@Motion-of-the-Ocean Thanks for the response, I appreciate your honesty and openness on this.
I have TWO follow up questions... 1. before you got into the swinging lifestyle, I'm assuming you two watched porn together?
2. Would you often swing with the same group (like, would it normally be the same couples at these parties) or did you always switch up and go to different parties with different people?
Glad I could offer some insight. Though I'm far from what one might term an "expert" swinger, I do like sharing what knowledge we have gleaned from it to help others who might have questions or be contemplating it. With that being said, to your follow-ups:
We have looked at porn together since we were married, though in those pre-internet days it consisted of buying magazines (and occasionally renting videos) in order to see others engaged in sex and that watching was our only admission of thinking about other couples for the first 12-13 years of our relationship; actually having sex with them, AKA: swinging, was never discussed. It was only her increasing curiosity with girl/girl scenes and getting a computer and internet connection in the late 90's, did we learn there was the possibility of actually making it a reality through personal ad sites.
So, in one way, I guess you could say porn had at least some role to play in getting into swinging, though it also had a lot more to do with learning to be less insecure and avoid jealousy as well as getting online. For those two reasons alone, swinging never would have worked in the early part of our marriage, even if we had contemplated it.
Since our two periods in the lifestyle were separated by a multi-year break, I often think of them as two somewhat distinctly different "adventures" and several of our changing actions, preferences and rules
showed a clear division. One of those was in the variety of couples we met and repeat playdates.
During our first foray into swinging, we did more of the "one & done" get togethers and out of maybe the dozen couples we were with, I can recall only three we had sex with a second time (and none a third), so most of them we would never see or run into again afterwards. Back then, it was more about the sexual experimentation than any lasting friendship.
In our second go at it, being somewhat seasoned, we put more emphasis on the "friends part" and after meeting an experienced couple close to the wife's age, we became fairly excusive with them, almost border-line poly. Rarely did we go to parties or clubs by ourselves and mostly relied on people they knew to meet and play with new couples, in effect becoming an exclusive group of older swingers with private parties. In fact, because of that, almost all our encounters were one-on-one swaps and we only participated in a single MFM threesome during one of those rare solo club visits versus in years past, when that activity was maybe a fourth of our activities.
In fact, it was that reliance on being almost exclusive to one couple and using them to meet others that proved to have its disadvantage once we stopped swinging with them and while there were other main, vanilla factors pushing us towards leaving the lifestyle a second time, that likely made it easier to decide to.
One thing I've learned is every swinger or ex-swinger is different in how they fit outside sex into their vanilla lives. I've known couples where it truly was a "lifestyle" and they'd attend parties almost every weekend, participate in related functions like cruises or hotel take-overs and would not only claim familiarity with countless couples and single guys, but would likely have more notches on their bedpost than could be counted. Then there were those like us, who viewed swinging more as a part-time hobby and an occasional diversion to supplement our sex lives every month or few months. I think that made it easier to see it as just a phase and to be able to take a break or even quit altogether without feeling a big part of one's life or identity is suddenly missing.
Any other questions you may have, please feel free to ask and BTW, good choice of avatar. I've never really been into the whole superheroes thing, but The Watchmen was a rare exception.
