How Much Should You Like Your Swinging Partners?

Maybe you’re not looking for new BFFs, but you are going to share your bed with them.

This is one of our most enduring debates with close friends in the swinging lifestyle — how much should you ‘like’ the couple you are planning to play with?

My wife and I have always had a pretty firm rule about who we would be with, in a lifestyle context. For us, we would want it to be a couple that we would enjoy having a long dinner out with. We like the idea that we would only play sexually with someone that we found sufficiently interesting that we would want to spend a leisurely vanilla evening with them.

Our friends, however, are less discerning. Actually, discerning is the wrong word. They apply a different standard. They want their lifestyle partners to be sexy and have a good energy. But they don’t really care if they would enjoy a long, drawn-out dinner with them. Their reasoning — they want to have sex with them, not go to dinner with them.

I don’t want to mischaracterize our friends. They are not bed-hoppers and don’t hook up with many couples. But they do have a different standard. The way they put it — if they are looking for someone to play chess with, they look for someone good at chess, not someone they like hanging out with necessarily.

For me, I have a hard time drawing those lines, perhaps. I want to like the people we meet in the lifestyle. Even within the lifestyle context, I find sex to be a pretty intimate act, and I only want to do it with people I like.

This doesn’t mean everyone we play with in the lifestyle will become a good friend — or even a friend at all. We go on vacations and meet couples that we know we’ll never see again. Similarly, we meet people locally that we know we don’t really have space for in our regular lives. We know we will see them for one fun night, and that will likely be it.

But I still want the type of rapport with them that would make me kind of want to see them again, for a beer or a chat.

My theory is that, despite the perception that swingers treat sex purely as sport, this is often not the case. We’re both socialized and genetically conditioned to believe that sex…

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