managed to get out of my mind-prison and into my body in a way I had never entirely managed before, especially during oral sex, and without even knowing it was coming I had an orgasm that absolutely rocked me. It was just like the books said it was supposed to be.
I had had orgasms with Bruce by this time. I had even had orgasms that may have been as powerful and complete as this one. But I had never had an orgasm that took me so completely out of my consciousness, that let my body take over so thoroughly, that represented so much a surrender of will, of ego, of self. I had never before had an orgasm I was so utterly involved with.
Then he fucked me. Long, slow strokes. It was tantalizing. He would fuck me in one position until I came, then get me in another position for a while, and so on, all the while holding himself back. When he finally did come he roared like a bull. It was very thrilling for me to know that I had brought him so much pleasure.
• • •
JWW: Bruce recounted a similarly gratifying experience with the man’s wife. He, too, was greatly excited by her excitement and found it enough of a spur to his potency to more than counteract the effects of his anxieties. He was further pleased by the ease with which she reached orgasm, after having had so much difficulty over the years in inducing a climax for Joanne. In addition, he had always had the usual unvoiced fears that his penis was “too small,” and was understandably delighted to be assured by his new partner that he was “hung like a horse.”
• • •
BRUCE: When we finally left them, Joanne and I were at first a little hesitant with one another, both reluctant to start talking about what we had just done. This was what is called “closed” swinging, of course; I was upstairs with the wife all the time, and Joanne was downstairs with the husband. Most first times are like that, and I think it’s probably a good idea, easier to get into . . .
Once we did start talking about it, the words came in a flood. We both wanted to establish how very good it had been, and how very good we had been. Joanne talked about the climax she had had while she was being eaten, not so much in terms of what an educated tongue the guy had but that she had found a way to let go, to get out of herself. I had experienced something vaguely similar, a feeling I had at one point in the evening of being in complete control. By this I mean that for probably the first time in my life in the course of lovemaking I didn’t really have to think about what I was going to do next. I just did it without thinking and knew that it would be the right thing to do, whatever it was. I was so tuned in to this woman’s body and to my own body that the right action came automatically, without conscious thought.
We had not been terribly worried that swinging would affect our feelings toward one another. I think that was a big worry the first time we were contemplating swinging, but by this time we knew each other well enough and were secure enough with each other that this was no longer a major concern. Still, it was nice to find out that, not only did we not feel differently toward each other in a negative way, but that we felt closer, in terms of having shared this important and delightful experience. Then there was another effect which is harder to explain, and this was increased in later swinging experiences. We became more conscious of ourselves and each other as sexual beings, as sexually attractive. I had always found Joanne attractive and considered her desirable not only to me but in the abstract. The fact that another man found her attractive and enjoyed making love to her made her increasingly desirable to me, at the same time that it made her more sexually confident of herself. And the same thing worked as far as her attitudes toward me were concerned.
We swung again with that same couple a week later. In the week between those two meetings, you could say that we put some of what we had learned into practice. We certainly were more active sexually than was usually the case. Our memories of the swinging evening, our anticipation of the next meeting, and our shared recollections and fantasies, all contributed to create an atmosphere that made us very anxious to make love to each other.
I don’t think we had consciously considered ourselves to be sexually inhibited previously. Perhaps “inhibited” isn’t the right word. However you want to put it, we found out now that we had been holding a part of ourselves back in our lovemaking, and it had affected the quality of our sexual relationship. It wasn’t so much what we had not done before, but that we had not done it with complete abandon and involvement.
During that week, I kept waiting for a reaction to set in, either on my part or on Joanne’s. I anticipated such a reaction and had tried before the event to prepare myself for such a reaction when it came. After all, I had spent a great many years of my life in the grip of a very straight, puritanical set of values, and I expected that I would get echoes of them, aftershocks, something like that.
This didn’t happen. I’m sure it would have, for both of us, if that first experience had not been such an excellent one and if it had not served to bring us so much closer together, both physically and emotionally. If we had been uptight with each other, I’m sure we would have felt that swinging was responsible and would have begun having second thoughts about the decency or morality of what we had done. But everything was so good for us I couldn’t make myself believe that anything about it could be indecent, immoral, evil.
• • •
JWW: Their second swinging experience took place a week later, again at the home of the couple who had initiated them. On this occasion, the other couple suggested they try “open” rather than “closed” swinging; in other words, all four persons remained in the same room rather than separating and coupling off behind closed doors.
While generalizations about swinging are difficult, it is probably valid to say that most swingers begin with closed swinging and gravitate to open swinging. The reasons advanced for the eventual preference of open swinging are several; most commonly one hears that open swinging is more exciting because of its possibilities for voyeurism and/or group sex, that open swinging makes the event more of a shared experience for a couple, that one partner might otherwise tend to worry about his or her mate’s safety or enjoyment.
For Bruce and Joanne, with their particular approach to swinging as sexual therapy-cum-education, open swinging was especially attractive for another reason. It had an educational value. One could learn by observing.
Here’s how Joanne explains it.
• • •
JOANNE: I’ve always enjoyed watching Bruce with another woman. First of all, it’s a very thrilling experience to watch two people make love. It’s an aesthetically beautiful thing, and it’s as erotic as anything I can think of. But more than that, there are things you can learn that way more easily than any other way I can imagine. By watching what another woman does, and by seeing what Bruce especially likes or doesn’t like, I can get ideas of things to do or not do when I make love to him.
It’s also a way of seeing yourself, if you can follow me. When I see another woman make love I identify with her, I feel what she’s feeling, and I know what I look like when I make love, and it gives me a different sort of perspective on the whole experience.
