A Revelation About Playing Separately

What could be more fun and rewarding for a couple than to spice up their sex life by playing together with other couples or singles?  Getting to watch your partner from a vantage point other than "right on top of them" during sex is something that few people in our country actually get to experience.  And being able to talk about the shared experiences you both had at the same time can fuel conversations for weeks and months to come.

That is how we started out, and it made sense.  We had the reassurance and security of having each other in the same room, watching out for each other, and finding other couples to play with was relatively easy.  Bur now that we are approaching 9 years involved in swinging, we have learned a LOT more about what we are each looking for in our play partners, and finding a guy that SHE likes and a girl that I like that are actually together started becoming increasingly difficult over the years.  So even though in the beginning we never thought it would happen, as our experience and comfort levels grew along with our "pickiness" for our play partners, we started finding ourselves saying "Hey, go play with so-and-so ... I'm gonna chill out here while you play."  In other words, we started "playing separately".


We have realized that there is no rule for against playing together that we set up, but in the absence of a couple that we are both wanting to play with together and the opportunity to do so, we are perfectly fine playing separately in the meantime.  How this works out for us and the benefit we get from it is somewhat surprising.  We have heard of many swinger couples that play separately with a strict "don't ask don't tell" policy where one partner simply doesn't want to know who the other is having sex with, but to us that feels a bit more like pre-approved cheating that can make a couple drift apart rather than bring them closer together.  Instead what we found is the mutual reward for us in playing separately is in telling stories.

It was an amazing revelation the other day when my wife said out of the blue "You know, I miss hearing your stories about so-and-so."  The so-and-so is a play friend that I  have that moved a couple hours away and we don't see each other much any more.  But to hear that was a bit surprising because there is nothing She directly got when I spent time with my play friend.  Instead my wife identified that she got a great deal of joy from hearing the stories about the times when I was off with my friend, even though she didn't participate in any way.  Then I started thinking about the times that I encouraged my wife to go play with a guy here or there, and I realized I felt the same way.  While she was gone it was nothing great, and sometimes I did have some concerns when I didn't hear from her for a while, but the reward for me too was when she got home and told me all about the fun and crazy times she had playing with a guy that sometimes I knew and sometimes I didn't.  But for both of us the sharing of what we liked and didn't like and the fun events and reactions made it all worthwhile.

So if you end up in a situation where you as a couple do end up playing separately, we strongly suggest that you consider talking and sharing about what happened to "close the gap" and let your partner live vicariously through what you tell them.  There is just something rewarding in hearing all about how your partner had fun, even when it is not with you.