A Letter to Our Younger Selves Before We Started Swinging

Dear you,

You're reading this in a private browser window. You've cleared your history twice this week. You've been on this particular journey for about three months now, cycling through the same questions in slightly different configurations, and you're no closer to knowing what to do than when you started.

Let us save you some time.

The thing you're most worried about isn't the thing

You're worried about jealousy. You've constructed elaborate scenarios in which one of you watches the other from across a room and feels something terrible that can't be taken back. You've thought about this more than you've thought about anything else in the decision.

Jealousy will happen. It will be less devastating than you're imagining and more manageable than you think. The conversations you have about it will be among the most honest conversations of your relationship. Some of those conversations will be at midnight on a motorway on the way home from somewhere. They will be worth having.

The thing you haven't worried about enough is the social complexity. The lifestyle is more social than you expect. The people in it are more interesting than you expect. The friendships you'll make are not something you've factored into the decision at all, and they'll turn out to be one of the main reasons you stay.

Your first time won't be what you imagined

It will be more ordinary and more significant simultaneously. You'll spend most of it in a bar. You'll talk to a couple who are completely normal in every visible way except for why you're all in the same room. You'll drive home with something between you that wasn't there before: a shared experience of having done a thing you'd both wondered about for years.

The conversation on the way home will surprise you. You'll say things to each other that you've apparently been sitting on for some time, things about what you want and what you're curious about and what you're not actually worried about now that it's real rather than hypothetical. That conversation is the point, more than anything else that happened that evening.

The community is not what you've seen on television

It's warmer, more ordinary, and considerably more self-aware. The people you'll meet are not performing some alternative lifestyle for an audience. They're just people who've made a specific choice about how to arrange their relationship and found a community of others who've made the same choice. The relief of being among people who don't require an explanation is real and arrives sooner than you expect.

The communication it requires will improve everything else

The conversations the lifestyle makes necessary will teach you things about yourselves and each other that years of normal life hadn't surfaced. You'll get better at saying what you actually want. You'll get better at hearing difficult things without treating them as threats. You'll get better at checking in rather than assuming. All of this will make you better at your relationship in ways that have nothing to do with anything that happens in a club.

You'll have nights that don't go well

Accept this now rather than being surprised by it later. Not catastrophically. Just an evening that didn't quite work, a connection that felt odd in the moment, a feeling that surfaced on the drive home that needed more processing than expected. These nights are part of it. The couples who handle them well are the ones who talk about them honestly rather than filing them away.

The question you keep asking has an answer

You keep asking whether this will change things between you. It will. Not in the way you're worried about. You'll know each other better. You'll trust each other more. You'll have a shared world that is entirely yours, that most of the people in your lives know nothing about, that belongs to both of you in a specific way that new shared experiences always do.

That's not nothing. That's quite a lot, actually.

Close the incognito window. Have the conversation.

From the two of you, a few years from now.

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