A Beginner's Guide to Swinging
By Lucy Jacobs

So you and your lover like to walk on the wild side. You enjoy having sex with your girlfriend, but you also don’t mind sharing her with others and indulging in a little neighborly love yourself. If your sexual motto is the more the merrier, read on for some tips on how to become a swinging couple.

Swingers: Not just a movie about Vegas
Swinging is probably just what you imagine it to be. It’s a sexual activity that adult couples willingly partake in. It involves sex and there are swingers’ clubs that specialize in same-sex couples or heterosexual couples. Of course it gets more complicated than that—there are all sorts of rules and unspoken etiquette that accompanies the swinging lifestyle, and there are several different varieties of engagements that can occur.

If you do a google search of swingers’ clubs, you will get more hits than you can handle. Meeting fellow swingers can be like signing up to LavaLife in order to meet someone, or it can be as unofficial as making eye contact with someone in a bar and asking them if they are interested in a threesome with you and your girlfriend or wife.

It’s not a new phenomenon—in fact, it was probably the most unabashedly popular in the 60s and 70s when fear of AIDS and other STDs wasn’t as prevalent as it is now. Key parties were known to take place where you and your partner, for example, would throw a party and when the guests arrive, you take their keys and place them in a common dish. At the end of the night (when everyone is too drunk to drive—hey, it was the 70s), the person whose keys you take out of the bowl is the person you go home with. Might sound crazy, but your folks probably did it.

Sounds good, but…
I know what you guys are thinking. What is there to lose? You get to have sex with other women, but you still get to keep your partner. For some, it might be as easy as that, but for others, swinging might harm your relationship. It really depends on who you are, what your partner thinks about the idea, and most importantly, you need to be utterly honest with each other.

Some couples make rules for themselves to avoid potential disasters. For example, you can agree that you won’t see or have sex with the same person or people more than once. Or now kissing on the mouth. Little things like this sometimes help couples to maintain a sense of distance from swinging. After all, you are still a couple—swinging is just a supplement to your already exciting sex lives.

Swinging Etiquette
While swinging might seem like something out of Soddom and Gomorrah, it isn’t just a chaotic free for all with thousands of naked people groping each other. There are rules to the game.

If you attend a swinging club, for instance, many require that you arrive and leave as a couple. This is also to avoid having horny losers wander into the building so that they can pleasure themselves while they watch others.

Don’t show up late either. This isn’t your regular party. Things will have already started happening by the time you get there, so being 75 minutes late doesn’t make you look cool.

Be friendly and nice. This isn’t the place to test our your domineering style of love-making. There is no subservience here, just equal access to free loving.

Just like any “normal” party you would go to, make sure you bring something for the host, whether it’s a bottle of wine, food or extra condoms.

Most important is your grooming and hygiene. Don’t smell. Don’t be hairy. Don’t be covered in disease. Take care of yourself or they will ask you to leave.

Just because you’re going to a swingers party, doesn’t mean you have to say yes to every “invitation” you receive. If someone wants to fool around with you but you aren’t interested, feel free to say so. Just be polite and honest.

The good, the bad and the ugly
There are lots of reasons why people like participating in the “lifestyle.” It’s exciting, you get to have sex with different people all the time, and you like the friendships that develop as a result.

It’s also a great place to explore certain sides of your sexuality, but not all sides. Don’t go swinging if you’ve got a strange fetish that involves human waste. Swingers tend to be middle-age, middle-class folks that might be your neighbors. You can’t tell that he or she is a swinger by looking at them.

Swinging could benefit your relationship as well. Maybe you won’t cheat on her if you have a mutual outlet to explore your sexual feelings. Maybe she won’t be considered a “slut” if she sleeps with different men. Swinging can open up avenues you didn’t know existed.

On the other hand, it’s not for the insecure. Jealousy can kill any relationship, so if your partner is the jealous type, sharing you with others might not seem like a great idea to her.

And of course the more sex you have with different partners, the likelier it is that you might catch something. Believe it or not, not all swingers’ clubs or parties enforce the use of condoms. It is up to you to request that your partner wear one. If they refuse, just walk away and find someone else to play with.