3 is not a Crowd

JWW: The preference for threesomes developed gradually. Bob found himself gradually getting less and less pleasure out of seeing his wife with another man, and Carol in turn found that she was taking infinitely more pleasure from her relations with bi wives than with their husbands. They noticed an increasing proportion of couple ads soliciting meetings either with couples with bisexual wives or with single bi-minded girls. At first they thought such advertisers had extra males available, extra males being a commodity in abundant supply on the swinging scene. Then they realized that the object of these ads was threesomes of two women and a man.

Their first experience as a trio, however, came not with another woman but with another man.

CAROL: The phone rang one night around dinnertime and it was this fellow we had visited with in Birmingham. He was in town overnight on business and his wife wasn’t with him, and he thought we would like to try a threesome. Now we knew he was legitimate because we had swung with him and his wife before and had had a very good time with them, in fact we hoped to swing with them again. You see, a lot of single men or men whose wives won’t swing will pass themselves off as a couple and then when they come around the excuse is that she’s sick or at a funeral or something of the sort, and then they want to have a threesome with you. We’ve never been stuck that way but we’ve heard plenty of stories.

BOB: The average swinger is a really good person, very open and aboveboard. But there are a lot of creeps, and nine out of ten times they’re married men who haven’t got the guts to get their wives to swing, or think their wives are too good for it, and they can mess things up for everybody.

CAROL: But this fellow was all right, so I asked Bob, and he said sure, invite the guy over, but I made it for after dinner because I had lamb chops on and there was no way to stretch them.

He came over and we had a fairly good time. The two men doubled up on me, one in back and one in front, and actually that’s about all we did, we spent most of our time sitting around and talking. I think he wanted company more than sex anyway, as far as that goes, and he said he always felt strange swinging without his wife and couldn’t really loosen up unless she was there.

BOB: After he left, Carol and I got to talking, and I said that as far as I was concerned, I’d rather not have a scene like that again. It was all right as far as it went, but I didn’t get much out of it, although I hoped she had enjoyed herself.

And she said that all things taken into consideration she really didn’t get that much pleasure with the other men, that for sex with men she really preferred just to do it with me, and that for her the highlight of swinging was bi-experiences with the other girl. And we tossed it around, and we came to the conclusion that as far as we in particular were concerned, the other husband was just something you put up with because he was there. That what we both really wanted more than anything else was a threesome with an extra bi-minded girl.

CAROL: The funny thing was that we had both had this in mind but neither of us would come right out and say it. I don’t know whether it was because I was afraid I would sound like an out-and-out lesbian or what.

BOB: I thought it would be pure selfishness on my part to suggest it, because I thought Carol would get a lot less out of swinging if there was no other man. I always took it for granted that this was a large part of her pleasure.

Another personal reason I had for preferring a threesome to a two-couple situation was that I really did not like contact with other men. The one time with the impotent fellow was the only real experience I had, but more and more we were noticing that couples would both be bi-minded, and the man would suggest something. I always said I wasn’t interested and that was the end of that, but turning somebody down puts a damper on things, and then of course you’re not inclined to get together with that particular couple again.

Also, even if the man isn’t bi-minded and has no interests that way, when you’re all four rolling around together there’s a certain amount of contact between you and the other man that can’t be helped. The worst part of it is that you have to keep being careful and avoiding this, so that with a lot of couples what we would ultimately wind up doing is having one of us men take a turn sitting out and watching while the other did a threesome with the two girls, and then vice versa. That way everybody can just touch whatever’s handy and not have half his mind devoted to worrying who it belongs to.