John Warren Wells

Wide Open: The New Marriage

Introduction

“May you live in interesting times.”

The Chinese pronounce that line as a curse. In that sense, we’re all of us accursed, for our times are almost too interesting to be endured. The world is in the midst of an extraordinary period of social change, and the speed of that change gets more and more blinding. No aspect of human life remains untouched.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the institution of marriage as traditionally structured has proved inadequate to a greater or lesser degree for a substantial proportion of the population. One result has been a surge of interest in diverse ways in which the fundamental idea of marriage can be adapted to meet present needs. Various forms of consensual adultery and plural marriage have begun to evolve. It is with these new marital life styles that this book is concerned.

An introduction is a curious thing, written after the text of the book it is to precede. I had originally intended this introduction to contain some general remarks on marriage, and now I find myself more inclined to let the following chapters make their own inferential points in that area. I suspect that a book should be introduced to a reader much as two strangers are introduced at a cocktail party. The host brings them together, mumbles something brief and insubstantial, and then leaves the two to work things out on their own. I’ll do as little mumbling as possible.

The theme of Wide Open called for a departure from my usual form. In the other books I’ve written, case histories were examined one to a chapter, with the objective of revealing individual lives and personalities to the reader as fully as possible. Here, however, our interest is less in specific individuals than in the ways they have come to grips with the traditional monogamous marriage. Thus, each chapter examines not one but several cases, and is supplemented by brief quotes from other interview subjects and capsule summaries of other examples.

All of the names of persons discussed in the pages to follow have been deliberately altered, as have all features which might tend to facilitate identification of them. And let me say that it has been a strain coming up with different names all the way through, and trying to remember which ones I’ve already used.

Finally, a word of apology. I kept having the feeling while writing this book that I was typing the word “relationship” an average of three times to the page. I have since proofread the text and must revise the estimate upward. It’s not a favorite word of mine to begin with, and the most annoying thing about it is its indispensability. If it gets on your nerves, cropping up so persistently, I’m sorry.

John Warren Wells

New York City

April, 1973

Living Together

“I got a phone call from her two weeks ago. ‘Well, Daddy, I know you’ll be happy to hear that Tommy and I are going to get married.’ Happy? The hell I was happy. He hasn’t got a dime, and he’s got no ambition, and his mother’s an alcoholic, and his father’s been in and out of mental institutions all his life; and she wants to marry him. I said, ‘Listen, why rush into anything? You’ve been living together, you’ve got a good thing going, what’s the rush?’ I don’t mind her living with the bum, I don’t mind supporting them, but why should she ruin her life by marrying the son-of-a-bitch?”

JWW: The speech quoted above is the virtually verbatim outburst of a middle-aged man who could hardly be further removed from the mainstream of the New Morality. He is utterly conventional, and not a liberal in any sense of the word. He lives in a suburb in the industrial Midwest, owns his own business, belongs to the local Rotary Club, attends church irregularly, tries to remember to fly the flag on national holidays, and in short reflects the traditional values of his generation. If his sex drive finds any extramarital expression, he keeps it a closely guarded secret. If any of his friends and neighbors are swingers, he doesn’t know about it and doesn’t want to know.

His daughter lives openly with her lover, and has done so for over a year, with his acquiescence if not his approval. And he desperately wants her to continue to do so rather than marry the man.

I would be hard-pressed to supply a better metaphor for the extraordinary attitudinal change in our thinking concerning premarital cohabitation. Ten years ago it would have been utterly inconceivable for this man to have entertained such a desire, let alone voice it. Ten years ago he would no more have countenanced his daughter’s living with a man without benefit of wedlock than she would have dared let him know about it. And if he did find out about such an arrangement, he would have done everything possible to terminate it, preferably by inducing the couple to marry.

Yet he now takes the position that, bad as it is for his daughter to live with a man he considers unsuitable, it would be infinitely worse for her to marry him.

Other parental attitudes are similarly revealing. A woman told me that her son had recently announced his impending marriage. She liked and approved of her future daughter-in-law, but not without reservations.

“They’ve only been living together for a little over a month. That’s not nearly enough time for two people to get to know each other. They’re still in the honeymoon stage. I’d feel easier about it if they would live together for a few more months.”

JWW: A thoughtful, enlightened, modern attitude. And had this thoughtful, enlightened, modern mother lived with her own husband before marriage? Why, no, she had not. As a matter of fact, she had been a technical virgin on her wedding night. And was her attitude now a reaction against difficulties which had characterized her own marriage? No, not at all. Her own marriage had been spectacularly successful.

“But things are different now. We were lucky, but if I were that age now, oh, I’d never marry a man without living with him first. And for more than a month, too.”

JWW: Another mother’s daughter also lives openly with her lover, and has been doing so for nearly three years. Before this she had lived with another young man for a shorter period of time. The mother, herself divorced, is completely at ease with her daughter’s living arrangement, while drawing wry amusement from the reactions of some of her friends.

“You see, they worry about Sheila. It doesn’t bother them that she’s living with Hal, or if it does, they keep it to themselves. Their attitude is that it’s all well and good, so long as the two of them get married sooner or later. And as the years go by, they grow concerned. If he hasn’t married her by now, they figure he never will. Well, it’s very possible that the two of them will never get married. They may separate, they may just go on as they are. That’s their business, not mine, and the fact that they’re happy now is all that’s important to me. I suppose they’ll want to get married if and when they want to have children. But they may decide not to have children. Or they may decide to have them without going through a marriage ceremony. All I can say is that they’re lucky they have these options. I never did.”

JWW: Nor did anyone a generation ago have the option of public cohabitation. This is not to say that unmarried couples did not live together. They did, but to a substantially lesser degree, and only under certain circumstances. The typical cohabiting couple consisted of persons living in a large city with no relatives residing nearby. Living arrangements were kept a secret — not only from parents, but also from employers, business associates, and all but close friends. Those more adventurous souls who aggressively let the world know that they shared a bed without sharing a last name usually turned out to be considerably less aggressive insofar as parents were concerned.

With the exception of bohemian free spirits, and such special cases where one party to the relationship was unable to obtain a divorce, these alliances were typically of short duration; the partners usually separated or married before very much time had elapsed.

(None of these remarks applies to common-law-marriage, which should be excluded from the category of non-marital cohabitation. A common-law marriage is simply a marriage without a marriage ceremony, and is so regarded in most jurisdictions. While arrangements of this sort are more or less acceptable in various social strata, they remain basically marital in nature.)

Both attitudes and practices in regard to non-marital cohabitation have changed so thoroughly that one hardly knows where to begin in enumerating them. College students share living quarters quite openly; a decade ago it was not impossible to be expelled from a majority of American colleges for having sexual relations. (This is not to say that students were much inclined to be virginal ten years ago, but that they had to be discreet; what was then called “discretion” is now called “hypocrisy.”)

For some couples, cohabitation is an end in itself. It is either considered a permanent situation, or permanence itself is rejected as a concept. “I don’t like to think in terms of a future,” one young man put it. “I think in terms of an extended present.” For other couples, a majority, cohabitation is regarded as a preliminary stage designed ultimately to resolve itself in a presumably monogamous marriage. Its role seems closer to that of engagement than anything else. Like an engagement, a cohabitational arrangement can be terminated before marriage with no stigma attached. And, again like an engagement, cohabitation becomes a concern if it endures for too long without resolving in marriage — a concern to parents and friends, if not to the participants.

Who lives together? The young, obviously. But also an increasing number of their elders. When one or both members of a couple have been divorced, a period of premarital cohabitation is almost always undertaken. The formerly married are generally inclined to approach remarriage warily, and by living together they are able to approach a marital relationship without making a commitment to each other for which they are not yet ready.

“My first wife and I never knew each other. We thought we were completely intimate because we went to bed a lot. All that told us was that we were sexually compatible. Marriage would be hell without sexual compatibility, but just because two people can get along in bed doesn’t mean they can spend the rest of their lives together. Living together entails a hell of a lot more than sleeping together.”

JWW: The speaker, a man in his late thirties, was divorced six years ago after ten years of marriage. Two years ago he began living with the woman who is now his wife of six months.

“I knew that I wanted to marry Betty before we started living together. I wouldn’t have wanted to live with her unless I felt that seriously about her. As far as we were concerned, sharing an apartment implied a commitment on both our parts. It didn’t mean we were definitely going to get married someday. It was no declaration of intent. It did mean that we were serious about each other and serious about our relationship. We lived together for a year and a half until we were more than certain that this was going to be a permanent thing. At that point we were closer to each other and knew each other far more profoundly than most of the married couples we know. Certainly far more than I ever grew to know my first wife, or Betty her first husband.”

And why, if their living situation was so good, did they ultimately marry?

“Not to start a family. I had had a vasectomy during my first marriage, so that wasn’t a consideration. Why did we get married? Because marriage is also a commitment, I guess, and we felt that we wanted to make that commitment to each other. We’re both basically very conventional people, you know. We never felt uncomfortable about living together before we were married, but I think we would have both been uncomfortable at the thought of going on that way forever.”

JWW: Had I written this same chapter only a few years ago, I would have had to deal at length with the ways in which partners in a non-marital cohabitational relationship dealt with guilts and anxieties attendant upon such a relationship. That such an approach is no longer warranted provides some measure of the change in our normative and existential mores.

The underlying causes of this change are much the same as the causes of change in our general views on the institution of monogamous marriage.

Certainly oral contraception has played a key role. “What if you get pregnant?” might be an inadequate argument against premarital intercourse, but became more powerful as an argument against living together. With the pill readily available, “I don’t intend to get pregnant” emerges as a valid answer. And more recently, with legal abortion increasingly obtainable, pregnancy has become a far less ominous prospect.

Too, the increasing capacity of females for independent lives has reduced the need for a woman to think in terms of immediate marriage. In part, these changes have developed out of the women’s liberation movement, but I suspect they have been more a cause of that movement than a result. A woman can earn a living; though her opportunities are somewhat proscribed, and though inequities exist in her relative earning power, she knows that she does not require a husband for her support.

Divorce is another factor. Just as it’s unarguable that marriage is a prerequisite for divorce, so has the increasing incidence of divorce made a generation of the young very wary of entering into matrimony. We have already heard from a man whose unsuccessful first marriage engendered a period of cohabitation prior to his second marriage, but it is not only the formerly married who display this sort of wariness. Virtually everyone coming of age today has had some second-hand experience with divorce. One’s parents may be divorced, or the parents of friends, or other relatives.

It’s interesting to speculate on those factors which produce social change. I could fill quite a few pages with such speculation, and no doubt the reader can supply other elements of contemporary living which have served to make living together less perilous while rendering it increasingly attractive for a substantial portion of the population.

Now, though, let’s take a look at some individuals who have elected to live together, in order to see the different ways in which these relationships develop and the manner in which they define themselves for their participants.

“When I was living with Les, it was really just a matter of convenience. Before then I had been in New York for about eight months. I started off at a residence for single girls, then took an apartment with one of the girls I met there. She moved out after two months. Then I advertised for a roommate and got one, but it didn’t work out. She was into drugs and wasn’t working, and it was a hassle to get her to move out, a real mess, so I decided not to try that again. There wasn’t much of my salary left after I paid the rent, but I was able to get by. I was sort of looking for a smaller place, but I couldn’t find anything decent, and I wasn’t looking too hard.

“I had met Les through a friend, and we went to bed together after we had known each other a few weeks. I had been seeing other guys, but there was nobody else I was balling at the time. We enjoyed each other’s company, and the physical part was good. Actually, I wasn’t particularly orgasmic at that stage in my life. I enjoyed sex but didn’t always come. Most of the time I wasn’t quite sure whether I had come or not.

“For the next month or so Les and I would see each other a few times a week. If it was a Friday or Saturday he would sleep over at my place, or I would stay over at his. On week nights I would go back to my place afterward, or vice versa, so that we could put on clean clothes for work. I also was going out to dinner with other guys during this time, although nothing ever got started sexually. That was how casual our scene was. I suppose I would have avoided balling anybody else, or if I did, I might have felt I would want to break off with Les. I think I’m basically monogamous. I’ve had casual sex — one-night stands — but I’ve never been really involved with two men at the same time, and if I’m involved with one man, I won’t let anything happen with anyone else, casual or heavy. Sometimes I consider this a moral standard on my part, and other times I wonder if it’s just a hang-up.

“One night I was complaining about what the apartment was costing me, and saying that maybe I should try to find another roommate, and Les suggested that he move in so that we could both save on rent. Of course, I had thought of this myself as a possibility. I couldn’t see any reason not to, and the next night we moved his stuff into my apartment.”

JWW: Ruth is twenty-five. Her father is an architect, and her parents live in a North Shore suburb of Chicago. Ruth graduated from a Midwestern college and is currently employed as a secretary and editorial assistant at a New York publishing house. She lives in a small but comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side. She is living with a man now, but not with Les; that relationship, her first of that sort, did not turn out successfully.

“It was a mistake from the start, although I didn’t realize it at the time. We didn’t really care that much about each other. We cared for each other enough to sleep together, but not enough to live together. The thing is, I didn’t know enough at the time to draw a distinction. I knew it would have been absurd for us to get married, but I thought living together would simply be convenient; I didn’t realize that it’s closer to being married than to having an affair.

“The whole thing was very strange. Of course, I stopped seeing other men, and I resented having to do this, although it was never stated openly between us that we wouldn’t go out with others. It was more or less taken for granted. At the same time that I resented his having this hold on me, I became very possessive myself. Like expecting him to call me if he was going to be late at the office, and at the same time being annoyed at having to call him when I was working late.

“The experience of living together was valuable in a way, if only because I learned how wrong we were for each other. I felt uncomfortable with his friends, and he didn’t like my friends, and the result of that was that we were both cut off from everyone except each other. The few friends we had were couples we got to know after we had started living together, and in those cases neither of us much cared for any of them, but we latched onto them in the hope that they would give us something in common.

“We had very little in common. This doesn’t show up when you’re not living together. For one thing, it’s easy to mask a lot of your feelings when you know you can go home and be by yourself in a few hours.

“We separated after a few months. The break was nothing spectacular. By the time it came, we were both relieved. There were no hard feelings. He just moved out. We would still call each other from time to time. We had friendly feelings toward each other, and still do, although I haven’t seen him in a long time. Just the other day someone was talking about Les, that he had a new job and was doing very well. I’m happy for him, because I know material success is very important to him. That was another thing I found out, that he was more hung up on material things than I was.

“If anything precipitated the split between us, it was my pregnancy scare. I wasn’t pregnant, I was just a few days late, but I had always been regular, and I was convinced this was it. I even showed up with some psychosomatic symptoms — sore breasts and so on. I didn’t say anything to Les and took it for granted that I would get an abortion, and then I realized that nothing on earth would induce me to marry Les, and from that point it became obvious to me that we were going to break up before very long.”

JWW: Although the split was not a painful one for Ruth, it left her wary of quick involvements, the same sort of wariness characteristic of the recently divorced. She began dating extensively, feeling a real need to diversify her social life, which had shrunk during her relationship with Les. She purposefully avoided serious involvements.

“I was more casual about sex than I had ever been before. I didn’t sleep with everyone I dated, not by any means, but I stopped using the potential seriousness of a relationship as a criterion. If anything, I found it easier to have sex with a man when there was no chance of anything heavy developing. I was especially drawn to married men during this period, probably because I knew nothing could develop. This period was very good for me in terms of sexual growth. I became orgasmic and dropped a lot of inhibitions, especially in regard to oral sex. You would think this would have happened during the time I was living with Les, because we were together so much and had sex over an extended period of time, but the sexual relationship between us never really evolved. It had seemed good at the beginning, but it never improved, and it was during this period of more casual sex that I really came to terms with my body, with my sexuality.

“With Barry, I don’t know which of us suggested that we might start living together. It just came up in conversation, and we talked it over a lot before we made our decision.

“We were in love with each other before either of us would admit it to ourselves, let alone to each other. Barry had almost gotten married in college — he was informally engaged when he realized he was getting in over his head and broke things off. Since then he had lived with two girls for brief periods of time. With one girl and then with another girl, not both at once.

“So we were both a little careful about not getting involved too deeply. Without even discussing it, we found that we had stopped seeing other people, stopped dating, and this was before we ever spent a full night together. We had sex quite frequently for, I think, a month before we ever literally slept together.

“Then things gradually evolved. I would keep some clothes at his place, and he kept some things at mine. On the weekends we were often together from Friday night until Monday morning. Still, we didn’t rush into making it a regular arrangement. We talked it over, and we realized that we already felt about each other as if we were living together. We had that degree of closeness. In fact, the only thing we didn’t have was the convenience. We were paying double rent, and one of us was always rushing from one apartment to the other, and it was silly to go on like that. My lease was up first, and his place was a better value, so I moved in with him. He had a roommate at the time, but the roommate was hardly ever home, since he spent most nights at his girl’s, so when I moved in with Barry, the roommate moved in with his girl in a sort of chain reaction. They got married recently, as a matter of fact.

“I’m sure Barry and I will get married sooner or later. My parents don’t exactly know that I’m living with him, but I’m sure they realize it. I mean, they’ll call here on Sunday mornings, and he’ll answer the phone and talk with them before he hands it to me. They’ve met Barry several times. I know they’ll be relieved when we get married, although I must say that they’ve never put on the slightest degree of pressure.

“I guess we’ll ultimately marry for the same reason we began living together, that it’s more convenient and because we already feel married. I’m not sure if we want children or not. Not for the time being, certainly. As far as that goes, I don’t see anything wrong with having children without going through a marriage ceremony. I probably wouldn’t actually do it, though.

“It’s simpler to be married, actually. When I meet neighbors, they’ll say to give their regards to my husband, and I don’t bother to correct them. There’s no word like ‘husband’ to describe a man you live with. ‘Lover’ doesn’t work. It just means someone you have sex with.

“Barry’s parents know we’re living together, and it’s all quite open between us. They live on Long Island, so we see them a great deal more frequently than my parents. They’re really great; they treat me like a daughter and seem completely cool about our relationship. I don’t know whether they’re more liberal than my folks. It may just be the geographical thing, the proximity, and my parents would be the same way if they lived closer to us. Or it may be a double-standard thing; Barry’s parents might be a little less cool if it was their daughter instead of their son. That’s just a guess. I don’t really know if the double standard is that much a part of their attitude.

“When I think about Les, I don’t have any real regrets. I don’t think I would have been capable of the relationship I now have with Barry if I didn’t have that experience behind me. What scares me, though, is the idea that I could have gotten married to Les if we hadn’t been in a position to live together. If I had stayed in my hometown after graduation and dated a local boy like Les, I’m sure I wouldn’t have lived with him, and we could have jumped straight into an impossible marriage. I would probably be divorced by now. Or I might still be trapped in a rotten marriage, and we might have had kids in the hope of keeping the marriage together, the way so many people do, and... I don’t even like to think about it. I know girls back home in that situation. I know some who are divorced and others who aren’t divorced but should be. What a stupid way to throw your life away.

“Things are changing, though. I knew girls who lived with boys in college, although I never did, and they aren’t making the kind of marriage mistakes other girls are. From what I understand, living together in college is a lot more common now than it was when I was in school. And I know more and more couples are living together not only in cities like New York but also in smaller towns. It’s a major change, and I guess it’s happening a little at a time, faster in some places than in others, but I think it’s going to make for better and more honest relationships all around, and it should do for a lot of people what it did for me; it should tend to keep the wrong people from marrying each other.”

“A friend of mine told me I was the only girl he knew of who was living with a guy without having sex with him. I told him there are lots of other people like that, but they’re married.”

JWW: Sue is distinctly atypical, but nothing could persuade me to leave her out of this chapter. She is twenty-one, fat, freckled, and radiantly cheerful. She graduated a year ago from a junior college not far from her home in the Adirondack region of New York State. She works as a dental receptionist, lives in an incongruously immaculate apartment on a particularly grungy block on the Lower East Side. Her hobbies include designing her own clothes, macramé, decoupage, reading tarot cards, and sex.

“I’ve been told I have a man’s attitude toward sex. In other words, take it where you find it, enjoy it for what it’s worth, and don’t get hung up on heavy romantic scenes. I don’t know why men should have a permanent claim on that attitude. Anyway, I think that’s changing as more and more women get into the lib scene.

“Not that I’m really into it myself. I’m all for it, but I don’t feel any personal need for it. I went to a couple of consciousness raising sessions, and they seemed unreal to me. The girls were all older, some of them were married, and they talked about turning their heads around and avoiding artificial exploitative relationships with men, and it was as if they were just getting into where I’d been all along. I felt embarrassed about mouthing off to these women who were older and more experienced than I was, and I couldn’t see that I could get anything out of a scene like that, so I think it’s good for them, but it has nothing to offer me.

“Actually, I haven’t had all that much sexual experience, and I haven’t been sexually liberated for very long. The college I went to was a quick century behind the times. I mean, they were still into fraternities and sororities and like that. I was an outcast, of course. I’ve always been an outsider, as far back as I can remember. I used to think it was my size. I’ve always been fat. But that’s not it. It’s that my head is different. Some people are basically outsiders; they feel more comfortable living part of their lives inside their own heads. Even here, in New York, I’m very much an outsider. The difference is that you can be an outsider here without feeling uncomfortable about it. I really dig this neighborhood. It’s scummy and rotten, and I love it. Maybe it’s a reaction to growing up middle-class. I suppose I’ll get older and want the same kind of security and creature comforts as everybody else. Not now, though. Right now I like my life the way it is. The only thing that bothers me is the fucking pollution; you can’t get a deep breath in this city. I may quit my job in June and spend the summer in the mountains. Not back home — I have no desire to go back there — but maybe out west somewhere.

“College — I was an outcast there, no sorority rush, no dating popularity. The first year was pretty horrible, but toward the end of that first year I got in with some of the other outcasts. The hippie element. We weren’t very hip by New York standards. But we got into grass and sex a little.

“The first boy I balled, I was convinced I was in love with him. He liked me, but the way I came on scared the hell out of him. I can’t blame him. We were just friends, you know, not even terribly close friends, and we started messing around, and I never even thought about stopping him. I was fantastically passionate. Then I convinced myself I was in love, and it scared him off, and I wanted to kill myself. It’s the only time in my life I really thought about suicide. I wasn’t really that miserable. I didn’t have this great sense of loss, but I guess I was being theatrical and thought suicide was the dramatically correct thing to do in my position. I never tried to do anything about it, just had these thoughts for a couple of days.

“Then I was rapping with another guy, a friend of the one I balled, and he helped me see where everything was at. That sex was a fun thing and all. He was bisexual, which was a horrible hassle around there. He wasn’t a student, but he lived in the town and hung out with the hip element from the college. He was very sensitive and drew things out of me I never knew were there. He made me see that I got into this love bag because I was unwilling to enjoy sex on its own terms. That I was trying to build a fence around my own freedom. He also made me realize that I’m sexually attractive. I had more or less assumed that it was impossible to be attractive and fat at the same time, and I would alternate between starvation diets and food binges, and never get any thinner, and by thinking I was unattractive I made myself unattractive. Since then I’ve found out that being fat doesn’t keep men from wanting to fuck you. As a matter of fact, a lot of men prefer fat women, even though they don’t want to admit it for some reason.”

JWW: I mention an Arab proverb: Thin women for show, fat women for pleasure.

“I never heard that one, but it’s exactly where it’s at. I heard another one. It goes something like, ‘There are three things men like more than they admit: sweet wine, fat women, and the music of Tchaikovsky.’ I don’t know about the wine and the music, but the other is true. But men who aren’t sure of themselves, you know, they’re a little uptight about being seen with a fat girl. They want to be able to wear a fashionable type of chick on their arm the way they wear clothes. Maybe there ought to be a men’s lib scene for dudes like that.”

JWW: The simultaneous discovery of sexual pleasure and of her own physical attractiveness led directly to the development of Sue’s personal sexual ethic. She determined that she wanted to learn about sex, wanted to enjoy sex, and wanted to do so without the requirement of emotional ties between herself and her partners. Although her opportunity for experimentation was limited on the small campus, she had had sex with half a dozen males by the time she graduated. She does not hesitate to characterize herself as promiscuous, feeling that the word is descriptive and need have no pejorative connotation. Indeed, she draws a distinction between good and bad promiscuity, arguing that a girl can be promiscuous without being a tramp. A tramp, in her eyes, is a girl who sleeps with anyone who asks her and who does so because of a low estimate of self or for some other neurotic reason.

During her last year in college, her relationship with her parents deteriorated markedly. It had never been good in the first place. Sue sees her parents as puritans and hypocrites, maintaining a poor marriage for social reasons. Immediately upon graduation she moved to New York. She has not been in contact with her parents since.

“I wanted to drop out of college, but I thought I would stay and get my diploma. Not that a diploma from a two-year cow college is worth much. The one good thing about the place is that nobody ever heard of it, so when you apply for a job they assume it’s a four-year school. As far as that goes, I could just say I graduated from there. Nobody ever bothers to check. Or I could go all the way and say I graduated from fucking Radcliffe and really impress them.

“New York — God, I couldn’t wait to get here. I just felt completely at home from the minute I got off the bus. I gravitated immediately to the Village and started rapping with some people and wound up a couple of blocks from where I live now, smoking grass and talking until morning.

“The first couple of weeks I just let myself go. I didn’t bother getting a place to stay. I just crashed wherever I happened to be. I smoked a lot and drank wine and had a lot of sex. There was nothing too freaky. The most far out thing was sitting around with two dudes, and they were both horny and started messing around with me both at the same time. I was having my period at the time, so I wound up sitting there and giving them hand jobs. Both at once, one in each hand, and they made a game out of it to see who could hold out the longest. They wanted me to give them head, but I didn’t want to. I don’t remember why. I usually enjoy that. Maybe I didn’t like them that much, or maybe it was the idea of doing something that intimate with someone else watching. I honestly don’t remember.

“Actually, that’s still about as close to an orgy as I’ve ever come. I’ve been invited to swings from time to time, but the vibes were never right. I’d like to try it when the right scene comes along. Though I don’t think I would enjoy it. I think I prefer really getting into one other person.

“After a couple of weeks I was loose enough to straighten my head out and put things together. I got a job and found this apartment. I didn’t have that need to keep going all the time. It was a kind of compulsive thing while it lasted. I think it was largely a reaction to being in New York and free at last and having this appetite to do everything all at once.

“I’m sorry about one thing, and that’s that I didn’t keep my sex diary during that time. I had started it at school and brought it along, but it was with my things in a locker at Port Authority, and I didn’t get it until I had a place of my own. I tried to bring it up to date, but it’s only really good if you can write things down as they happen.”

JWW: Sue’s sex diary is what its name implies, a day-by-day record of her sexual experiences. It is a remarkable document, and I hope one day to publish it in full. A brief extract should convey style and content:

“Mark H. Says thirty-eight but I’d guess five years older than that. Had his usual two-thirty appointment. Root-canal work. Flirted as usual, the type who flirts as a reflex, not expecting anything. Bald in front, flaring sideburns touched with gray. Very mod dresser. Bells yet! Thank God no toupee. I flirted back for first time. He gave me speculative look. I came back with wide-eyed look, said I got off work at five-thirty. ‘We can have dinner or something,’ he said. ‘Or something,’ I said. Don’t know what appealed about him. Not my usual type. Change of pace? Maybe. Dinner — little Italian place where we wouldn’t run into his friends. Food so so. Kept urging more wine on me. Stockbroker, Aquarius, wife, kids. Vetoed my place when he found out the address. Hotel instead. No luggage hassle, must go there often. Nice body, hairy chest. Very powerful erection. Circumcised. Cock not too long but quite thick. Used a cologne. Always put down men who wear cologne, but really dug the smell. Fit the luxury of the hotel... Ate me like a maniac. I wanted to wait and come with him inside me. Finally faked it or he’d be spending the winter down there. Point of honor or something, girl must come before he’ll fuck. Good fucker, long slow strokes, then fucked really hard, bang-bang-bang. Only thing that bothered me was feeling he was performing and I was audience, proving how good he was. Feeling interfered a little, but I came good... Sent me home in a cab. Seemed relieved I was so cool about things, seemed unwilling to believe it. Guessed he thought coolness meant he hadn’t satisfied me, so felt sorry for him and said something about doing this again sometime. Wonder if he’ll want to. Wonder if I’ll want to. Vibes — that he wasn’t sure whether or not he ought to give me a quick twenty dollars. Did give me ten for the cab, insisted he had nothing smaller. Don’t think he was trying to make me feel like a whore like Kurt W. Well, don’t feel like one anyway. I know where my head is. Still, gave the cab change to some street people. Otherwise might be broke sometime and start hoping for money, and don’t want that scene. No way.”

In both her diary and her conversation, Sue notes with amusement that many men are taken aback by her own casual sexual attitudes. They seem to resent her for being able to take sex like a man, and worry that it is a reflection on their performance. Some pursue her and desire involvement simply because she does not. This last is as true of her hip young sexual partners as it is of others. Although this did not precipitate her decision to live with Roger, she has learned that the fact that she has a male roommate serves the function of discouraging unwelcome pursuit.

“Roger and I are very good for each other. At first I wasn’t too sure how it would work out. It was my idea. I suggested it. I hadn’t even planned to, hadn’t thought about the possibility. We had known each other for a few weeks and were very easy with each other without knowing a whole lot about each other. Originally I took it for granted that he was gay. Tall and slender, pretty features, and a certain amount of gay mannerisms, and also he had some friends who were obviously gay.

