Before moving on, let me make this important statement: 

Swinging seems to be an activity or lifestyle that tends to make good relationships better and bad ones worse.

This is not a rule, but more an observation and an application of logic. If you have trust issues or are having problems in your sex life, adding more people to your sex life only increases the potential for complications, suspicions, and jealousy. Oh yeah, and if you are a jealous person, you really want to give this a lot of thought, or at least do yourself a favor and go really really REALLY slow, like see how you feel when your partner dresses up sexy and gets flirted with. Did it turn you on or feel good? Or did you feel bad. If it made you feel bad, think about working on your relationship first if you want to keep it.

Openness is the Key

The key that makes Swinging work is that the people involved are doing it with the full knowledge of their relationship partners. When everyone knows and there are no secrets it can be fun for all. Truthfully, one of the best times for us as a couple in our Swinging encounters is afterwards when we tell each other about our experiences. Talking openly about the new sensations, physical differences, and conversations that went on while playing with someone else usually gets us both really excited and we end up having sex before we can even finish talking. All the benefits gained from this being a shared experience are lost if you are doing it without your partner’s knowledge, and many people call this “cheating”. Cheating is something we will have to cover as a separate topic in the future, because there are varying views about how it should be handled in Swinging.

For this discussion we will assume that you are a couple looking to openly do this together, or an unattached single lady or man interested in couples, but if that is not the case you will still find the informaiton here useful and perhaps if you share this website with your partner they might just surprise you and get interested too!

One interesting piece of terminolgy that we encountered early on is the difference between “sex” and “fucking”. Be aware that there are people that use the word “sex” to mean any kind of sexual interaction, such as oral stimulation, hand-to-body touching, and masturbation — anything except vaginal or anal intercourse. This can be very confusing, since a person could ask you if you’d like to have sex and they are not talking about intercourse. People that use “sex” in that way tend to call intercourse “fucking”. So, if they are talking about having sex, they might not care about having condoms around. If they are talking about fucking, though, the discussion about if condoms will be used should follow quickly.

It’s amazing that four words can be so complex. A conversation can be rolling along between Swingers that you’ve recently met, and everything is going well, and then they ask, “So … how do you play?” Newbie Swingers can be totally thrown off by this question if they aren’t aware that it could be coming. The solution? Be prepared. Know what they are actually asking and have at least a simple answer to keep the conversation going.

“How do you play?” is really asking several questions at once, which are:

• Are you (both of you if you are a couple) Swingers? Some people come to Swinger events just to watch, which is fine, so it’s an important question.
• Which of you, if you are a couple, play? There are plenty of couples where only one person in the couple plays, and the other is just there for moral support or to watch but not really be physically involved with others.
• What kind of sex are you into? The answer they are probably looking for is something like “same-room sex”, “soft-swap”, “full-swap”, or one of the other interesting terms.
• Do you play together? They are also wanting to know is do you, if you are a couple, only play if both of you can play (only play together), or can one of you play if the other does not (play separately)? This question also refers to if you two both have partners to play with, do you require the playing be done in each other’s presence (same room), or can you two be having sex in different locations at the same time (separate rooms).
• Who do you play with? Information about if you only play with couples, or single women or single guys is helpful, but not mandatory, since the person who is asking is probably most wanting to know if you will play with THEM. But they also sometimes want to know if the female is into women too. (Bisexual)

So, a made-up example of an answer to the question “How do you play?” might be:

We both swing, full-swap or bondage, same room only, we only play together, and the wife is Bi-curious.

It sounds a bit complicated, but knowing what that question is really asking and having a general idea of what your answer is will make things go much easier when it comes up.

So, Start Swinging Already!

Hopefully this is enough information to get you at least started thinking about the options you have before you. Really the most important thing if you are a couple is to just talk about it. A lot! Talk about it so you are comfortable enough to slip in little mentions of it in everyday conversation when you are talking in private just for fun, and when it is something that is on both of your minds and exciting to both of you it will make your first adventure of going to your first club or party, or meeting your first couple, so much more comfortable knowing you are both wanting it together.