Marriage is not, and should not be a religious issue. If marriage is to be a religious issue than only churches should be allowed to issue marriage licenses, not the State, and only spiritual leaders of those religions should be allowed to marry people. Justices of the Peace, judges, police officers, and other public officials should not be allowed to marry people. Otherwise marriage remains a legal contract between two people regardless of gender orientation that any particular religion can decide to recognize or not.

I think the general attitude in our society regarding other people’s sexuality and lifestyle is: “Of course you can do whatever you want to do, so long as it is something I would do. If not I’ll judge, scorn and marginalize you.”

What do you think, and why?

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AshleyMadison.com, the dating site for married people looking to cheat (do you hear ‘Escape’ [the Pina Colada song] playing in the background? I do.) did a survey of the 1.9 million people who signed-up with them last year to see who cheats the most.  Here is their results:

For Women:
1. Teachers
2. Stay-at-home Moms
3. Nurses
4. Administrative Assistants
5. Real Estate Agents

For Men:
1. Physicians
2. Police Officers
3. Lawyers
4. Real Estate Agents
5. Engineers

This really came as no surprise.  From being in the swinger lifestyle for many years we’ve noticed that teachers, those in the medical profession, Realtors and law enforcement personnel are highly overrepresented.  Over course swinging isn’t cheating, and our conclusion was that these are high stressed jobs and these people need to blow-off some steam.  They work hard, they play hard.  Niel Biderman of Ashley Madison mentions the same.

In a study of 1187 swingers done by Bellermine University in 2000 they found:

The typical swinger in this study was 39 years old, had two years of college education, had been married 1.5 times, was in a current marriage lasting 10.5 years, and had been involved in swinging for 5 years. The subjects were predominately white at 90.4 percent of the sample.  African-American’s were 4.1 percent of those sampled, Hispanic’s were 3.0 percent, and 1.5 percent indicated “other”. Gender differences were minimal on all of these characteristics. Included in the sample were ten physicians, fifteen attorneys, sixty-five upper level managers or owners of businesses, twenty-seven engineers, twenty-two teachers, forty health professionals including nurses…

Sound like the typical Ashley Madison member?

My point here is that you can’t judge someone by the sex they have behind closed doors.  Everyone has a kink.  Anyone’s sex life, if it were made public, would shock and horrify someone else.  One person’s kink is another person’s vanilla sex.  What gets one person off does nothing for someone else.  Neither is more ‘right’ than the other, it’s just ‘right’ for that particular person.  Saying that one person is ‘better’ than another, or is more ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ in their dealings with others in business or public based upon their particular sexual preference in private, is simply stupid and a grossly inaccurate picture of who someone really is.

When (as mentioned in the previous post) as many as 20% of Americans have an open relationship some kind or another, chances are you come in contact with a swinger, a polyamorous individual, a cuckhold, a sadist or masocist, etc. on a daily basis and never know it.  Your doctor, your kid’s teacher, the police officer that just responded to the break-in call at your neighbor’s house, your neighbor, your best friend, a family member and those American soldiers you support all could be one of the above.  Their sexuality in no way dictates how they relate to their fellow men in a professional or social environment.

Link to article

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I came across a blog tonight where the author was talking about how they had discovered from some neighbors that some other neighbors are suspected swingers (I won’t link his blog here because I’m sure he doesn’t want a bunch of swingers posting comments to it).  His post wasn’t bashing them at all and was actually very witty in handling the whole subject.  Many who commented on the blog had pretty typical reactions though: “We were shocked to find-out there are swingers in our neighborhood.”

I guess the fact that statistically 3 out of 10 of their women neighbors, and 4 out of 10 of their men neighbors are cheating doesn’t shock them, but neighbors who honestly and openly have sex with others does.  Because that should only happen when you are doing it in secret and cheating, right?

To show how rumors will travel, one commenter (who is local to me) even stated that swingers were meeting at a certain athletic club.  Well, being in the swinger community for years now I can truthfully say that I’ve never heard of this athletic club being a meeting place for swingers, and we’re embedded enough that we would of heard about it were it true.

Ah, the stories people make-up to make their own life more interesting.  If people only knew that the real life of a swinger is much less interesting, and includes much less sex than they think.

How can I convince my partner to have a threesome or to swing? This is a question you see a lot of, simply because many people have group sex fantasies but are in relationships where their partner either doesn’t share the fantasy or is totally unreceptive to hearing anything about their partner’s sexual fantasies because of personal insecurities and jealousy. So I thought I’d address it in this post.

The fact is you can’t convince, coerce or manipulate anyone into doing something they don’t want to do without making them resent you and screw-up your relationship with them. All you can do is in a non-threatening manner express to them that this is one of your sexual fantasies and see where it goes from there. If they say it’s not theirs, than out of respect for them you have to drop the subject. If they say they’ve been thinking the same thing, than you can carry the conversation on further and talk about what it is about it that turns each of you on and what you’d like to do and what both of you are looking to get out of it.

Remember, if it doesn’t benefit the couple, it harms the couple. Opening-up your relationship sexually has to be a two-way street where both of you are getting something positive from the experience. If not, than you simply shouldn’t venture there. Every time you hear someone say “I tried this and it ruined our relationship” or “I have some friends that did this and now they are broken-up” that was the reason why. It wasn’t both of their fantasy, it was just one of theirs. And that person convinced, coerced or manipulated their partner into do it.

Those couples who are secure in themselves and thus their relationship and therefore aren’t prone to jealousy and share the same group sex fantasies have a wonderful time at including others in their sex life. Those that aren’t, don’t.

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