“It turned out that he was sort of asexual. He couldn’t make it with girls or boys. He had had some homosexual experiences, but he didn’t really enjoy them, or if he did, the idea of being gay disturbed him so much that he couldn’t get into it. He said that his problem was that he couldn’t really relate to anybody. And he had to be alone all the time, he was a loner, but he needed to have a crowd around him, people nearby who could be there without touching him. I’m not getting this exactly right...

“We rapped about what a bitch it is to live alone, and I said that one particular guy was trying to get me to live with him, and why I wasn’t ready for that, and how I had been thinking about getting a roommate but I didn’t really think I would like to live with another girl. And he said he couldn’t live with a girl because he wasn’t into sex and didn’t want to live with a guy because of the whole gay scene, and that even living with a straight guy would probably be a hassle. So then I said something about how we ought to team up, and we both laughed our heads off over the idea, and then talked about it some more, and to make a long story short (if it isn’t already too late for that), we decided that he would move in with me on a trial basis. The apartment was perfect for privacy. The door leads into the kitchen, and there are two rooms leading off it, one on either side of the kitchen, so I could have anybody in my room without Roger being in the way. He could have company, too, but as far as I know, he’s never brought anybody home with him. I don’t know if he ever has sex or not. It’s possible he would do things and not tell me about them. Actually, we don’t really have that much communication.

“People always are struck by the strangeness of it. I know it’s strange in that very few people live this way, but all it amounts to is that we’re roommates who happen to be of different sexes.

“It’s particularly good because we can each play out our sexual roles the way two roommates of the same sex couldn’t. For example, I do the cooking and the light cleaning and take care of decorating the place. Roger does the shopping and the heavy cleaning and goes out for anything we need at night, which is an important safety factor in a neighborhood like this one. I think it’s basically more healthy for a man and woman to live together, and it’s a much easier relationship to maintain when there’s no sexual feeling between you.

“Occasionally we joke about sometimes going to bed together, but those jokes seem to make us both uncomfortable lately. I’ve never had any desire to ball Roger. If he’s had any desire for me, he’s kept it a secret. If the desire came about, I think I’d suppress it. I suppose Roger would react the same way. Out of fear that anything sexual might screw up what we’ve got going.

“If Roger really wanted to ball me, I guess I would go along with it, however I felt about him. Because I like him — I would have to say I’m closer to him than to anybody else at the present time — and so I would want to do it for his sake. I don’t think he’ll want to, though.

“Also, I have the feeling that if we ever did go to bed together, it would be something that wouldn’t happen more than once. Whether it was good or bad for both of us, I can visualize us getting up the next morning and acting as if nothing had happened and going back to the way things are. Maybe this is a fantasy of mine. Maybe I do have a desire to ball Roger and would want it to work out that way...

“In a way, he and I are very much alike. I’ve just begun to realize it lately. I always thought our getting together was a perfect example of the attraction of opposites. The promiscuous girl and the asexual boy. But we’re both outsiders, and neither of us is very good at relating to other people. My reaction is to spread sex around, while Roger’s is to shut it off entirely. I think that’s nothing but two sides of the same coin.

“I know he’s worried about being gay. I don’t think I’m worried about becoming a lesbian, or being a latent lesbian or anything. I can’t remember ever being attracted to a girl. I see girls and regard them as attractive, but not as attractive to me the way I do with men. Sometimes I think about having sex with another girl because it’s something I haven’t done. I imagine if the right girl made the right play for me at the right time, I might give it a try. I’ll probably never know — no girl has ever made a pass at me in all my life.

“I can’t imagine myself kissing a girl on the mouth. I could imagine going down on another girl, but not kissing her on the mouth...

“If my folks had any idea of my life style, it would utterly freak them out.”

JWW: I won’t comment on Sue’s personality here; I find the way she has resolved her sexual and emotional nature fascinating, but in this context we are more specifically concerned with her particular living arrangements.

It certainly seems to work for her, and for Roger as well. She is able to play a female role with Roger, while she is unable to play such a role with her male sexual partners, preferring to “take sex like a man” and drawing amusement from their confusion.

I doubt that living arrangements of this sort are common. Young persons frequently live in communal arrangements of one sort or another, often without any of the commune members being sexually involved with any of the others, but such communes function either as extended sibling groups or off-campus coed dormitories. I presume the platonic cohabitation of one male with one female is rare; this is the sole instance of which I have firsthand knowledge. But I would not be astonished to see such unions become more common in the future. If society is prepared to accept unmarried couples living together and having sexual relations together, surely society would be equally willing to accept a similar liaison with the sexual element omitted. God knows there are enough married couples around who cohabit without having sex together!

Through Sue, I met Roger and expressed a desire to discuss their living arrangement with him. He was acquiescent, if not enthusiastic, and we talked together one afternoon. He was not able to talk about his background or his sexual orientation, and his observations on his life style with Sue were limited to an abbreviated version of the facts she had already discussed with me. So it goes.

“There’s something my father said to me once before I went away to school. He was always very open with me about sex. He didn’t question me about my own experiences — which spared me a lot of embarrassment, since most of my experience at that time was with Mother Five Fingers — and he didn’t lay down rules. He would just sort of make observations. One of the things he said that summer was that he thought it was unwise to have sex with any girl unless you were prepared to marry her if you had to. No, I got that wrong. Not ‘unwise.’ I don’t remember the word, but the idea was that this was a moral thing rather than a pragmatic one. ‘Unethical.’ That was the word. He didn’t mean that you had to do the gentlemanly thing and marry a girl if you knocked her up, but that you shouldn’t fuck her in the first place unless that was how you felt about her, not that you would want to marry her but that you would be willing.

“I’m afraid I didn’t take his advice. When I was in college, my criterion was that I wouldn’t have sex with a girl unless she was willing. If she had a vagina and if she would hold still for a second, I was game.

“There was another thing he told me. He said I should try not to mistake an erection for love. I’m afraid I wasn’t too brilliant at following that bit of advice, either, but the line would come back to me from time to time and help me put some of my furious love affairs in proper perspective. Or a little closer to proper perspective, anyway. When you’re that age, it’s hard to be very balanced about sex.

“Lately I’ve thought about my father’s main sexual ethic, though. I think it made more sense years ago, when pregnancy was not only more of a possibility but more of a disaster. Between the pill and legal abortion, pregnancy just doesn’t seem like a legitimate line for determining whether or not a girl is one you should sleep with.

“Sexual ethics interest me. A friend of mine was very pleased with himself when he made the decision that he would never ball a girl unless he wanted to go down on her. He felt that if he didn’t like her that much he had no business getting in bed with her. I can relate to that...

“My own sexual ethic is that I don’t really want to have sex with a girl unless I want to live with her. I’ve had enough one night stands and short-term affairs so that I’m honestly not interested in them anymore. That sounds phony as hell when you say it out loud, maybe because I used that line on girls before it happened to be the truth. I was very good in the bullshit department at one time. I did a Mr. Sincere number that could really make you puke.

“But now it happens to be true. I’m past thirty, and I want to get married and yet don’t want to get married, to the point where I’m very unclear as to just what it is that I do want out of life. I’m not a success, I’m just starting in private practice, but after all those years of no free time and not much money, I’m on level ground for a change. Unless I suddenly turn into someone who spends money hand over fist, I’ll never really have to worry about money for the rest of my life. That’s one of the most attractive things about being a doctor, you know. You don’t get rich, you can’t possibly accumulate real wealth, but you can be sure of making a decent living to the point where you don’t have to think about money. And I’d prefer to go through life without thinking about money. I’m more interested in two things — my work and my emotional life.

“Thank God I never got married. That’s such a fucking temptation. Marry a coed and let her work your way through med school for you. Marry a nurse, she’ll support you through your internship, and you’ll support her for the rest of your life. I’ve known guys who literally marry for that immediate money. I was never that broke, and I’m sure I’m constitutionally incapable of marrying someone for money anyway, but there are other pressures. Especially during an internship. You put in these incredible hours, like twelve or sixteen hours a day under intense pressure, and your shifts keep changing, and it gets impossible. You need something stable, you need a home, you need a woman you can get into whenever you happen to have the time and the strength to throw her a fuck. This is an enormous temptation, and there are tons of guys who swear they couldn’t have hacked the whole thing without a wife.

“Trouble is, the marriages usually go to hell. Doctors have the worst marriages of any vocational group in the country. They have a sky-high divorce rate, a high suicide rate, a high coronary rate. Believe me, it’s not that they work themselves to death. An established doctor can take it very damned easy, and plenty of them do. As far as I can tell, the ones who take it easy don’t do any better than the ones who lose themselves in their work.

“During all the early years of marriage they neglect their wives because they have to — their work has to be their whole life, their time isn’t their own, let alone their wives’. And they generally turn out to have married the wrong girls for the wrong reasons, and by the time they realize it, they’ve got kids, and... Christ, I don’t want to get started on this. I spent all last night drinking with a buddy who’s going through a marriage crisis, and I’m just playing back everything that came out of that conversation.

“Ultimately I want very much to get married. I don’t think it’ll be to Anne. I want to go on living with her for the time being, but I don’t think we’ve got the kind of thing going that could have any real future. In fact, I think she’s beginning to feel confined, and I’ve got a feeling she’ll want to split before the year is out.

“With the right girl, and at the right time, I want very much to get married. I want a wife, I want children. These things are very important to me.

“Very important. But I’m damned glad I decided to wait for them.”

JWW: Lewis, an earnest and evidently dedicated ophthalmologist, provides a good illustration of yet another facet of non-marital cohabitation. Ruth was careful not to live with anyone unless she felt close enough to him to marry him; Lewis, on the other hand, was interested only in sexual relations in a cohabitational context. It does not matter much to him if such a relationship has no future; indeed, although he is now on the verge of marriage (admittedly to a woman as yet unknown), one of his chief satisfactions is that the living arrangements he has had in the course of the past several years did not lead to marriage, and that he thus avoided what he regards as an enormous pitfall for a doctor, an early marriage.

Lewis’s history is not particularly relevant in the context of this book. Indeed, the several conversations we had were not formal interviews in any sense, and centered more upon certain physiological aspects of sexuality, on the sex lives of physicians in general, etc. (He believes that there is a particularly high incidence of impotence among members of the medical profession, and what I’ve read on the subject seems to bear him out.)

Some of Lewis’s experiences in living with sexual partners, and some of his views on that general subject, deserve inclusion here.

“Of the doctors I know, the ones who do the most chasing are the married ones. Not all of them, of course. But the majority of the guys who play grabass with the nurses are the ones who got married in med school or shortly afterward.

“I don’t think it’s just that their marriages are in bad shape, although I’m sure that’s a big part of it. I think it’s because they didn’t have that great a variety of sexual experience before they were married. It’s easy to say that hit-and-run sex is a drag, but it’s hard to be sure of it if you’ve never had your fair share of it. It’s a little difficult to get tired of something you never had.

“I’ve gotten to the point where I literally can’t imagine myself knocking off a quickie with a student nurse or pitching a stewardess in an East Side bar. I’ve done these things, and I remember them with a good deal of pleasure. But they’re not consistent with the sort of person I am today. I can’t even flirt with any real enthusiasm. There’s a constant sexual patter that you hear with any hospital staff, propositions and innuendos and all of that, and probably ninety percent of it is not serious at all. If a nurse doesn’t hear a dozen lewd remarks a day, she runs to a mirror to make sure her face is still there. It generally doesn’t mean anything more than a kind of sex-oriented camaraderie.

“I can’t even get very interested in that sort of scene anymore. I guess what it amounts to is that I’ve evolved into a wholly monogamous personality. I don’t want to fuck a girl unless I know her. Otherwise it’s masturbation. As a matter of fact, I prefer masturbation under such circumstances. It’s honest, it’s not exploitative, you don’t have to put on masks with each other.”

JWW: And, I say, you don’t have to look your best.

“That’s Boys in the Band, isn’t it? I never saw it, but I must have heard half the lines in it at one time or another... A friend of mine finds it as incomprehensible that I don’t want every stray piece that comes along as I do that he does. Each of us keeps telling the other that he’s going through a temporary phase. I’ve considered that possibility. Naturally, I prefer to think that my attitude represents maturity, but people always think that whenever they go through changes. It’s possible that once I go through the commitment of marriage I may find monogamy stifling. Right now I’m monogamous without having any formal commitment to it. That may make a difference. Maybe I find sexual relationships with just one girl satisfying because I know that I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with her, and maybe that would change after marriage. I can’t say one way or another until I go through the experience...

“The first girl I lived with was a grad student in botany. I was going to med school at the time. She was enormously interested in medicine herself, had majored in biochemistry and wanted to go to medical school, but couldn’t make the cut. If she wasn’t going to be a doctor, she damn well wanted to marry one. And, incidentally, she succeeded. She’s married right now to an orthopedic surgeon. I think they’ve got two kids.

“I came very close to marrying her myself. I would have, if we hadn’t shacked up. I would have married her out of a desire for permanence and stability and security and all the rest of it. Fortunately, I managed to talk her into living with me. That gave me what I needed at the time without tying me up. After about a month I knew I was never going to marry this girl. Not because she wasn’t right for me — I didn’t really learn that for some time — but because once I had the relationship, I knew I didn’t need to make it legal.

“I’m not talking about sex. We had been fucking our brains out long before we were living together. I didn’t live with her for sex, but so that we could be, I don’t know, call it a temporary family...

“I didn’t tell her I wasn’t going to marry her. Not at the time. If I had, she would have split. As a matter of fact, our breakup came when she finally realized that we were never going to find our way to the altar. I suppose from her point of view she made a mistake living with me, in that she wasted time she could have used finding a husband. That’s being a little hard on her, makes her sound like a calculating bitch. She was calculating, but not a bitch. She just sincerely wanted to get married. I’m sure she’ll make a good doctor’s wife, better than most.

“Ever since then, I’ve been very honest in all my relationships with women. For purely selfish reasons, too. I’m just not comfortable playing games. I’m too old for that routine. I don’t want it. The few girls I’ve lived with have always known in front that I’m not looking for a marriage thing. That I personally cannot afford to be future-oriented in my emotional relationships. They accepted it and were comfortable with it...”

JWW: Couples who live together ultimately marry or separate in a majority of cases. Any of a number of motives may propel two people who have cohabited for an extended period of time into marriage. The most obvious pressure is that of convention; however extensively non-marital cohabitation may be accepted, eventual marriage remains the norm. As an extension of this, marriage often follows upon a mutual desire for a change in life style; when a couple decides to have children, or to move from an apartment to a house, marriage suits this new life style better than “living together.” In much the same fashion, marriage occurs when the partners reach a particular plateau in the maturation process — when they graduate from college, when they become self supporting, etc.

Marriage may be elected because of a change in the nature of a couple’s relationship. Paradoxically, the change may be for the better or for the worse. When a cohabitational relationship seems to be deteriorating, the partners may get married in order to bond themselves more closely together, just as married couples may attempt to resolve their difficulties by having a child. On the other hand, a couple may marry because their relationship has improved to the point where they wish to express a deeper commitment to each other.

Does a marriage have a greater chance of success if the partners have lived together beforehand? An absolute answer cannot easily be supplied, and any data offered would perforce be suspect because of the difficulty of a qualitative judgment of marital success. A survey might determine that such couples were more or less likely to get divorced within a specific period of time, but few of us would be likely to call a marriage successful simply because it has endured. Additionally, it’s theoretically possible that persons likely to live together have a greater or lesser propensity to achieve successful marriages.

Almost invariably, couples who have married after having lived together believe that their marriages have been better as a result. And persons who did not live together before marriage frequently comment that they wish they had done so, either because it would have saved them from an unhappy marriage or because it would have made their marital adjustment easier. This sort of hindsight may not be too significant, but it is interesting for what it reveals of attitudes.

My own opinion is that premarital cohabitation greatly increases the possibility of marital success. But it is no more than opinion.

JWW: Those who do marry after an extended period of living together are sometimes apt to aver that marriage has not changed their relationship, that it constitutes no more than a legal formalization of an existing state. I doubt that this is ever absolutely true. However little importance one attaches to a marriage ceremony, the change in status it conveys inevitably carries connotations of increased commitment, of societal recognition, of implied permanence. By becoming husband and wife, a couple will change in the way that they perceive themselves and their relationship and in the way that they and their relationship are perceived by others.

“After we were married, people reacted to us differently. In subtle ways. Other men who might have come on to me while we were living together weren’t as likely to consider me fair game. Other women were less apt to flirt with my husband than when he was my ‘old man.’ This was along the same lines that we had noticed before when we started living together, and the same thing happened. In each case we were recognized as having deepened our mutual commitment, and people recognized this in their reaction to us.”

JWW: Sometimes there is an immediate urge to rebel against the new relationship. A situation which was quite comfortable beforehand may suddenly seem confining:

“A funny thing, in the year and a half we were living together, I never really had an urge to make love to another woman. I don’t mean that the thought never crossed my mind. When I saw an attractive girl, I would think of her in sexual terms. I think everybody does that, but I never really wanted to do anything about it. Almost immediately after we went through the wedding ceremony, I got a classic case of the seven-year itch. It wasn’t even a desire for a specific girl. I just had a yen for someone besides her. I never did anything about it, although I’m sure I would have if there had been a really ideal opportunity thrown in my face.

“Ultimately I got over it. Probably because I got used to being married. I had wanted to have sex with someone else because I felt I had given up a portion of my freedom and wanted to assert myself. What’s weird is that I knew my motives at the time. That didn’t change anything, the desire was just as strong.”

JWW: Does marriage make it more or less likely for a couple to stay together? At first glance, the answer seems perfectly obvious. Divorce, however readily obtainable it may ultimately become, will always be a more complicated process than simply packing a suitcase and getting new stationery printed. The actual mechanics of separation and divorce, added to the implied commitment of marriage, make the dissolution of a marriage more difficult than the breakup of a non-marital union.

“During our second year of marriage, we went through a very bad time. I was trying to get pregnant and couldn’t, my husband was in a bad situation at work, and we actually did separate for several weeks. He went to a hotel. If we had gone through that bad a time when we were living together, I doubt that we would have stayed together.”

JWW: This statement is typical. But it is also true that, for some people, a marriage is harder to hold together than an informal arrangement. I’ve known several couples who lived together for periods in excess of five years, got married, and were divorced or permanently separated within the first few years of marriage. As one man explained:

“We weren’t as flexible after we were married. When we were living together, we could have a hassle and one of us would walk out and then walk back in a few days later, and it worked itself out. When the same kind of thing happened after the wedding, there was this feeling that the break had to be permanent. I can’t really explain it, but it was there.”

JWW: This particular couple lived together for five years, were married for slightly over two years, then separated permanently. Interestingly, they have not divorced, neither of them seeing any point in a divorce other than the freedom to make the same mistake all over again. Both are living together with other people now, and have been for several years.

JWW: Living together is not so much an alternative to the traditional monogamous marriage as are the marital forms we shall encounter in the following chapters. It is relevant here more in terms of the way it reflects so many changes in our perception of proper sexual behavior, of courtship, of marriage.

Twenty or forty years ago, college sophomores and Greenwich Village free spirits used up a great many man-hours talking about the desirability of free love. Just what this term meant depended upon the speakers and the circumstances, and perhaps in the majority of cases the phrase was employed largely as an intellectual argument for premarital intercourse. (When I went to college, it was said that there was no such thing as free love, not so long as you had to pay tuition.) In ideal terms, however, the phrase often pointed to a sexual utopia wherein people would live together without being married, retaining all their individual rights and unregimented by the dictates of society.

Implicit in the advocacy of this sort of free love was the understanding that it would (or should) ultimately replace marriage.

Couples who live together today practice free love to an extent that those old bohemians would not have deemed possible. If this tells us a great deal about the institution of marriage in contemporary society, I would submit that the continuing perseverance of marriage and its evident ultimate appeal to so many of these same couples tells us even more about marriage.

Again, this chapter is different in another way from those which follow it. The practice it concerns is one which is rapidly becoming the norm, much as premarital intercourse became the norm some years before.

Group marriages, swinging marriages, open marriages — these alternatives to traditional monogamy are not the norm, nor is there much likelihood that they will become the norm in the foreseeable future, the visionary statements of their staunchest advocates notwithstanding. Their significance lies less in the number of people experimenting with them than in the fact that they exist at all.

Swinging

A friend of mine inadvertently became an expert on Colley Cibber. Cibber was an English minor poet of the first half of the eighteenth century, whose chief claim to fame was the scathing denunciation to which he was subjected in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. My friend was an English major in college and did his senior paper on Cibber. When he worked for his master’s, it seemed easier to stay with Cibber than to break new ground, and for the same reason he furthered his expertise on the man in the successful pursuit of his doctorate.

At a cocktail party he was introduced to another guest with the information that they would have much to talk about, as the other guest was also intimately familiar with Cibber’s life and works. My friend replied that he never wanted to hear the name of Colley Cibber mentioned for the rest of his life, and stalked off abruptly.

That’s how I sometimes feel about swinging, or wife-swapping, or whatever the hell you want to call it. My friend had learned more about Colley Cibber than ought to be required of any man. I have heard so much about swinging, and talked so much about swinging, and written so bloody much about swinging, that I can barely watch a Tarzan movie without breaking out in hives.

This personal supersaturation in swinging as a topic for deathless prose was such that my original outline for this book made no provision for the subject. But here my friend has the advantage of me; Colley Cibber’s role in English literature is as vital as tits on a bull, while an understanding of the nature of swinging is essential to a survey of marriage in modern society.

So here we go again. If you can stand it, I suppose I can force myself.

JWW: Swinging can take many forms, and the diversity of its expression makes defining it a difficult matter. The definition I have found that best covers the subject is that swinging is mutually acknowledged recreational adultery. All of the words in the definition are important. In swinging, husband and wife are aware of each other’s extramarital activities to the point where these activities constitute a genuine aspect of their marriage. And these activities are undertaken for pleasure, excitement, satisfaction, but not in pursuit of love. Some swingers feel emotionally close to their extramarital contacts, while others maintain a purely impersonal attitude, but in any event there is a distinct difference between the feeling for one’s spouse and the feeling for one’s swinging associates.

Our concern here will have to be limited to swinging as a component of marriage and as an attempt to modify the traditional marital relationship and accommodate it to today’s world. The reasons why people get into swinging, and some of the effects it has on their lives and their sexual attitudes, is largely outside this chapter’s scope. Readers interested in a more comprehensive treatment of the subject might consult The Wife-Swap Report, a book of mine published by Dell. Where most books on swinging concern themselves with a half-dozen case histories or a couple of hundred capsulated interviews, this one is the product of a series of interviews with one couple concerning their experiences during several years of swinging, and the changes engendered in their separate selves and in their marriage. While one feels one ought to be somewhat diffident about plugging one’s own book, in this case the impulse is tempered by my feeling that I functioned as little more than a conduit for the transmission of Paul and Sheila’s own observations. The two of them have more to say about swinging than I can possibly say here, and I would only hope that you enjoy the book as much as I will enjoy receiving royalties on it.

While the temporary sexual exchange of mates is perhaps as old as the institution of monogamy, it was not until after the Second World War that swingers began to achieve numerical importance in American society. Originally, the typical swinging couple had been married for from five to fifteen years and had had relatively little premarital sexual experience. Swinging evolved out of the desire of one or both partners for extramarital sexual experience, coupled with a reluctance to endanger the marital relationship by engaging unilaterally in an adulterous love affair. Thus, extramarital sex became a joint project, and adultery was not a threat to marriage but a component of marriage.

This pattern remains the most common one in swinging, and represents a commitment to conservative middle-class values in conflict with the concept of sexual monogamy. The swinger wants to have the cake of a respectable and durable marriage while eating the cake of extramarital promiscuity. An illicit affair is unsatisfactory not only because of its potential for destroying the marriage if discovered, but also because it involves treachery and deceit; furthermore, it is generally either a tawdry consortation with pickups or prostitutes, or involves an emotional bond which is a betrayal of the spouse. People are often drawn to swinging after experimenting with extramarital affairs of this nature and finding them less than satisfactory.

In recent years, the impact of swinging upon society has been considerable. As swinging has increased in both incidence and influence, the type of couples it attracts and the role it plays in their marriages have broadened to a significant degree. Young couples now get into swinging before marrying, and instead of turning to the pastime as a reaction to the limitations of marriage, make it a part of their marriage from the beginning. There was a time when almost all swingers were between thirty and forty years old; perhaps a majority still are, but swingers in their twenties and sixties are by no means rare.

Rather than offer up more general observations on the nature of swinging, let me turn the floor over to some of its practitioners.

“I think in most cases swinging is the man’s idea. He is more likely to think of it in the first place and to be less inhibited about it. In our own case, I must say I wasn’t really aware that swinging existed before my husband started to bring up the subject. I had heard of it very vaguely, but I didn’t think it was something people like us might be involved in. I put it in a category with taking dope.

“Eddie hinted about it for awhile before he actually went and said anything direct. Left books and magazine articles on the subject where I would run over them. I knew early on what he was getting at, but I wouldn’t speak out on the subject. I couldn’t believe he would really want me to have other men. A lot of women have said the same thing. As hard as their husbands would try to get them to go along with it and give it a try, they were sure they would lose their husband’s respect if they actually went and did it.

“What decided me, I don’t know exactly. Like any decision, a little of this and a little of that, and you never know just what made up your mind for you. I got to the point where the idea excited me. Here I wasn’t used to having sex thoughts about other men, and now I was finding myself having them all the time.

“I won’t say that Eddie and I were bored with each other. We had a nice home and the children, and we were in love with each other. But it wasn’t the same as before between the two of us. You know, you start off married life having relations constantly, and everything is new and exciting, and as the years go by, the excitement goes out of it. You don’t do it so often, and you don’t get the pleasure out of it.

“But I never had these thoughts before the subject came up. I would wonder sometimes that maybe he didn’t love me as much as he did in the beginning, but most of the time I thought this was just the way it was with married couples, that sex was less important as you got along in years and the novelty of it wore off. It was thinking about swinging that made me feel that maybe everything wasn’t the way it should be with us.”

JWW: Martha is in her late thirties. Her husband, Eddie, is a few years her senior. She is somewhat plump, attractive but by no means striking, and looks very much like the housewife and mother she is. She and Eddie have been swinging for eight years. Like most swingers, they seek out partners who are very much like themselves in respect to age, socioeconomic status, education, etc. While they do not belong to a club, the majority of their contacts are with perhaps a dozen couples who live within a twenty-five mile radius of one another. They were not acquainted with any of these couples prior to their entrance into swinging. Now most of their social activity involves these couples, and it is not uncommon for them to spend purely social evenings with members of the circle without having sexual relations.

“I believe that swinging is very good for a marriage. This is true in a number of ways. Of course, the main benefit is for your sex life. Not just in the course of swinging, but the changes in your married sex life.

“For ourselves, there were so many things we did not know regarding sex. I had no experience except with Eddie, and he had not had all that much. We read books on the subject, but it is not the same thing. You learn a great deal from different partners.

“Also, swinging makes a husband and wife more exciting to each other. You come to know that you are desirable to other men, and this makes you a more desirable person, and your husband treasures you more. And the same is true of the wife.

“In the beginning, I must admit to jealousy. This was funny, because I had not expected to be jealous, but thought Eddie would be jealous, and he was not. But I was. When we were just starting out, the couples would always go to different rooms, and it would bother me that he was with a woman and I did not know what he was doing. Then the first time we were with another couple and all together in one room, it was even worse, because I saw him with her and saw the pleasure he was having, and resented it. Which was so two-faced of me, because at the same time I was having my own pleasure with that woman’s husband. But feelings of this kind do not always make sense; you cannot work them out that way.

“It did not take me long to overcome my feelings of jealousy. I believe the reason for them is that so many husbands and wives feel insecure about the people they are married to, whether they have the inferiority complex or whatever it is, that they are afraid their husband will like the other woman better, or will find her more attractive or have a better time with her. But you learn to overcome these feelings, and the end of it is that you get over jealousy in other areas besides swinging. This was not that much of a problem with us before we were swingers, but was so with many other couples, where the wife would worry constantly about the husband becoming involved with someone at his place of business.

“With swingers, you are not inclined to be jealous, because you know your husband loves you and only you, and has the sexual variety he wants with other swinging wives, and so would not need to seek it elsewhere, with the chance of falling in love with another woman.

“Another benefit of swinging is that you are close to your friends in a way that is not possible with those who do not swing. There are none of the usual secrets and inhibitions which get in the way of close friendship. With non-swingers you are constantly forcing yourself not to be sexually attracted to another woman’s husband, whereas with swingers the sex is a part of the friendship and does not threaten anyone or make anyone uncomfortable.

“I would never go so far as to say that swinging saved our marriage, as I do not feel our marriage was in any trouble before we began to swing. But I would definitely say our marriage is better now because we are swingers, and that we are both happier people for it, and know each other better, and are more deeply in love than ever.”

JWW: Swinging does not necessarily eliminate jealousy, although I would say that Martha’s views on the subject are valid in most cases. Jealousy on the part of husband or wife frequently make a couple discontinue swinging after a brief flirtation with the practice, but whether or not further experimentation would have worked things out is moot. And many swingers are capable of an interesting version of double-think in this area; they are able to accept with no qualms whatsoever their mates’ sexual relations with others, but only so long as they take place in their own presence.

