Getting Started Swinging

What is Swinging?  My favorite definition of Swinging is people in committed relationships openly engaging in sexual activity with people outside of their committed relationships. Swinging takes on many forms involving married couples, engaged couples, dating couples, single guys, and single women, so it is a bit tricky to cover all the ways it can happen.

Before moving on, let me make this important statement:

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

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

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

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

Now, if as a couple you two really appreciate and adore each other and the sex is already good for both of you, and talking about maybe having another couple watch you have sex together heats things up in bed for you two, this might be a good lifestyle to try together. But how do you get started?  Our recommendation -- visit a Swinger Club.

Ditch the Dinner, Hit a Club
Before we found out about Swinger Clubs we went a slightly different route by posting an ad in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist and tried the dinner and drinks thing with a couple a few times to see if we found the right couple. (See About Us for details.) After two dinners together and no real hint of a connection we decided to find a better way to meet people. We just felt like we were wasting our valuable family time arranging babysitters and schedules to dine with people that we ended up not wanting to be around. So we did a little research, decided to bite the bullet, and went to a Swinger club.

In our opinion, Swinger clubs are much more laid back than strip clubs, and more fun because the people are REAL instead of models that are walking around ... real people dressing sexy, dancing sexy, and mingling. Swinger clubs are very open to couples coming and just watching and enjoying the sexy atmosphere and various levels of nudity that the people there are in. Sometimes there are people that have sex in the open that you can watch too. You can totally watch together and share that experience and see how you feel.  After your visit, talk about it together as much as you can. If you BOTH don't 100% agree on it being a good thing and wanting to go back, things will be much better if you don't go back until you are both on the same page and want to try it again. Pushing anyone past their comfort zone in this lifestyle usually just makes things worse.

Going to a Swinger club is simply our favorite way to meet new couples and singles, but even if we chat with a couple online and want to physically meet for the first time, meeting at a club is still our favorite. There is no pressure like if we went out to dinner or drinks with a specific couple in public. If we meet at a club and both sides are attracted to the other then we have a place to play and have sex right there. Try doing THAT meeting at a bar or a restaurant! However, if either or both sides are not feeling like there is the right chemistry there, well there are a hundred or so other people right there that are all looking for basically the same thing, and we can introduce the new couple to some of them. And if they've never been to a Swinger club before, they are in for a treat! Just sitting around watching the half-dressed women and men mingling and dancing is well worth the trip.

Swinger Websites
If you really are just not comforable with the thought of going out to a Swinger club just yet but you still want to meet couples if possible, one thing you may want to try is putting a profile on a Swinger Personals website.  You can read all about doing that in our article about that HERE.

Hotel Parties and House Parties
If you're not up for larger groups, there are also "hotel parties" and "house parties" which tend to be a bit smaller in number (but not always). Although we have not been to any ourselves, from what we've heard they can be more intimate and friendly since they are usually hosted by people that make a lot of effort to help everyone mingle and feel comfortable. Being that they are sometimes "one-time-events" rather than a place that is open two or three nights a week, people kind of put more effort into being social and friendly versus hiding in the shadows.

The key to really getting comfortable and figuring out what this lifestyle is all about, we believe, is to put yourselves in situations where like-minded people are gathering and just start talking to them. If you are new or less experienced then you have the opportunity to learn a lot from people you meet in Swinger environments. So talk to the people that you can, but even MORE importantly, if you are a couple talk, talk, and talk some more to each other!

Terminology
There is a lot of special terminology that is used by Swingers, so it's totally understandable that people have put together dictionaries and glossaries. One that seems fairly comprehensive is HERE. It may help to make yourself somewhat familiar with these terms before you start talking to other Swingers so you are talking the same language.

Playing
One term you should be familiar with right away is "Playing". When Swingers say "play" they are using it as a catch-all term for any kind of sexual activity that you do with other people, whether it is oral sex, intercourse, anal sex, spanking, bondage, masturbation, etc.. So just be aware that until you discuss the details, if you ask someone if they would like to "play", and they say Yes, you two may be thinking you have agreed to two totally different things. The key is to talk BEFORE you start playing so you both know what is expected.

Sex and Fucking

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

How do you play??

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

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

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

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

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

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

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