And the idea that Bob would want me to have relations with other men. This really shocked me. I was a virgin when I met Bob, although I did sleep with him before we were married. He had had plenty of experience before he met me, which I felt was desirable, but I was always just as glad that I had been pure for him.
BOB: You never felt you’d missed out on anything?
CAROL: Oh, sometimes. In a vague general way. But I didn’t sit around sulking, and for the most part I was glad of the way things had happened. And I never considered having an affair after we were married. I did think about it when you were running around—the idea that sauce for the goose might be sauce for the gander, that it would be a way of getting even with you. But it seemed a childish way to do it. What would I be proving? And there was nobody I knew that I wanted to go to bed with anyway.
But now, seeing these books and magazines, I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to talk to him about it but I didn’t know how to begin or what to say or what I would say if he came right out and said this was what he wanted. So I put off talking to him, and in the meantime I read the books and articles.
Well, this did make a slight difference in my thinking. For one thing, it gave me a much better idea of what swinging was all about. I was thinking just in terms of games with the keys at this point, of swapping partners with friends of ours, and so I had a very narrow view of the swinging scene. I learned for the first time, for instance, that the typical swinging date was with some strangers you met through the mail, and that you went to their house or they came to your house and you had a pleasant social evening and then switched partners. This somehow made it seem far more palatable to me. I couldn’t see myself getting involved in this with someone I knew socially, but with a stranger who was in the same boat, I could see how that might work.
I also began to realize that the average swinging couple were people in the same general situation as us. Couples who had been married for a few years or more and who had gradually had the excitement go out of their sexual life. And I couldn’t deny that this was happening with us. In the books, couple after couple told the same opening story, the same pattern. I thought about how much less often we had sex these days and how so much of the time it was just the same as always. The freshness and excitement wasn’t completely gone, but it was going fast.
Now some of the books he had left around for me were nothing much more than pornography. Very crudely written and obviously stories some writer had made up. They pretended to be case histories but you could tell that they weren’t. And there was one that was supposed to be the autobiography of a swinger, but it was just one sex scene after the other with lots of description. Some, though, you could tell were true. They might have excessive descriptions because I guess that’s how books are sold, but the truth rang true. One was a book about swinging by a married couple in California who were swingers themselves, and who told their own story as well as the stories of some other people they knew.
And in this book in particular I was impressed over and over by the way couples explained that swinging not only brought excitement into their lives but improved their marriages. I had a little trouble believing this at first. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
One other thing I’ll have to admit is that the books got me hot. Partly the sexy descriptions themselves, and partly the whole idea of doing this, of swinging with another couple. I got very hot, and I would find myself thinking about this more and more, and when Bob got home I met him at the door wearing a sheer nightgown and carrying two martinis, and we had the drinks in the bedroom and I just about raped him.
BOB: She was really wild.
CAROL: It was the best we had been together in ages, and I wasn’t fool enough to doubt that it was reading those books that had made the difference. So while he was lying there getting his breath back to normal, I asked him just what he had in mind with the swinger books.
BOB: I guess I hemmed and hawed.
CAROL: I just guess you did.
BOB: Well, I was still recovering from your greeting, and the question took me by surprise.
CAROL: I told him I had read all the books, and that I wondered if that was really what he wanted for us to do. He said he just thought the books were interesting, that the whole idea was interesting. I said it looked to me as though he was more than just interested.
BOB: I asked her how she felt about it. She said she didn’t know because it was such a completely new idea to her. She wanted to know if I wouldn’t be unhappy at the idea of her with another man.
CAROL: He said he would be pleased for me to be enjoying myself that way. And that it would be better for both of us to do this sort of thing openly than to carry on affairs on the sly.
BOB: To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Carol being with somebody else. It did bother me to a degree, but I found the whole idea of swinging so exciting, so attractive in so many ways, that I wanted to give it a try and see what my feelings would be.
CAROL: We talked about all of this for hours. It was at this time Bob confessed to me about his three affairs, although the one night with the prostitute . . . you couldn’t really call that an affair. But in a way that part bothered me the most, that he would need variety so much that he would have to pay money to a whore who would just go through the motions of sex with him.
BOB: That gal went through some pretty good motions, honey.
CAROL: I was glad that we were talking about these things because they had been on my mind for so long. And talking this way made us both feel closer and more loving. We wound up that night getting some of the magazines, including a club bulletin that I had not yet seen, and we went through them looking at the advertisements and just speculating which ads we might answer if we did decide to give this a try. There were several ads that looked promising, couples around our own age and in this area who seemed to want the kind of thing that we wanted, a quiet evening of two couples.
BOB: I suggested that maybe we might get in touch with one of them and explain that we were newcomers, and that we would like to get together with them and discuss things, but with no strings attached. That way if either of us felt that it went against the grain, or if something about the other couple didn’t appeal to us, we would have a ready-made out.
