The Wife-Swap Report (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Read online

  I didn’t say anything!

  “Jan and Paul,” he said. “They’re going to make love. And now I’m going to make love to you.”

  I said, “Why?”

  He said, “Because you’re beautiful and I want to fuck you.”

  I had absolutely no will of my own. None. If he had said he was going to kill me I suppose I would have gone along with that, too. We stayed there in the living room with the same idiot record playing over and over. He took off all my clothes, then undressed himself. I remember looking at his penis and thinking that it was the first penis other than my husband’s and my son’s that I had seen in years. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  We made love on the couch. It must have been incredibly boring for him at first, unless he had a thing for necrophilia. I guess I did a fairly good impersonation of a corpse. I was just numb. I lay there on my back while he touched me and kissed me.

  He was very patient. He went down on me and just did that very gently for what seemed like ages, and my mind relaxed and got loose, until finally my stupid body put two and two together and realized that something exciting was going on. I got excited, very excited, and he stayed with me and I had an orgasm that way.

  Then we had intercourse, and I had another orgasm, and so did he.

  PAUL: When Jan and I finished, I think I must have blacked out. Not for very long, but for a few minutes, anyway. When I came out of it I didn’t know where I was for a moment. Then I saw her face and felt her body under mine and got my bearings.

  I was suddenly very sober and very much shocked about the whole thing. I thought back to what Jeff had said in the kitchen, and it seemed now that he hadn’t really given us permission to do this at all, but that I had read things into his words. And of course I was completely torn up at the thought of what Sheila was going to say.

  Jan told me to relax. “Jeff knows we’re together,” she said. “And he doesn’t mind.”

  I asked her if she was sure of this. She said she was, and that as far as she and Jeff were concerned, this sort of thing had no adverse effect on their marriage. She said in fact that it kept their marriage strong, because they didn’t get bored with each other and weren’t tempted to do any secret cheating. She said Jeff knew she loved him and that what she did in bed with me or anyone else wouldn’t affect the love she and Jeff had for each other.

  She asked if I would mind if another man made love to Sheila.

  I said I didn’t know. She asked if I would mind if Jeff made love to Sheila. “We had our fun,” she said, “and they’re having theirs.” All at once I had this strong mental picture of Jeff and Sheila in our bed, making love. A really vivid photographic image of this. And the feeling that rushed through me was one of relief. That was exactly what I felt. I had nothing to feel guilty about now, because Sheila and Jeff were doing what Jan and I had done, and the two acts canceled one another out.

  “You don’t have to worry about a thing,” she said. “I love Jeff and you love Sheila. You won’t ruin your marriage, Paul. Your marriage will be stronger than ever before. But think of all the fun we’ll have, Paul. We can do this once a week. All open and aboveboard, and we won’t have to worry about anyone finding out. No sneaking around, no hiding.”

  I was too rattled to say anything. I thought we would straighten our clothing and go back to join the others. I didn’t know what we would say or do, but I figured I could play it by ear. But Jan wasn’t through. She wanted another turn—and I can’t really blame her, the first didn’t last too long. She stood up and took off her clothes. I stared at her. She had a really exceptional figure.

  There were any number of things I wanted to ask her, but it was no time to talk. I got out of my clothes, and while I made love to her I imagined Jeff with Sheila, and the whole experience was exciting in ways I couldn’t even begin to understand . . .

  We did finally get dressed and go back to the party. I would have barged right on in, but Jan stopped me and knocked on the door, and I guess that gave them time to get their clothes on. Jeff opened the door. “I hope you kids had as much fun as we did,” he said, grinning.

  Until he said that I don’t think I completely believed that he and Sheila had really done it. Hearing him say it gave me a very funny feeling.

  Then he said that he was sure we would have a lot of questions, that he knew there must be a lot we would all have to talk about, but that it would keep until morning and that Sheila and I would probably want to be alone for the time being. He told us everything was going to be great and not to worry about a thing, and then he and Jan went out the door and left us alone with each other.

  SHEILA: Neither of us knew what to say.

  PAUL: That’s an understatement We got through it by saying as little as possible. We just went upstairs and got undressed and into bed.

  SHEILA: I could smell her on him. Her perfume. More than that—her smell. I asked him if she was better than me. “Just different,” he said, and I knew exactly what he meant. Because Jeff was different from him, and it was different being with Jeff than with Paul. Not better or worse. Different.

  I said, “But it was more exciting, wasn’t it?” He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I knew it was more exciting for him because it had been more exciting for me. Four years of making love to each other and to no one else—it isn’t a question of getting stale, of the romance going out of a marriage. It’s just that you can’t possibly have that first-time thrill when you’re doing it with someone for the five-hundredth time. So I knew.

  We didn’t talk, but we were close together. We held each other, and he told me he loved me, and I guess I cried a little. And then—and this may seem strange—then we made love.

  PAUL: That happens more often than you might think.

  SHEILA: It almost always happens with people who go into swapping with their eyes open, as a matter of fact. In our situation I think it was a little unusual.

