An interesting topic that seems to come up a lot is, does swinging end up in divorce?
I read the other day that 2% of swinger couples end up divorced. Then there was another study which said that 92% of open marriages end in divorce.
What does this mean and are swingers headed to divorce court or are you the 98% who make it? I had to stop and think of these two extremes to try and understand what’s really going on.
First, we have to define some terms as swingers, polyamorous, open, and monogamous marriages have different meanings to a lot of people.
As a swinger, I believe that a lot of “straights,” tend to misunderstand us and believe that we’re all on the way to hell. Let’s talk about the basic types of relationships and then try to make sense of what’s the most stable one.
Monogamous couples are those who are not supposed to stray, which is where the “mono” part comes from.
Swingers are couples who throw their house keys in a bowl and go home with a different person every night, Not! Swingers have recreational sex with others, but it’s usually not a free for all.
Polyamorous couples have multiple partners or family units. A guy may have two or more girlfriends who know about each other. They may also have multiple families. It’s sort of like polygamy except it’s not all fun for the guys. Girls can get in on the action also.
Open marriages are couples who have agreed to see other people. So your wife can have a date on Friday night that doesn’t involve you.
Now that we’ve broadly categorized couples, let’s try and make sense of the whole thing.
Starting with monogamous couples, which is supposed to be the “correct” way, statistics tell us that roughly 50% will end in divorce. So only half of your will be until death do you part, while the other half is on Ashley Madison getting your brains fucked out.
There is a lot of reasons for straight people to get a divorce, such as boredom or trading up. Your hot admin with those short skirts and big tits seems a lot more appealing than your wife back home with the rug rats. How often does your wife greet you with a blowjob like your administrative assistant does?
As a guy, most of our decisions are made by our little buddy who lives in our pants, commonly known as the one-eyed trouser snake. Let’s face it, we’re lazy, and it makes a lot more sense to let our dick make all our decisions for us.
A lot of guys give their dick a name because you would not want a total stranger to make all your decisions for you, right? So the little woman will never notice that you come home with lipstick stains on your boxers, or worse your little buddy.
By the same token, hubby might notice that Wifey has pecker tracks on her face or that she comes home less the bra and with her panties around one ankle.
These little indiscretions will quickly put you in front of Judge Judy as you divide everything in half. Remember the Samarai Lawyer on Saturday Night Live?
Now, swingers get to go to parties and bang that hot admin or suck the dick of some guy who has to tuck it in their socks. Just like straight people, we fuck others except with the permission of our spouses and at the end of the night go home with the other half.
The nice thing about swinging is that you don’t have to worry about coming home with your underwear inside out or missing, because it doesn’t matter as you’ll laugh about the whole thing.
For me, the biggest downside is that my wife and I both like the same types of girls. This means that after I chat her up, Wifey will swoop in and take her off my hands. It’s a little embarrassing to admit that you always get sloppy seconds from your wife! But, at least she usually lets me watch.
It’s always better if you can go to a party and pick up some hottie or hunk, and it doesn’t involve sneaking off to Motel 6 with Tom Bodette. This way you can scratch your itch without having to hide your wedding ring.
This is a long way of saying, divorce is rare for swingers, and while I’m not sure that 98% of swingers don’t divorce, I know the actual number is really low. Looking at couples we know, there have been two couples who swapped wives. They both got divorced and married the other half. This, to me, was a little weird because they could have just kept on swapping at parties without the expense of divorce court.
We’ve had two couples who the wife left her husband for another woman. Which to me doesn’t sound like that bad of a deal as long as I get to watch?
Other than that as best I can think of everyone is still with their original partner.
Certainly, swinging is not right for everyone and will not fix a bad marriage but will only hasten its demise. For the rest of us, it seems to work out okay.
Larry Archer's World (LarryArcher.blog) 
Of course, I’ve see and heard of swinging coupes divorcing, not because of the sex per se but because of the one thing a lot of swingers try to avoid: Emotional attachment. A lot of swing gets I know have a rule prohibiting emotions other than list being involved… and like someone is likely to have such a level of mastery and at all times.
If emotionally bonding isn’t the issue, rules violations is the next thing on the list that’ll lead to divorce because couples don’t usually leave room for shit to happen and, indeed, believe that it can’t and shouldn’t happen. They set up some very rigid and, as it turns out, impossible rules and with the threat stated or implied that any little violation of the rules will result in a divorce.