I’ve just recently received a letter pointing this up from a marine stationed in the Pacific. It came to me in care of my monthly column in Swank Magazine. Its author had been overseas for nine months at the time of writing, with another fifteen months to go. He is twenty-one, and he and his wife were swingers in civilian life. He has resolved to be sexually faithful to her during his absence, and is utterly obsessed with the anxiety that she might have sexual relations with someone else during his absence. Reading between the lines, I would suspect it was his idea to remain faithful. Some excerpts from his correspondence should be instructive in this regard. I doubt that his attitudes are typical, and presume much of his anxiety derives from his extreme lack of self-confidence.

Dear Mr. Wells,

... I’m twenty-one and so is my wife. We’ve been married for two years now, but are now separated by my being stationed here. I really hate being away from her...

My wife and I were both swingers before I came into the service and will probably continue to swing after I get out of this green machine. I’m curious to find out something, so please tell me what you think. I want to know if a woman can hold off for so long. I’ve been here three months now and have been true to my wife and will continue to do so. Do you also think a man can hold off for so long?

In case you’re wondering why we are such young swingers, that’s because we never had much experience with sex before we were married, and we wanted to know how to really satisfy each other, and so we found swinging quite enjoyable, and will remain swinging with other couples. We both learned so much...

I really dig swinging, but while we’re separated we have put a freeze to it until we’re back together again. My wife now has this girlfriend who is divorced. Her girlfriend has talked to her about swinging but has never tried it, and as far as I know, my wife hasn’t mentioned anything about our being swingers to the girlfriend.

My wife has asked me if I mind her going to stag movies. I said I didn’t mind as long as she goes with a bunch of girlfriends. Did I do right by letting her go? I know it will make her hornier than she is already; that is why I don’t go myself. Do you think she’ll ever go out on me, because we have friends who are swingers? She has visited the home of one couple we swung with before, and I’m almost sure she hasn’t messed with them, because I believe her very much and trust her. But can she hold off for so long and be true to me?

She’s living now with her mom and father with our little girl. I’m just curious if she’ll be tempted to try anything. I don’t ever want to hurt her or for her to hurt me. I know she is hornier than ever, and so am I. I know I could go for two days straight screwing if I was home. I just hope she doesn’t screw nobody.

When we were together, we decided that if we were ever horny for somebody, we would bring that couple home with us if they also had the desire for us. We promise to tell each other in letters everything we do...

JWW: In my reply, I stated that it was perfectly possible that my correspondent’s wife would remain faithful to him, and that it was also possible she would not. “It seems to me,” I went on, “that rather than worry at great length over your wife’s behavior, you would be better off realizing that it’s not all that important whether or not you and your wife are sexually faithful to each other while you are apart. As swingers in civilian life, you have both learned that it is possible to have sexual relations with others without lessening your love for each other. The same principle should hold true while you are apart. As far as stag movies are concerned, while they might make your wife hornier than ever, they might also help her to sublimate her desires. In any case, I don’t see any point in your telling her not to go. It would probably be best for you to encourage her to do what she wants, so that she won’t wind up feeling guilty and keeping things from you.”

I received a reply to my letter almost by return mail. I was interested to note that certain paragraphs from the first letter were repeated almost verbatim, relating the writer’s concern about his shyness with other women in swinging situations and his doubts concerning his own attractiveness and sexual desirability. In response to the points I raised, he commented as follows:

Dear Mr. Wells,

... I’m on maneuvers now and still would rather be home with my wife and child. I’m still holding off (it’s hard) and hoping my wife is doing the same. You said as swingers in civilian life that we both learned that it is possible to have sexual relations with others without lessening our love for each other. Yes, this is true. We have. But I know it would hurt her if while we were apart I were to have sex with other women, and it would hurt me if she had sex with another man. We always said that we would do everything together, like if I wanted to have sex with a woman, she would have sex with a man in the same house at the same time. It would hurt both of us to know that we were unfaithful, or that I was unfaithful to her while she was faithful to me, or vice versa.

Now, I want to ask you about the effects of going without sex for a whole year. Can a man my age continue his normal sex life under those circumstances? Will I be able to develop my control of holding off for long periods of time till my wife reaches orgasm? Can a man lose his potency because he doesn’t have sex for a year? I’m horny as ever and want to remain faithful to my wife. A lot of guys here have made bets saying I ain’t gonna last much longer.

I told you about my wife visiting some of our swinging friends. There’s one couple who tease her about having sex. Should she continue to visit them, or tell them to stop, or what?

JWW: One detects various undercurrents in these letters. I have the feeling, for example, that the writer would welcome advice from me to have extramarital relations for the sake of his health, or so that he will be sexually adequate when reunited with his wife. But what I find most interesting is the extraordinary distinction drawn between the shared adultery of swinging and the “cheating” of unilateral extramarital relations during their forced separation. He seems to feel that, should he cheat on his wife, she will be morally free to cheat on him in turn, and he emphatically does not want that to happen.

I’d like to know just how this couple was introduced to swinging in the first place. I suspect that the desire to learn more about sex is more a rationalization than a motive, and wonder whether it was the husband or the wife who first wanted to swing, whether the desire evolved spontaneously or was suggested by another couple. Whatever the precise circumstances, this man’s attitude points up the fact that swinging does not perforce eliminate sexual jealousy. Rather, it facilitates a medium for extramarital relations in which jealousy is not allowed to operate, while leaving the fundamental feelings of the partners largely unchanged.

To an extent, this paradox is no doubt related to the youth and relative inexperience (not to mention insecurity) of my correspondent and his wife. I would postulate that, had they been married longer and been more extensively involved with swinging prior to a separation of this sort, they would very likely have reached an understanding before the separation that each would be free to have casual sexual relations with others. Many couples, swingers or not, make a similar accommodation, and I have known swingers who replace the shared adultery of swinging together under the same roof with a sharing of confidences during periods of separation; they have sex as they please, but tell each other everything through the mails.

Is jealousy a part of the makeup of experienced swingers? In some cases it is. Consider the following:

“One thing we’ve learned to be careful with is when a couple gets involved in our general circle of friends and it turns out that they’re not married, or not married to each other. I know that a lot of swingers couldn’t care less on this subject, just so the people are friendly and attractive and there are as many women as men. But we don’t feel this way. If a man or woman isn’t married, he or she doesn’t have the same amount to lose as everybody else. A single woman could let herself get involved with another woman’s husband beyond the point of just swinging. This can be a very dangerous thing. When it’s all a matter of married couples, all of them in the same general situation, you know nothing’s going to come of it but a pleasant evening together. Of course, there rare exceptions. Everyone has stories of swinging with a couple, and then the other husband will call the wife during an afternoon and try to set up something private. To me, that’s a case of people who are not really swingers at heart and do not understand the openness that is a part of the ideal swinging marriage.

“There is one couple we see frequently who are not married but might as well be. He is separated from his wife but is unable to get a divorce, and his swinging partner lives with her widowed mother, so they cannot actually live together, not that they could anyway, because of his position in the community. However, they have been going together for a matter of years, and we consider them the same as if they were married, and do not see them as a threat to our own marriages. Also, neither of them has ever tried to start anything outside of regular swinging channels. Even so, I know we would all be happy to see the two of them get married, which they intend to do if the opportunity ever comes along.”

JWW: Another husband, a veteran of several years of swinging and group sex, was astonished to discover within himself a capacity for jealousy he had never thought existed. In the course of a business trip, he called his wife, only to have a man answer the phone. He thought the voice was one he recognized, that of a neighbor.

“I was stunned. I slammed down the phone and started pacing the floor. The idea that she would be with someone else behind my back had me livid with rage. Fortunately, I called her back almost immediately. She answered, and I started to give her hell. She didn’t know what I was talking about, insisting that she was alone in the house. Ultimately, I actually called the neighbor, who of course had been home with his wife the entire time; I’d had a wrong number the first time and had flown completely off the handle without taking the trouble to find out the actual circumstances.

“Later we wound up talking it out at length. It turned out that she occasionally would have enjoyed having sex while I was on a trip. For that matter, I’d had my share of opportunities on the road and hated to turn them down. What bothered each of us was not the idea of sex with someone else but the thought of being taken advantage of behind our backs. The upshot was that when I’m on the road we act as free agents and can do what we want, but we avoid getting involved in anything and tell each other about it afterward. It’s exciting in its own way, just as regular swinging is exciting in its particular way.”

JWW: Other swinging couples will work out still other forms of accommodation during periods apart from one another, with the general aim of eliminating jealousy and deception and avoiding anything which might threaten a marriage. The experience of two couples in western Pennsylvania provides a good example. Both couples were around forty and had been swinging for almost ten years. They had met in the course of swinging, and for quite a few years each couple had been the other’s best friends. I interviewed the two couples together and learned that they swung only as couples and only with couples similar to themselves in age, background, and marital status. Then one of the husbands explained an arrangement they had made the previous summer:

“Joe’s wife, Ulla, went over with her mother to visit her relatives in Norway. She was gone for two months, while Joe was left alone to batch it. Meanwhile, as usual, I was on the road four days out of every seven. A couple of nights a week Joe would come over here and have supper with Frieda just so they could keep each other company. Well, it wasn’t long before one thing led to another, and the two of them went to bed together. I mean, they’d been doing this for years, and it seemed ridiculous for them not to do it just because I was a hundred miles away and Ulla was in Norway.

“They told me about it that weekend, and I figured, what the hell, why not? Also Joe wrote to Ulla, and she wrote back that she was relieved to hear it, because she knew it would be a strain for Joe to go without sex for two months, and if he was with Frieda, she wouldn’t have to worry about him bringing home a disease or wrecking a marriage or any of that sort of thing. He also wrote her to feel free to enjoy herself in Norway, and she had been considering having an affair over there but had been reluctant to do anything behind Joe’s back. And in the meantime I had taken out this waitress a couple of times in one of the towns I’m in frequently, but I never let it go further than a dinner date. Now that I knew Joe and Frieda were taking care of each other while I was on the road, I felt free to bring the waitress back to the motel with me. Then Ulla came back from Norway, and things got back to normal again, and we had all of us learned that swinging didn’t have to be as rigid a business as we had made it before.”

JWW: How does a swinging marriage differ from a non-swinging marriage? What changes does this sort of organized adultery engender in a marital relationship?

Swingers are almost unanimous in holding that the practice has had a beneficial effect on the nature of their marriages, whether or not they go so far as to credit it with saving marriages that would otherwise have failed. The points most often made are that swinging has made them more open to each other, more honest with each other, more sensitive to each other and to their own inner selves.

“Before we got into this, I never really let Greg know me, and I never really knew him. It’s as if we were afraid to open up to each other. Instead of growing closer together, we were gradually growing farther and farther apart. He had his work and his bowling league. I had my housework and my reading and my women friends. We shared the children and the house and our bed, and bed was becoming less and less important to us as time went by.

“As a matter of fact, we were both aware of what was happening before we thought at all about swinging. We went through stages of trying to find an activity that would bring us closer together. We tried to get ourselves interested in various hobbies — making wine at home, taking an interest in political activity. All of these things just seemed like a phony attempt at togetherness. Looking back on it now, we can laugh at ourselves. At the time, though, it was a desperate attempt to make married life more meaningful. Neither of us wanted what so many of our acquaintances seem to have, a dead marriage where two people go on living under the same roof and caring less and less about each other as the years go by.

“Swinging, at the beginning, was a fairly traumatic experience for us. In so many ways we were forced to look at our inner feelings and talk things out. We had to figure out how we really felt about ourselves and each other, and also our feelings about sex and morality and convention and, oh, virtually everything. What I remember most vividly about our first attempt at swinging is not the time we spent with the other couple, but the conversation we had when we got back home. We sat up talking until dawn. I found myself saying things to Greg that I hadn’t even thought to myself before.

“From what people have told me, I gather that this happens with a great many people. Not all of them, of course. We’ve met people who evidently drifted into swinging without a second thought and don’t seem to have enlarged themselves at all as a result of their experiences. Those are the kind of people we try to avoid.”

JWW: This deepening of the marital bond, this heightened sensitivity to one’s partner, is reported not only by those who embrace swinging wholeheartedly but also by couples who make one or two ventures in that area before deciding that it is not for them. Cases of this sort are less likely to be reported in the literature of the field, perhaps because such couples do not remain in the subculture long enough to come to an investigator’s attention. I’ve come across quite a few couples whose negative experiences with swinging led them to abandon it early on. Some condemn swinging out of hand and offer strong negative comments on the practice and its practitioners. Others are less unequivocal on the subject, maintaining that swinging may well be valuable but that it turned out to be other than a desirable situation in their own particular case. Occasionally there is the implication that they might make another attempt at it under optimum circumstances, should the occasion arise. In any event, however, almost all of these persons feel that the experience was a beneficial one in terms of their marriage, that it matured them and helped them to discover each other. The husband quoted here gives a typical response:

“I’m very glad we tried it. It didn’t work out for us, and I don’t think we would ever be inclined to try it again, but it’s something I’m very glad we went through. For one thing, it was something I wanted to get involved in for a period of years before we actually got around to it. I had fantasies on the subject before I even thought about it as something we actually might do, and then it was a long time before I got up the courage to suggest it to my wife. After that, it was even longer before she agreed to go along with it, I didn’t put any real pressure on, I don’t think, but she was aware that this was something I wanted to try, and that was why she ultimately agreed to find out what the whole thing was all about...

“If nothing else, the fact that we tried it managed to get the desire for it out of my system. I’m sure I would otherwise have gone on being preoccupied with the idea indefinitely.

“Besides this, our experiences drew us together to a great extent. I’m not sure if I can explain this sensibly. A part of it was the feeling that we had shared something, that we had gone through a particular ordeal together. That makes it sound as though we survived a shipwreck together or something. That’s not exactly what I mean. It was more that we had struck a new level of intimacy. Seeing my wife having sexual relations with another man, seeing her perform certain acts with this total stranger that she had previously performed only with me, gave me a very warm feeling toward her. I think I grew to see her more as a sexual being in her own right than as an extension of myself, as a human being instead of as someone labeled ‘wife.’ Also the knowledge that she was doing this primarily for my benefit, to please me, made me realize how deeply she loved me and made me aware how I treasured her.

“Another effect was that our sexual relationship with each other became more intense and meaningful after we had tried swinging. We really got over our inhibitions with each other and became far more experimental sexually. We would look at pornography together, we started experimenting with sexual toys like vibrators and that kind of thing. We like to say that we’ve become swingers, but a special kind of swingers who need only each other. I think what happened was that after we had been through a scene like that, we knew neither of us had to worry about shocking or disgusting the other, and we were able to bring fantasies to life without sharing our bed with anyone else.

“Sometimes as a prelude to sexual relations we will talk about a couple we’ve met and engage in a verbal fantasy of swinging with them, telling each other what we would like to do with the other couple, etc. This fantasy won’t represent a real desire but will be a conscious method of stimulating ourselves through fantasy.”

JWW: What comments of this sort suggest, among other things, is that experimentation with swinging functions much in the manner of an encounter group, forcing participants to tear down various defenses and be more honest with themselves and with others. Thus it may have some of the dangers of the encounter group — i.e., our emotional defenses generally exist for a reason, and it can be dangerous for us to discard them wholesale.

Awhile ago I was interviewed on an Ohio radio station on the topic of swinging. Also interviewed on the same show was a clinical psychologist from Cincinnati whose experiences with swinging were wholly negative; in contrast, I reported that the majority of couples whom I’d interviewed reported distinctly positive experiences with swinging. This all seems natural enough. People for whom swinging worked out well do not find themselves seeking a psychologist’s help, while people who have been severely upset through such experiences do not wind up telling me their troubles.

There are two obvious ways in which swinging improves a marital relationship. First, as we have been discussing, it may foster the growth of intimacy and honesty between the partners. Second, it may eliminate the frustration of wanting extramarital sex but being unable to reconcile such sex with the concept of marriage.

The charge is occasionally leveled against swinging that it divorces love and sex and reduces sex to a purely physical activity, or makes of it a social device similar to a bridge game or cocktail party. One can hardly deny the charge, since it is fundamental to the whole concept of swinging.

In this connection, it might be worthwhile that the whole point of swinging, for most of the people who engage in it, is distinctly sexual. This may well seem obvious, but in the midst of thoughtful discussions of swinging’s role in opening up marital relationships and bringing partners closer together, one can easily lose sight of the fact that couples swing out of a desire for new sexual partners with whom they can perform sexual acts.

Having established this, we can then consider what the existence of swinging tells us about the way sex and marriage are perceived. Obviously, the swinger continues to see a monogamous marriage as the most desirable life style, while finding strict sexual monogamy confining. He takes it for granted that a man will desire women other than his wife, that a woman will wish to have sex with other men besides her husband. And while he may feel that swinging itself is not yet socially respectable, he feels that the desire for such activity is virtually universal.

“There are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who swing and the ones who wish they did. I’ve heard guys say that they’ve never desired another woman besides their wife. Well, there was a time when I said much the same thing myself. Maybe I believed it, maybe I just liked the sound of it, but it was a load of crap. And when I hear other men say it, I’m convinced it’s just as much a load of crap now as it was when I said it. It’s natural to want other partners. It’s a normal biological thing. You take a healthy male and show him a good-looking female, and he is going to respond to her. A wedding ring on his finger won’t keep him from getting a hard-on, unless he’s simply made himself so uptight that he’s wearing that wedding ring right around his balls.”

JWW: By the same token, the extension of sex beyond the marital relationship is seen as proof that the marriage is more than “just sex.”

“Sex is something we have with each other or with other people. Love is something we have between ourselves. Now we’re in a position to see the difference, and to know how much more complete love is. That doesn’t mean pure sex isn’t worthwhile, but it’s on another level entirely.”

“Our first experiences with swinging were pretty tame by current standards. The whole idea of it was so far out for us at the time. In the course of the first four months we had five, maybe six meetings with other couples. These were couples we met by answering ads in the magazines. The format of our dates with these couples was virtually identical. After a few exchanges of letters and photographs, we would go to their home after dinner. One couple suggested we all meet first for a drink at a cocktail lounge to look each other over, and then we went to their home from there. Anyway, we would have a drink or two and get to know each other conversationally. Then there would be something to break the ice, dancing or strip poker or dirty password or some parlor game or other, and then we would pair off with each other, and one of us would go to a bedroom with one of the others, and the other two people would stay in the living room. We would have sex in private, then get dressed and all get together again for coffee and some more conversation. Once or twice we left almost immediately after the sex was finished because of a generally uptight feeling and wanting to be alone, but usually we would talk for a while, and the conversation at those times was a lot looser and easier than before the sex.

“Then ultimately we swung for a second time with one of these couples, and they were more experienced swingers than we were, and we went to separate rooms as usual but afterward sat around naked, the four of us together. Then we very naturally drifted into a scene where I made love to the other guy’s wife while he made love to Kathy, all four of us in the same room, and in a sense you could say that that was when we really became swingers. What we did before then would fit the old-fashioned term of wife-swapping, because we were trading partners and having the same behind-closed-doors sex of an ordinary husband and wife. But now we have developed the new attitude of extending ourselves sexually and getting into new things, and as far as we’re concerned, that’s what swinging’s all about, that’s the name of the game.”

JWW: Most initial swinging experiences are as described above, with activity confined to couples in separate rooms. And in most cases the swinging repertoire gradually opens up, usually going through a series of stages. First the couples will have sex in front of one another. Then group activity will occur. Female homosexual relations are often the next stage. Male homosexual relations occur in a smaller percentage of cases, but could be said to represent a further evolutionary step in the progress of a swinging couple.

“I think it’s very natural to keep progressing this way. I know it’s a standard way people develop sexually through swinging. Once you’ve taken the first big step of having sex with another couple, it’s easy to start doing a lot of other things society regards as perverted. When you try one thing and discover it’s a tremendous source of pleasure, it’s only sensible to start wondering what other things might be pleasurable in the same way.

“Gradually your curiosity begins to get the better of your hang-ups. You start by realizing that a certain act is all right for other people. Then you get to the point where you know you desire it but are still a little reluctant to take the plunge. Then finally you say what the hell, why not, and you go ahead and give it a try, and it turns out to be a kick. Each time it gets easier to go through those changes in a shorter period of time, because your experience up to that point has made you a less repressed and less inhibited person and you’ve learned to open up readily to new forms of enjoyment.

“In our case, Kathy was a long time letting herself get into a bi scene with another girl. It would come up almost all the time, it seemed like, but swingers know how to take no for an answer, and there was no pressure involved. A few times she was told by girls that they wanted to, you know, go down on her, and wouldn’t expect her to do anything in return. She just couldn’t bring herself to go along with this.

“Then one night we were at a scene with maybe three other couples, and Kathy caught up in a tangle of bodies, and she looked down and saw this girl stroking her thighs. And she was going to say something, but she didn’t, and she stopped looking in that direction, and a minute or two later the girl started going down on her. Just knowing it was a woman doing it made it exciting for her, but she was able to accept it because she was also involved with a man at the same time, and besides, she had not encouraged the girl or even agreed to it formally.

“That same night, she was able to get into the bi scene completely. Another girl made a tentative pass at her, and she had grown enough from the earlier experience to be able to participate fully, with each of them taking an active part.

“In my own case, I would say that my own attitudes changed at least in part because of Kathy’s experiences with bi activity. I found that I gradually reached the point where I was constantly wondering what it would be like to fellate another man. Not that I would look at a guy and have the desire to go down on him, but more that I would have this abstract urge to suck a cock.

“One night we were at a swing with a lot of strangers, and there was some male bisexual activity going on along with everything else, and I decided what the hell, why not. I simply went over to this guy who had been performing with another man earlier — so I knew he wouldn’t have any real objection — and I went down on him without a word. It was incredibly exciting for me, probably because of the way I had built it up in my mind. I enjoyed the experience completely, then walked away from him without saying anything.

“Kathy hadn’t seen this, but later that night I told her about it. I think I expected her to disapprove, though I don’t know why, as I had never disapproved in the slightest over her own bi acts. When she approved, I was able to be a lot more cool about it. From that point on I would have sex with other men when the opportunity presented itself, and gradually came to where I not only enjoyed the act, either active or passive, but also was able to relate to other men sexually, to be attracted to a man physically instead of being involved merely in a sexual act with his genitals. Along the way, there were times when I had doubts about whether this was right or manly or whatever, because of the prejudice our society builds into us against male homosexual activity, but I gradually outgrew all of this and now consider myself a genuine bisexual. I prefer sex with women, and I wouldn’t want to have a relationship with a man except in a group sex context, but I’m basically fully bisexual.”

JWW: I’ve quoted this account at length because I think it does a superb job of illustrating the manner in which sexual horizons are broadened in the course of extended involvement with swinging. This is not to suggest that all swingers extend their horizons to this degree. A considerable majority of swinging wives do experience homosexual relations sooner or later, while a majority of swinging husbands do not. (The reasons for this dichotomy are beyond our scope here, but are discussed at length in The Wife-Swap Report and Women Who Swing Both Ways, among other places. And my observations indicate that the gap is diminishing; male bisexuality is definitely increasing among swingers in general.)

However far this progression may carry, it almost always exists. The swinger moves slowly or swiftly from sexual fidelity to permissive adultery and on into the more esoteric reaches of sexual expression, with the ultimate goal being that stage of sexuality which Freud called “polymorphous perverse,” and which swingers call “sexual liberation.”

A search for new frontiers in sex is a logical consequence of divorcing sex from emotional involvement, though I doubt that it is an inevitable consequence. And I think the view that sex can provide ultimate pleasure and satisfaction is very much an attitude of our times, and one which is very much a part of the growth of swinging. That couples turn to swinging when a marital sexual relationship goes stale is not the whole story; one must appreciate that contemporary men and women expect more of sex than previous generations did.

What is the final result of this search for the last word in sexual expression, this quest for the golden fleece of absolute orgasm?

Here are two perspectives on the subject. The first speaker is a woman in her early forties who has spent just over a dozen years as a swinger:

“For a long time, swinging was a very stable activity for us. Our first contacts were with several couples here in town, and they let us know that there was a group forming for swinging. There were six couples in the group when we joined it, and it finally grew to a maximum size of a dozen couples. We would meet once a month, have drinks, possibly watch a stag movie together, and then draw partners and go to the wife’s house for two hours of sex.

“It probably sounds very strange that we had such a completely confined type of swinging scene, with everyone just having contacts within the group on a once-a-month basis. You have to realize that we were completely isolated. In our town, it was impossible at that time to obtain any of the correspondence magazines, and even books on swinging were hard to come by. We knew that there were a lot of other people out there who were into swapping, and we knew they had a wilder scene going than we did, but we didn’t know how to get in touch with anyone, and there was a general reluctance to experiment. One major factor, I guess, was that everyone in our group was really worried about the possibility of exposure, so it was easier to go on as we were.

“Then ultimately we got out of all that and began engaging in correspondence, and before long, swinging became the most important thing in our lives. It was really an insane time for us. We were swinging at least once a week, and often would swing both Friday and Saturday nights. When we missed a weekend we thought of it as an opportunity we had let slip by...

“There was this constant sense that something new might happen, that we might go a little bit farther each time. For a long while we crept along in stages, talking ourselves up for each new experiment, and then we seemed to hit a point where we all at once became hard-core swingers, and then you didn’t have to talk us into anything, you had only to suggest it. We got into mild sadomasochism and bisexuality and all kinds of group scenes. There’s no real way to describe it beyond saying that we did everything.

“The next stage we hit was when we had done everything, and we found that our kick was to turn on people who hadn’t gone so far yet. It seemed we had just finished being pupils when we became teachers. We learned to be very deliberately seductive. Looking back, I’m ashamed of that stage, because we were quite calculating and dishonest in getting younger couples to try something they hadn’t done before. I don’t think we did anyone any harm, but I’m ashamed all the same.

“What came about finally was the realization that swinging couldn’t be life itself, that it could be only a part of life. And that you couldn’t engage in it that intensively without harming your feelings toward yourselves and toward others, and even toward sex in general. You could say that we outgrew the kind of swinging we had been doing, and began to settle down...

“Our present pattern is almost like a return to the way we started out in the first place. Namely, we have a circle of a dozen or so couples that we see from time to time, not all at once, but one or two other couples every once in a while, with occasional contacts with new couples who are friends of someone, or whatever. We have group sex on these occasions, and once in a while we’ll all agree to act out some sort of fantasy situation or other, but basically it’s a much lower-keyed sort of affair. There are times when we miss the special excitement of the time when sex was everything to us, but by and large we’re glad those days are over.”

JWW: Another informant described through a series of letters a similar progression from plain to fancy swinging. An emotional crisis subsequently precipitated a complete withdrawal from swinging activity. He wrote:

“If we had it all to do over again, I would make damn sure that swinging never again assumed such proportions in our lives. We thought of ourselves as truly liberated spirits, the vanguard of a Bright New World of sexual freedom, when actually we were nothing more or less than two people for whom wild sexual activity had become an absolute obsession...

“I find myself looking back nostalgically on those days when we first began to get caught up in swinging. Perhaps it is an illusion, but they seem to me very dewy and innocent in retrospect. It is hard for me to say that I regret having gotten into this in the first place. It has been advantageous in certain ways, a mistake in others. Perhaps it will be possible one day for us to resume swinging, although I doubt it greatly. I cannot say that our marriage is better or worse for what we have been through, as there is no way of knowing what it would have been otherwise. Too, I suspect that the credit or blame for what has become of us may be attached more to our individual selves than to the institution of swinging; it, like everything else, is probably what you make it. But I am quite certain that, for better or for worse, it is a closed chapter in our lives.”

JWW: The patterns we have been discussing are those of swinging in its purest and most traditional forms, and we have thus far confined ourselves to that form of swinging in which love and sex are purposefully separated from each other. Couples may be friends or may carefully remain strangers except in a sexual sense, but in either case sexual promiscuity is combined with emotional fidelity.

In recent years a new type of swinging couple has begun to emerge. This couple is young, probably under thirty, and may or may not be married.

What distinguishes such couples from traditional swingers is a desire to experience not merely sexual but also emotional intimacy with others. They see love not as something to be reserved exclusively for one’s husband or wife but to be bestowed upon anyone with whom one desires to have sexual relations. Often they will seek swinging contacts with the stated desire of establishing a group of couples who will function almost as an extended family, and the possibility of ultimately uniting in one or another form of group marriage is frequently considered and often discussed.

We will examine some of the forces operating in group and plural marriages in subsequent chapters, but I think we can consider this type of swinger here in the specific context of swinging. Certainly a great many more young couples get into this sort of swinging than ever become serious about the idea of group marriage, let alone take concrete steps toward achieving the actualization of the idea.

“We first got into this spontaneously. We were very close with this other couple in the building, saw them a few nights every week, and one night we were all stoned, and a sex thing developed. The outcome was that I balled the other girl, and Ruth went downstairs with the other guy, although they didn’t wind up actually making it together.

“Well, the other couple couldn’t handle it. Ruth and I were very easy about it, but when we saw them after that, they were like uptight about it, didn’t want to discuss it at all, and we started to see less of them. We weren’t especially surprised when they moved out.

“We talked about it a lot, though, and rapped about how love wasn’t an exclusive thing or anything, and how under ideal circumstances it ought to be possible to have a really complete relationship with another couple. We came to the conclusion that when you’re friends with another couple there’s almost always a mutual sexual attraction operating, and you have to go through the phoniness of suppressing it, or else you ruin the relationship. Which means that you have to pretend that the attraction doesn’t exist, and that makes it impossible to be as close as you could be otherwise.