  PAUL: It probably was.

  SHEILA: It was also very satisfying. I don’t remember what I thought at the time. I probably thought about myself with Jeff and about Paul with Jan, but I don’t honestly remember. But it was very exciting and satisfying.

  JWW: And in the morning?

  PAUL: By a sort of unvoiced agreement, neither of us mentioned it in the morning. This was pretty weird, actually. I kept finding myself wondering if it really happened or if maybe I dreamed the whole thing.

  SHEILA: I had the feeling that you might have blacked it all out. We were all drinking fairly heavily, and I thought maybe I remembered it all and you didn’t.

  PAUL: That’s a funny notion.

  SHEILA: Hysterical.

  PAUL: Well, to get back to the subject, we didn’t really discuss it at all until the Creightons came over. They turned up on our doorstep in the middle of the afternoon. We sent the kids outside to play and Sheila put up a pot of coffee, and they filled us in on the whole situation. For the most part they just talked and we listened, throwing in an occasional question here and there. Jeff carried the conversation, with Jan functioning as a sort of echo.

  SHEILA: We were only the second couple they had done this with. Now this is funny—at the time I was really surprised to learn that they had ever done this before, which shows how naive I was. But later I was more surprised to think that they had carried out this elaborate seduction with so little experience as swingers. In any case, we were the second couple on their list. The first couple had been the previous occupants of our apartment, believe it or not. There had been no seduction then. The other couple had been reading about wife-swapping, and the four of them got to talking about it and studying books on it, and they decided to give it a try. All open and aboveboard, and pleasing for all concerned, except that the other couple had moved to the West Coast after a few months of fun and games.

  What they did, mainly, was explain the effect that swinging with this other couple had had on their marriage. They went to great lengths to sell us on the idea that swapping
did more to hold a marriage together than to break it up. They emphasized that swinging with the other couple had livened up their own sexual relationship, that it had kept them from getting urges for affairs with outsiders—all the standard rationalizations that swingers have. Maybe “rationalizations” is a bad term, because most of these arguments are true enough, and quite valid. The only thing is that they don’t really explain why people stay with swinging.

  JWW: Which is?

  SHEILA: Because it is exciting . . .

  PAUL: They didn’t just talk to us. They also left us a satchel full of literature. They were more anxious to pass out pamphlets than the religious nuts who go around ringing doorbells, and the books and magazines they gave us were a hell of a lot more interesting. There were the usual books on swapping, plus a variety of swap-club magazines and newsletters.

  JWW: Then the Creightons had been active in swap clubs?

  PAUL: No, they hadn’t. They had sent for the literature just as a matter of interest, and after their friends moved out they had planned to try to find new friends through correspondence, but they had never quite gotten around to taking the plunge. It’s a big step, you know, actually writing letters and arranging a meeting with total strangers. I’m sure they would have gone through with it sooner or later, but then we moved in next door to them, and they were strongly attracted to us, and so they decided to see if they couldn’t get something started with us before they got involved in correspondence.

  SHEILA: Remember, this was back in the days when the postal inspectors did a lot of entrapment of swingers. That’s stopped now, but at the time it was a very good reason for staying away from the correspondence clubs.

  JWW: How did you react to all of this?

  PAUL: It was almost too much to absorb. At first it really wasn’t a question of reacting. We were too busy trying to digest all this information, to figure out what sort of people our friends were and what sort of world this society of swingers was. We talked to them all afternoon, had dinner, put the kids to bed, then had them come over and talk to us some more. And then we stayed up half the night reading the books and magazines and discussing what we read, and, inevitably, getting excited from the reading and conversation and making love.

  JWW: Just the two of you, that is.

  PAUL: Yes.

  SHEILA: That whole night and the next few evenings as well served as a tremendous emotional catharsis for us. I think over the year or two prior to that time we had begun shutting each other out. People tend to do this, you know. Even in a good marriage there’s a tendency to build walls between the partners, to lead semiprivate lives. This experience, jarring as it was, got us to open up to one another and talk about a lot of things we had barely thought about before. Our whole ideas, not only concerning sex, but about, oh, lots of things—marriage, love, life.

  I was able for the first time to talk about the affair I had had before I began going with Paul. There were aspects to that affair, I won’t go into them now, but they needed talking about and I had kept it all locked inside. And Paul told me about the girl in Chicago, which was something he really had to get out in the open but which he could not possibly have talked about before this. Nor could I have listened, as far as that goes.

  PAUL: We did clear the air. And we decided that, well, that we would do this again.

  JWW: That you would continue to exchange partners with the Creightons.

  PAUL: Yes.

  SHEILA: It would be a regular Friday-night thing, we decided. A weekly swap. I remember I got together with Jan the afternoon after we finally decided, and I told her, and we talked about almost everything. She told me she had felt very close to me from the day we moved in, but that now that we were sharing husbands she felt infinitely closer to me than ever before. I knew exactly what she meant. I felt a tremendous amount of tenderness for her, and warmth. She said that we were sisters, closer than sisters.