How does one have fun swinging with this hanging over their heads? If swinging is a form of self-expression and one shared with their partner, how can you express yourself when there’s a lot of shit you’re not gonna be allowed to do? I know of a couple who divorced (it was messy as fuck, too) because the wife wanted to suck the guy she was with off and the rules said she couldn’t for any reason and her only defense was that she just felt like doing it because it would have pleased her more than being fucked by the guy. But hubby, as it turned out, was free to baste all the tonsils he wanted to with spunk.
In these situations, I feel it’s better to work such things out without lawyers getting involved… but that’s me, I never jacked my wife up for any rules violations or emotional attachments because, for one, we didn’t have such restrictive rules and for the other, I am well aware of how powerful sex is and how it can easily unlock things. And you just deal with them, talk about them and confirm that your relationship is still as strong as it’s always been – and keep moving forward, making sure some lawyer’s not gonna earn their paycheck via either of you, nope, not today.
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Daddy,
I haven’t seen emotional bonding as a problem in my experience. That’s one of the reasons that things like dating are a no-no because that becomes cheating and emotional. If you go to a party and have sex with someone, that’s a physical thing and not emotion. Now I grant you that after a while there is an emotional bond but it’s more like family and not lovers. Problems like that seem to be mostly with new couples before you understand the rules. I’ve seen a number of new guys who would ask the wives out for a date and unlike straights, women talk and the new couple gets shunned and often they don’t realize why. Now if this was a group of new couples instead of one new couple with seasoned couples, I could see this happening.
Rules are typically made up by new couples as they try to deal with jealousy and coming to grips with the other half being in bed with someone. But what we always tell new couples is to agree on a set of rules but cut the other some slack if one of you breaks the rules. Once you’re in for a while, the rules will melt away and you don’t worry if one of you gets laid and the other doesn’t because you’re more comfortable with everything. When we got into the Lifestyle, we were introduced into a large group of swingers and didn’t have to make up the rules as we went along.
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Yeah, Larry, but other people don’t know that, do they? It assumes that they know how and when to separate the two things… and most people can’t. I get to run into those who can’t and then they can’t figure out how it all got fucked up.
I mean, if your wife kissed a guy, would you take her over the coals for it? I wouldn’t but since a lot of folks on this side of the country prohibit this, wow. We say I isn’t personal and it’s just sex… and some find it’s more than just sex and take the road to divorce rather than to make adjustments.
That’s all I’m saying.
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I think swinging requires a lot of communication and that’s always a good thing for couples. The swingers I know are all so happy and so in love. Good sex makes people happy lol.
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Violette,
Committed couples can fit into swinging pretty easy. Swinging will never fix a marriage but almost certainly destroy it. If you are having problems, then swinging is the exact thing you should run away from. Communications is a big thing and being open and honest helps. I was lucky in Foxy being tolerant as I was the kid in a candy store and not her. Like most things, you find a middle ground that both of you are happy in. For us, large house parties were the best as you’re under less pressure to party and have to do a charity fuck.
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When I first started having sex with other people in my current relationship, even though it was with his encouragement, we had some things come up that made it tough. But we had the commitment to each other to work things out and to try to understand the other’s point of view. I think a relationship in trouble doesn’t have a firm enough foundation to work through the things that will inevitably crop up. So it will fail. But now that we’ve worked out all the kinks (well not alll the kinks 😈) things are so hot and I feel so loved by him even when I’m with someone else. It’s amazing.
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Violette,
I’m glad that you worked out your issues and agree that if you don’t have a solid relationship to begin with, it’s almost impossible to make it work. We have to accept our partner’s kinks as well as they accepting ours. It’s not always easy to do but if you can work it through, the rewards are great.
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kDaddy,
Possibly we got lucky getting started. Kissing is not something we do to others of the opposite sex and is considered personal and intimate. Funny, you can fuck someone but shouldn’t be examining their tonsils! Virtually everyone in our initial crowd was long time swingers and that helped a lot. Back in the midwest, we belonged to two large organized groups of maybe 100 couples each and at functions, the percentage of newbie’s was low and the regulars understood the rules. I’ve seen a number of new couples who were invited to a party and then never invited back.
Back home there were a number of groups divided up mostly by socioeconomic classes. I can’t speak for other groups as we would cross paths but typically not interact. We went to different clubs and hung out at different places.
In Vegas, we run with a much smaller group that is fairly private and mostly attend house parties. I’ve never set foot in The Green Door but my wife and one of her girlfriends have been there. We have a fair number of clubs that operate out of private homes but virtually never go to any of those. Maybe we’ve become more selective, I’m not sure but things are lower key here when you’d expect them to be much faster paced. Of course, we hit the AVN awards but it’s mostly to hobnob and not to party.