“So we came up with this ideal image of a friendship where we would all have sex together and all be really true friends, and even all love each other. We were confident enough of the way we felt toward each other so that we were never really concerned that it could interfere with the thing we have going for ourselves.”

JWW: As an initial experiment, this couple contacted prospective partners through an underground newspaper. Other contacts were made at a bar which caters to swinging couples. The results, while not wholly unsuccessful, were not what they were looking for.

“The novelty of doing this made it very exciting, I got a tremendous thrill the first time I saw Ruth in another guy’s arms, getting pleasure from him and giving pleasure to him. And we liked the idea of being able to cut through the usual phony conventions of relationships and have sex out in the open. What put us off was that these people did not really want to know us. They just wanted to ball us. They were holding themselves back. Well, a certain amount of that is probably inevitable at first. You’re naturally uptight about putting it all out in front with someone you don’t know yet. But the thing was that they didn’t want to get to know us. I mean, one time I was having a really great time with this girl, kissing her breasts and giving her a nice lazy finger wave, and I looked up at her and said, ‘I love you.’ Because I had a great feeling of tenderness and love for her at that moment. Well, she went all pale and told me never to say that, and that just killed the whole thing for both of us. She couldn’t really respond because she was afraid I was going to fuck things up by falling in love with her, and I couldn’t really get into anything with her because I knew how she felt, and I kept picking up all her negative vibes, and it was a very bad scene. We ultimately did screw, probably more out of a sense of obligation than any real desire, but she had screwed up what could have been a really together experience, and I knew that as far as she was concerned, I had screwed it up.

“After that, I stopped telling women I loved them, but it was always the same kind of scene. And also we would meet a couple and after sitting around with them for a few hours we would know that we didn’t have much in common and would never be really close friends, but the situation was so structured that you had to go ahead and have sex or you would be putting them down. It was all very stupid, because we were getting just what we didn’t want, finding ourselves locked into balling people we didn’t even like, or guarding our emotions with people so as not to do bad things to their heads.

“So we gave the whole thing up, but we still liked the idea of it. Our last shot was with a couple who wrote an ad that appealed to us. The ad implied that they wanted only to meet people with their heads together who wanted a really meaningful relationship. This looked great on paper, but it turned out that for them the definition meant we would all smoke dope together and be bisexual. The dope was cool, but we weren’t sure about the bisexual part, and also, they were no more into the idea of emotional intimacy than any of the others, so we turned off to the whole scene.

“Then there was this couple we became friendly with, Dan and Judy, and one time Dan and I were alone together and we were talking about something to do with sex, and for some reason or other I told him about our experience. I didn’t have it in mind that they would be interested. I just felt open enough with Dan so that I felt I could talk about these scenes we had been involved in.

“It turned out that he and Judy had gone through a lot of the same changes, but hadn’t done anything about it to the extent that we had. The closest they came was when a college roommate of Dan’s was staying with them for a few weeks, and the roommate balled Judy one afternoon while Dan was at work, and they told him about it when he came home; and after a certain amount of getting it all together, they worked out a three-in-a-bed scene which they stayed with until the roommate split for the Coast.

“We worked it out that I dug Judy and he dug Ruth, and that we would discuss it with the girls and see what happened. What happened was that we all balled the next night. One thing I have to admit is that now that we had this intimacy that we had always wanted, I came very close to freaking. I heard Dan and Ruth telling each other how they loved each other, and I got a stab of jealousy that I couldn’t believe. But then it just got washed away by this tremendous feeling of well-being, this sense that everything was really right for the first time. Of the four of us, everybody genuinely loves everybody else. The important thing isn’t the sex. It’s the way the sex is a part of everything else and it all goes together so completely.

“At the present time, we’re considering another couple. The guy works in Dan’s office, and the six of us have been together quite a few times, and Ruth and Judy and Dan and I agree that we have the right kind of feelings toward them. And we think that three couples would be better than two. The big thing now is deciding how to broach this to them. I think their heads are in the right place, but we’ve never gotten into the topic of love-based friendships with them and don’t know for sure how they’ll handle it. We don’t want to be laying any trips on them. What we may do is let it come out in conversation that the four of us have this thing going, and see where it goes from there. Actually, we’re just about at the point now with them where it’s artificial to keep them from knowing what kind of scene we have going. We know them too well to have that kind of secret from them.

“Sometimes the question of group marriage comes up, but none of us can really see that, not in our case. As close as we are, Dan and Judy are a unit, and Ruth and I are a unit. We prefer it that way. It’s important to belong to your friends, but it’s also important to belong in a special way to just one other person. For us, anyhow.

“The feelings we all have for each other, it all makes every other friendship we’ve any of us ever had seem like nothing at all. And you just can’t compare our situation to meeting strangers in a bar and taking them home and fucking them and then never seeing them again. It’s so completely different in every respect.”

JWW: A great many swingers see themselves as riding the wave of the future, and certainly the growth of the custom has been dramatic enough. I sometimes suspect, though, that our attitudes are evolving toward a point where swinging will ultimately become obsolete. Based as it is on the principle of emotional monogamy, it cannot logically outlive that principle. I’m sure that the sexual relationship described above has far more attraction for the idealistic young than the emotionally sterile swinging seen elsewhere in this chapter.

As we have seen, the swinging marriage makes extramarital sex a function of the marriage itself. Another new style in marriage similarly facilitates extramarital sex, but in a way which replaces togetherness with the acknowledgment of the rights of privacy. Partners in a permissive marriage subscribe to a concept of matrimony which allows for extramarital sexual relations — and even extramarital love — within a fundamentally monogamous framework.

Going Separate Ways

“Let me tell you, folks, my wife and I have discovered the secret of a happy marriage. It’s the double bed. Yes, the double bed — one in her house and one in mine.”

The bit of nightclub shtick quoted above has led a venerable life. In an East Side cheaters’ joint the other night I heard it again for the first time in ten years. It got as good a laugh as ever, perhaps because it was so well suited to its audience.

For a substantial number of American married couples, the line’s humor is underscored with truth. In the permissive marriage, the secret of marital success is, if not double beds in separate houses, the ability to go separate ways and lead separate lives. The options open to partners in a permissive marriage include but are not necessarily limited to that of engaging in extramarital sexual relations. Such relations are undertaken not jointly, as in swinging, but individually.

It is difficult to define the permissive marriage precisely. While swinging represents a distinct social movement, permissive marriages represent individual accommodations worked out by individual pairs of husbands and wives. Perhaps we can best approach a definition by first looking at some marriages which do not fit this category.

“Am I married? Let me put it this way. My wife is married. She knows I have to be able to live my own life. I don’t throw it up at her all the time, but she knows I get around on my own.”

JWW: This, in one form or another, has been for years the pattern of standard American adultery. The husband engages in extramarital affairs to whatever extent he wishes, veiling his activities from his wife and from the friends they have in common. If questioned, he will explain that he and his wife have an understanding, that she is aware of his extramarital activity but prefers to ignore it. He may add that his wife is equally free to express herself sexually outside of marriage. The less likely it appears to him that she will ever do so, the more likely he is to be magnanimous in this regard.

This sort of unilateral “understanding” may or may not exist to the extent the husband implies. Often he merely assumes that his wife knows of and tolerates his infidelities, with such an assumption greatly diminishing his own guilt. In other instances the understanding is pure fabrication; the husband knows that his wife has no knowledge of his infidelities, knows too that she would disapprove violently, but has found that other women are less reluctant to have an affair with a married man if they are led to believe such an understanding exists.

In still other cases, the understanding may be real enough. It will usually have been arrived at after a marital crisis in which the wife learns of her husband’s penchant for casual adultery. He convinces her that this need for extramarital sex does not impinge in any way on his love for her, and that it does not constitute a threat to their marriage; she at once forgives the infidelities of the past and facilitates the infidelities of the future by ignoring such evidence of his affairs as may later come to her attention. The understanding, such as it is, consists of her recognizing the need to overlook what she cannot accept, and of his exercising due caution to avoid her being presented with anything too vivid to be easily overlooked.

The understanding is almost always unilateral. It is almost always the wife who understands, the husband who behaves in a manner which must be understood. This fact surely reflects the double standard, but it is simplistic to argue that this sort of husband would invariably be appalled if his wife behaved as he does. Most men insist that they would grant their wives the same degree of freedom they demand for themselves. Certainly some of them are insincere, but I believe the majority are honest in this regard. Some actively wish their wives would have affairs, not merely to alleviate their own guilt, but out of the feeling that extramarital sex would be for their wives, as it is for them, a source of pleasure and satisfaction.

Why, then, is the understanding so one-sided? Two factors have traditionally helped make it so. The wife, her world centered upon home and family, simply has less opportunity for extramarital involvement. While her husband meets interesting women through his work, she sees only those men who come to her house, and unless she is capable of enjoying the cliché of casual sex with an appliance repairman or a door-to-door salesman, she has no chance for a real extramarital relationship. In addition, women have long been taught, whether socially or biologically, that they can enjoy sex only in the context of an emotional relationship. Even when the opportunity for such a relationship presents itself, they are more apt to feel that it will pose a threat to their marriage.

(All of this is changing, with more and more women leading lives extending beyond the boundaries of kitchen, children, and church, and with that redefinition of female roles which at once feeds and feeds upon the women’s liberation movement, I suspect that we will see an increasing number of women who, like Sue in the chapter on living together, take their sex like a man. I would doubt, though, that all of the differences between male and female sexual attitudes will abruptly wither away.)

The understanding, then, does not fit the definition of the permissive marriage which we are trying to formulate. It represents a compromise. The wife agrees, probably by closing her eyes, to live with her husband’s unfaithfulness. The husband also compromises by keeping his affairs under wraps. Whether the compromise is ultimately successful depends on a number of things. The wife may suffer extreme ego damage, may retreat into neurotic behavior, may turn to alcohol or drugs, may fall out of love with her husband. The husband may find that a long-term pattern of casual deception makes him cease to love and respect his wife. He may become more seriously involved in an affair than he had intended, to the point where he wishes to divorce his wife for the sake of his mistress. Or, on the other hand, the understanding may endure throughout the course of the marriage, and may represent the best possible accommodation for all parties concerned.

“We have a marriage in name only. We haven’t been in love with each other for years. We’re only staying together because of the children/for religious reasons/because we can’t get a divorce (choose one). We care about each other and don’t want to make each other unhappy, but we have to have outlets outside of marriage. Hell, I’m not a priest, and I haven’t been in the same bed with her for years.”

JWW: Like the understanding, the marriage in name only may or may not actually be as it is described. Often it represents a conscious exaggeration designed to lessen the guilt of a prospective extramarital partner. One is less apt to experience anxiety at the prospect of breaking up a marriage if the marriage is perceived as a legal fiction.

Discounting those cases in which the statement quoted above is an out-and-out lie, there remain many cases in which it is at least an improvement on the truth. It is only natural for a person discussing his marriage with his mistress to emphasize all of the marriage’s weaknesses and minimize all of its strengths. This is partly a matter of telling one’s mistress what she wants to hear, certainly, but it may also come about with no ulterior motive; a man’s marriage honestly seems far less significant to him when he is in bed with another woman, and takes on far greater significance when he is sitting in front of his own hearth, digesting a good dinner and playing with his children.

Nevertheless, the marriage in name only certainly does exist. It has probably become less common than it was in years past, because such marriages are far more likely now to end in divorce. The bars to divorce have given way greatly, and the legal dissolution of marriage has become easier to obtain and carries less social stigma in almost all strata of society.

But people still do stay together “for the sake of the children.” (Whether children are better off under such circumstances is a moot point. The obvious answer is that they are not, that a broken home is preferable to a loveless one, that parental honesty is superior to parental deception. Obvious as this may be, I am by no means certain that this is true, as there is an indisputable correlation of parental divorce and emotional difficulties. The world could do with a sound study of this subject.)

An interesting result of maintaining marriage for the sake of children is the phenomenon of divorce after twenty or thirty years of marriage. The union is preserved for the children’s benefit; the children grow up, complete their education, and marry; and the parents are finally free to dissolve their unsuccessful marriage. Just a week or so ago I read a rather startling letter in “Dear Abby.” The writer reported attending a large party to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of a couple she had known intimately for many years. At the height of the festivities the husband called for silence. Then, with his beaming wife at his side, he announced that he and his wife were taking this opportunity to let all their friends know that they were about to get divorced. Their children were grown and married, he explained, and there was no longer any need for them to live a marital lie. Thus they were going to go their separate ways while they still had time to enjoy life. And while the guests stood gaping, the band played the “Anniversary Waltz” and the prospective ex-spouses danced together.

(No, I am not making this up. No, “Dear Abby” didn’t make it up either. And yes, I’d give long odds that husband and wife went to bed together after the party broke up. And yes, yes, yes, this is a hell of a strange world we live in.)

The marriage in name only is not as likely to be unilateral as the understanding, in terms of extramarital sex. Either the husband or the wife or both may have sexual relations outside of marriage. Nor are these relationships necessarily casual. The husband may have a mistress or the wife a lover, and such relationships may constitute sexual and emotional monogamy.

This sort of marriage may or may not be permissive. Either party may be either open or secretive about extramarital affairs, depending on particular attitudes and circumstances. But however permissive such a situation may be, marriages of this type are not what we mean here by permissive marriage.

“Sex just isn’t important to my wife. She’s willing to go through with it, but she doesn’t enjoy it, doesn’t seem to have needs the way I do. I love her very much, and our marriage is important to me, but I’m a very sensual kind of a guy and I have to be able to express this side of my nature.”

“My husband can’t satisfy me sexually. He can’t get it up/ejaculates prematurely/lacks tenderness (choose one). We love each other, but I have to have sexual satisfaction.”

JWW: Again, we’re dealing here with statements that are not always entirely true. Often a desire for sex outside of marriage will make one unduly aware of one’s partner’s sexual inadequacies. Many men justify visits to prostitutes on the grounds that their wives will not perform certain sexual acts which they crave, most commonly fellatio. In many cases one learns that they never attempted to induce their wives to fellate them, but use this as an unconscious rationalization for their behavior.

This reservation aside, there are quite a few marriages in which the sexual uninterest or inadequacy of one partner leads to the sexual infidelity of the other. Occasionally an understanding between husband and wife will exist. Sometimes it is voiced; more often it is unspoken. A wife who does not enjoy sex, who regards it as dirty or improper, may be pleased that other women will relieve her of her marital chores. A husband is less likely to accept such an arrangement with equanimity, as it reflects rather obviously on his manhood, but there are cases enough on record of husbands, either possessed of low sex drives or fundamentally homosexual in orientation, who relinquish with pleasure the burden of satisfying their wives.

“One night our fantasy was listing all the guys she balled, and we stopped at sixty, including the hound dog that she screwed for years.”

JWW: Another form of marital relationship that is distinctly permissive, without constituting a permissive marriage as defined here, is that in which the extramarital activities of one partner are a source of excitement and pleasure to the other partner as well. The acts of one provide strong vicarious gratification for the other.

Esquire recently ran what was ostensibly an interview with the “world’s greatest lover,” an apartment building watchman who evidently has devoted his entire life to refining his skills at seducing and satisfying an enormous number of women. The interview was pretty terrible, and like so many items in that magazine, it could as easily have been a spoof on such articles as not. One could not be sure, and one could not much care, either.

The most interesting aspect of it was that (according to Esquire) the article came about because of the single-minded determination of the man’s wife to see her husband’s prowess recognized in print. She hounded the editors until an interview was arranged, then stood at her husband’s side during the interview, backing up his story. Assuming that all of this actually happened, the wife obviously derived considerable satisfaction from the knowledge of her husband’s extracurricular activities.

I’ve had more firsthand familiarity with relationships in which the husband delighted in his wife’s promiscuity. The quote above is from a letter I received some months ago chronicling the sexual career of the writer’s wife in the course of thirty years of marriage. During this time the husband states he has had little extramarital sex himself — “Maybe I’m nuts or something, but I can count on my right hand the number of stray pieces I’ve had” — And obviously gets maximal satisfaction from his wife’s behavior.

Letters of this sort, in which a husband boasts of his wife’s sexuality, are fairly common. In most cases they are sheer fantasy, with the writer purposely making the letter as colorfully pornographic as possible. This particular letter was similar in tone and style to others, but in this case I was able to establish its literal truth. There is no point in reproducing it here, but interested readers may find it printed almost in full in Doing It!, a collection of ten of my Swank Magazine columns in book form.

Such marriages represent little more than an adaptation of matrimony to suit at once the particular sexual idiosyncrasies of husband and wife.

JWW: Hmmmm. So far, we’ve done little more than formulate some negative definitions of the permissive marriage, examining a variety of marital relationships with permissive aspects that fall short of our chapter’s subject.

Now let’s look at a few genuine permissive marriages to see just what forms they’ve taken and just how they managed to evolve into those forms. Our first speaker is Helene, a tall and attractive woman in her late thirties, well-dressed and self-possessed. She is a statistician employed by a market research corporation. Her husband, Maurice, is a tax lawyer.

“My first marriage broke up because of my husband’s possessiveness. I’m sure there were other factors as well, but this was the most important one. He was the ultimate male chauvinist pig, although the term hadn’t come along at the time. He wanted me to stay home and cook and clean and make babies. He wanted me to be a wife first and person second, if at all. It was at his instigation that I quit my job, although I wanted to go on working, and we could certainly have used the income. During the day, he expected me to be home. He got very upset if he called and I wasn’t there. He had me so thoroughly intimidated that I rarely left the apartment except to do the marketing or get my hair done, and I would even set specific times for that, so I would be home when he called.

“I had no male friends during the course of the marriage. That was absolutely out of the question. He even resented my female friends, but was willing to tolerate them...

“For all his jealousy, I never did have an affair. I don’t think it really occurred to me that an affair was an option of mine. He was upset if I talked to other men at parties, for God’s sake. He preferred parties where the men stood on one side of the room and talked about cars and football, while the women stayed on the other side and talked about babies and exchanged recipes. That man had one of the keenest minds of the twelfth century.

“After the divorce, I found out that for all his insane insistence on my fidelity, he was Mr. Cheater in person. He didn’t have affairs as such, he wasn’t geared for that sort of thing. Instead he spent a couple of afternoons a week with call girls. Paid money for absolutely passionless sex. He did a lot to screw up my life, but I can’t really resent him for it anymore. I can only pity him. His whole attitude regarding love and sex and marriage was genuinely sick.”

JWW: Once her first marriage had ended, Helene returned to work, took an apartment of her own, and began to become socially active once again

“I had had several affairs before Maurice and I met. He was also divorced, and had just broken up with a girl he had lived with for almost a year. We met through mutual friends and saw each other several times before we got around to going to bed together. Eventually we began living together and found ourselves considering marriage.

“We were both very apprehensive about taking the plunge again. Maurice said he seriously doubted that any woman, whoever she was, would be able to fulfill him completely. He had had affairs during his marriage and admitted he had become slightly involved with a girl while he and I were living together. For my part, I was determined to avoid anything at all like the situation I went through during my first marriage. My job was an important part of my life, and I intended to continue with my career. He agreed completely on that point, saying that a woman with a stimulating job was a more stimulating companion than a woman who spent her days in front of a television set. Besides that, though, there were certain friendships I had with men that I did not desire to give up. There were men I frequently had lunch with, one man who shared my enthusiasm for chamber music and used to take me to concerts, and so on.

“Once we had started living together, I stopped having evening dates with other men. I did this automatically, but it began to bother me. It seemed wrong, for example, that I should have to give up chamber music concerts because Maurice didn’t care for them. It seemed even worse to drag him along to them when he didn’t want to go. And it annoyed me that having a deep relationship with one man meant I had to forgo having meaningful friendships with other men.

“Until we started to discuss it, I had not thought of this aspect in sexual terms as such. I had never had simultaneous affairs in the past, and thus I had never contemplated having sex with another man while I was involved with Maurice. But in the course of discussing our mutual concern about marriage, I began to discover within myself a capacity for enjoying an extramarital affair. It seemed to me that if I could enjoy a man’s friendship and companionship, I might also be able to enjoy him sexually while still living with Maurice, or being married to Maurice.

“It would be wrong to give the impression that all of this worked itself out in a series of level-headed conversations. But I’m afraid we didn’t reach a plateau of Instant Maturity. What kept happening was that one of us would rebel against the confines of our relationship, would throw that rebellion in the other’s face either to inflict pain or to exorcise guilt, and the fight that followed would eventually resolve itself in discussion, with the two of us moving a little bit closer to our own definition of the proper structure of a marriage.

“As an example, I called Maurice at his office one afternoon and said I would be having dinner downtown and would then go to a recital at Town Hall. I didn’t specifically state that I was going by myself, but that was the implication. When I got home afterward, I confessed that I had gone to dinner and to the concert with a man I was friendly with, adding that I had kissed him good night when he put me in the cab for home. I don’t remember just what form our argument took, but through this and other arguments we gradually came to see that it was possessiveness and exclusivity that makes so many marriages an unendurable proposition for the people involved in them.

“Another time, Maurice said he was working late at the office. Several nights later he admitted he had spent the hours from five to ten with a girl who worked as a receptionist for one of his clients. They had dinner and then went to bed in her apartment. He added that she had wanted him to stay the night. I asked him why the hell he felt compelled to come home, that I wasn’t his jailer, and suggested he go to her then and there. He left the house but came back within fifteen minutes. I said something like, ‘What’s the matter, isn’t she home?’ He said he hadn’t called her, that he really just wanted to be with me. We worked things out, and in the process learned a little more about ourselves and our needs and what we could give to each other as well as what we expected from each other.”

JWW: This redefinition of attitudes and roles was a drawn-out process for Helene and Maurice. Both realized that they could not possibly be comfortable with a conventional marriage, and so they literally had to invent a form of marriage which would work out to their mutual satisfaction, uniting them as a couple without infringing upon their rights as individuals.

“I don’t suppose it would have taken us so long to get around to marriage if we hadn’t both taken marriage so seriously. For a variety of reasons, each of us felt that marriage was a necessary state for lasting happiness. And each of us had been married before, and we shared a real determination not to fail at marriage for a second time. This is not always the way it works for people who have been divorced. I’ve known quite a few who rush into a second marriage very lightly — they were divorced before, and feel that if things don’t work out, they can always get divorced again. We went to the opposite extreme, dead set on getting married only if we were determined to make it last a lifetime.

“Marriage held several attractions for us. The prospect of children was one of them. We both agreed that we would prefer to adopt. There are so many children without homes, and the last thing the world needs is more babies, and also I felt I was a little old to be giving birth to a child for the first time. Nor did I relish the prospect of two years of dirty diapers and all of the limitations involved in raising an infant. I have nothing against women who want that kind of life, but that doesn’t make me one of them. We’re right now in the process of adopting a beautiful little biracial boy two and a half years old. If it works out as we hope, we’ll think about adopting a little girl in two or three years.

“More than the desire for children, we wanted to be married out of a desire for permanence. An unshared life is a very lonely life, and New York is overflowing with lonely old men and women who have no one in the world but their own selves for company. You see them on the streets talking to themselves. I used to think they were all crazy, but you don’t have to be crazy to talk to yourself. All that’s required is for you to have no one else in the world who will listen to you. Maurice and I wanted to grow old together, we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with each of us as the other’s best friend.

“What we worked out finally was the idea of marriage as a relationship in which neither party owned the other and in which each of us was free to come and go as he desired. There would be no strings except one — that we would make sure our marriage survived. We would be honest to each other and considerate of each other, and each of us would gladly accept the fact that the other had his own individual life to live.

“This meant that I wouldn’t say I was going to a concert alone and then go with a male friend. I could still go with my friend, but I would say in advance that I was doing so, and I would feel free to bring him home for a drink afterward. I would also feel free to have an affair with him, but not if I was going to bring him home for a drink. We both agreed that those aspects of our individual lives which involved sexual intimacy ought to be kept private.

“We’ve also found that it’s best to keep extramarital sex not only private but not to discuss it. At first we had the feeling that we had to be honest and open and tell each other what we did, and we learned that we were getting a distasteful childish pleasure about bragging about what we had done sexually, and that it was lowering our mutual self-esteem. Now, I’ll generally know when Maurice is having an affair, and I’m sure he knows whether my dates are purely platonic or not — they almost always are — but we don’t tell each other about it, nor do we ask each other questions.

“I’m not at all jealous of Maurice, and I don’t believe he’s jealous of me in any way. On two occasions he’s called me at night to tell me he’ll be staying out overnight. I’ve never done this myself. The first time he did this, it bothered me, although I don’t think the feeling was jealousy exactly. It was more that I felt I wanted him to be with me while we both slept. When he did it the second time, I told him how I felt, and we talked it over, and he said he’d felt uncomfortable himself waking up in a bed without me. Interestingly, the second time had not been a sexual occasion, but an all-night poker game...

“Jealousy is an immature emotion, as I see it. There’s no way in which one person can belong entirely to another person. People have to have time away from each other, and they have to have parts of themselves which can’t find expression within marriage. If you give up those parts of your life which your husband or wife can’t share with you, you’re only making yourself smaller and more limited as a result, and your partner doesn’t gain anything from this; in fact, he loses, because you become stifled and less exciting and wind up resenting him for the change in your life.”

JWW: I asked how friends and acquaintances feel about their version of permissive marriage.

“Most of the friends we have in common are the sort who have little trouble understanding our relationship. The majority of them are couples in which the wife works, and they also have found it necessary to allow themselves a lot of independence within the framework of their marriages. I don’t know that we’ve actually discussed our concept of marriage at any length. They know that one of us will attend a party without the other, and that we have that kind of freedom.

“The men I’m friendly with are usually taken aback to learn that Maurice knows I’m going out with them. For instance, one man whom Maurice and I both know socially has taken me to lunch maybe half a dozen times. He’s in a lot of personal difficulty right now, unsure whether or not to quit his job, up in the air over a lot of things, and what he needs is a sympathetic ear. Evidently my ear was the sort he was looking for, so once a week or so he buys me a lunch and tells me his troubles.

“The last time I saw him, I mentioned something to the effect that this was a favorite restaurant of Maurice’s and that he would wish he could have joined us. He went white and asked if Maurice knew we had lunch together. I said of course he did, and why? He said he hadn’t told his wife, that she would be very upset, not just at the idea of his having lunch with another woman, but that the woman was one she was friendly with. He obviously thought I would be in the same position with Maurice and wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t let anything slip in front of his wife.

“Now, this struck me as so utterly ridiculous! Because there could be nothing more innocent than our lunches together. He has never made the most embryonic pass at me, and I’m sure one of the reasons he feels comfortable seeing me this way is that I don’t happen to turn him on sexually. Nor does he appeal to me sexually. But by keeping something so innocent a secret, he’s actually taking a big risk. If some mutual friend sees us together, and mentions it to his wife, she can’t help but conclude that we’re having an affair. And there’s no logical way he could deny it.

“In contrast, I don’t have to lie to Maurice, nor do I have to hide a part of my life from him. If something comes up in one of our lunchtime conversations, I can share it with Maurice over dinner. My lunch partner has to suppress it, and it builds another wall between the two of them.”

JWW: Would she be inclined to recommend her form of permissive marriage to everyone?

“Yes, definitely.

“Let me qualify that slightly. There’s no denying that a great many people are not ready for this sort of marriage, and that some of them will never be able to make themselves ready for it. And the idea of sexual freedom is the least important aspect of it, Jack. That’s the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind, that Maurice and I can have affairs with a clear conscience, but I doubt that we have any more extramarital sex than we would if we had not elected to permit it. It’s possible we have less. When you know you can do whatever you want to do, there’s no forbidden fruit element to lure you into it.

“No, the point that would be hardest for most people to swallow is the idea that two people can belong to each other without owning each other. That they can have a better life together by virtue of the fact that they have lives apart as well. For a person with a conventional mind and a conventional attitude toward marriage, this would be hard to get down. And for a person with anxieties and insecurities he’s unable to face, I would guess it would be impossible.

“Otherwise, I think it’s the only sensible and realistic and honest and open way for two people to live. I don’t believe the institution of marriage is on its way out. I think that’s a lot of bullshit rhetoric. I do think the concept of marriage has to evolve in order to fit itself to the realities of modern times. And in that sense, yes, I would recommend our style of marriage to all couples who are mature and self-confident enough to handle it.”

JWW: Helene and Maurice have made mutual permissiveness an integral part of their whole relationship. This arrangement suits them both, and they have been able to carry it out with little difficulty. The fact that they live and work in New York City certainly has something to do with this. Were they transplanted abruptly to a small town in the middle of South Dakota, it would be far more difficult for them to lead their lives as they do now.

Faye and Alec do live in a small town in South Dakota, where Alec owns a grocery store. They are in their thirties and have two sons, ages nine and eleven. Their version of the permissive marriage is not constant, as with Helene and Maurice, but intermittent — i.e., they take separate vacations, at which times the usual rules of marriage are suspended.

For Helene and Maurice, a permissive marriage was needed to allow for full self-expression; sexual freedom, while a significant component of this self-expression, was by no means the overriding concern. The separate vacations which Faye and Alec take no doubt facilitate overall self-expression, but they do not hesitate to assert that their motivation is specifically sexual.