  Thursday night Paul and I practically had an orgy. All we could think about was what we would be doing the following night. Not the simple fact of having sex relations with Jeff and Jan but the whole idea of meeting together and systematically changing partners. I’m sure the forbidden aspect of it was part of the excitement. Forbidden fruit and all that.

  Friday night, they came over to our place again after dinner. It was amazing how relaxed all four of us were. A real contrast to the scene a week earlier.

  We put on records, danced a little, then turned down the lights and had a regular necking party. I sat on Jeff’s lap on an armchair and Paul and Jan took the couch, and we kissed and petted like teenagers.

  Then I took Jeff upstairs.

  Love Thy Neighbor

  PAUL: It’s a cliché to say that the average married couple doesn’t know what they’re missing. Cliché or not, it’s very literally true. It was certainly true in our case.

  SHEILA: In other words, we thought we were happy. We didn’t realize how miserable our lives were.

  PAUL: No, seriously. We did think our lives were full, that we were getting as much out of sex and love and life as we could reasonably expect to. We didn’t start with this basic feeling of sexual discontent that you hear so much about. In other words, we didn’t know what we were missing. That first night with Jan and Jeff opened up a whole new world for us, to add yet another cliché to the pile. There was a potential excitement in sexual relationships that we had not known to be there—

  SHEILA: We had never been that technique-minded before, for example. We would vary positions and try different things to a limited degree, but for the most part we had settled into a comfortable groove. There were certain things we both knew that we liked, and we would do that, and there was very little interest in increased experimentation. But when we started swinging we would learn little things from Jeff or Jan and introduce them into our own relationship. And besides that, we were just more concerned with matters of technique, more interested in the whole idea.

  PAUL: This is universally true, incidentally. Swingers are just better in bed than civilians.

  SHEILA: That’s partly because they get more practice, of course. And because they’re sexier people to begin with. But it’s also because they care more. They don’t confine themselves to the same partner year after year after year. They make love with a lot of different people, and so they have a basis for comparison.

  PAUL: And they take pride in technique. You might be surprised to learn how much skill a man or woman can develop simply through practice and application. The average person tends to think that sexual ability is inborn. That a person is or is not passionate, for instance. That the major factors are the size of a man’s penis or the shape of a girl’s body. Those are probably the least important considerations, as a matter of fact. How long a man can sustain intercourse, the extent of a man’s or woman’s muscular control, any number of oral and manual techniques—these have more to do with one’s ability or lack thereof in the hay.

  SHEILA: Amen to that . . .

  • • •

  They are easier, now, with one another and with the interviewer. Before, when they discussed the manner in which the Creightons had seduced them, there was a very noticeable quantity of tension in the air, accompanied by a note of sorrow, perhaps a lament for their vanished innocence. The recollection of their reactions at the time—their confusion, the awkwardness of the situation, their doubts and fears—had introduced those very emotions as a background to our conversation. Now they have gotten past that initiation and reminisce as veteran swingers defending the life and proud of their abilities and strengths.

  Over the summer, their relationship with the Creightons gradually developed and deepened. Before the summer’s end, the frequency of their sessions had increased from once to twice a week, with both Tuesday and Friday nights given over to sexual exchanges with the other couple. The social lives of both couples became so thoroughly centered upon the switching of partners that sex literally served as the focal point of all their lives. />
  • • •

  PAUL: The change in our relationship was a very gradual thing. You have to remember that we were all of us not far removed from the novice stage in this sort of thing. The Creightons had swung with another couple, true enough, but they had never gotten any further than simply trading partners and going off to separate rooms for an hour or two of fun and games. This of course is the most basic level of swinging, and most couples move on to more involved stuff before very long.

  SHEILA: And we knew what other couples did.

  PAUL: Yes, that was the wild part. Between the ads in the club publications, some of which got pretty explicit, and the books which purported to tell all about swapping, we knew that what we were doing was regarded by hard-core swingers as pretty tame stuff. We would read about other things, threesomes and foursomes, all balling in the same room, that sort of thing, and I think all four of us really wanted to get into that bag but nobody wanted to be the one to suggest it. Like at a square party, for instance, where maybe all of the people there would really dig swapping for the night, but of course no one has the nerve to suggest it and so it never happens.

  So the four of us got into this sort of thing in a gradual way. Looking back on it, it seems almost childish the way we would sort of stick our toes in and then look around carefully to make sure no one was overly shocked. The first testing of the boundaries was conversational. We began talking about things, all four of us together, that wouldn’t have been brought up in conversation earlier. For example, one Friday night we were at our place or theirs, it hardly matters, and we were sitting around having drinks as a sort of prelude to what would follow, and Jeff announced that he was hungry as a bear and that he intended to give Sheila the frenching of her life. She rose to the occasion with some remark about his well-trained tongue—

  SHEILA: There are times when I wish you didn’t have a photographic memory for everything I say.

  PAUL: Well, you said it, didn’t you? Anyway, that broke a particular conversational harder. We began talking openly about what we intended to do together, or what we had done. It made things more intimate.