or, How to Lead a Swinging Lifestyle Without Having to Involve Yourself with All Those Other People
So you and your plucky mate have been tossing around the “swingers” idea again, have you? Been looking fondly at passers-by? Letting the flirting at work creep up to the next level (the one just below “actionable”)? Or perhaps you’ve just been enjoying the same meal, metaphorically speaking, for so long that it’s becoming predictable, unappetizing and easy to skip? When your lover become less of a banquet and more like greasy leftovers, it’s time to change something.
But sneaking around just isn’t fair, as well as being a pain to negotiate, and it’s getting harder and harder to get away with besides. It used to be that you just had to watch for lipstick stains, odd-colored strands of hair, bodily marks that weren’t there before your “business trip”, and the occasional accidental public meeting and subsequent judicial decision, but now, what with current technology bounding along, it’s entirely possible that the coat you got for Christmas contains a hidden GPS homing beacon and your spouse is tracking you on the Internet. Couples can make a go of the open marriage thing as long they both have some action on the side so the cheating achieves parity, but scheduling becomes a major undertaking, especially if you only have the one car.
At some point in your sensual career the idea will come up of safely introducing another player into your previously closed set, and now we’re really getting into problems. Whom to choose? Another man, or a woman? Or another couple? How do you go about finding them? Ask a friend? Advertise? Should you swap partners, or just go at it concurrently, as it were? Should everyone be in the same room? What if (I/my lover) like(s) him/her/them better than (my lover/me)? What if the other people like really weird stuff? What if they think we’re perverts? What if they’re from Vice? What if they’re secretly recording us for blackmail, or to sell online? What if word gets out? What if we’re not any good? What if the kids walk in? Oh dear god, what about diseases?
I’m not saying that all these problems will arise (they will), or that they can’t be overcome if they do, but there are actually many ways to pump up your sex life with that swinging thrill without having to clean up the living room, and I don’t mean just dressing the wife up as a tart.
Dressing the Wife Up As a Tart
It is a place to begin, however. Just because you’re committed to one person doesn’t mean you have to keep sleeping with the same one over and over, does it? It’s said that every person contains multitudes of personalities, so why not date a few of them? They’re certainly easier to find, for one thing, and a dating service shouldn’t be required unless the multiple personality thing is really severe. Dressing up in costumes is one way to go about it, although there does need to be some role-playing involved. Only an enema bag full of ice water could be more chilling than hearing, “Right, so I’m a nun. Let’s get this over with so I can get some sleep, this thing is itchier than a burlap thong.”
Pretending to be other people can be a harmless way of siphoning off some of that urge-to-swing pressure, and you’re virtually guaranteed to discover something about your bedmate that you never suspected before, even if it’s only of the “He should be prohibited by law from ever wearing tights again” variety. You can even take it out in public, arranging to meet each other in bars and such, although it would probably be a good idea to agree on matching costumes beforehand. Unless of course you get really turned on by the thought of, say, Martin Luthor picking up Cinderella in a sports pub and taking her in a back alley for a quickie. Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound too bad…
Lovers by Proxy (or Sex by Mail)
You don’t necessarily need a new person in the room, you just need some new viewpoints. Try a few of these handy tips:
• Pop in a porn tape, turn the volume up and turn the set towards the wall. Now you can pretend you’ve been invited to a massive orgy and the two of you just ducked into a side room.
• Pick a famous couple and act out what you think their sex life must be like. No fair picking anyone from the Royal Family or a Kennedy, they’re too well documented. Or you could pick two famous people that you think really should have sex (here I’m thinking, as I’m sure you are, of Angelina Jolie and Foghorn Leghorn). Alternately you can pick your own friends or acquaintances and act out what you think their sex life is like. Make sure you don’t get too interested in her masterful rendition of Miss Jenkins from Accounting, however. Anything you say can and will be used against you later on, so you should definitely avoid such exclamations as, “Oh, Margaret, this is exactly how I imagined it!” or “I thought you’d be thinner.”
• Pick up some good smut and act out the sex scenes. Simple test for good smut books – pick it up and open it three times at random. If you hit a sex scene twice, buy it. Fortunately this works in almost any book published since 1972 that doesn’t actually involve Harry Potter.
• Play the stock market. Not the boring way, with money and everything, but in bed. Take an assortment of stocks, write them out and assign a different sex act to each one. At the close of trading each day, check the returns and map out your evening playtime from the results. This also gives you the extra anticipation from watching the stock market throughout the day. “C’mon, Amalgamated! Two more points and it’s titty city! Go baby, go! I need this bad!” Don’t worry about your co-workers talking about you – all investors talk like this.
Bringing In a Whole Other Person
If you’re really having difficulties changing your perspective, you can get some outside help without compromising your fidelity or having to share your towels.
• Invite a friend to provide choreography. Whether by e-mail, pre-written suggestion, or even a whispered comment before you leave work, your friend can provide a game plan that you might not have considered. Even a passed note at lunch that says “Apply lubricant with a whitewash brush and bucket” can add a new depth to your evening activities. You could even trade notes every day, get a sort of one-upmanship competition thing going. “Okay, I did him in the rectory like you said, now tonight you have to let him strap you to the ice cream truck.” Bringing it up with your friend in the first place is your problem.
• If you need on-the-spot advice, dial up a phone sex number and let her (or them) talk you both through. Think of it like calling up a sexual hotline, where operators are lying by. You can call a friend for the same purpose but by that point you may not be capable of explaining yourself and people tend to hang up on late night breathers. Call a pro.
• Get online and join a chat room, then let everyone decide by consensus what should happen next. Spend some time investigating chat rooms before you do this – you don’t want to discover that your sex life is being directed by a group of 11-year-old quilting enthusiasts.
• If you’re bold enough, you can invite a friend over to call out suggestions from the next room. It can be an incredible rush knowing someone else is so intimately involved with what you’re doing, it’s oddly relaxing not having to decide what to do, and extremely thrilling wondering what your friend will think up next. To get past the inevitable embarrassment, a glass or two of wine for everyone can be invaluable. You might even let them bring a date, in case they feel more comfortable that way. Or you can invite a small group of friends over to get a more varied collection of suggestions. Yes, I think that would be the best way. A roomful of your buddies, roaring drunk, screaming sexual advice at your bedroom door. What could be more romantic?
• You can involve friends and still remain private. Invite a trusted friend to videotape you and your lover at play, but blindfold them to maintain decorum. They can follow the noises for the most part. If focus is really a problem or if you tend to move around a lot, have them creep slowly up until their toes touch flesh, then stop and just aim the camera down. Or you can work out a modified version of the water game “Marco Polo”.
• Wouldn’t it be nice to visit Mom? Just stop by as a surprise, maybe bring some dinner. She’ll be so pleased she won’t even notice the two of you taking so long to visit the bathroom and you’ll be able to relive some of the teenage excitement you haven’t really experienced since you moved out and finally lost your paranoid habit of listening for slippers coming down the hall.
There are many possible ways of improving your sex life and still keeping it in the family. Sleeping with someone else just because your current sex life is boring is like giving up on your favorite team during a losing streak. Just like with your team, try encouragement and different plays for a few seasons before you trade them for someone younger with faster hands.