FAYE: “We first started to have marriage trouble about five years ago. At that time we had been married just seven years, so you could call it the seven-year itch. It was partly that, and partly on account of my youngest being in nursery school, which left me with more time on my hands. Also, that was just about the time when the business started to do better, and Alec didn’t have to struggle so hard to come out ahead. All of these things came together at once, along with both of us being just out of our twenties and just into our thirties and the feeling of life passing us by.

“We would make love, and even when it was good, I would lie there feeling unsatisfied afterward. I would have an orgasm, the same as always, but it would not do me any good. I would still feel empty. I would find myself daydreaming about boys I went out with before I was married. I had this fantasy of running into one boy or another on the street and the two of us driving off to a motel for a wild afternoon together. Of course, this never happened, and then I found out that Alec was having an affair with another woman, and this just threw me for a loop.”

ALEC: “I was going through the same thing as Faye, but I didn’t know what was on her mind, and she didn’t know what was on mine. I was at a point where all I wanted was to make love to another woman. I don’t know what I expected it to be. Not that it would be better than with Faye, but that it would be different. Everything was the same with us, one day after the one before it, and the years were going by faster all the time. I would get erections constantly waiting on customers in the store. Some of those women made it pretty obvious that they were on the lookout for something, but you don’t dare put a foot wrong in a town this size, or the whole world knows it. Finally, there was one gal, her husband was with the military overseas, and I guess it was hell for her getting along without it. We started dropping little things in conversation when she came around the store, and one thing led to another, and we wound up going to these tourist cabins about ten miles out of town. We went, I guess, no more than half a dozen times before the shit hit the fan.

“I felt badly about it. It was good for me, it made me feel alive again, but I hated having to sneak around like that. She’d come by, and we’d make arrangements, and then I’d find an excuse to get out of the store and drive out there, and she would already have a cabin rented, and we’d get right to it. I just couldn’t get free for more than an hour at a time without drawing suspicion, so I don’t guess we spent more than six hours’ total time in bed with each other. A couple of times we talked about going somewhere for a weekend. There are always things like retail grocers’ conventions in Chicago or St. Paul, and we talked about her going with me, but I think I knew all along that this would never happen. Also, it did bother me that here I was screwing her while her husband was in the service, but I figured she had her needs, and he couldn’t satisfy them from where he was.”

FAYE: “How I found out was, somebody mentioned seeing his car at that place, and when I brought it up, he opened up right away. He was unhappy about keeping things from me. I flew off the handle and almost left him then and there, but he kept swearing he loved me and it wouldn’t happen again and begging me to stay, and at last I calmed myself and realized he had been having the same kind of desires I had. And maybe what had me so upset was his doing what I wanted to be doing myself all along, and envying him for it.”

JWW: The next step for Faye and Alec was the mutual recognition of their desires for extramarital experience. By opening up to each other and confronting their own real feelings, they found that neither of them believed casual affairs would present a true danger to their marriage. Alec had discovered during the course of his brief affair that his marital relations were more exciting than they had been previously, and Faye found that her own knowledge of her husband’s adultery seemed to have an aphrodisiacal effect upon her. Rather than a threat, outside sex seemed to have the potential for enhancing their marriage.

ALEC: “We had a hard time coming to the conclusion, but once we were there, it was like not getting anyplace at all. There was still the question of what were we to do about it. I had broken off with the one girl, and didn’t have any great interest in taking up with her again. Even if I had, it would have been no time at all before we were the talk of the town. Faye might feel it was all right for me to have affairs, but that didn’t make her willing to have the whole town know about it. Not to mention the effect it would have on my business, in a town like this where everybody knows everything about everybody else.”

FAYE: “Then there was the question of how I was to have affairs. That was even more impossible here. We came up with all manner of fool ideas. Like I would take a bus to Chicago and try to pick up a man in a bar. Well, I surely didn’t want to behave like a whore. I’m not the type to do anything of the sort. I didn’t just want straight plain sex. I wanted some kind of, I don’t know, romance? I wanted to feel young and attractive and desirable.”

ALEC: “The first thing we tried was swinging. I read a magazine article on the subject, and it struck me as just the ticket. Here you’ve got two couples in the same situation, and both of them have to be discreet, so you get together and trade wives, and there’s no complications, and nobody gets hurt. I managed to get hold of one of those magazines with personal ads, and we started getting in touch with people.”

FAYE: “But it just never worked out right for us.”

ALEC: “You would meet a couple, and they might not be attractive to you, or you’re not attractive to them. And it would just be sex, with all of the romance out of it. There was no way to get out of your own self — that’s what was wrong with it. I was still Faye’s husband, and the woman I was putting it to was still this other guy’s wife, and after we had tried it enough times to know what it was all about, and had the same reaction each time, well, we knew that wasn’t the answer.”

FAYE: “It wasn’t all bad. We learned things about sex, we got more experimental and liberal in our sex attitudes. But by the time we were used to the whole idea of swinging, we were tired of it.”

ALEC: “Another thing. It would bother me when I was with a woman to worry about Faye being in another room with another man. I don’t mean jealousy. I mean I had to be concerned with whether she was having a good time. I had to go on being her husband, and what I wanted was to take off that particular uniform completely.”

FAYE: “I was embarrassed to be with another man with Alec around. Not even the sex so much as talking with him or just making out, kissing, necking. There was a thrill in it at the beginning, because it was so different, but when the thrill wore off, it was just uncomfortable.”

JWW: The solution, when they hit on it, was so simple that they found it incomprehensible that they hadn’t thought of it immediately. Alec was planning to go to a convention and invited Faye to accompany him. She teased that maybe he would rather take someone else, that he could probably have a better time on his own. It is unclear who thought of the answer — that they would say they were going to the convention, but that he would go to one city while she went to another.

ALEC: “It was just the perfect answer. I went to Chicago for the convention, and of course I was so determined not to waste any time that I had to get laid before I was in town an hour. I got the bellhop to bring a girl to my room, and turned her every way but loose. I just had to do that right away so I could relax. Afterward I found myself wondering about Faye, but I just made myself stop. I decided that as long as I was at that convention, I wasn’t married.”

FAYE: “That’s the attitude you have to have.”

ALEC: “That night I got friendly with a girl who was there to do product demonstrations. We had a few drinks, but it went no further. The next night we had dinner, and I started to romance her. She was divorced and in the mood, and we hit it off well enough, and I brought her back to my room. We were together more or less nonstop for the rest of the convention. She knew I was married. I don’t guess it bothered her. Since then, sometimes I’ll say I’m married, and sometimes I’ll say I’m not. Depending on what I think a girl wants to hear, or on who I feel like pretending to be.”

FAYE: “I went to Kansas City, but I couldn’t tell you why, Maybe because we were there once together, so at least I knew the name of a good hotel. Once I was there, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought nothing would happen and couldn’t decide whether to make up a story for Alec or tell him the truth. What I found out is that if you’re a woman there’s nothing easier than finding a man who wants to take you to bed. I had dinner at the hotel restaurant and then sat at my table having a drink afterward, and the bartender brought over a fresh drink and pointed out a man at the bar who had bought it for me. I smiled at him, and he came over, and not twenty minutes later his face was between my legs and I was moaning like nobody’s business.”

JWW: There is a definite element of braggadocio in their talk as Faye and Alec recount their experiences on their separate vacations. They make a special point of describing in detail just what they did and how many times and how great it was. At first I thought this might be a form of one-upmanship or a method of self-assertion. I later came to see that it was more a matter of habit. They capped their vacations by telling each other as erotically as possible of their experiences, with the teller reliving the act while the listener enjoyed it vicariously. This narrative pattern evidently persisted in their conversations with me.

Their first separate vacation was a successful one, and since then all of their vacations have been occasions for permissive extramarital ventures. Each winter they spend a week in Florida, each in a different city. Each summer, while their sons are at camp, each spends several weeks at a resort. The resorts are ideal, I am assured; you can have a regular summer romance with no feeling of cheapness to it, and yet your partner takes it for granted that the romance will end when the vacation does.

This reminds me of a version of swinging developed by a couple of my acquaintances, and I mentioned it to them. This particular couple makes a practice of going to resorts in the Catskills during singles’ weekends. They register individually, the wife using her maiden name, and of course take separate rooms. They then operate sexually as free agents, letting none of their new friends know that they are married. Once they managed to arrange a double date together. Another time, both unsuccessful at finding a suitable partner, they wound up taking each other to bed.

Faye and Alec find the story amusing but agree they would not be interested in such an arrangement. It would conflict with their chief aim of being apart from each other, and also struck them as fundamentally sadistic; they felt the couple was getting special kicks out of deceiving others.

A great many married couples do take occasional separate vacations, feeling that they need a spell apart from each other as well as a break in the day-to-day routine. These vacations do not necessarily involve any extramarital sex, although it is frequently assumed that a dalliance at such a time is a far less serious matter than an affair in the normal course of things. For Faye and Alec, however, these vacations are specifically and unequivocally sexual.

Thus they have rendered their marriage permissive in a compartmentalized sense. Each, I know, would b roundly shocked if the other had an affair other than in the course of an out-of-town vacation, and the likelihood of this happening seems remote.

Similar forms of compartmentalization are not uncommon. The country is full of businessmen who are strictly faithful to their wives except when away from home, and undoubtedly many of their wives take this sort of casual cheating for granted, and can overlook it more readily than the same offense committed on home ground. Certainly, convenience and safety are factors that help to explain the attitude of both the businessmen and their wives, but I’m sure another element comes into play — the feeling that the traditional rules apply less strictly on foreign soil.

Here is Alec’s summary of their general feelings about their permissive marriage:

“Faye and I both grew up with the usual image of marriage. A man and woman met and fell in love and got married and had children and were faithful to each other for the rest of their lives. When you’re brought up to believe that’s how everybody lives, it’s hard to get over it. Even when you know better, there’s a long spell of time when you’ll find yourself worrying that you’re not normal, that what you’re doing is wrong, that if you had a really good marriage you wouldn’t feel the need to go outside it for sexual pleasure.

“But this is just a damn lie. Maybe there was a time when men and women were faithful to each other after marriage. I suppose years ago it was harder to be unfaithful, what with the risks of disease and pregnancy, things you don’t have to worry about today.”

JWW: As both Faye and Alec have undergone surgical sterilization, the possibility of pregnancy as a result of their sexual contacts is nil.

“Even so, I’m sure most people ran around then as they do now. Probably more wives were faithful, while the husbands catted around on them. It’s still that way, and was probably more so years ago.

“Nowadays you have to be blind not to see that it’s a natural thing to want sex outside of marriage. Because everybody is either doing it or wanting to. The fellows I’ll meet on vacation, say, at a convention, nine out of ten them will be hoping to get something before the trip is over. They’ll bring their wives along and send them out shopping and quick get a hooker up to the room and then worry about getting her smell aired out of there before the little woman comes back. It’s just human nature to want it, and how much you love each other isn’t going to change it.

“The arrangement Faye and I have, it gives us a chance to get what we want without interfering in other areas of our lives. Living in a town like this, we have no choice but to work out something like this, but now that we’ve discovered it, I’m sure we’d be the same wherever we live. We have our vacations to blow off steam and get things out of our system, and then when we’re back together again, we have the closeness of marriage with no threats to it and no need for more running around until the next vacation comes along.

“As far as the folks around here are concerned, we are the straightest couple you could hope to find. A nice home and a good business and two clean-cut boys and church every Sunday, and not the slightest breath of scandal. The people who know about that one girl I got together with — if they even think about it — they regard it as the one fling that every man’s entitled to once in his life. They figure I’ve reformed and settled down permanently and am all the better for getting it out of my system. And they know we’re together all the time, and we’ll never flirt around at a party or go in for dirty jokes, so I suppose the more modern element around here would say we were pretty damn square.

“And if you told them what our vacations are like, I don’t guess they’d believe a bit of it.”

JWW: Can the category of permissive marriage embrace a union in which only one of the partners engages in extramarital sex?

At first glance, the answer would seem to be no. Such unilateral permissiveness looks to be outside the bounds of the marriage where each party is free to go his separate way. Surely it is a different matter if the husband has a life of his own while the wife exists only within the framework of marriage. Such an arrangement would seem to be no more than the “understanding” that we discussed earlier and dismissed from consideration.

There are borderline cases, though, in which understandings evolve into permissive marriage. A voiced or silent recognition of one partner’s right to extramarital sexual relations leads in time to mutual freedom for both partners. Yet the expression of this freedom need not take a sexual form for both persons, as the comment of the wife of a college professor shows:

“Before we were married, Douglas was completely open in saying that he did not know for certain whether or not he could be one hundred percent faithful to me. He said it was biologically normal for men to be attracted to other women and that a wedding ring didn’t change this. He said men were different in the way they felt about sex, that it wasn’t always bound up with emotions, as it was for women. He assured me that if he did have other women, he would certainly be discreet about it, and that it would have nothing to do with the love he had for me or the importance of our marriage in his life.

“At the time, I accepted all of this without a second thought. I don’t suppose I really took him seriously. I wanted very much to get married. It was almost a neurotic desire that grew out of my own family situation. I knew he had certain hesitations, and I felt that his saying this was just a way of expressing his general anxieties on the subject of marriage. By saying he wasn’t sure he could be faithful, he was saying that he wasn’t sure he was ready to settle down. Well, I was ready enough for both of us, and I could see that his desire to marry me was greater than his reluctance to take that step, and I was very quick to agree that I would not be drastically upset if he had affairs. It was easy for me to agree with this, since I did not believe anything of the sort would ever happen.

“In our fifth year of marriage, I happened to learn that Doug was having an affair with a college student. The circumstances of finding out were not the best. A former boyfriend of the girl called me, hoping that I would break up the romance, and thus he would get his girl back. The phone call rattled me, and when Doug came home, I blew up all over the place. I must have expected him to come begging for forgiveness, and I was stunned when he very calmly reminded me of our ‘agreement’ that he was entitled to occasional affairs. We hadn’t mentioned the subject since the wedding, and his attitude of being slightly offended that I would even call the matter to his attention knocked me off my feet. (I’ve since realized that his response was a defense mechanism, a way for him to deal with his own guilt over the situation.) I remember feeling like someone who had just read the fine print in a contract she signed years ago...

“Doug managed to calm me. I was too shocked to become really hysterical, and just felt numb. He went on to tell me first of all that the girl meant nothing to him, that he still loved me and only me, and that he certainly had not been neglecting me sexually. This was certainly true; I learned that his affair with the girl had been going on for just over a month, and during that month Doug had made love to me with greater frequency than in the past. He argued that it couldn’t be said that he was cheating on me, since I was not being cheated out of anything.

“In the course of the discussion, it also developed that this was not Doug’s first affair. On a handful of occasions he had had relations on a casual one-night-only basis, both on campus and when he was out of town overnight. He had also had two previous affairs with students, one lasting for a period of weeks, another lasting for almost a full term. I had never had the slightest suspicion in this regard. He insisted he felt he was entitled to behave this way, that I had acknowledged his rights before marriage, and that he had kept me ignorant of what was going on because he felt I would prefer it that way. And he made it perfectly obvious that he would continue to have affairs when the opportunity arose.

“I can’t pretend that I felt at ease about all of this. I felt it was wrong, I felt it reflected badly on our marriage, I felt it indicated that I was not enough for Doug. But there was really nothing I could do about it without losing him. He made it clear he would go on behaving as he had done, and I knew I would rather have him on that basis than lose him altogether. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind as much as possible and to refrain from thinking about him with the other girl. I remember being glad I didn’t know what she looked like or anything much about her, as I would not have wanted to be able to visualize the two of them together. I would have preferred it if I hadn’t known her name.

“Shortly thereafter, Doug announced out of the blue that the affair was over. I was overjoyed to hear this, but masked my reaction. We did not discuss the prospect of his having future affairs, and my own feeling was that I simply hoped I would not know about them.

“As time passed, I learned to be able to tell when Doug was involved with someone. I can’t pinpoint any specific signs. It was purely intuitive on my part. I just knew.

“My disapproval changed as I began to feel less threatened by Doug’s affairs. I saw that he was still my husband despite his relations with other women. Our own marriage seemed excellent in comparison to the marriages of other people we knew. I felt we were more deeply in love than most other couples, and that we got along better.

“One big factor in my change of attitude was when a chemistry professor divorced his wife after almost twenty years to marry a laboratory assistant. This was a man who had literally never looked at another woman during all the years of his marriage. According to campus gossip — and there was plenty of it, believe me — he had never once been unfaithful to his wife until he fell in love with this young girl. I began to regard Doug’s casual infidelities as a safety valve. If a man was able to have this sort of experience from time to time, he wouldn’t be so likely to lose his head completely and destroy his marriage.

“After that, I was able to discuss extramarital sex with Doug in an abstract way. I didn’t ask him specifically about his affairs nor did he volunteer information about them, but I discussed affairs and marriage in general. I asked him if he didn’t feel that a wife should have the same leeway in marriage. He returned to the point he’d made way back before we were married, that sex had different meanings for men and women, that a woman could not be so casual about adultery. By this time, women’s lib was getting a lot of media attention, and all those aspects of the double.standard were being challenged. We argued about all of this. We both agreed that men and women did have different attitudes toward infidelity, but I held that the difference was socially and culturally imposed, while Doug argued that there was a biological difference between the sexes that oriented women toward sexual monogamy...

“In connection with all of this, I was growing to feel trapped and limited by my role as wife. I couldn’t say how much of this was a reaction to Doug’s affairs, or how much was attributable to the impact of women’s lib on my consciousness, or how much just grew out of the fact that I was trapped and limited, that my self-expression and intellectual growth had atrophied during marriage. At any rate, I was determined to make my life more meaningful. I got politically active — previously I had not done so because Doug had no interest in politics. I began to get around more and to meet new people who did not know me first and foremost as Doug’s wife.

“It’s interesting that Doug’s first reaction to this was disapproval. Standard male chauvinism. His principal objection was that I ought to be satisfied with my life as it was, that it ought to be sufficiently fulfilling to be his wife and the mother of his children. I made him see that it was no more a reflection on our marriage for me to want interests of my own than it was for him to require occasional outside sex. At first he refused to see the connection, but then he got the point. He accepted my new activities, but later on he did say that he felt it would bother him if I had relations with another man. I said this was more male chauvinism, more of the double standard. He answered that he wasn’t forbidding me to do anything, just stating the simple fact that he felt it would bother him.

“It’s funny. I tried to have an affair. Maybe to assert myself, to get even with Doug. I don’t know. What was going through my mind was that I ought to be liberated enough to have an extramarital relationship. I read a very interesting piece somewhere by a woman who had gotten involved in the movement and who had reached the point where she felt it necessary to experience homosexual relations, felt that one had to love another woman physically in order to understand the concept of sisterhood and free herself of male-imposed sexual submission. She actually had sexual relations with three other women before she was able to see that she just wasn’t cut out for it, that she felt embarrassed beforehand and uncomfortable afterward, that the beauty of another woman did not attract her in a sexual way, and that whatever minor homosexual impulses she might have were insufficient to change the fact that her sexual preferences were exclusively heterosexual.

“I tried forcing myself into an affair, and in much the same way. There was a man I met through a political reform group I belonged to, and we hit it off well. He was an attractive man and made it obvious he was attracted to me. He was married, but separated from his wife. I felt that he and I liked each other very much, that no overpowering love could ever come from it, and that it would only be natural and normal and good for us if we slept together. While I didn’t initiate anything, I made myself show enough warmth so that he felt confident in making a pass at me.

“I simply could not respond to him. Twice we were going to go to a motel after having petted in his car, and both times I backed down. He was very patient with me. A third time, we did go to the motel and got undressed and into bed together. The more he tried to make love to me, the more I felt myself withdrawing. I felt that I was in the wrong place with the wrong person. I felt that by going through with this I would be cheapening myself and cheapening sex. I can’t explain all of this, but the point is that I could not respond sexually at all and had only the negative response of gooseflesh and extreme anxiety. I would have let him go on and have intercourse with me — I felt I damn well owed him that — but my reaction turned him off completely, and he gave up. I did manage to convince him that it wasn’t his fault, that I had not done anything of this sort before and thus had been unable to realize I was incapable of it.

“I don’t know that this confirms Doug’s opinion of the difference between male and female sexuality. From time to time I suspect that my personal process of liberation is by no means finished, and that the time may come when an affair will be enjoyable, even necessary for me. One of the problems that time may have been that I tried to have an affair not because I wanted one but because I ought to have one, and a sexual experience for therapeutic purposes can’t be ideal.

“Whatever happens, I think our marriage now is an open one, very valuable to both of us while giving both of us room to be ourselves. In Doug’s case this means asserting himself sexually, while my own self-assertion is expressed in other forms. For both of us, the marriage is a good expression of the ways we feel about each other and our own steps toward self-realization.”

JWW: A special version of the permissive marriage is that in which the partners are either bisexual or predominantly homosexual in orientation. Arrangements of this sort have always existed, and this type of permissive marriage is less a reflection of the changing image of marriage than are the other relationships we have examined.

Male and female homosexuals marry one another for a variety of reasons — as do male and female heterosexuals, as far as that goes. The marriage of convenience is surely no new phenomenon. While one might think that our more liberal sexual attitudes might reduce the need for marriage as a “cover,” sometimes the effect is the reverse.

“People are more aware of homosexuality than they used to be. In a more innocent age, two men could live together for ages, and as long as they were masculine in type and didn’t mince, the straight world persisted in regarding them as eligible bachelors. Nowadays any man who gets much past thirty without having married somewhere along the way is the subject of speculation. I damn well believe in gay lib. I think homosexuals ought to be able to lead the lives they want to lead. But I also love my parents and appreciate the impossibility of their changing attitudes they’ve held all their lives. I’m not sure if they know I’m homosexual. I would guess that they assume I’ve had homosexual experiences, but that I put this out of my life forever by marrying Adelle. It’s made both our parents so much happier, and it’s made life in general a smoother proposition for both of us. Sexually, she goes her way and I go mine, and we take turns comforting each other when a love affair ends badly. We get each other through a lot of bad nights.”

JWW: This last observation plays an important part in many homosexual marriages. While some homosexuals tend to have long-term monogamous love affairs, a great many do not, and a sexless companionate marriage to a homosexual of the opposite sex offers a valuable element of permanence.

Various movements toward sexual freedom have engendered a considerable increase in bisexuality. A great many of these “new bisexuals” are heterosexuals who have come to be able to enjoy homosexual relations as well. Various social forces have made it at once easier for them to recognize bisexual impulses and conscionable for them to indulge these impulses. At the same time, an increasing number of men and women who had previously identified themselves as homosexuals are learning that this does not preclude them from participating in and enjoying relations with the opposite sex.

The marriage of bisexuals, whether their primary orientation is toward their own or the opposite sex, often involves a specific compromise. While marriage is desired for all of the usual reasons — to have children, to form a stable union, etc. — husband and wife will often feel it an unwarranted sacrifice to give up homosexuality after the wedding. For some such couples, one or another form of group sex provides on answer. For others, the solution runs along the lines of the arrangement described here:

“At the beginning, Gordon and I had very conventional expectations of our marriage. We decided to get married at a time when we were both very hung up about the gay scene. We had had some bad experiences and felt that marriage gave us a chance at a normal life. Because we were able to enjoy sex together immensely, we thought we would be able to give up gay sex entirely, that it was a stage we had gone through, and we would have no further need of it if our marriage was a good one.

“There were moments almost from the beginning when I found myself longing for another girl. I would see an appealing stranger and be struck by a wave of dizziness. I think I might have gone to bed with another girl if the opportunity presented itself, but I was away from the old neighborhood and cut off from old friends, and I wasn’t about to proposition a stranger around here unless I had good reason to believe she was gay, so all of this made it easy for me to resist temptation.

“Gordon was out of the house more, and anyway, men have more opportunity for quick pickups. One night he was moody at dinner, and later that night he began to cry. He told me that he had been unable to resist and had gone to a Turkish bath for some impersonal homosexual sex. I remember that my immediate reaction was one of relief; I was glad I wasn’t the only one with those desires.

“We quickly agreed that we did not feel jealous about homosexual relations. Since we were both into the same thing, neither of us was going to be uptight the way a straight person might. I didn’t feel cheated if Gordon had sex with another man, and he felt the same about relations I might have with other women. Yet we had to admit that we would be very uptight if one of us had sex with somebody of the opposite sex, if Gordon went with another girl or I went with another man. A heterosexual affair would be competition, it would be bad for the ego, it would threaten the special feeling we had for each other.

“Ever since then we have felt free to go our separate ways. For Gordon this has meant pickups in gay bars, casual sex in Turkish baths, nothing that demands any involvement. This was the kind of sex he felt most comfortable with before we were married. For me it has meant an occasional one-night stand and one long relationship with a girl I had known but not had sex with before my marriage. There was an awkward situation several months ago when she wanted me to leave Gordon and live with her. I was already pregnant with Gordon’s child, and it was her dream that I would live with her and we would raise the child together. I made it clear that my first loyalty was to Gordon, and she backed off and accepted me on my own terms, but I expect she and I will break things off before much longer, as I have never felt as comfortable with her since that time.”

JWW: As more people come to regard conventional marriage as potentially stifling to the individual, one can only assume that more and more marriages will grow increasingly permissive. Relationships in any society inevitably evolve to better suit the needs of the participants. There is no reason why the institution of marriage should be exceptional in this regard. Simplistic as it is to assert that the nuclear family is utterly outmoded, that marriage will not endure for more than another generation, I find it quite as unrealistic to expect that the nature of marriage will be utterly uninfluenced by the extraordinary changes in our ways of life.

Will the whole concept of sexual fidelity vanish in short order? I rather doubt it, although I suspect a great many people will attach substantially less importance to it than has been the rule in the past. I doubt, too, that the double standard will die out entirely, but recognize at the same time that its distinctions will continue to fade and blur.

The mutually permissive marriage has many aspects beyond the condoning of adultery, as we have seen. Most of the examples we have dealt with have concerned sexual behavior as a function of the permissive marriage, perhaps largely because it is the most clear-cut indicator of attitudinal changes. That a woman escapes the confines of the kitchen, or holds a job, or participates in activities of her own, is a less vivid example of freedom within marriage (and far less a violation of social mores) than that she spends time alone with other men, and has sex with some of them.

Additionally, the specifically sexual aspects of the permissive marriage have given rise to a concept which represents a very new style in love and marriage — i.e., that it is possible to be emotionally involved with, even to love, more than one person at a time. The permissive marriage facilitates the expression of multiple love within the social structure of monogamy. The marital life styles we will examine in the next few chapters extend the concept of love for more than a single partner to the point where monogamy is eliminated and multiple marriage of one sort or another replaces it. In such relationships, one does not merely have sexual relations with more than one partner (as in swinging) or have meaningful emotional relationships with more than one partner (as in some permissive marriages). In addition, one relates to several partners equally with the intention of maintaining such multiple relationships on a permanent basis.

Side by Side by Side

The term “group marriage” is generally used to denote a marital relationship (in fact if not in law) of more than two persons. One can further assume that both sexes are represented; I have never heard the term applied to a group exclusively male or female.

In this sense, a threesome, or ménage à trois, composed either of two women and a man or of two men and a woman would be considered a group marriage. I think it is worthwhile, though, to consider such unions separately. The differences between threesomes and all numerically larger plural marriages seem to be sufficiently great enough to constitute generic differences. Since it may be difficult to determine the reasons why this is so, perhaps we should first learn how it is so.

First of all, a threesome is considerably more likely to evolve spontaneously. Plural marriages of more than three persons are often consciously planned and arranged, with the concept of such a relationship preceding the actual selection of partners. A philosophical commitment to the idea of the group marriage comes first, to be followed by the actual selection of members for the group.

Threesomes may also be formed in this manner, of course. It is not uncommon for a husband and wife to come to the decision that their lives together would be enriched by the addition of a third person, whether male or female, to the family circle. This sort of decision in advance of specific opportunity has been happening more widely in recent years, as more persons are intellectually aware of the possibilities of experimentation in marital structure.

But many threesomes, like Topsy, just grow. A third person is gradually drawn into the sphere of a marriage, becoming at once a friend of one partner and a lover of the other. The extramarital relationship is either confessed or discovered, it serves not to force the three principals apart but in fact draws them together, and the three ultimately come to regard themselves as husband and wives — or husbands and wife, as the case may be.

The manner in which threesomes come into existence, and the sundry psychological aspects that render them particularly attractive, are largely outside our area of concern here. We might more profitably try to learn what forms these troilistic relationships take once they have been established as presumably permanent alliances.

It is as tiresome as it is awkward to keep referring the reader to one’s other books, but it would be unrealistic to display sudden symptoms of false modesty. I have examined the subject of troilism at length in Three Is Not a Crowd, and would urge readers who are particularly interested in the evolution of threesomes to consult that work. The book consists of interviews in depth with three permanent trios and one couple who have participated extensively in temporary threesomes and are actively seeking a partner for a permanent relationship. While we will consider these cases briefly in the pages to follow, the book renders them in far more scope than we have room for here.

Another difference between the threesome and the group marriage lies in the sort of people who become involved. Group marriage, as we will see, appeals for the most part to a rather well-defined class of the population. Threesomes, on the other hand, are apt to occur in virtually any stratum of society, among educated and uneducated, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, innocent and sophisticated, urban and rural.