CAROL: I liked that idea. We decided to sleep on it, and we made love for a second time that night, which was something we hadn’t done in I don’t know how long. The next day I got so excited thinking about the whole thing that I surprised Bob by writing a letter to the couple that sounded best from their ad. I had it all ready when he came home, along with snapshots of ourselves.
And we sent it off—you probably know how that works, you put your letter in an unaddressed envelope and then put that in another envelope and mail it to the club, along with a dollar forwarding fee. The clubs make their money forwarding letters, and some of the better ones do make an effort to police their lists and clear out objectionable people.
We sent the letter off, and after that we were tremendously anxious to hear from the couple we wrote to. Bob would call me every day when the mail came to ask if I had gotten a letter from them. And finally—it took about two weeks—we received a letter from this couple in Charleston with a photograph of the two of them and a very nice letter.
Now it’s only since then that I’ve realized how lucky we were.
BOB: Absolutely a first class case of beginner’s luck. We sent out one letter and got an answer to it, and it doesn’t usually work that way. A large percentage of the ads are just from jerks who want to get letters, or people who back out at the last moment. Or else an advertiser will get swamped with letters and he can’t possibly answer them all. Or you’ll get an answer, but it’s an old or unattractive or vulgar couple, or a single man posing as a couple, or any of a number of things that can go wrong. But we lucked out. This couple was truly charming, and reading their letter I was impressed how much like us they were. They had be
en married about as long, and he had a Chevrolet agency in Charleston, and they had been swinging for a little less than a year. He was a tall good-looking guy and she was a knockout blonde built like something straight out of the pages of Playboy. She was just wearing the bottom half of a bikini in the photo they sent along.
CAROL: Bob was practically drooling.
BOB: Let’s just say I was impressed. I was even more impressed by the letter because it was obvious that these were intelligent and civilized people. They understood completely that we wanted a no-strings arrangement and suggested that we come to their house so that we could leave easily if that was what we wanted.
As far as I was concerned, I knew that I wanted us to swing with them.
CAROL: I felt pretty much the same way, but I was a little less certain.
BOB: They included their phone number, so I called Ray and we set up a date for that Saturday. We went there and got along fine. There was no pressure and it was perfectly enjoyable right from the beginning. Ray and I compared notes, and it turned out coincidentally enough that he played defensive tackle for South Carolina about the same time I played for Georgia Tech, which meant we were probably on the same field at the same time, although we had never known each other. Carol also got along very well with Ray’s wife, Irene.
CAROL: We had a signal worked out. If I decided yes, I would say something to Bob about did he remember to leave a light on in the house so that burglars wouldn’t know we were out. And if I decided no I would remind him he had a golf date in the afternoon. At one point I almost forgot the whole thing because I was enjoying the conversation so much, and I forgot what brought it up but here I was jabbering away about Bob’s golf game, and Bob gave me a look—
BOB: I thought she was building up to call the whole thing off, and I couldn’t believe it because she was having so much fun.
CAROL: And in the middle of the sentence I realized what I was saying, and I stopped cold and said, “But that reminds me, Bob—did you leave a light on for the burglars?”
BOB: At which point the conversation stopped cold, and Ray and Irene looked as though they thought they had a couple of nuts on their hands. I just started laughing. “That means she’s decided she wants to swing,” I announced to everybody. “We were going to be subtle as hell about it, but my wife got carried away.”
Actually, this helped break the ice because it gave us all something to laugh about. And there was music playing, and Ray asked Carol to dance, and I danced with Irene, and things just went naturally from there. They had a couple of kids but had boarded them with Irene’s mother for the evening, which was their standard arrangement whenever they went swinging, whether they had a couple to their house or went somewhere else.
Well, it was a great evening. It was even better than I had expected, and Irene was as imaginative in bed as she was beautiful. Finally we drove home and got so excited telling each other about the evening that we stopped at a motel on the way and made love, and then made love all over again when we got home.
• • •
JWW: For the next few months, Bob and Carol followed a typical routine for new swingers. After their first markedly successful experience, they began answering a great many ads and setting up dates once a week. Some of these meetings were occasionally less than ideal but were never disappointing enough to cool their enthusiasm for swinging. They saw the Charleston couple several more times, had repeat dates with some of the other couples, and limited themselves to single meetings with those couples with whom they had less rapport.
On the second date with Ray and Irene, Ray suggested that all four undress in the same room together and watch a stag film. Bob and Irene petted during the movie, as did Ray and Carol, and when the film ended, the lovemaking was confined to one room rather than the couples going to separate bedrooms. From that time on, this became Bob and Carol’s preferred mode of swinging.