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Fantastic discussion! Since I’m not really a swinger (I’ve had a bit of experience, but I’m not regular) I don’t have much to add — but my DH and I wrote in our marriage contract that we wouldn’t necessarily have to be exclusive. Mostly we’ve exercised that option together, for instance at parties or sex clubs. We’re still together, 37 years later….
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I agree Lisabet, it has been a fun trip for us and with the exception of one couple where the wife left for her yoga instructor, everyone is still status quo. I often wondered about her as she initially was straight and her husband (outwardly) was a nice guy. She and I had partied a number of times and it appeared that she liked guys. In swinging, if a woman isn’t bisexual, there is a good possibility that she’ll end up that way.
Her yoga instructor was really butch down to her penny loafers but seemed nice enough. From what I’ve seen, gay women tend to be very possessive and that may have been part of the reasons as he never had a problem sharing his wife and I hated to see her go.
The Lifestyle removes a lot of the reasons to cheat and allows you to sample forbidden fruit without harming your marriage. As a closet voyeur, the show at parties is well worth the price of admission, so if you just go for the show it’s worth it. LOL
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It’s one of the great experiences in my life, hands down and second to being poly and having a wife and with us having two girlfriends. Not only did I – we – have lot of sex with other people but we learned a lot about each other and how strong our love and commitment to each other was. Learned a lot of shit about other people in this, some of it not so good but the majority of it very good and educational.
You start playing with other couples and, at first, it feels like you’re the only one who think this is a good idea and thing to do until you find out that, nope, you’re not the only ones and the sex – and the experience itself when you share it with your partner – is just fucking amazing. I loved seeing my wife get her head handed to her or to see her taking a man or woman apart at the seams and I’d feel so much love for her to see her enjoying herself and as she wanted to. You’d think that something like this would drive a couple apart and destroy them – and like I wrote, I know of a lot of relationships got destroyed because of this but we learned from this and worked to make sure that the same thing didn’t happen to us.
Wasn’t always a walk in the part and we had to make a lot of adjustments like being more picky about who we got jiggy with – but we were determined to see it through and no matter what. I think the main thing in this for us was this was about us as a couple and not so much an individual kind of thing. We figured and decided that this would make us better together and like Larry said, cheating was off the table; when you don’t have to cheat to get what you want, man, that just takes a great load off of your mind and off the relationship as a whole. Just have fun doing whatever and, really, it’s as much a thing of self-discovery as it is having unfettered sex and without the drama… well, in theory anyway because while we had no drama at all, some folks would bring their drama to the bedroom with us, sad to say.
Some folks just aren’t as grown up as they think they are…
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Regarding the difference in statistics you cite for swingers vs open marriages, could that be due potential inequalities in the outcome?
That is, from your descriptions swinging would seem to usually involve a more equal outcome,or at least more sharing of the experience. That is, it was anticipated that both partners would find someone else to party with, or at least both partners would share in the experience.
In an open relationship, I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case.
I’m under the impression, and correct me if I’m wrong, that an open relationship can end up being more of an individual experience for the partners. So each could be trying to find others to hook up with, independent of their partner.
One would think this would increase the likelihood of unequal outcomes.
First of all, one partner may be able to attract other partners than the other.
Also they may not always include their partner in their outside adventures.
Under such circumstances, the possibility of the other partner not being thrilled with the situation would seem to be somewhat higher than if things were equitable.
Thoughts?
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Mark,
To me, there is a big difference between swinging and open marriage. An open marriage is somewhat like two single people who are dating others. Swingers apply some control by only getting together for sex and normally at the same location. Open means that there are little restrictions on what you do with some other person besides your spouse. That to me is fraught with problems.
With swinging, we are not unhappy with our spouse only looking to inject a little variety into our relationship and that to me is not “open.” Personally, I classify open as dangerous to a relationship. Plus with swinging you are not alone with someone but typically in a party situation.
While I’ve never tried an open or a poly relationship, I can only offer what my opinions are and cannot speak from experience. My concern is that people lump swingers with open couples and I think that is wrong.
As strange as it often seems to straights, we consider intimate things like kissing as off-limits but a blowjob is okay. My wife is okay with me fucking someone but would be pissed if I gave her a backrub. Being on a date in an open relationship will likely mean that more than sex is going on and that can be a problem.
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