It is important, I think, that we distinguish clearly between permanent threesomes that constitute de facto marriages and the temporary threesomes that exist for purposes of sexual recreation. This latter class is infinitely more numerous, and a cursory glance at any of the correspondence bulletins of the sexual underground reveals that an astonishing proportion of the singles and couples advertising therein are seeking such three-way alliances as either a preferred or an exclusive form of swinging. An overwhelming majority seek triangles of two women and a man, but one also finds a good number of ads placed by single men desiring to join couples and by couples looking for an additional man.

No doubt the threesome’s appeal to swingers has points in common with its appeal to others as a form of marriage, but we will limit ourselves here to permanent relationships.

The threesome exists in a great variety of forms. The two obvious categories are triangles of one man and two women and those of one woman and two men. But within these categories there are a great many variables. A threesome may be heterosexual or bisexual. Incest, actual or symbolic, may be a component. A man’s two wives or a woman’s two husbands may or may not be on an equal footing. One of the three participants may be the apex of the triangle, as it were, with both of the other participants relating more to that one than to each other. The old maxim that all happy families are alike does not apply to threesomes; all of them, happy or otherwise, are quite different.

The examples which follow are by no means presented as a complete catalog of the forms that may exist. They are merely an enumeration of troilistic relationships with which I have some degree of firsthand familiarity. The first four are examined in detail in Three Is Not a Crowd. I have written about a few of the others elsewhere; the rest are noted here for the first time.

1. A man, his wife, and the wife’s younger sister. The sister, after having lived alone, moved in with the couple. Her own sex life was promiscuous and unsatisfying. She and the husband fell in love, had sexual relations. The wife was able to accept this, feeling that relations with the sister did not constitute infidelity, as would a comparable affair with an outsider. At first the husband would bed the two women on alternate nights. Then the three took to sharing a bed; both women, especially the wife, derived voyeuristic and exhibitionistic pleasure from this development. There has been no overt homosexual activity between the wife and her sister, nor has such activity ever been considered by any of the three. The sister has borne the husband a child — the wife has never been able to conceive — and the child is being raised as that of the husband and wife. The family lives in a remote situation several miles from a small town, which has simplified the problem of keeping the nature of the relationship from outside attention.

2. A man, his wife, and the wife’s college roommate. The wife and roommate had had an intense lesbian love affair during college, had discontinued it after a year, and had been exclusively heterosexual since. After a divorce, the roommate moved in with the married pair, presumably for a week. Before long she was having sex with both the husband and the wife, neither of whom was aware of her relations with the other. Things came into the open after the husband discovered the two women in bed. They now sleep three in a bed, and “everyone does everything to everybody.”

3. A man, his sister, and his wife. The brother and sister had sex together regularly during adolescence. They separated, and he subsequently married. He and his wife participated periodically in group-sex encounters. The sister, on a visit, had sex with both her brother and his wife, and resolved to remain as one of the family.

4. A man and wife who engage in swinging solely with other females. They particularly desire younger and less experienced females as swinging partners, and each plays a quasi-parental role in the sexual relationship. While they have not yet established a long-term relationship with one girl, it is their intention to do so; they have been hampered by their inability to find an ideal permanent partner and their fear of exposure. They have discussed the possibility of “adopting” a foster child and subsequently seducing her.

5. A man, his wife, and his older brother. The brother is married but separated from his wife. He seduced the wife one night when both had been drinking — the husband was working late at the time. He is now a frequent house guest, although he does not officially live with the couple. The husband goes to another room when the wife and the brother desire to have sexual relations. The husband’s expressed attitude is that it is “only decent” for him to make his wife available to his brother, as the brother has no other sexual outlet at his disposal.

6. A man and his two wives. He had been having affairs simultaneously with both women and ultimately persuaded both to experiment with three-way sex. The experiment was successful. The women enjoyed homosexual activity, a new experience for both of them. The three were united in marriage by a friend of the man’s who had been ordained as a minister by a mail-order church. It is doubtful that the marriage has any legal status. At the time I was acquainted with this trio, both women were radiantly pregnant.

7. A man, his wife, and his friend. The man had extensive homosexual relations during adolescence and sporadic contacts afterward prior to marriage. Shortly after marriage, he began a pattern of going out drinking and bringing home a man he had befriended. He would order his wife to have sex with his drinking buddy, an order to which she never seemed to have seriously objected. After watching the two together, the husband would then have relations with the wife. No relationship was ever established which lasted for more than a night, and although the situation obviously gratified the husband’s homosexual impulses, he evidently never had overt sexual relations with any of the other men. Ultimately he brought home a friend whose sexual orientation was primarily homosexual. The friend had relations with the wife, then joined in when the husband was embracing the wife, to the considerable enjoyment of all concerned. The friend moved in with the couple almost immediately, and willingly underwent a vasectomy so that there would be no danger of his impregnating the wife. Both the husband and friend occasionally have sex with the wife when the other is not present. The two men, however, have homosexual relations only in the wife’s presence, evidently because by including her they are able to do so without experiencing guilt that would otherwise bother them. The preferred form of sexual activity for the three is for both men to enjoy the wife simultaneously. She has vaginal intercourse with one while accommodating the other anally or orally.

8. A man, his wife, and another woman. The other woman and her husband, after financial reverses, moved in with the couple. The man and the other woman fell in love and had sex. The other woman and her husband subsequently left, but shortly thereafter the woman separated from her husband and once again moved in with the couple. She soon resumed her affair with the husband, who began planning to arrange a threesome. This worked out well, and the three engaged in a full repertoire of troilistic activity, with the two women performing and enjoying homosexual acts at the husband’s direction. The other woman eventually became anxious, wanted to possess the husband exclusively, also felt a need to keep her marriage intact for her children’s sake, and rejoined her own husband. The man, during my correspondence with him, has expressed a desire to get the threesome back together again but is fearful that any steps he might take in that direction could disrupt the lives of all concerned.

9. A woman and her two husbands. She had been living with one man for several months, then resumed an affair with the other man. Both men wanted to marry her, and each demanded she cease having relations with the other. She attempted suicide. Afterward she declared she could not bear to give either man up. For a time they took turns spending nights with her. Then one proposed a polyandrous marriage, and this was agreed upon. She married both men on successive days, with each serving as best man at the other’s wedding. The clergymen who officiated were unaware of the circumstances. Legally, the first marriage is legitimate, the second bigamous. The men regard themselves as co-husbands, and both have taken the woman’s surname “to simplify things.” They share a house, and the neighbors presumably believe that one man is her husband, the other her brother-in-law. There is no homosexual activity between the husbands.

10. A man and woman adopted a foster daughter for sexual purposes. She shared their bed and performed sex acts with both of them. The discovery of their having attempted to develop a similar arrangement with another girl earlier led to exposure, and the girl was ordered returned to the orphanage. The couple left the state and were ultimately divorced. The girl has sought similar troilistic relationships with older couples ever since. (This ease was reported at length in Women Who Swing Both Ways.)

11. A man, his male lover, and the lover’s sister. The men had lived openly together for some time. The brother and sister had experimented with incest in early adolescence and both had since become exclusively homosexual. The sister became a close friend of her brother’s lover. They fell in love and had sexual relations. The three now live together. The brother and sister do not have sex with each other.

12. A man, his wife, and the wife’s niece. The niece moved to their city and roomed at their house before getting a place of her own. She actively seduced first the husband and then the wife. When the husband wanted to leave his wife and marry the niece, she told him of her affair with the wife. (The wife had already known that the girl was having an affair with the husband, and seems not to have objected.) The three now share a bedroom.

“I thought it would be more of a hassle than it is. To the average person, the idea of a man and two women living together and having sex together is a total mindblower. But the thing is, the only people who know are people who figure to be cool. Neighbors, people in the building, people at work, they don’t have to know. It’s not thrown in their faces. They may know that the three of us live together, but they don’t know that Doreen and I both sleep with Frank, or that Doreen and I have sex together. They may suspect things, depending on where their heads are at, but that’s not the same thing as knowing.

“Before we got into this, I lived with a black guy for almost a year. Now that was a hassle, because it was so obvious. If you think about it, an interracial couple is a far more common thing than a threesome. More people would be uptight about a threesome. But an interracial couple — anybody who sees you on the street together gets the whole picture at once. And the looks you get! That’s basically why we broke up. I couldn’t handle the whole scene. He wanted to marry me, I wanted to marry him, but I knew I couldn’t hack the constant irritation of an interracial marriage. My friends were completely cool about it. My family had no strong objection; my father was opposed to my marrying him, because he felt I would be unhappy myself, and that was the conclusion I came to...

“In this threesome thing, the opinion of outsiders is no problem, because they stay outsiders, they don’t know what’s going down. With our friends, there’s no hassle. They can accept a threesome as a legitimate scene, even if they’re not into it themselves. Of course, this wouldn’t be true if we lived in some small town in the middle of nowhere, or if we weren’t basically hip ourselves, which means that friends of ours are basically hip in the first place.”

JWW: Lily is twenty-four, short, slender, with very large, intense eyes. She makes jewelry, which is sold through several Greenwich Village shops. Doreen, twenty-two, tall and full-figured, is an artist’s model and amateur sculptor. Frank, thirty, is heavyset, with a full beard and a receding hairline; he is a commercial artist employed by an advertising agency and is the father of two children, who live with his ex-wife.

I was introduced to Lily by a friend who was aware of her relationship with Frank and Doreen. She was quite willing to discuss this relationship. Later she introduced me to Frank and Doreen as well, While they were cooperative enough, Lily was better able to articulate the manner in which the threesome evolved and the way it presently functioned.

“I had known Frank enough to say hello to for a couple of years. One night we ran into each other and went to a movie together. We went back to his place afterward and found out that we liked each other enough for me to stay the night. Neither of us expected at the time that it would lead to anything heavy. I went home the next morning. He said he would call, but I wasn’t sure whether he would or not.

“Then we drifted into a thing where we would see each other a couple of nights a week. I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else at the time. He was seeing an old girlfriend now and then and picking up a one-night stand when he could. I didn’t know this at the time. I don’t think I would have minded. I was casual about him and wouldn’t have felt I had the right to feel possessive.

“One night he asked me if I had ever had sex with another girl. I said I hadn’t. This was not strictly true. While I was in high school my best girlfriend and I did a certain amount of fooling around, touching each other’s breasts and kissing. That was as far as it went, and we never considered what we were doing as homosexual; we would take turns pretending to be the boy — that’s what it amounted to. And once in college a girl admitted to me that she was a lesbian and asked me to let her make love to me. I let her go down on me, but I was very uptight about the whole scene. It excited me, but I made her stop before I could have an orgasm.

“I didn’t get into any of this with Frank, though. So he said it was something I would probably enjoy, that most women were able to get into bisexuality enough to enjoy a threesome. He was petting me as he talked about it, and all of this got me excited. I admitted that the thought turned me on. It also obviously turned him on, and we made love, and it was very satisfying.

“Afterward, he asked me if I’d be seriously interested in a threesome. He said there was a girl he knew who enjoyed that kind of scene. He said he had told her about me and she would be interested. I said I wasn’t sure I could really go through with it but that I might be interested sometime later on.

“He called the next day and asked me to come over, and when I got there Doreen was already there. He hadn’t said anything about this over the phone, and I realized immediately that this was the girl he’d referred to and that he wanted the three of us to go to bed together. I got simultaneously excited and uptight. Also I had mentally pictured an older and more experienced girl, and Doreen was younger and seemed very innocent, almost naive. I had a lot of trouble getting all this together.

“We drank some wine and smoked some grass and got into an extended rap on sex. Doreen had never had a relationship with another woman. Her only bisexual experience was at swings. She had been dating this married guy who was into orgies, and he took her to several, and she got into having sex with other women at those affairs. Since then she had participated in a couple of trio scenes, but always with people she didn’t really know, and in a purely physical way. I remember she said that she had never kissed another girl on the mouth. We talked about how weird this was, to kiss the genitals of a person but be hung up about kissing mouth-to-mouth, and we agreed that it was completely consistent with the kind of relationships (or non relationships) she had experienced.

“Frank suggested we kiss, and we wound up getting into a sort of sense expansion thing. He kissed each of us, and then we kissed each other, and he would touch one of us, and we would duplicate the touch on each other, like I would try to caress Doreen’s breasts exactly as he had done mine.

“We discussed the male fantasy of having two women, and how it was a machismo thing. I said I thought it was impossible to relate sexually to more than one person at a time. Doreen and Frank both said this wasn’t true, that you could learn to open up to more than a one-to-one relationship. We got to the point in conversation where I knew it could stay talk all night, and where nobody was particularly horny, but I had this desire to try it, if only to get it out of the way, with the feeling that the evening would be incomplete if we didn’t finally get it on. So I said something to the effect that I wanted to give it a try, and we all got undressed and went to bed.

“It wasn’t very good. Frank couldn’t get an erection. We went down on each other. I was holding Doreen’s breasts and kissing her while Frank went down on her, and she had an orgasm then. I found that very warm, thrilling in an emotional sense. I felt very close to her at that moment, as if I had shared the orgasm with her. I didn’t come myself, although I was close a couple of times. The big discovery for me was that I was able to relate to Doreen’s body, that I enjoyed making love to her, and also that she and I could relate to each other as people. The sex we shared was not satisfying as sex, but it brought more emotional satisfaction to us than good sex usually did. Doreen said that after a swing she always felt soiled, but that with the two of us she felt beautiful.

“We got together the following night, and this time everything got going the way it was supposed to. I guess having been together the night before and having found out that we still liked each other kept us from being uptight, and we were all into it this time in both an emotional and a physical way. I got real pleasure out of everything that happened. I went down on Doreen while Frank fucked me, and I could feel what both of them were feeling, and it was just tremendous.”

JWW: In the early stages of the three-way relationship, there was no thought of the participants living together. Lily regarded the trio as essentially experimental and did not expect anything more permanent to come of it.

“What happened was that we all gradually began to realize just how much we liked being together. The sex was what made us seek each other out. And it was really fantastic. I was never really into sex that completely. I had always enjoyed it, it was always important to me, but I had never tripped out on sex to anything near this extent. I became conscious of my sexuality for the first time. I think a sexual relationship with someone of your own sex can make you understand your own body in a way you can’t reach otherwise.

“We become important to each other in ways that went beyond the sex. I had never had a friendship with another girl that was anything like the friendship I had with Doreen. Maybe this was because I had always had latent lesbian desires and they unconsciously kept me from letting go completely in a friendship, possibly because I had echoes from the petting I had done with my girlfriend in high school and was afraid of getting into anything like that on an adult level. I don’t know. Whatever it was, Doreen and I really came to love each other.

“Frank found that for the first time in his life he did not desire other women. In any relationship, he had always had a desire for outside sex. This had been true throughout his marriage, for example, although he hadn’t done anything about the desire for the first few years of the marriage. He had reached a point where he felt it would be impossible for him ever to get into a relationship involving any commitment on his part, because he would never be able to be true to one woman. Now, although there was no feeling on anyone’s part that he ought to be committed to the two of us, he just didn’t have any desire for outside sex. He has said that he thinks he found with the two of us what he must have been looking for all along. He is not sure what this is exactly. Maybe he kept chasing women to prove his manhood, maybe all his previous sexual relationships were somehow unsatisfactory, but whatever it was, he just wanted me and Doreen.

“It finally came up in conversation that we all wanted to live together. Each of us had come to this conclusion, but we hadn’t voiced it because of fear that the others wouldn’t feel the same way. When it all came out in the open, we were still not certain it was possible. While we were all hip and unconventional people, we were not all that unconventional. The three of us are fundamentally middle-class people with the usual middle-class attitudes underneath.

“Frank rented a larger apartment. I suggested maybe Doreen could move in, and I would spend nights there. She said she wouldn’t actually live there unless I did, too, and I decided I could always move out if things got too heavy. I never moved out, and neither did she.

“The actual living situation is very good. Fortunately, the apartment has space. Actually, not space so much as a lot of small rooms, so that each of us has a room of our own. I think this is important. You have to be able to be by yourself when you want to.

“This is one of the good things about a relationship of three persons as opposed to the usual marriage. An individual can be alone without depriving the other of companionship. When you live with one other person, if he wants to go to the movies and you don’t, either you go anyway or you force him to go alone. If Frank wants to go to the movies and I want to read, I can stay here while Doreen goes. In this way there’s more personal freedom. Of course, it took us awhile to work this out. Early on we thought we all three had to do everything together, but you get over that stage soon enough.

“Friends will ask us things like do we fight over who does the housework. The great thing is that not only don’t we fight over it, but we each have only half as much to do because there are two of us. We alternate cooking and doing laundry and like that, and all those tasks are a lot less of a pain when you have to do them only half of the time.

“Another question is, don’t we get jealous of each other. The only way to answer this is to say no and let it go at that, because the whole concept of jealousy is just impossible for us, and people either understand that intuitively or they don’t. How can I be jealous of Frank’s feeling for Doreen when I love both of them? I suppose if there were no sexual relationship between the two women in a trio, there would naturally be jealousy. But I can’t conceive of a threesome in which everybody wasn’t into sex with everybody else. It wouldn’t be a real relationship otherwise.

“An interesting thing is that people tend to take it for granted that a threesome is desirable for Frank but think that Doreen and I get cheated on the deal. Girls will say that they could go for the idea of living with two men, for instance, but that they wouldn’t want to share a man with another woman. I personally don’t think I could get into a threesome with two men. If they had sex together it would turn me off — don’t ask me why, but it would — and if they didn’t, it would be unnatural. Also the men in a situation like that would have to compete with each other. I don’t see how it could work out to anybody’s advantage. I think in any relationship there has to be a leader, and it’s natural for the man to play that role. If you had two men, you would either have two leaders, or one would be in the other’s shadow. Doreen and I can be equals and sisters and lovers and everything, and it works out fine, because Frank is the dominant member of the family.”

JWW: In Three Is Not a Crowd, all four cases consisted of groups of two females and one male. In noting this fact, I observed there: “One ought not to infer that this is the standard or even the most common form of the triangle. In swinging society per se, I would say that it is by far the most frequently sought — far more couples seek single girls through ads than single men — but that it is less frequently achieved — infinitely more single men respond to such ads. I am not statistically inclined, nor is my kind of research the kind that involves a large enough sample for statistical conclusions to be drawn. However, I would guess that the majority of more or less permanent and stable threesomes do involve a man and two women rather than a woman and two men. Generally speaking, a man may willingly share his wife with another man for a night or a weekend, but permanent polyandry seems to go against the grain of Western culture.”

Since the publication of that book, I have become acquainted with several two-men-one-woman threesomes, some of which have been briefly described in the foregoing pages of this chapter. And I am more firmly inclined than before to state that they constitute a minority of troilistic relationships. Lily’s arguments seem creditable in this context.

“One attitude we’ve noticed is that people are inclined to think that we’re interested in sex outside of our relationship. The idea being evidently that if you’ll go for a threesome you’ll go for anything. This is absolutely not the case with us, and none of us have had any outside sex since we started living together. Guys tend to come on to Doreen and me more aggressively than if it were just one of us living with Frank. I would guess that’s because they can’t really conceive of a threesome as a permanent thing.

“Part of this is because of the law. Two people can marry each other. Three people can’t.”

JWW: I mentioned some of the marital attempts trios have made — going through a three-way marriage ceremony, going through two separate ceremonies.

“We’ve discussed that. Maybe it makes some people feel better, but we don’t feel it would make sense for us. It’s inconsistent to go through a legal ceremony if it’s not going to be legally valid, and to do it just for the sake of the ceremony with some far out minister — we don’t need that. We feel that we’re married. Each of us is married to both of the others.

“I made wedding rings for the three of us. It was never said that they were wedding rings, but that’s the understanding we have of them. I copied the design from an old European ring I saw in a shop once. Three snakes intertwined with each other. The symbolism is pretty obvious, isn’t it?

“We would all like it if we could get married. If three-way marriage was recognized as legal. I don’t think this will ever happen, though.

“As far as having children is concerned, I don’t see that it would be a problem. Doreen and I are both on the pill. Eventually I’ll probably want to have a child. Doreen already has a strong desire for motherhood and has talked about going off the pill sometime in the fall. I think it would be much easier to raise a baby in a household like ours. The mother wouldn’t be nearly so tied down with another woman to share child care with her. I’m sure I would love a child of hers as if it were my own, and vice versa. We feel that anything that comes from our relationship is the product of the three of us.

“There’s the question of how the child would be affected by the whole scene, and that’s not something I can answer. I don’t really know. I can see how it might be bad for him to grow up to discover that his parents have a relationship which is condemned by the rest of the world. But I would think that in a loving and open household, problems like that could be worked out easily enough. A kid would have to be better off with three parents who love each other than two parents who don’t. Frank has two kids he hardly ever sees. Any kids he had with me or Doreen would have to be in better shape.”

JWW: Members of a successful unconventional marriage tend to sound almost messianic on the subject. This is not hard to understand, certainly, but after Lily’s unequivocal hymn of praise to the joys of the threesome, we might do well to hear from a couple of people who became involved in threesomes that subsequently failed. The first speaker, Dana, is in his early thirties. He had been married for three years and has one child. The relationship he is discussing ran its course ten years ago.

“I moved to New York the summer after I finished college. I was living in a rooming house and trying to find an apartment I could afford. I ran into Fritz, and we had lunch together a couple of times. We had known each other in college, always got along well, but were never close. He graduated a year ahead of me. Anyway, the guy he had been sharing a place with joined the Peace Corps, and I was still looking for a place, and he couldn’t afford all the rent himself, so we decided to share.

“He was going with Alicia at the time, and he confided that one reason he was glad to have me as a roommate was that otherwise she might have wanted to move in with him, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for that. He was serious about her but didn’t want to get too serious too soon.

“I was in a bad way socially. Just before I graduated, I had broken up with a girl I was very serious about. I had wanted to marry her, and she didn’t want to marry me, and the whole thing left some scars. I was desperate to have a relationship with a girl, but at the same time, I was afraid to put myself in a position where I could be hurt again. As a result, I was very clumsy with women. I was very bad at getting dates, and when I did go out with a girl, I behaved badly. I would be obsessed with the desire to score, which is the one thing that will keep you from scoring. All of this made me frustrated and unhappy.

“This may have helped draw me to Alicia. I was able to relax with her, because she was out-of-bounds for me, she was my buddy’s girl, so I wasn’t expected to score with her and could relax and just get to know her as a human being. We both thought of it as a brother-sister kind of thing. I enjoyed spending time with both of them. Occasionally Alicia would get me a date with a friend of hers, but nothing ever worked out very well in that direction.

“I had never really had a female friend before. It was a new experience for me, and I liked it. Of course, all along I was falling in love with Alicia without realizing it.

“The inevitable happened. She came over one night to cook dinner for the three of us, and then Fritz called to say he had to work late. Since dinner was already on the stove, she decided to stay, and we would eat together. We had wine with dinner. All through the meal there was this sexual tension that we both felt. We both realized it was dangerous for us to be alone together, and we joked about it, and it just wasn’t a joke. After dinner we listened to records, and she looked at me and asked how long I intended to wait before I kissed her, and I reached for her and kissed her, and once I did that, it was all over, Nothing could have stopped us. We fucked like maniacs.

“Afterward I was just stunned. I couldn’t believe what I had done. She was completely calm. She said we’d had too much wine and we had both been drawn to each other for a long time, and no one had been hurt by what we did. It wouldn’t happen again. She wouldn’t tell Fritz, and of course, I mustn’t tell Fritz, and everything would be the same as it used to be. I was amazed that she could be so casual about it. I wondered if maybe she was less moral than I had thought. But I also thought she was right in what she had said.

“I found it impossible to be as I had been with Fritz. I was very uncomfortable now spending time with the two of them. Also, I wanted to make love to her again. I couldn’t stop wanting this, and one day I went over to her apartment and got her to go to bed with me. She didn’t want to at first, but I persuaded her. This happened a few more times as well. Each time, we would swear it wouldn’t happen again, but when it kept happening again, we had trouble believing ourselves.

“I kept wanting to tell Fritz. One night I finally did, without planning to. The two of us were sitting around the place having a few beers. He was talking about a girl in his office that he was thinking about making a play for. I resented this and said something about Alicia not approving. He said he wasn’t married to her yet, and that anyway he didn’t think men could go through their lives being faithful to one woman, that even if he married Alicia, he would probably want to get something on the side now and then. I asked if Alicia would have the same rights, and he said that men and women were different that way, that she would not have trouble being faithful.

“At which point I blurted out the whole thing. He didn’t believe me at first, and then he started saying how great it was that I’d told him, or he might have made a fool of himself by marrying her, and that it was good he knew about her, and I wound up defending her, and then he cried and said he loved her, and it just went on like this for hours. We were both pretty smashed, drinking booze on top of the beer.

“The next day, he had a big scene with Alicia, at her apartment, and then they both came over, and we all talked it out. She said she loved us both and didn’t know what to do, and maybe she should just move out of town and never see either of us again. I said I would move out, get out of their lives. Fritz said maybe I was better for her than he was, and he would move out.

“It was Alicia who suggested that we could both be her lovers. She had to say it a couple of times before either of us took her seriously. The more we talked about it, the more sense it seemed to make. God knows why.

“She would come over and cook dinner for us every night, and then one of us would take her to bed, depending on whose turn it was. Then she moved her stuff in and would sleep one night in my bed and the next night in Fritz’s. One night I went to sleep alone and woke up with her playing with my penis. She said Fritz had made love to her and had fallen asleep, and she still felt like doing it some more. We knocked off a quick one, and then she went back to his bed to sleep. He never knew she’d left.

“All this time, no one knew about what was going on. No one ever did. As far as anyone outside was concerned, she was Fritz’s girl.

“One night, when it was my turn to sleep with her, Fritz came into the room. He said he thought it might be fun to watch us together. I learned later that Alicia had suggested he do this. I was going to suggest he leave, but his presence excited her tremendously, and I went along with it. As soon as I finished, he took my place. I was uncomfortable watching them. I didn’t find it exciting that time, but that may have been because I had just finished making love. Later on I did find it exciting to watch.

“I never realized at the time just how completely she dominated the relationship. She really initiated all the developments. It was her suggestion that we all sleep together, with her in the middle. It was also her idea that we both make love to her at once. She would take one of us in her mouth while the other one fucked her.

“As time went by, this very weird love-hate thing began to develop. Fritz and I both came to despise her. We found her amoral and disgusting. I was also disgusted with myself. I began to wonder what was next. With the three of us having sex all together, there was invariably a certain amount of Fritz’s and my bodies touching. I never got over being uncomfortable about this. I was worried that he would want to have sex with me, or that my distaste for it stemmed from subconsciously wanting to have sex with him. It also seemed to me that sharing a woman with another man was a way of having a homosexual relationship with him, and this was a source of deep concern to me. I don’t know how much Fritz thought about any of this, or how he may have felt about it.

“I went through a period of impotence, which is a very scary thing. I picked up a prostitute — I had never done this before — and was able to perform with her. Then the next day I tried again with Alicia, and I couldn’t. This made it even more obvious to me that I was involved in a sick situation and I had to get out. Then my potency with Alicia returned, but I still wanted to end the situation, and we ultimately got it out in the open and I announced I was moving out. Ostensibly I was simply taking a place of my own that would be more convenient as far as getting to and from work was concerned, and we would still have this sexual thing together. But we all knew it was over. Fritz and Alicia pretended to be unhappy. That is, Fritz pretended — I know he was secretly relieved. Alicia really was unhappy.

“It took me a long time to get over all of that. I did a lot of serious drinking, and when I got drunk I would either curse myself for separating from them or curse them for the mess they had made of my life. I had fantasies of killing one or both of them. That scared me enough to get me into psychotherapy, which I stayed in for almost two years. The therapy seemed to help a great deal.

“I’m able to understand Alicia better now. She and Fritz got married about a year after I left. The marriage lasted a little over a year. Fritz remarried and lives in Connecticut. I haven’t seen him in years. I’d like to see him sometime, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever try to get in touch with him. Someone told me that Alicia is living with a lesbian. That was a couple of years ago, and I don’t know if it was true at the time, or what she’s doing now.

“There are times when I think our trouble was that we were born ten years too soon. Kids who are the age we were then can adapt to that kind of a situation nowadays a hell of a lot better than we can. Alicia was ahead of her time, sexually emancipated before the term existed, and Fritz and I were not able to handle that kind of emancipation. There are other times, though, when I look at my marriage and realize that I could never be comfortable with any relationship involving more than one man and one woman. I consider myself lucky to have gotten out of it as easily as I did. Suppose Alicia had become pregnant and didn’t know which of us was the father? Even now I get a chill thinking of something like that.”

JWW: For Dana, a threesome was a distinctly unpleasant experience. For Kirsten, threesomes are pleasant enough; she maintains, however, that it is a mistake to think of them as permanent relationships. She is about twenty-five, a fragile blond with an absentminded air about her.

“I tend to get into trios a lot. I don’t know why, exactly. It happens. Being bi probably has something to do with it. When I’m with a man, I tend to want to be with a woman, and vice versa. A trio rounds it out for me. I guess I must give off vibes that way, because it’s common for a couple to come on to me as if they know in front that I’m into their scene.

“The thing is, people think it can last. ‘I love you and you love her and she loves me and it’s beautiful.’ One person always splits, and then the two who are left either try to make it as a couple or try to get a third person, or split up and look elsewhere. Because splitting from a trio is a very easy thing to do. Sooner or later somebody gets uptight. Two of you will have a stronger thing going than either has with the third, or one person is uptight about the whole idea of the thing, or somebody just splits because something interesting is happening in Denver and he wants to check it out.

