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1. What is your moral position toward swinging? Are you a person who practices monogammy but believe it is possible to have a happy and fulfilled swinging marriage? Are you a person who believes monogammy is the only morally justified means of being married?
Morality is one of those subjective words where it can mean one thing to one person and another to someone else. To me "morality" is treating my fellow man in a manner which will not harm them emotionally, physically or financially. Everything else is just people's attempts to pigeonhole others because it fills a black hole of insecurity and gives them some kind of peace of mind feeling "morally superior" to someone else.
2. What is your experience with swingers? Do you personally know any swingers? In your opinion, is their relationship successful?
My wife and I have been together twelve years and opened-up our relationship six years ago through swinging. After being together five years we started talking honestly and openly about our fantasies beyond the basic stuff and discovered that we both had fantasies that involved including other people but we were both to scared to bring-up to each other for fear of hurting feelings and jealousy. Within a year we had started swinging. As we delved more into exploring our fantasies together, as a team, we also discovered that we became friends with the couples and singles we swung with, and this led to
polyamorous relationships with people over over the years.
I can say from being on both sides of the fence of monogamy and non-monogamy that when life has dealt us lumps it's been our friends from the swinger and polyamory communities that have been there to help whereas our "vanilla" friends (that's said tongue-in-cheek by the way) were the proverbial "Let us know if we can help in any way" and never came through. From experiences like this I would trust a swinger or polyamorous friend to have my back more-so than others.
3. Are you a swinger? Has it improved your relationship?
Yes, and yes. We had a pretty damn good relationship to begin with, we were in no way bored with each other nor was there anything lacking in our relationship. What opening-up our relationship did do which made it even better was advanced our communication light years beyond where it was, and you can imagine it had to be pretty good to even bring-up the subject of being sexually attracted to other people. Six years later we communicate on a level that most people can't imagine and some of our monogamous friends have expressed they wish they had with their spouse.
It has also strengthened our commitment to each other because we've had to work through a lot of issues that remain buried in a monogamous relationship until it implodes one day. Opening-up your relationship sexually, emotionally or both exposes every crack in the foundation of your relationship and forces you to deal with them. Things you thought would never bother you can, and things you thought would bother you don't. You not only go through a great growth period as a couple you also do on a personal basis. If you don't you don't survive as a couple. Having an open relationship forces you to move beyond yourself and your selfish needs and desires and start to really consider your partner as an equal, not as something you own or control, and to recognize and appreciate them for who they really are. It forces you to look at happiness as something beyond what makes you happy, you start to look at it from the perspective of what makes your partner happy too, and that becomes just as important to your happiness.
In polyamory we call this
"compersion", the act of feeling joy in your partner's joy, even if you are not the direct cause of that joy.
I'm not exactly the hippie generation
