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Myth No.3: Swingers Lack Commitment

Dr. Jay and Liseth

In this third myth-buster installment, we explore the notion that couples who swing lack commitment.

I met a group of swingers on their own turf in their own village and spent a week with them. Following are a series of articles that outline what I believe to be the “5 top myths about swingers” that my clinical training taught me, and I believe is representative of how a lot of people think about this emerging sub-culture who seems to be leading the next sexual revolution.

In this third myth-buster installment, we explore the notion that couples who swing lack commitment.

Myth No.3: Couples who swing lack commitment

Let’s take this myth on directly: Most of my esteemed colleagues in the psychology industry say things like, “At the core of swinger behavior is a lack of ability to commit and a fear of intimacy, which is at the root of consensual non-monogamy.”

Honestly, I found this a compelling argument until I actually got to know real swingers on the SDC cruise. Yes, all of us depending upon the erotic context we navigate can fall prey to primitive vulnerabilities (e.g. insecurity, jealously, inability to commit, intimacy phobia). However, to cavalierly dismiss those in the lifestyle as intimacy phobics who cannot commit is shortsighted and smug.

Think about it: To experience a level of comfort with your spouse enjoying a sexual experience with someone else takes a gargantuan level of commitment and trust!

To the contrary: Rather than be afraid of their own or their partner’s erotic proclivities, we spoke to dozens of people who welcome the opportunity to better understand and respect what they and their partner desire sexually in solidarity and support for them getting needs met in a transparent way. The commitment was to shepherd the desire and invite it in its many forms into the sanctity of their union, not deny its presence and be overcome by the aberrant shadow it so often casts through betrayal and infidelity. Rather than being confined by a puritanical notion of commitment that sees sexual exclusivity as proof of devotion, swingers seem to find their “safety” inside of committed inclusivity where infinite variety is negotiated via mutual consent rather than thwarted by assumed compliance with a prescriptive cultural ideal.

Think about it; to experience a level of comfort for your spouse to enjoy sexual pleasure with another person requires a gargantuan level of commitment and trust!

People who lack commitment are sometimes described as those with “leaky characters,” A.K.A. selfish assholes who are out to get something for nothing and exploit other people. Granted, I did not administer any psychological tests on the SDC cruise as we were guest content experts, so I cannot make an empirically validated claim here. However, I did immerse myself into the “swinger village” on the ship enough to engage in dozens of deep and substantive conversations with a cross-section of this interesting subset of the population and there were several undeniable themes recast and retold in different ways all saying some very similar things. What we learned was surprising.

In our N of 24 + couples interviewed, a consistent couple’s profile emerged: married for 15-20 years; 2.5 kids (both full-nesters and empty-nesters); professionals either at a high level of executive management or entrepreneur business owner; divorced and in 2nd or 3rd marriage; actively involved in their local communities at varied levels (church elders, a synagogue cantor, and a PTA President); a rich network of friendships (many are frequent customers of other lifestyle events and invest in planned trips with those friends as a structured commitment to those relationships); interested and involved in their children’s lives (many were fielding calls, texts and FaceTiming with their children and grandchildren to “stay connected” to them during the cruise). The SDC adventure advertised as a “lifestyle cruise” was a diverse heterogeneous cross section of the North American and international upper-middle class culture made up of very “normal” people.

Swingers are very normal people who commit to the unconventional as a hedge against future relationship failure

The takeaway? These people have a wide range of highly active and engaged social contact and connections, all of which require an active commitment to maintain. Any one of them could be sitting next to me in my children’s after-school activities, a Bible study class, a community cultural event, non-profit fund raiser or having dinner at a table across from us on our date night at our local pub.

What also emerged were consistent patterns of discontent in their prior relationships that led to lots of reported drama and divorces alongside a “commitment” to learn from those mistakes and implement unconventional changes to not repeat them. This was an evolved group of folks who experienced real life, and in many cases those experiences were painful and costly. The divorce chronicles we heard repeatedly were evidence of this where hard-earned lessons in what caused prior marriages to fail were paid forward in choosing consensual non-monogamy (CNM) as a buffer to enhance commitment and quality of their love life as an “investment” in a new model of marriage that all believed deepened their commitment and bond.

Here’s what we heard: “Things got boring, everything was more important than the marriage; we stopped learning and growing together; I was suffocating from control and complying with their demands; I couldn’t live up to his/her expectations; we both got out of shape and stopped trying to be sexy; burned out and restless; all of our friends were getting divorced; I had an affair; I thought about having an affair all the time; I was soul dead; we were devitalized and on the verge of splitting up; we stopped having sex; the sex was terrible and routine…” and it continued -- all landing in the same place: “the swinging lifestyle saved our marriage”. Again, very counterintuitive and not what we expected to hear.

This was often from people who have been in a long-term committed second marriage, and active in the lifestyle for 7 to 15 years. It’s hard to argue with results, although my instincts and hubris of being a clinician who knew better wanted to.

Contrary to the popular mythology that most professional healers such as myself were indoctrinated into, these couples were some of the happiest and healthiest I have ever spoken to in almost three decades of doing clinical psychotherapy with couples. Certainly, no perfection here but undeniably a very strong “commitment” to “getting it right” and investing real time and very real money (e.g., some people paid in excess of $10k to be on this cruise) into the “lifestyle” as one of many commitments in their respective relationship journey to make their partnership a priority and do what it takes to invest in making it satisfying and fulfilling for both partners.