“A permanent relationship means one man and one woman and a house and a station wagon and children and the family dog, and it’s got to be as straight as possible so that it’s very fucking hard for you to split from each other. I could not possibly handle that straight a scene the way I am now. I’m not ready for it, I have no desire for it. But someday I will be a little older and a little more together, and this is what I will want. And I’ll want the whole trip. One man, and I’ll marry him in a church, and after that I’ll never fuck anyone but him, and if he fucks other women, I will not want to know anything about it.

“People tell me, like, that I have very unrealistic ideas about marriage. That if a person has been around, has been hip, they can’t handle the hassles of the kind of marriage I’m talking about. I don’t think this is true. I think the more you’ve been around, the more you know it’s all shit and the easier it is to say fuck it, enough of that, and make a marriage work. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know.

“Other things don’t last. That’s what it keeps coming back to. They don’t last. If something lasting is important, then a trio is the wrong place to look for it. The same as a commune. Even the communes that go on and on, it’s always people coming and going, coming and going, joining and dropping out. Like the subway, people getting off when it gets to their stop, and new people getting on.

“The first trio I was into, it was very bad for me when it broke. By this I mean the first trio I was into in a heavy sense, not just a one-night thing. What happened was that the other girl got pregnant, and he decided to marry her. The idea was that I could still live with them, but I got paranoid and felt she got pregnant on purpose (which maybe was paranoid, but I still think she did) and felt that they wanted me out of it, and I left.

“Since then, I still get into these things, usually with another couple, but once with two guys, and it’s good for me, because I’m not looking for something to last. And trios don’t last.”

JWW: But sometimes they do last. Perhaps the failure rate for troilistic relationships is greater than for traditional marriages, but I am not even sure that this is true.

Some trios, certainly, are more successful than others. It is a simpler matter to assert this than it is to explain what makes some succeed while others fail. I simply do not have a broad enough sample to make absolute statements on the subject. With that understood, let me attempt to list the factors that seem to me to be characteristic of those threesomes which appear to be most satisfactory to their participants, and which appear to endure.

1. The participants tend to idealize the relationship. I suggested earlier that Lily’s attitude might represent compensation for society’s hostility toward threesomes. In any event, successful trios share this enthusiasm. One hears talk constantly about the “beauty” of the relationship, about the extent of mutual love, about the inherent naturalness of three in bed. Members of successful threesomes do not merely feel it is all right for them to live as they do, but are positive that their lives are enriched for it, that their union is a noble thing.

2. The living situation is such as to facilitate concealment. The household is located either in a rural area, where no one is in a position to know what is going on, or in a large city, where no one cares. Or a blood relationship either exists or is purported to exist so that the presence of a third person in a household elicits no suspicion.

3. The same sex partners are either bisexual or siblings. Not a sine qua non by any means, but jealousy and or competition usually manifest themselves when this is not the case.

4. The roles of the same-sex partners are clearly defined. This is less a matter of you-do-the-cooking-I’ll-scrub-the-floor than a subtler proposition of me-mother-you-daughter or me-big-sister-you-little-sister. A trio has a better chance of stability if both co-wives (or co-husbands) perceive their relationship in the same way.

5. The male (or the elder male) is the dominant partner. There are trios of two men and a woman in which the female is dominant, to the evident satisfaction of all concerned. My experience indicates that they are not often inclined to endure. In the case Dana described, both he and Fritz were uneasy in a relationship that Alicia dominated.

6. The participants are not excessively neurotic. This is a requisite of any relationship, however many persons are involved. I mention it because a large portion of those who experiment with threesomes are excessively neurotic — as are a large portion of the people who experiment with anything. I mention it, too, because I’ve spent most of the past two days reading books and articles by psychiatrists, and one comes away from this sort of thing with the impression that most of the people in the world are crazy. (It is unfortunate, I think, that such a great amount of the significant writing on sexual themes is done by psychiatrists who deal constantly with severely disturbed persons. There are well-adjusted homosexuals, but one would never know it on the basis of psychiatric literature on the subject — because happy and well-adjusted homosexuals do not wind up on the couch.)

7. None of the participants is much concerned with the opinions of specific others. More especially, the judgment of parents is not an important factor. In one case after another, parents were either deceased, or lived far away, or had limited influence on the child.

JWW: Do threesomes have a future?

I would agree with Lily that it is extremely unlikely that troilistic marriages will be legally sanctioned in the near future. If they are to win public acceptance, the victory will more likely come through the increasing recognition of the legitimacy of non-marital relationships and of the extension of the concept of marriage to include unions that do not now enjoy legal standings.

A great many of the persons I’ve interviewed expressed the wish that they could be open about their relationships. As our concept of universal monogamous marriage continues to erode, as I feel it shall, the several unconventional alternatives to that state will become increasingly respectable.

It is altogether fitting and proper that this should happen. When people are sufficiently committed to an enduring relationship to continue it despite the social necessity to keep it clandestine, that relationship is obviously a fulfilling one for them. I would not argue that plural marriages ought to be legalized, as such a step would serve principally to enrich divorce lawyers and estate lawyers. But I’d agree with the Bard that one ought not to the marriage of true minds impediments attach — whether those minds be two in number, or three, or more.

With These Rings We Thee Wed

I don’t know very much about group marriage. My firsthand access to such unions has been limited to half a dozen cases. Two of these I knew only through correspondence. Of the four with which I became familiar through interviews, two had terminated before I met the participants. One of the other two has ended since then, and the last, while still functioning, has had a substantial change of personnel.

I’d be more apologetic about my lack of extensive information on this subject if it weren’t so widely shared. I don’t think anyone knows a whole hell of a lot about group marriage, and I’m not sure there’s all that much to know.

Earlier, in justifying a distinction between threesomes and plural marriages of more than three persons, I made the point that while threesomes will often derive from circumstances, group marriages are almost always idealistic in origin — i.e., the idea of group marriage is perceived as attractive prior to the selection of members of the group. Furthermore, group marriage is viewed as ideal, as an important if not essential alternative to monogamy, with the capacity to change the lives of its participants.

I suppose it might be possible to discuss the ideas and ideals of group marriage without discussing Bob Rimmer, but I’m certainly not going to try. Rimmer is a successful middle-aged businessman who turned novelist with extraordinary popular success. Most of his books have concerned the concept of plural marriage, which Rimmer advocates with the zeal of the true believer. One comes away from his books with the impression that group marriage not only makes everyone happy and turns the world beautiful, but that it also cures warts and the common cold, banishes flatulence, clears up acne, and straightens crooked limbs.

One cannot be neutral on the subject of Rimmer. The reader either finds his ideas moving and beautiful or recoils in shock from the man’s writing style. I find the experience of reading him something like walking through very deep snow with no destination in mind. His characters talk interminably, talk as if they know someone Out There is listening in, and when they make love it is all so pure and beautiful it makes you want to puke. As a result, I’ve never been able to take Rimmer seriously, and have trouble believing that anyone else does, either.

Ah, but they do. The Harrad Experiment, his most successful book to date, has sold millions of copies, while adding a word to the language. The book, couched as nonfiction (to the considerable distress of many of its readers, who believed Harrad College really existed, wanted to go there, and felt cheated when they learned it was all A Make-Believe Story), concerns a fictional college where students live in group marriage situations as part of the curriculum. Another novel, Proposition 31, involves a movement to amend the California state constitution to legalize group marriage. (Don’t hold your breath until this happens.)

Another book which also seems to have sold well consists almost entirely of letters Rimmer received in response to The Harrad Experiment. The book makes strange reading. The letters do not appear to have been selected for publication with any criteria in mind, nor have they been edited to free them of extraneous matter. Rimmer’s replies are not included. He has not commented on any of the letters. They are all simply there. But the sheer quantity of them, and the intensity of the writers’ interest in group marriage, cannot fail to make an impression. I’m sure only a minuscule percentage of Rimmer’s correspondents will ever become involved in group marriage, but it is overwhelming that so many of them regard it as an ideal improvement on monogamy.

In a recent issue of the magazine Sexual Behavior, Rimmer comments on an article on group marriage by an Alabama sociology professor and marriage counselor. The author of the article concludes that group marriage, while a fascinating phenomenon, does not have much of a future. Rimmer notes his amusement, then goes on to say that since the publication of Harrad and Proposition 31:

I have received hundreds of letters from couples experimenting with various forms of group living, from communes to two- or three-couple economic arrangements... They tend to bear out my belief that emotionally sound group marriages can be a viable and life expanding way of living.

He further notes similarities between those experiments he characterizes as successful: the high educational level of the couples involved, couples who “have been married five years or more and communicate reasonably well in their monogamous lives,” and a tendency to avoid any publicity concerning their participation in a group marriage. He adds that he knows of at least five successful groups, his criterion for success being that they “are going strong after three years.”

Rimmer offers a variety of arguments for group marriage, my favorite being something to the effect that it will come to provide a Final Solution to the problem of senior citizens. (It’s a little unclear to me what he’s getting at here, but I must admit I find the concept of geriatric group marriage quite fetching.) Most interestingly, he restates the premises of both novels, first calling for legalization of group marriage, then arguing that if a real college were to duplicate Harrad’s offer of “a structured form of premarital living,” this would be instantly accepted by “thousands of youngsters and their parents.”

I suppose it would be more gracious of me to hide my prejudices. Well, the hell with graciousness. This particular emperor is stark naked, and I find myself compelled to call attention to the fact. His observations are such utter bullshit that I keep being tempted to dismiss group marriage as more of the same crap.

Five group marriages going strong after three years! Now, what in hell does that prove about anything? I don’t want to launch a personal attack on a man who comes across as decent, amiable, well-meaning and honest, a man with a generally harmless if witless idée fixe. Yet, if it’s impossible to write about group marriage without writing about Rimmer, so is it dishonest to write about him without stating that I consider his views absurd.

Or is all of this a waste of time? No one is neutral on the subject of Rimmer, so it’s logical to assume that some of my readers have already come to the same conclusion about him, while others — his enthusiasts — will by now have stopped reading this book, having reached similar conclusions about my own sensitivity and mental competence. Ah, well. You can’t please everybody, as the hooker said to the regiment...

February 3, 1973

Dear Mr. Wells,

I understand that you are writing or have written a book on new forms of marriage. Would you please tell me how I can obtain a copy?

(This is it—JWW)

I have read several of your books, including Three Is Not a Crowd, which very nearly prompted me to write to you at that time. It was then my intention to suggest that you turn your sights to marital units of more than three people. I have a strong personal interest in this subject, as my wife and I have been members of a group situation of this sort for almost two full years. I don’t know whether you would call it a group marriage, a communal living arrangement, or what. My wife and I are legally married to each other, as are the other couple who has been in this with us from the start. At present there are just the four of us, but we have had three third couples with us in the past and expect to add a third couple again sometime when the occasion arises. Two of these third couples were legally married. The other was not; in fact, the man and woman had not been sexually intimate with each other before joining us, although they had been acquainted with each other (and with us) for a long time.

Perhaps I should tell you something of our situation. I am thirty-one. My wife, Ellie, is four months older than I am. We have been married for four years and lived together for several months before marriage. I was never married before. Ellie was married after high school graduation and was divorced after less than a year... I am a chemical engineer in the field of petrochemicals. Ellie works mornings at a clinic for retarded children. During her first marriage she gave birth to a retarded child who has been institutionalized all its life. We have a daughter three years old...

We first became interested in the idea of group marriage after having read a book on the subject. The Harrad Experiment — no doubt you have some acquaintance with its contents and philosophy. (No doubt about it — JWW) Ellie and I discussed this among ourselves and then talked about it with Hal and Roberta, with whom we had grown very friendly. Hal is my age, and Roberta is two years younger. Both are teachers of primary school children. We were surprised to learn that they had also read The Harrad Experiment and were intrigued by the idea of it. We discussed the concept of being able to love more than one person and agreed that it appealed to us as a philosophical concept.

Before this point, while there was a great deal of warm friendship between us and mutual attraction, we did not consciously think of each other in sexual terms. I had had desires for other women but had done nothing about them. Hal and Roberta had considered swinging to the point of corresponding with couples, but had let the matter drop. Now that the subject had come up, we were able to think of each other sexually and consider the possibilities. I assured Ellie I would not be hurt if she had sex with Hal, and she felt much the same about my making love with Roberta. Among the four of us we discussed the possibility of forming a group marriage and agreed that we could not really talk about it with any real awareness unless we first exchanged partners and determined our own reactions to the experiment.

To make a long story short, we traded mates for an evening and found it caused no problems whatsoever. In addition to the pleasure of intimacy with Roberta, I felt a brotherly affection for Hal and satisfaction over the pleasure he and Ellie had given each other. These feelings deepened for all of us every time we repeated the experiment, and it was mutually agreed that a group marriage would be ideal for us. At the same time, we were unsure whether it was feasible. An exposure of such an arrangement would certainly lead to loss of jobs for the three of them, and possibly for me as well. We knew that anything we set up would have to be absolutely secret, and this went against the grain, in that we felt we ought to be able to be completely open about our love for one another...

I found the solution of buying a two-family house and renting out the second floor to Hal and Roberta. This made sexual interchange simple, simplified our having meals together, etc. It was not all that we wanted it to be. We were still involved in separate households, separate kitchens, all of that. We talked about converting the house — there was really no need for two kitchens. Then we realized that we had selected a two-family house in the first place for the concealment it offered, and anyone entering the place after the conversion we were talking about would realize we were living communally. Also, the conversion would lower the resale value of the house, it being in a neighborhood of multiple dwellings...

JWW: There follows an extended discussion of the evolution of the relationship, the eventual sale of the house, and the purchase of a large farmhouse within commuting distance of their jobs. The farmhouse was selected both for the privacy it offered and out of a desire to “get back to the land” by growing their own food, keeping farm animals, and living close to nature. Shortly after the move to the farm, a third couple joined the group. The couple stayed only a month before departing. They were advocates of group sex, and the wife was bisexual; the two couples had not experimented at all with group sex, and found it unpleasant, and the bisexual wife was unsuccessful at making converts of Ellie and Roberta. The separation was without rancor.

We agreed that a third couple was a desirable addition if we could find the right couple. We felt that a family of six adults would be an improvement on one of four. We have never tried more than three couples, and agree with Rimmer that a group of more than six is not viable... Our two other “third couples” have been welcome additions to our group, so that we feel that six is an ideal size for a group. Unfortunately, we have been unable to maintain it at this size. One couple would probably have remained with us, but the husband was transferred out-of-state, and his ties to us were not strong enough to make him look for another job. The other couple was the one I described as not legally married to each other. Hal and Roberta had known them both — they were also schoolteachers — and Ellie and I knew them through Hal and Roberta. They became aware of our group marriage, and the idea developed that they would join. The fact that they were not married and thus not deeply committed to each other kept things from working out well. Ultimately the woman left, and the man suggested he might get another girl so that he could stay with us. We decided against this, and have more or less lost contact with him since...

With each of these couples, we have noticed that the four original members are closer to one another than to the third couple, whoever they may be. This is inevitable because of our shared experiences, etc. It is our hope that we will overcome this if we find the right third couple and live with them long enough to have a real basis of mutual love with them, as the four of us have now among ourselves.

I am legally married to Ellie and consider this bond more than a scrap of paper. She and I are husband and wife in a way that goes beyond the relationship between myself and Roberta, or Ellie and Hal. I know there are groups where this is not the case. We all feel that there is a closeness and mutual need possible between two persons that cannot be felt for a larger group, at least as far as we are all concerned. In this sense you might say that we are not a group marriage in the true sense of the term, but are two couples who live communally and share sex...

Finances are kept separate. Ellie and I have our money, Roberta and Hal have theirs. Household accounts and the like are paid out of a common fund to which we all contribute equally. My salary plus Ellie’s part-time earnings is approximately equal to Hal and Roberta’s joint income. While financial considerations are not of major importance to any of us, we agree that a group marriage with a couple with significantly lower or higher income would be difficult and a source of stress all around.

We are unanimous in feeling that our lives are far richer for the relationship we have constructed. We feel it has made us more aware individuals, that we have “expanded our consciousnesses” in a meaningful way and without the use of drugs. (We do not drink, take pills of any sort, or smoke marijuana, although we have experimented with marijuana on several occasions. We all infinitely prefer the “natural high” which we get from each other!)

I am not including a return address, and will not sign this letter with my real name. The names “Ellie,” “Roberta,” and “Hal” are fictitious. Perhaps this represents paranoia on my part, but I hope you won’t be offended. Letters do sometimes fall into the wrong hands, and while I’m inclined to trust you personally, I don’t place similar trust in the United States Post Office Department. We simply have too much at stake to take chances. You may use this letter as you see fit, as I have written nothing that would point to us. Please do not mention the city or state where we live...

Jeremy

JWW: I’ve heard nothing further from Jeremy, and lacking a return address, have been unable to inquire further. Nor have I been able to answer the question which opened his letter. I guess he wrote that part before deciding to remain anonymous. Perhaps he’ll be able to locate this book on his own. If so, I hope he’ll let me know more about the course his group marriage has taken.

I find especially interesting his uncertainty as to whether or not this foursome constitutes a true group marriage. I would certainly say that it does, the special bonds between lawful spouses notwithstanding. In our next case, we’ll examine another group marriage in which no special bonds existed. The subject of group marriage was only one aspect of my several conversations with Daphne. She has been “into” a great many things in her thirty-two years: drugs, encounter groups, therapy, Freudian analysis, promiscuity, group sex, yoga, political activism, marriage, divorce, amateur prostitution, and God knows what else that she may have failed to mention.

She seems a lot more together than her background would indicate. Her varied enthusiasms represent less a devil-may-care willingness to try anything once than a rather desperate striving for utopian solutions to personal problems. But a full look at Daphne will have to wait for some other time and place; here we’ll make do with an abridged edition of her description of her venture at group marriage.

“About that time, Peter and I got back together again. He had been out to the Coast, where he lived in a commune for a few months, and was rapping on and on about the closeness of it. I had had my own mixed experiences with communes and did not want to get into that scene again... He was talking communes with some friends of his, and they mentioned the idea of putting together a group marriage. They had read books on the subject and were very strong on the idea. They had tried living with another couple that way, but it hadn’t worked out, so Peter introduced me to them, and the four of us got along pretty well, and we decided to see what would happen.

“They had a huge apartment on Riverside Drive, so there was plenty of space for us to move in with them. It was better than the communes I had been involved in, because it wasn’t stuck off in the middle of nowhere, you weren’t isolated, you could see other people besides the members of the group. Also, it had more structure, it was less casual than a commune, there weren’t people constantly drifting in and out...

“Everybody was bi, and we were all completely into group sex. This would have been better if I had liked the rest of them more than I did. But I thought the other guy was very pretentious and phony, and the other girl was, I don’t know, bossy. You know, like it was her apartment, it was her kitchen. She had lived there with her husband before they were divorced, and it was still her place. Also, she had a kid, and since she worked and I was not working at the time, it was my job to take care of the kid days. I enjoyed this at first because of the novelty of it, but got to resent it. The kid was thoroughly obnoxious. I took the massage parlor gig largely to get away from the fucking kid. I didn’t really need money at the time, I still had enough to get along and was not expected to pay rent, as this chick’s alimony covered all that.

“Other people would come by occasionally and join us in sex, but nobody else actually lived there but the four of us. I guess we were together for a couple of months. Then Peter split and went back to the Coast, and then another couple joined the remaining three of us but left after a week or two, and then another guy joined up, and we were a quartet again. And I went along with this for a while out of, I guess you would call it inertia. Until one day it hit me that I was living and balling with these three people and I couldn’t stand any of them. I didn’t like either of the guys, and I had come to the point where I literally hated the other chick. Like I wished she would just suddenly die and take her brat of a kid with her. And I thought, Christ, what am I doing with all of these rotten people?

“So I got the hell out. I’ve never been involved in anything like that since. I wouldn’t want to get involved. Just the ordinary day-to-day hassles of who cleans up the mess and who does this and who does that are too much. And you get people who can’t stand the strain of living with a single other person, and they try to solve their problems by living with three other people, and instead of fewer problems, they have more of them. I suppose it’s something to go through, and you learn from it, like anything else, but as a regular way of life, I don’t think it makes any sense.”

JWW: Jeff is twenty-eight, a look-a-like for Rob Reiner, who plays the son-in-law on All in the Family. He does administrative work for a New York hospital, where his wife, Peggy, is employed as a nurse. He and Peggy became interested in the idea of group marriage before they were married themselves.

“We liked the idea but felt it would never work in practice. We had read Harrad and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and were influenced by both of them, at the same time feeling that they were utopian and idealistic and would not work in the real world. Peggy was somewhat more inclined to think that some version of a group marriage might work. I was more skeptical, but generally speaking, our ideas were quite close on the subject.

“We both agreed that it would be possible to adapt aspects of the general philosophy to our own lives. That our getting married would not mean we would belong to each other in a possessive or exclusive way and that each of us would be free to pursue other relationships. We felt that any outside relationships, if they were honest and open and loving, would enhance our marriage rather than detract from it.

“As it happened, neither of us took any advantage of this freedom. Our sexual relationship was a good one, and we felt fulfilled by it...

“After about a year, our thoughts again turned to the group marriage concept. We tried swinging, with the idea of finding a couple we could get involved with that way. Our experiences with swinging were enjoyable, but purely in a sexual way. At first we found it tremendously exciting. Then the novelty wore off, and we realized that it was completely artificial, just bodies going through the motions. Without emotional sensitivity it was meaningless. It was valuable in that we learned we were able to enjoy sex with other people, that it didn’t unhinge us, and that it improved our sexual relationship together, but there was a point where we realized we had outgrown it.

“After we had given it up, Peggy was talking with a friend of hers, and it came out that that couple had had very similar experiences with swinging at about the same time as we did. Peggy told me about this revelation, and the other girl told her husband, and when we saw them a few nights later, it was unreal the way everybody had the same thoughts but nobody was saying anything. Someone dropped a double entendre, and we all laughed hysterically, and everything came out in the open.

“The obvious thing was to swing with them, but we were all holding back, because there was this feeling of being on the verge of something bigger than swinging. The conversation turned to group marriage, with the general idea being that if only we were in a position to move to the Arizona desert we could really get into a group thing. Then we admitted that we didn’t really want to live in the middle of the desert, even if we could have afforded to, that we liked living in New York. The idea of living together seemed impractical on a. variety of counts. Not just social pressure, but more important, the lack of privacy. We all felt a living situation might be more intimacy than we were really capable of.

“We didn’t swing together that night. Everyone wanted to, but no one wanted to be the one to bring it up. Afterward Peggy and I talked about having wanted to swing with them, and they went home and had the same conversation. We got together the following evening and swung, and it was a very intimate thing, a beautiful experience. It had the excitement we had experienced early in swinging, but at the same time, it was honest and more emotionally close and felt better afterward. In swinging we would occasionally get what I can only describe as sex hangovers, the physical and mental feeling afterward that we wouldn’t want to have sex again for like a year. There was none of this now.

“We decided to consider ourselves as four members of a group marriage. They lived a few blocks away from us, and that seemed to be an ideal distance. We would get together two nights a week. It seemed awkward to make it a scheduled thing, but we felt that otherwise there’d be constant decisions to be made over and over, and worrying that you were seeing the other couple more or less frequently than they would have preferred it, and the artificiality of a schedule seemed a small price to pay to eliminate that aggravation. So we got into the pattern of seeing them every Tuesday and Friday night.”

JWW: One might argue that the relationship Jeff describes is not a group marriage but an arrangement for mutually exclusive swinging. Several elements prompt me to label it a group marriage. Most important is that the participants so considered it. In addition, the underlying philosophy derives from the group-marriage subculture, and the emotional relationship of the partners is consistent with it.

“We grew in a great many ways as a result of all of this. The four of us are at a point now where we’re almost telepathic. It’s uncanny... I was an only child, and I used to wish I had a brother. When I was four or five, I had this invisible friend who was like a brother. I guess it’s common for only children to have that fantasy. Now I had a brother, and it was a beautiful thing. And Peggy had a sister, and everything was really great. I know I’m not being very articulate; it’s hard to find words for all of this...

“The sexual intimacy is easier to explain than what we all went through emotionally. I suppose because it’s more graphic. The girls became fully bisexual almost from the start. They had both been introduced to bi activity during swinging, but neither of them had ever been able to really relax and enjoy it. It was purely physical for them. Now it became emotional as well, it became bound up in the love they had for each other, and they were fully at ease making love to each other.

“He and I had never had any bisexual experience, and both of us had a real thing about physical contact of any sort with another man. We didn’t like people who take hold of your arms, for example. The girls suggested we get into an intimacy building situation, deliberately touching each other in nonsexual ways. It took quite a bit of time before we were able to do this and be relaxed about it.

“Little by little I came to have the desire to perform the sex act with him. Because it was an experience I had not had. Specifically, I wanted to know what it was like to perform fellatio. And to handle his penis.

“He expressed the same desire one night. I think it was Peggy who brought the subject up by saying something to the effect that the husbands were missing something by being heterosexual, and he said he had been tempted to go to a gay bar just to find out what it was all about. He said he would naturally prefer to perform homosexual acts with me, whom he loved and trusted, but he would want it to be a one-time-only affair, because he didn’t think sex between the two of us was compatible with our relationship. I hadn’t gone into my own feelings to that extent, but when I heard him say this, I realized he was expressing what I felt myself.

“We took turns performing fellatio on each other. It was a purely physical thing. I was surprised to find that I was less troubled at the idea of going down on him than of his going down on me. I would have thought it would be the other way around, but I found it harder to enjoy the experience when I was playing a passive role in it... We both did it, and agreed that it was not unpleasant and that we had enjoyed it, and that we would not do it again. And we never have.

“It was a very worthwhile experience. It showed me I had been afraid of something for years for no good reason. That sex between men was not something I had to fear, that I had participated in it without going insane or killing myself or having my cock turn green, and that I also didn’t have to fear being homosexual because I had not the slightest desire to repeat the experience. The love the two of us have for each other was not affected. And we had something else between us now which I can only think of as having gone through battle together, as having shared a common ordeal.”

JWW: I notice in rereading Jeff’s comments that I have him sounding as though he is talking of a relationship which is no longer in existence. At the time I interviewed him, the relationship was thriving. Several months later I wrote him a letter prior to beginning work on this book. I asked him if he would bring me up to date on the group marriage. The letter was not answered. I called his home and was told the number was no longer in service. Since Ma Bell tells you this on numerous occasions when the number is in service, I did not leap to conclusions. I called Jeff at his office and he broke in on me in mid-sentence. “That’s all over,” he said. “Peggy’s getting a divorce. The whole thing is finished. I don’t want to talk about any of it.”

I tried to get more information from him, asked him to meet me for a drink. He insisted again that he had nothing to say to me and hung up abruptly. I wrote him another letter, not really expecting an answer, and didn’t get one.

Which does leave things up in the air. I have no idea why the foursome broke up, nor do I have any idea why Jeff and Peggy broke up, and while one could speculate endlessly, it seems rather pointless. In our earlier talks, I had formed a favorable impression of this particular group marriage, had felt that it seemed to fulfill the needs and expectations of the members, and that it ought to have a reasonable chance to endure.

August 10, 1971

Dear Mr. Wells:

I’ve just finished reading Three Is Not a Crowd and want to congratulate you on handling a sensitive subject with tact and finesse. I have been trying with little success to compile a useful bibliography on plural marriage. It seems as though most of the available literature is either pure and simple pornography or is written by an author who condemns plural marriage categorically, on either moral or pseudoscientific grounds.

Could you suggest books I might find of interest? I would greatly appreciate it if you could. Please include any books or articles of your own which in any way touch on this subject.

My interest is both academic and personal. If I get approval, I will be preparing a master’s thesis on some aspect of plural marriage. On a more personal level, I have been involved in a threesome for almost a year. Just recently it grew to a fivesome, with the addition of another couple. Our ultimate goal is six...

Sincerely,

Burton

JWW: I couldn’t help Burton much with the bibliography. I suggested the usual run of professional journals. Then I made a grave tactical error.

I mentioned that Rimmer’s novels were worth a reading because of his extraordinary influence upon people with any sort of interest in group marriage. But I qualified this recommendation with my own opinion of the books, to which you folks out there have already been subjected.

I closed with a variety of questions about the origin and structure of Burton’s threesome-turned-fivesome, extending him an invitation to correspond on the subject at length.

Almost by return mail I got back two single-spaced pages. The first third consisted of personal vituperation of the most colorful sort; if I reproduced it here I’d be tempted to sue myself for libel. “Literary whore” and “cheap insensitive hack” were the gentler epithets. The remaining two-thirds of the letter was a paean of praise to Rimmer, an elaborate discussion of his philosophy, a lot of gushing over his literary style, and stray paragraphs which, cheap insensitive hack that I am, I was hard put to comprehend. I could reproduce that part of the letter, I suppose, but I’m somehow disinclined to bother.

Some you win, some you lose. I laughed a lot, I promised myself to learn from this experience, and then I had a few drinks and wrote Burton another letter. I thanked him for his analyses of Rimmer and me, said I had read his remarks with interest and no doubt profited by them, and was only sorry he had had insufficient time to reply to some of the other points I’d raised. Whereupon I repeated the questions and invitation of my earlier letter.