The first time we did this, I have to admit to extraordinary nervousness. I think I was more nervous then than I was when we first swung with this couple. The idea of all being together was very unsettling. Everything about it embarrassed me. I was apprehensive at the idea of Bruce seeing me with another man, as though his feelings for me would be severely tested by the sight of me in another man’s arms. I was also nervous about the presence of the other woman. I felt I would be in competition with her. Her breasts were considerably bigger than mine, and I felt that she was more attractive and that both of the men would gravitate toward her, or want to be with her.
There were other feelings, too, other anxieties. I had some unfocused reservations about her seeing me naked, about my looking at her body. I had a great curiosity about what she would look like naked and at the same time was nervous about it, was reluctant to actually go ahead and look at her. Later I learned to recognize these anxieties as evidence of my own ambivalent homosexual impulses, and of course in time this resolved itself easily enough, but then it was just a further complication.
Fortunately, we had established enough of a pattern of them leading and us following so that my own nervousness was swept aside and ignored. They put on records and we had a few drinks, and then I was sitting on one couch with the husband while Bruce was sitting across the room with the wife. The husband and I began necking, and it didn’t take him long to get my mind off my anxieties. I got excited, and then I forgot about the other two people in the room, and then when I got more excited I remembered them and found their presence exciting instead of inhibiting.
Before our lovemaking got down to the nitty-gritty, the other husband slowed things down and indicated that we ought to watch Bruce and his wife. So we watched them. I can still picture that scene very vividly in my mind.
The were both naked. The couch was sort of a love seat, about five feet long, and he was sprawled out on it with his head in one corner and his legs extended, his feet hanging on the floor. He had his eyes closed and his mouth half open, and one hand was tangled in her hair. She was kneeling on the floor beside him sucking his cock.
It was the most, oh, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.
I was just absolutely struck by the sight of this. I watched her head bobbing up and down, and the way her cheeks were drawn in, concave, as she sucked him, and his fingers flexing in her hair. I watched her breasts rise and fall as her head moved up and down, up and down. And while I watched, her husband was playing with me, touching me all over. He took my hand and put it on his penis, and my hand picked up the rhythm she was using and I jerked his cock in time to the rhythm she sucked in.
He began making love to me in earnest before the two of them finished. It was a nice lazy transition. First we were watching them, and then we were watching and making love simultaneously, and then we had forgotten them and were all caught up in the things we were doing to each other.
I really enjoyed going down on him that time. I had never before really enjoyed the act, not in a direct sense. I had long ago learned to do it without disliking it, but previously it had been only a secondary source of pleasure for me—I enjoyed it because it brought Bruce pleasure.
Watching her—well, it not only showed me things about how to do it, but it made me vividly aware of fellatio as an act that could be an enormous source of pleasure for the woman performing it. It was so obvious that she enjoyed what she was doing, and not only because she was driving Bruce out of his skull.
So when I had her husband’s cock in my mouth, I found myself loving it. Relishing the taste of it, the way it filled my mouth, the sensation of it on my tongue and lips and the inner walls of my mouth. I had never been able to take too much of Bruce’s penis into my mouth, I would always tend to gag on it if I tried, but now the excitement I was getting helped me dilate my throat muscles or something, or just overcome the gagging reflex, and I was thus much better at what I was doing.
So I did that for a long time, and we did other things, and then there was a point when I realized that Bruce and the other woman were just a few yards away and that they were watching us. And I was so thoroughly excited by then that instead of being uptight about being observed, I found it had a strong aphrodisiacal effect upon me. I responded to the fact that they were watching me. The whole thing, every aspect of it, was tremendously stimulating.
• • •
JWW: Bruce and Joanne continued to swing, spending an average of a night a week in this fashion. They continued to see the first couple occasionally, and gradually enlarged their circle of swinging acquaintances, both through correspondence and referrals.
Naturally, not all of these experiences were idyllic. Sometimes they did not find the other couple physically appealing, although this was rarely a highly disturbing factor. More often, the might be put off by the personalities of another couple. Some of their ex
periences were such that, had their introduction to swinging been similarly disappointing, they doubt that they would have continued with it. But by this time they felt themselves wholeheartedly committed to swinging, and unfortunate experiences of this sort were just seen as temporary disappointments.
Sexual facility is not hard to learn once you begin to learn it. As soon as people start learning to get and give pleasure, they will generally continue their education themselves quite automatically. Thus it was not very long before Bruce and Joanne were quite sexually accomplished, and one might think that “sexual therapy” would then no longer be a true motive for their continuing to swing.
Perhaps their insistence that they continued to regard swinging as educational is in large measure a means of rationalizing; perhaps their real motive was an understandable desire purely for pleasure, for fun. Nevertheless, they do seem to believe that they went on swinging out of a desire to go on “growing” sexually—not so much to learn techniques but to open themselves up sexually, to learn to deal with hang-ups and inhibitions, and further to explore themselves and their world in terms of their own sexual identity.
This expanding of sexual horizons is not unusual among swingers. On the contrary, most couples who get involved in group sex find themselves forever enlarging the boundaries of their sexual experience—moving from closed to open swinging, from two-couple parties to larger groups, from one-plus-one couplings to threesomes and moresomes, from heterosexuality to bisexuality, from orthodox to more unusual forms of sexual relations. Sometimes this desire for novelty can become an end in itself.
Let’s see how Bruce sees it.
• • •
BRUCE: The way we’ve approached it, you could almost say that swinging has been a sexual version of psychoanalysis. By getting into new scenes, new experiences, and by teaching ourselves to be open to them, and finally by discussing and analyzing our reactions later in the privacy of our own home, we’ve found out a great deal. We’ve found out things about ourselves and we’ve learned things about sex and life in general.
The Sex Therapists: What They Can Do and How They Do It (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 15) Page 7