Swinging, wife swapping or open marriage. All these terms refer to adulterous marriage. A reader posed the question, “Can a marriage survive wife swapping?”
The short answer is “Yes!” The more troubling answer is that once the line has been crossed into swinging, there are scars inflicted often lasting a lifetime. You marriage can survive, but it will have scars from what happened.
The likelihood of physical scars is small. There’s the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases. Although the likelihood is small, running the risk of contracting a disease that you’ll struggle with for years is greater than I’d want to consider.
The risks far outweigh the benefits. Struggling for years with an illness is not worth 15-30 minutes of indulged lusts.
The likelihood of emotional or social scars is high. Swinging (wife swapping) changes your sex life and it will change your social life.
Whether the two of you do what’s called a hard swap or a soft swap, there will be repercussions. You brought outsiders into the most intimate part of your marriage relationship.
Bringing in outsiders forever changes the social relationships you have with the other swingers. Some of you may be able to forgive your spouse and yourself, yet the majority will find that task more than they can handle.
Some spouses never forgive either themselves or their spouse for what happened. The shame is immense. No matter how much you rationalize it, the shame remains.
You can’t make it go away. You may act like ‘all is well’, but know, deep down inside that changes have occurred.
The whole nature of your marriage transforms. What was once a special relationship that only the two of you shared is no longer ‘special’.
You and your spouse have bonded with others. You have brought others into your special world. Swinging is very intense. Swinging by nature has to be sensually intense in order to drown out any emotional or mental reservations.
Any hesitancy has to be overcome, and the way to overcome that hesitancy is by means of intense experiences.
All that bonding with others often sets the stage for conflicts regarding loyalty and confused feelings. The longer the swinging continues, the greater the confusion. With bonding comes triggers.
Other swingers may at times activate those ‘triggers’ in you, which often leads to feelings being aroused that you did not want aroused. You may or may not be aware of the triggers.
Deactivating the triggers takes time. Once you are out, you may still find yourself working to neutralize your triggers.
If you are lucky, no one took pictures or videos of the swinging which could embarrass you later on. In cases where they have, such items are often used to further manipulate and control.
They are definitely used to make sure that secrets are not revealed. The swinging lifestyle is often a mass of swirling secrets. Those secrets are part of what attracts, and part of what controls those ‘in the lifestyle’.
Spiritually, you may be risking dissonance, depending on your belief system. If you adhere to a one man-one woman conviction, you will experience dissonance.
There will be a spiritual tension between what you are doing and what you believe. Although some people can live with the dissonance, a great many find the discomfort hard to live with. How you choose to deal with the dissonance will make a difference in how well you cope overall.
So, yes, your marriage can survive swinging, but it will not be the same. You and your marriage will not exit the swinging lifestyle unchanged. You marriage can be salvaged.
One of the tough questions is whether you want to leave it with some parts of your marriage relationship intact or stay in until they whole relationship is beyond reclamation.
Do you want to live with a portion of your marriage or loose it all to the wife swapping lifestyle?
If you did make the decision to swing and now want to undo what happened, it can be done. The video, “Overcoming Relationship Trauma for Swingers” guides you in getting out of that dark place.
Your marriage can be healed. It will have some scars, but you can get your life back.
Best Regards,
Jeff