To which I received this reply:

September 18, 1971

Dear John,

Christ, I never expected to hear from you again. As you may have gathered, I wrote that last letter in white heat and mailed it immediately. I’ve been trying to break myself of this habit. If I’d made myself keep the letter overnight, I’m sure I would not have mailed it. I certainly disagree with you about Bob Rimmer — I guess I made that obvious enough, didn’t I? As for my remarks about you, I’ve been regretting them ever since I mailed that letter...

Of course I’ll be glad to discuss our plural marriage with you. I suppose the first step is to introduce the players. I’m twenty-three, B.S. in psychology, minor in sociology. Typical Midwestern WASP background. Fair student, rotten athlete, mediocre bridge player... Nan, twenty-two, English major, poet, published in several of the no-pay poetry magazines, novel vaguely in progress, parents divorced, older brother a career marine, believe it or don’t... Kitty, twenty-one, history major, active on college newspaper, parents divorced when young and mother remarried, no contact with father, no brothers or sisters... We three were the beginnings of the group, having initiated a threesome a year ago this week. This summer the group was enlarged with the addition of Sam and Janet, who are married to each other. (Of course, we are all married to each other, but they are married in the legal sense, having a scrap of parchment to that effect, even as I have a square of sheepskin testifying to the world that I am educated, and of about as much validity.) Sam is a graduate student in philosophy, twenty-three, wit like a razor and built like a Theodore Bear, Jewish, Philadelphia-born, future vocational plans uncertain... Janet, twenty, lapsed German Catholic, a botany major who is sufficiently liberated even from the concept of liberation as to aspire to nothing more (or less) than a career of voluntary domestic servitude. Her bounty of breasts and hips suggests God had her in mind for just such a role, and all small children love her on sight...

JWW: There follows a very long and involved explanation of the origin of the original threesome. In brief, Burton commenced an affair with Kitty while in the process of an affair with Nan. Kitty was aware of his affair with Nan. He subsequently made Nan aware of it as well. With both women, first separately and then together, he discussed the impossibility of monogamy and the validity of the “you-can-love-more-than-one” philosophy. The idea of a threesome evolved from these discussions.

“Two moments stand out in memory. The first was the night when I first made love to both Nan and Kitty, each in the presence of the other. Inhibitions and hang-ups withered and fell by the wayside. All three of us learned to relax in the pleasure of watching and being watched, to have sexual joy enhanced rather than constricted by this added dimension. For two full hours I copulated first with one girl and then the other. (I had earlier taught myself to have non-ejaculatory orgasms, by surrendering myself to all of the release and satisfaction — physical and emotional — of orgasm without allowing semen to flow, and it permits a man to perform the sex act almost indefinitely, as potency is not diminished by this variety of orgasm. Of course, at the end of two hours I did let myself ejaculate, and enjoyed it immensely.)

(I would jolly well hope so—JWW)

“... will also not soon forget the night when Nan and Kitty made love to one another for the first time. As they became more and more at ease with each other, a sexual bond emerged between them in a beautiful fashion. Often when I was making love to one girl the other would lie close beside her, holding her hand and gazing deeply into her eyes at the moment of climax, so that the climax was shared in essence not by two of us but by all three of us... This intimacy developed into mutual love play between them. Nan in particular felt that she was bisexual and that the love of women for one another could be compatible with their love for a man. They began to make love one afternoon when I was out, but decided their first full experience should be shared with me. That night I was with them and watched Nan make beautiful oral love to Kitty. I viewed with rapture the special differences of the lesbian embrace, its inherent gentleness as opposed to the symbolic conflict and aggression of man-woman intercourse. Then, when Kitty gratified Nan orally in return, I sat beside them and masturbated. My ejaculation splashed upon Nan’s beautiful breasts at the very instant that Kitty brought her to a final climax...”

JWW: Other sexual possibilities explored by the three are next related in detail. Tone and style are much the same as in the material quoted above, with recurring emphasis of the beauty and love characteristic of each episode. Burton and Nan and Kitty evidently found the whole range of troilistic sexual practices enjoyable and gratifying. If any of the three ever had any qualms about the relationship, Burton does not mention the fact.

Early in our three-way love affair, there was no thought of enlarging our group. We felt that the three of us constituted a full family and could be permanently happy together. We went through several marriage ceremonies of our own design. First we simply pledged to love one another fully and completely and honestly. On a later occasion we felt we had reached a point where we were ready to commit ourselves to one another on a permanent basis, and we restructured our vows to include this commitment to permanence. These small ceremonies were held by ourselves in the privacy of the apartment where we live together. On another occasion we attempted to duplicate the water sharing ceremony in Stranger in a Strange Land and become water brothers. This was done largely to express our acceptance of Robert Heinlein’s concept of water brothers more than anything else...

The idea gradually arose that a family unit of three persons was too small to function at its best. This feeling came about not from discontent but through the elevation of our own consciousness through meditation, conversation, and the stimulation of various reading matter.”

(Here he offers an extended reading list with comments on various books — JWW)

... One point that we felt was significant was that a group with only one male member had elements of the harem about it. In a true plural marriage the female members ought to belong to more than one man. (I use “belong” not in the sense of the male possession of the female, but in the sense that all of us now belong to each other.)

But there is a big difference between deciding that a group should be larger and taking immediate steps to enlarge it. This point, I feel strongly, is where a great many attempts at communes, plural marriage, and other radical life styles fail. The addition to a group of the wrong person or persons could easily be disastrous. Each of the three of us had stayed briefly in communes (while never belonging to a commune), and we all knew many people with communal experience. In case after case, communes have failed because the wrong people have been allowed to join, or to visit on a permanent basis. We knew our group could only grow if and when we found people whom we could all love and who would all love us. In the months which followed our decision, many friends and acquaintances were considered and rejected — without their knowledge, of course.

Sam and Janet... became close friends of ours. Nan and Kitty found Sam emotionally and physically attractive, and I could not help being strongly attracted to Janet. Like all of our friends here, they were aware of our life style and viewed it with sympathy. They, too, were into Rimmer’s writings, etc., and had speculated on the possibility of entering into some form of plural marriage situation but were concerned that they could only do so if the situation were to be permanent and based on genuine mutual love... To make along story short—

(Fat chance! — JWW)

— we invited them to join us, and they accepted on a trial basis. This trial period was not a long one. We all of us learned before long that we were suited to one another. Sam and Janet had had some reservations, feeling that their marriage to each other would separate them from the rest of the group. Janet was also uncertain about her own capacity for bisexual response. None of these fears was justified.

JWW: Burton discusses the special added pleasure for the females of being able to make love to two males simultaneously, and adds that he and Sam are strictly heterosexual, feeling that bisexuality on their part would be incompatible with their male roles in the group, although, interestingly enough, both had experienced a certain amount of homosexual activity during adolescence. He suggests that love between sisters lends itself to sexual expression, while love between brothers is strengthened by abstaining from such expression, and presents various arguments for this conclusion.

We are unsure what the ultimate size of our group will be. If it remains at five forever, none of us will have any complaints. Rimmer says that two couples or three couples is ideal. Another writer in a novel that is an obvious imitation of The Harrad Experiment says that a group can function better with an uneven number of members — five or seven — and holds that there should be an extra man. The idea seems to be that with an even number of men and women, people tend to couple up, to the detriment of the group. I do not know whether this should be true or not, as our group, first three and now five, has never had an even number of members. In any event, we are in no rush to change things, and if we do grow to six or seven ultimately, I suspect the individuals involved will have more to do with the success of the group than its precise numerical makeup.

You invited me to go on at great length, and I’ve done just that. If there’s anything else you want to know, feel free to write at any time...”

Burton

JWW: My next letter to Burton raised several points which he answered as follows:

November 28, 1971

Dear Jack,

It was good to hear from you. Everything is going well here. The group remains at five. We have been considering adding another couple but are in the process of deciding against them. The general feeling now is that there would be a sacrifice of intimacy if we enlarged, and naturally we wish to avoid this at all costs...

Do many people know of our group marriage? Our close friends in the area know, and other persons are aware that the five of us live together in communal fashion, although they probably are unaware of the precise nature of our relationship or that we feel ourselves to be committed to a permanent life together. Of course, on a college campus there is a far more tolerant attitude toward radical life styles than we could expect to find in the “real” world. Fortunately, the nature of our vocational interests is such that we will all be quite comfortable spending our lives in this sort of environment, and should have no trouble supporting ourselves through teaching, writing, etc. Our ultimate goal is a farm in the area. While we are realistic enough to know that subsistence farming is a difficult if not impossible way of life for most people, it would be ideal if we did not have to depend upon it for economic survival. The prospect of getting fresh milk from our goats, growing organic fruits and vegetables, is very attractive to us, and should not be hard to realize. This attitude is by no means ours exclusively. Most of the people we know have one version or another of this dream, whether or not they are sympathetic to the idea of group marriage or communal living. It is all bound up in the idea of being physically responsible for your own existence, learning crafts, getting close to nature, and living a sane life in an obviously insane world...

No, we anticipate no problems as far as children are concerned. As a matter of fact, we are presently awaiting medical confirmation of Janet’s pregnancy. Sam and I fathered the child. No, that’s not a typographical error. When Janet decided that she wanted to be pregnant, the two of us made love to her jointly, both of us offering a gift of sperm to this girl whom we love. Unless the child resembles one of us strongly, we will never know whose sperm was accepted. This was a deliberate choice; we want the child to have not one father but two. The same procedure will be followed if and when Nan and Kitty decide to get pregnant... We are all confident that our loving household will be a far better nursery than is provided in the standard American monogamous marriage...

Burton

JWW: A final exchange of letters in the course of preparing this book brought assurance that the group is still intact and going strong, that Janet is rejoicing in her pregnancy and is the envy of Nan and Kitty, that the group is almost certain to remain permanently at five, and that several other group marriages have begun to take shape in the college community, largely inspired by their example.

JWW: I do know of one group marriage which constitutes more an adaptation to circumstantial developments than the pursuit of a philosophical ideal. It involves three couples who live separately and raise their children separately, which makes it a substantially less tightly knit form of group marriage than Burton’s. The nature of the relationship is such, however, that I feel it is closer to group marriage in structure and concept than a trio of swinging couples.

My personal knowledge of this group is limited by the circumstances under which I acquired it. I was stuck overnight in a Midwestern city when my flight home was canceled because of weather conditions. I took a room at a nearby Holiday Inn and spent the evening in the bar. Somewhere along the way I began drinking and chatting with a fellow who had been similarly stranded and who was similarly morose about it. Conversation established that I was a writer, and what sort of things I wrote about. “I could tell you something you wouldn’t believe,” he said. I told him to go right ahead, but he grinned and changed the subject.

After more drinks and more talk, he began telling me about the relationship he and his wife had with two other couples. We went on drinking until the bar closed, and the next day I nursed a hangover at thirty-thousand feet. It was several days before I got around to jotting down some notes of what I recalled of our conversation. What follows is thus a less precise reconstruction of what I heard than is usually the case, as I can’t recall his conversational style and have no doubt forgotten some minor facts. I never did learn the names of the principals, and while I must have known his first name, I’m damned if I can remember it. For convenience, let’s name the couples alphabetically as Abner and Ann, Ben and Beverly, and Chuck and Cynthia. Abner’s the narrator — if his real name had been Abner, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have forgotten it.

“I might as well tell you this. You don’t know my name, or where I live, and we’re never going to see each other again, so what the hell.

“There are six of us, three couples. We’re all of us the same age, early thirties, and we’ve all been married just about ten years. Ben and Chuck and I work for the same company. We all went with this company shortly after we got married, and we were all from different parts of the country originally. We got to know each other because we were all living in the same apartment complex. This wasn’t a great coincidence — it’s not that large a city, and young couples starting out in our type of situation, young executives, no children, there are only two or three places you’re likely to live.

“The six of us became very friendly. The three guys would drive to work together, splitting the driving. The wives would get together during the day to go shopping or have coffee or look at television. We were all in a new place where we didn’t know anybody and had no ties whatsoever, so we became closer than we probably would have under other circumstances.

“Now, this was the pattern for a matter of years, the three guys going to and from work together, the wives seeing each other days, and our social activity being shared among the three couples. On a week night we might have one or both couples over for dinner. On a weekend it would be the six of us going to a movie or bowling or having drinks at one of our apartments. Our first children were all three born in the space of about eight months, and then we all began talking about moving out of the apartment complex and buying houses. There was a desire to do this at the same time, and to buy houses in the same development. As it turned out, one new housing development offered what we all agreed was the best deal, and we wound up buying a house next door to Ben and Beverly and across the street from Chuck and Cynthia. Our houses were different in trim, but all had the same floor plan, just as our apartments before had had identical floor plans. All along, we made the usual jokes about getting drunk and coming home to the wrong house by mistake, and sleeping with somebody else’s wife and not noticing the difference until morning. Everybody in developments makes this kind of joke.

“I don’t know what this has to do with anything, but early on our wives found out that they had their periods at the same time. Their cycles gradually got on the same wave length. One of the girls said this isn’t that rare, that girls in her dorm at college, roommates, would usually be on the same cycle.”

JWW: It’s not rare; in fact, it’s quite common. I have no idea how or why it happens, but it does. A friend of mine was bemused (and more than a little disappointed) when his wife and his mistress began menstruating simultaneously. Their cycles had formerly been very different, and the two did not even know each other, which particularly baffled him.

“About three, four years ago, some things started happening. First of all, Ben had an affair with Cynthia. I don’t know if you would call it an affair. They had sex a couple of times. Then Bev and I got into a clinch in the kitchen one night when we both had had a few more than usual. Cynthia walked in, and we made a joke out of it, and I kissed Cynthia to even it out, but I don’t think she was fooled, and Bev and I knew that we felt something for each other.

“Next, Chuck found out about Ben and Cynthia, and Cynthia swore she wouldn’t see Ben anymore, and Chuck didn’t let on to Ben that he knew anything about it, but told me privately one night when we were both drunk. I kept having both Bev and Cynthia on my mind, and I made a heavy pass at Bev, but we stopped short of going all the way and agreed to keep it cool, and shortly thereafter I made a pass at Cynthia and slept with her, and about the same time Chuck and Ann were falling in love, not going to bed, but deciding that they loved each other.”

JWW: Well, I guess that’s close enough to the way it happened. I obviously can’t remember precisely who did what and with whom. What it amounts to is that these six longstanding friends suddenly began to become sexually conscious of one another at about the same time, and to do something about it. It might be argued that even before this happened, they had achieved much of the dynamic of the group marriage without the exchange of sexual partners. According to Abner, none of them had ever committed adultery with anyone at all before this point, but he might not have been in a position to know for certain what the others did or did not do.

“For a few months we were going along with everything up in the air and everybody waiting for the shit to hit the fan. Like one day I had two drinks for lunch and called Bev from the office. I said, ‘Look, everybody’s fucking everybody else, so why don’t I come over, and you and I can do what we should have done a long time ago.’ She said she couldn’t see me, and I found out later that it was because Chuck was over there at the time.

“It was all strange. Things seesawed back and forth. Ben put his house on the market and was going to move out of town with or without Beverly, and then he changed his mind and took it back out from under the realtor two days before the closing. There was a lot of drinking, there was a lot of shouting and going nuts, and then finally there was a meeting of all three couples, and we worked things out.

“What it came down to was that all of the guys loved all of the girls, and nothing was going to change this. And none of us really objected to the cheating. None of the husbands really gave a shit if his wife slept with one of the other men. And vice versa. What bothered everybody was first the constant sneaking around, and second the anxiety that marriages would fail, and the uneasiness among people who had grown so friendly.

“So what we do is switch around when we feel like it. There’s no set pattern. The great majority of the time I’ll be with Ann. Or I may call Bev or Cynthia, or they may call me. Or two or three of the couples will get together for an evening, and people will drift off to different bedrooms by twos, and nobody asks questions.”

JWW: As far as I was able to determine, there was no bisexual behavior among any of the six, no sexual acts involving more than two persons, and no commitment to any ideal beyond the standard argument that any activity is all right so long as it does not injure anyone else.

There may have been complexities that Abner did not care to tell me about. It’s occurred to me, too, that his entire story may well have been sheer invention. It would not surprise me to learn that he spun the whole story out of thin air, or that he had put forth the plot of a novel as his own experience. It’s also quite possible that the three couples, friends and neighbors, do exist, but that the sexual activity among them does not, that it represented wishful thinking on Abner’s part. And it’s also possible that everything he told me is gospel. My judgment that evening was not at its best; strong drink, like the Shadow, has the power to cloud men’s minds. I do seem to recall the feeling throughout that Abner was holding something back, that there was a significant bit of data he was unwilling to reveal to me. As to what it might be, your guess is as good as mine.

JWW: Does group marriage have a future?

I’m a little sorry I asked myself that question, as I’m not at all sure of the answer. I would certainly say that group marriage has a short-term future — i.e., the number of experiments with group marriage and the general public’s awareness of the phenomenon will undoubtedly increase in, say, the next decade. This seems inevitable, given the great interest in the concept as contrasted to the small number of group marriages actually in existence.

But this is not to say that it will have lasting impact on marriage as an institution, or that it will serve most people who embrace it as an alternative to monogamy. It would seem to me that a successful group marriage would have to have the components which Burton describes as existing in his, including a strong emotional bond among all the participants, a deep universal commitment to both the concept of group marriage and to permanence, and either an extreme community of interests and personal circumstances or a great deal of flexibility in these areas.

Finally, I would submit that a large portion of the attraction of group marriage in concept derives directly from the fact that it is uncommon. “What we have is beautiful and righteous despite what the outside world would think” — this heady statement of affirmation loses much of its impact if the outside world does accept group marriage.

I might as well state my personal bias. I find it illogical at root that a person who considers sharing his life with one other person an infringement on his freedom would fail to find himself more fettered by being united in marriage to more than one person. It is like discovering that one’s apartment is too small, and coping with the problem by adopting three children and six English sheepdogs.

What About The Kids?

It’s only reasonable to wonder about the ultimate effect of these new styles of marriage on the offspring of those marriages. A great many questions present themselves. Is it good or bad to grow up with a father and two mothers? What happens when children find out that their parents are swingers? Or should the fact be kept from them in the first place?

In almost all instances, persons enthusiastic about their particular form of marriage will argue that their children will be at worst unaffected, at best favorably affected, by the manner in which they have structured their particular relationship. And in almost all instances I suspect that they are less free from anxiety on this point than they prefer to let on — whether to me, to each other, or to themselves. No previous generation has recognized as thoroughly as the present one the extent to which family relationships influence the development of personality. The importance of providing the best possible atmosphere for children is a serious concern of every responsible parent, and even in the most conventional household one finds parents anxious that they may not be doing the right thing. Because no one seems to know what the right thing might be, and everyone can point to children from seemingly ideal backgrounds who have become criminals, drug addicts, psychotics, or whatever. Given this combination of great concern and great uncertainty, one can hardly expect parents with radical life styles to be supremely confident.

It would be easy enough to cite a variety of cases showing how children from an unconventional marriage turned out badly, and demonstrating inferentially how the structure of the parental marriage might be blamed for the results. It would be no more difficult to do the opposite, holding up presumably well-adjusted children and crediting their soundness to the honesty and courage their parents have shown in marching to a different drummer. Finally, I could present examples to prove both sides, which would make me appear either a man of balanced judgment or a wishy-washy milksop, as you prefer.

Instead, I’m going to pass on the question.

I think it’s unanswerable at the present time, on a par with inquiring into the possible long-term effects of a drug that came onto the market only a year ago.

I suspect that the idealism inherent in a large portion of permissive marriages and plural marriages could have a very beneficial effect upon children, if only because the heightened importance attached to making the marriage itself a vital and honest relationship would likely carry over into the performance of parental functions. I also suspect that the lack of stability of so many of these marriages could have a distinctly bad effect. Children might grow up proud of their parents’ hipness and refusal to conform to societal norms; on the other hand, they might yearn to have been raised Like All the Other Kids.

There are certain childhood experiences which are readily associated with specific behavior patterns in adult life. As one example, sexual seduction by the father or a father figure before puberty is a background element in the history of a significant number of prostitutes, to the point where some sort of causal relationship is considered to exist. But, just as one need not have gone through this experience in order to become a prostitute, neither do all girls thus seduced wind up as prostitutes. Indeed, some actually wind up with no visible emotional scars whatsoever.

Another argument against trying to estimate the effects of unconventional marriage on children is that we do not yet know just how unconventional these relationships will seem a few years from now. Some swingers recently brushed aside the question with the suggestion that, by the time their children are old enough to know what’s happening, swinging will be accepted throughout society as normal and legitimate. This sounds like overstatement, but any examination of current social trends leads to the supposition that social attitudes will continue to increase in permissiveness for some time to come.

Some other thoughts on children might not be out of place here. Even as the structure of marriage is increasingly being altered, so is the relationship of marriage and child-raising coming to a point where it is no longer to be taken for granted.

Until very recently, the intentionally childless marriage was an unusual occurrence. And, until about as recently, it was virtually unheard of for a person to intentionally conceive and raise a child out of wedlock.

Admittedly, there has been no mass movement in the opposite direction. The great majority of couples who marry do so with the eventual plan of raising children. The great majority of single women continue to find the prospect of unmarried motherhood unattractive. But departures from both of these norms are being actively considered by a significant number of people, and actually undertaken by some of them.

Similar factors are responsible for both phenomena. The most obvious one is the extent to which childbirth has become voluntary. Improved contraceptive techniques, opportunities for sterilization, and the increasing availability and moral acceptability of abortion have made parenthood far more a matter of choice than it has ever been in the past.

Ecological considerations have lately led more and more people to view the childless marriage as not only possible but morally preferable. While the more vocal advocates of Zero Population Growth, like the loudest spokesmen for most causes, impress most people as monomaniacal and unrealistic. Young married couples are not often inclined to dismiss all of their arguments out of hand. I’m sure only a handful of couples fervently desire to reproduce themselves and deny themselves this satisfaction out of consideration for the planet’s welfare. But couples who would prefer not to have children anyway find it far easier to act on this preference. Not long ago a couple who remained intentionally childless was apt to be regarded as selfish for refusing to play their biological roles, even sinful for ignoring the divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply. Now the same couple is more likely to be considered selfless for subordinating their desires to the good of the world in general. Social pressures which might have made them act against their own deepest wishes no longer have much force.

It may seem paradoxical that single women are electing to have children at the same time that married women are electing not to. Again, the element of choice plays a part. The single woman who realizes her freedom to avoid conception or to abort an unintentionally conceived fetus realizes in turn her freedom not to avoid motherhood. I know two girls who had had several illegal abortions between them prior to the legalization of abortion in New York State; both found themselves pregnant again shortly after the change in the law, and both elected to have the children, a step neither had seriously considered before.

The alternative of abortion has the additional property of reducing the number of marriages which result from undesired pregnancies. A man is less likely to marry a woman out of a sense of noblesse oblige if he knows that she can easily and safely terminate the pregnancy. Here a young woman describes the thought processes involved in her decision to keep her child:

“He wasn’t interested in marriage, and I didn’t feel I could pressure him into it, or that it would be desirable to marry a man who didn’t want to marry me. And I had always thought abortion was all right, and I still think it’s morally right for other people, but I found that it was not something I could go through with. The same feeling of responsibility that kept me from having an abortion made it impossible for me to put the baby up for adoption. And when I had her, and she was so beautiful, I cried with joy knowing I had made the right decision.”

JWW: The prospect of raising a child in a fatherless home holds less dread than it did. The public example of several women in the entertainment industry is often cited as contributing to a change in attitudes. I don’t doubt this has an effect, but even more influential is the example of the many women who have borne children in wedlock and raised them much as unmarried mothers do.

“My first reaction was, how can I support myself and take care of a child at the same time, because I would have to work and like that. Then I thought about all the women I know who are mothers holding down full-time jobs. It doesn’t really matter if they’re married or not. It comes down to the same thing — they have to make arrangements for daycare. You don’t need a husband to do that. There are all these working wives, and there are all these divorced women who have no choice because they’re not getting child support, and there are widows, and it should be easier for them, there should be public daycare centers, but they don’t have that hard a time of it. Any married woman who works will tell you she does it because she wants to. So I thought it out, and I figured what’s the difference between a working wife and a working divorcée and a working unmarried mother in terms of the hassle involved, and I couldn’t see any difference. And I liked the idea of having a child, so why not just have it?”

JWW: These are negative decisions — the decision not to have an abortion, not to give a child up for adoption. They are decisions undertaken after the fact of unwanted pregnancy is confirmed. Most single women who decide to have children make that decision under such circumstances. Some may unconsciously choose to be pregnant by being lax in contraceptive procedure — one can always play with that type of hypothesis, and I’m sure it’s sometimes valid — but on a conscious level the decision is made after conception, not before it.

But in a small proportion of cases, conception is purposefully undertaken by women who come to the rational conclusion that (a) they do not want to be married and (b) they do want to experience motherhood. Here’s a good articulation of this motive:

“I knew I didn’t want to get married again. I was married and divorced, and maybe I would be ready to get married someday, but for the time being it was not what I wanted. And I was getting close to thirty, and I don’t think it’s good to become a mother too much after that, and the desire for a child was pressuring me to seek marriage, which at the same time I knew I could not handle. I was very calculating. I went through the men I knew and picked the one I thought was most suitable from a genetic standpoint. Maybe it wasn’t that scientific. Let’s say I picked him because I thought I would most want to have children that were like him.

“He was a man I had slept with a couple of times, and I thought of just starting an affair with him and not letting him know I was getting pregnant, but I rejected that. I felt the dishonesty would ultimately have detrimental effects to me and to the baby. So I went to him and told him what I wanted.

“He was stunned, but he managed to be cool about it. He said he wanted to think about it. A few days later he told me he felt enormously honored, it was a tremendous ego thing for him, and he felt he could get pleasure out of fatherhood without participating in the bringing up of the kid. But he also felt he would feel a responsibility, and yet he didn’t want to take on a financial burden. We decided that he would not give me any money for the baby’s support but that he would carry two insurance policies, one that would cover the child’s college education whether he lived or died, the other to pay a large sum to me in trust for the child in the event of his death. His argument was that he wanted to guarantee the kid’s education, and he also wanted to guarantee his ability to provide help in emergency circumstances. In other words, I was to feel free to go to him in time of stress for help, and the second policy was to make sure that he could render this help from the grave if he happened to die.

“I expect that I may decide to marry at some future time. I recognized this possibility when I decided to do all of this. If any husband would be turned off by the fact that I have a child, he’s a man I wouldn’t want to be married to anyway. And whatever happens, I’m leading a life I find fulfilling, and find myself less hung up about being single than I was before the baby was born.”

JWW: A man will less often decide to father a child out of wedlock, if only because he feels the decision is not his to make. I think it’s a biological imperative that men will display a more cavalier attitude here. There’s a pop poster of a man with an enlarged abdomen and the caption, “Wouldn’t you be more careful if it was you who got pregnant?” The poster is designed to stress the male’s responsibility for birth control, but to my mind it defeats its own purpose by virtue of its inherent truth. Yes, to be sure, men would be more careful if they bore the burden of pregnancy, but men don’t get pregnant, and probably never will, and thus will never be quite so intimately concerned as women always will.

There are cases of single men who elect to raise their children themselves. Lately single men and single women have begun to adopt children, and this trend is one which I believe is likely to increase dramatically. There is a disconcerting division in the area of adoption; “ideal” babies are in chronic short supply, while less ideal prospects for adoption — biracial children, children more than a few months old, et al. — are so excessively available as to be a drug on the market. Public and private adoption agencies are coming to realize that their standards must be revised if they are to comply with laws of supply and demand, and persons who heretofore assumed adoption was closed to them are coming to realize their potential for fatherhood or motherhood.

There are instances, too, where a male will accept fatherhood after an involuntary pregnancy, or seek it actively. I am personally acquainted with both types of incidents. One man I know impregnated a girl with whom he had a casual acquaintance, found the prospect of abortion personally insupportable, and persuaded the girl to marry him (so that his legal rights to the child would be defined), then obtain an immediate annulment and leave him to raise the child. His daughter is now three years old, and he has contended with the problem of raising her in a motherless home, and if he has ever regretted his decision, he has kept that regret a secret.

Another friend, in the course of an extramarital affair, found that he desired to have a child by his mistress. He had already had three children with his wife, and enjoyed paternity. His mistress rejected the idea at first, accepted it on reflection, and has since given birth to the child. He sees the infant regularly and contributes substantially to its support. His wife is unaware of the circumstances.

JWW: We could go on this way, but I think the point is clear enough. Changes in our concepts of marriage are being echoed in a variety of ways by changes in our concepts of parenthood.

Which should not be surprising. The French have assured us that the more things change, the more they remain the same. This has almost always been true. Yet I am nearly persuaded to believe that there are times when the old maxim does not apply, times when, the more things change, the more they change. We are living through precisely such a time, and I cannot believe that the substantive changes in every stratum of society will not amount to a genuine change in the nature of the human life experience.

Ah, but let’s not get into that. Let’s leave this book as what it set out to be, a discussion of the changes in marital relationships. Let’s get off the stage before it turns into a heavy rap on the several ways in which the world is coming to an end — or coming to a beginning.

Content

John Warren Wells
Wide Open: The New Marriage

Introduction

Living Together

Swinging

Going Separate Ways

Side by Side by Side

With These Rings We Thee Wed

What About The Kids?