• • •
CAROL: Once you become used to this, to all being together it’s not nearly as enjoyable to separate and couple off. In a funny way it gets so that it almost feels like cheating on your mate to be off by yourself at a time like that. You get a much greater feeling of closeness when you all stay together and have sex openly in front of one another.
BOB: You also have the fun of watching, and I mean wholesome watching, not the peeping Tom variety. You participate and watch at the same time.
CAROL: I really enjoy watching Bob with another woman. I had thought that this would be something to really bring out the jealous streak in me. That’s not what happened at all. I get a real charge out of it.
Also, when you are together like that, you sort of change partners over and over again. You make love to each other in addition to the other couple. This also gives more of a feeling of togetherness. And there are all sorts of physical things about the four of you together, like a man may kiss one girl while he has relations with another, or different things of that sort which are outside of the usual and add a lot of spice to an evening.
BOB: Or the two girls may put on a show, for instance.
CAROL: Do you remember the first time that happened?
BOB: Did you think I would ever forget?
CAROL: And how I didn’t like the idea one bit. And if it had just been thrown out to me as an idea, or if that girl had just come over and made a pass at me, I think I would have run out of the house screaming.
BOB: It was our house. Where would you have gone to?
CAROL: Anywhere, anywhere at all.
BOB: And how far could you run? You were stark naked at the time, the way I remember it.
CAROL: I still almost ran, and naked or clothed would have made no difference at all. But fortunately they used the gradual approach. Even so, I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I wasn’t as shocked as I might have been.
BOB: The way it happened was we had this couple over, real nice people and very experienced swingers. They had been to orgies, scenes of twenty couples or more.
CAROL: We never did try anything like that.
BOB: We were never with more than one couple at a time, never have been, and as enthusiastic as some people are over those mob scenes I never had the slightest interest in them. The whole idea of crowds rubs me the wrong way.
But we had this couple over and had a real good time. He was a skinny guy but fairly muscular, and she was a little old redhead, also on the skinny side, with deep eyes that could stare clear through you. And we had a good time with them, and there we were just lying around in the buff while they were telling us some of their experiences.
And he was saying that one of the things he really enjoys is watching two girls make love.
CAROL: And I said, “Oh, you mean lesbians.”
BOB: And he says not lesbians at all, but just two women who like to do this as a sort of exhibition. They don’t have to be lesbians, he says, but just to enjoy this sort of thing a little bit.
And Carol said that she couldn’t see how a normal woman could let herself do that.
CAROL: And the girl said that she was a normal woman, she certainly considered herself a normal woman, and she happened to like it. And then she gave me a long look and all of a sudden I knew we weren’t talking about something they had seen at a party. We were talking about here and now, about this redheaded girl and me.
And I got this shiver all through me.
So I said, “Look, are you trying to tell me you’d like to make love to me?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” she said.
“I’m not like that,” I said.
She gave me a big smile. She asked me if I had ever tried it, and I said no, I never had.
“Well,” she said, “you might enjoy it.”
“I couldn’t,” I said. “I would freeze up.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” I said. “I couldn’t touch you or do any of those things to you. I just couldn’t.”
I felt like crying. I really did.
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br /> “I’ll tell you,” she said, “you don’t have to do a thing. All you have to do is close your eyes and let me fool with you a little, and I won’t do anything that you won’t like. You can trust me that far, can’t you?”
I said I guessed I could, but would she really want to do this to me? She said it always got the men really charged up and she didn’t mind at all. But did she really want to, I wanted to know. Yes, she said, it was something that she enjoyed now and then if the other wife was someone who appealed to her, and she thought I was very beautiful and she knew she would enjoy it, and she guaranteed I would enjoy it, too.
Now you have to remember and bear in mind that not ten minutes ago I had been watching this girl and my husband making love to beat the band, so I knew she was normal, a normal woman. She was no out-and-out lesbian, I could know that much. And Bob here kept urging me to go along with it. I could see how excited he was about it.
• • •
BOB: It wasn’t hard to see. I had read about this in all the books, two of the girls putting on a show, and I had always found it very stimulating to think about it. I understood that it was very common at swinging sessions. In fact, Carol didn’t know it, but we had had overtures made to us before in this respect. Once a man asked me if Carol would go for it, and I told him I didn’t think so. And another time I noticed a gal said something to Carol with a sort of double meaning, waiting to see if she would pick up on it, but she didn’t and they let it lay.
CAROL: So to make a long story short I decided I would go along with it, but honestly not expecting to get anything out of it myself, because it had never even been in my mind that this was something that I or any other normal woman could enjoy. I had never really given the whole thing enough thought to form an opinion. But I would go along with it once and see if it was something I could put up with for Bob’s benefit.
Which just goes to show you how well I didn’t know myself, because it’s putting it mildly to say I got a lot more than I expected.
3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 14