Swinging is stimulating and intense. It’s also something that impacts you on a personal level. If you want intensity, stimulation and excitement, it delivers.
If your idea of marriage emphasizes commitment and trust, swinging often shatters traditional ideas of commitment, trust and loyalty.
How Does Swinging Affect Your Marriage <<– listen to the audio here
Hello there. This is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. Thank you for tuning in today. I’m glad you’re here today. The question we’re going to be focusing on during our brief time today is how does swinging affect your marriage. This is one that I picked up on from some of the comments and queries there at Survive Your Partner’s Affair.
Swinging and Affairs
This whole topic of swinging oftentimes goes hand in hand with affairs because people want to know “How does it affect my marriage?” Swinging is very stimulating and intense. It’s high drama, high emotion.
It’s something that impacts you on a personal level. Since those kind of relationships involve your person, things will affect you on a very personal level.
If you want intensity, stimulation, and excitement in your life, swinging will deliver it. Along with lots of fireworks. If that’s what your idea of marriage is swinging may deliver that.
But, if your idea of marriage emphasizes the whole idea of commitment and trust, swinging will shatter those traditional ideas of fidelity, commitment, trust, and loyalty.
You’re going to have to realize this. You’re dealing with two total opposites. If you’ve got an idea of marriage where it’s about commitment, loyalty, trust, swinging will be very destructive.
If your idea of marriage you’re just wanting something that’s fun, exciting, stimulating, then it’s going to have a whole different impact.
Intensity versus Intimacy
Swinging creates confusion between intensity and intimacy. When people get those two terms confused they start doing weird things.
Intimacy is that sense of closeness. It’s often easy to get that confused with intensity because when you go through a very emotionally intense time, because you went through that emotionally intense time with someone you think you have intimacy with them. No. That doesn’t make for intimacy. That makes for intensity.
What it amounts to is that one is a cheap substitute for the other. The intensity is a cheap substitute for intimacy.
It’ll give you what seems to be closeness, but it’s not real closeness. It’s not based on two people having heartfelt emotions and sharing things at a very close level, what’s in their heart about things.
It will be two people sharing some common experiences where they had intense emotions. But it’s not the same.
Back when I did a lot of work in psychiatric hospitals, many times the experience of being in psychiatric hospitals it was very high drama with a lot of intensity of emotions. For some of the people it’s the first time that they experienced a lot of intense emotions like that, so they developed these relationships with other patients, thinking oh we’re in love.
Well, it was the first time that they had to deal with some of these issues in the group therapy sessions and individual therapy sessions, and since it was the first time they ever dealt with some of that stuff they falsely assume that they were madly in love with someone who they shared those experiences with.
I mention this because you’re going to find a lot of intensity with the swinging. It will change your marriage. Not only will it change your marriage, the effects are not reversible.
You can’t keep going back and forth from swinging to traditional marriage, from swinging to traditional marriage. It doesn’t work like that.
You either go one or the other. There is no clicking of your shoes and saying there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, that’ll bring your marriage back.
Once you step over the line into swinging you’re not in a position where you can go back and undo and an experience some of the things that you have.
So what’s the solution? The solution is be very aware of what you’re getting into. And losing your definition of marriage along the way.
Know What You Are Getting Into
1. I hinted at this earlier, but let me go ahead and make it as clear as I can here. Swinging changes everything. Swinging will change the definition of your marriage.
Swinging will change your definition of fidelity, respect, loyalty, and commitment. All these things are going to change.
There will still be the same language, but the meaning will be so turned around that you’re not going to recognize it. And that’s one of the things that, although you can take these two groups and they may use some of the same words, what they mean by the words are very very different. You’re going to need to be aware of that.
When you sit down in casual conversation they’ll talk about fidelity, respect, loyalty, commitment. But what they mean by them and what you mean are two different things.
Because you may say “Well, gee, Bob and Jenny, they’ve got a relationship where they were swinging and it’s improved their marriage. Because when I talk to them about commitment, when I talk to them about fidelity, they’re talking about the same thing.”
They’re using the same words. But what they mean by those things is very different. You need to be aware of that. Don’t just assume because you hear some nice little buzzwords that you’re wanting to hear, that it means what you’re thinking in your head.
2. The swinging lifestyle has baggage with it. What I mean by baggage, at times this baggage includes alcohol and drug use. Not every case, but there’s a high likelihood that you will start seeing that. Along with high drama, secretiveness, lies.
And then there’s just the whole mess of orgies. When you get into swinging things get messy. Things get messy in a hurry. If you have a lot of high drama with one husband or with one wife, can you imagine what happens when you have several women or several men that you’re trying to deal with?
When this stuff goes down, the movies may make it look nice and romantic. The reality is it’s very messy and people make a mess of things.
There’s a lot of drugs and alcohol, because a lot of the people get themselves numbed out in order to be able to participate in such behavior.
I know when I’ve talked to people that have tried to get out of it they have told me about how they have had to stay drunk or under the influence just to be able to do what they did. Because some things they found so repulsive. And you don’t see the people taking the pro-swinging approach addressing these topics, and they need to be honest about that.
3. You need to be aware of what I call the perversion spiral. What I mean by the perversion spiral, this is that desire for intensity. Because that desire for intensity often happens in such a way that experiences have to be more intense to silence any kind of guilt.
With swinging you have more and more sex. Sex becomes increasingly intense. It has to become more and more extreme to block out any negative feelings that you had about your experiences at the less intense levels.
It takes you deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole that you’re not going to want to go down. Many times it leaves people with shattered lives, shattered sense of morality.
I’ve been in a position where I’ve had to help pick up the pieces and it’s not a pleasant situation to try to recover from. That’s why I go ahead and share some of these things with you, so that you can make informed choices and you know how it will affect your marriage.
Swinging Will Impact Your Marriage
Because swinging will impact your marriage. It is not a two-way street. You can’t undo, once you step over the line, what has been done. I encourage you, be very aware what you’re getting into and what you’re losing.
A lot of times people look at”Oh, look at all the fun I have!” They don’t ever look at the price tag of what they’re losing. You need to look at the whole thing.
This is a serious topic and I encourage you to think through this rather than jump into it.
If you have gone too far down the rabbit hole and feel traumatized by swinging, there’s hope. In the video, “How to Recover from Relationship Trauma”, I’ll guide you in dealing with these concerns. From physical symptoms to regaining a sense of peace.
Best Regards,
Jeff
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