I received this message from an old friend who’s getting into the swinging lifestyle with his wife:
“She is very Bi but she is insanely picky when it comes to women. I think she will eventually get there with the right woman and me but the issue still remains that we aren’t attracted to the same people most of the time. And the ones that we are attracted to have ugly partners and neither of us are interested in taking one for the team. Haha!”
If you go into ENM with the goal of only hooking up with couples that you and your partner are both really attracted to then, to put it simply, you’re not going to be doing much hooking up. Assembling four people who all think each other are ultra hot — often based off nothing more than dating profile pics (which tend to be horrible) — who are into the same things, all vibe, and can match schedules … well, that just rarely happens … and leads to way more time being spent shopping on apps than actually having sex.
But what my friend mentions is probably the biggest obstruction to carrying out the swinging lifestyle — especially for younger couples who still maintain high standards and have yet to say “fuck it.” The thing is that he’s right. It’s an odd phenomenon that long-term partners — the type that are often drawn to ENM — tend to not be in the same class aesthetically. It’s as if we have different criteria for selecting life partners over temp boyfriends / girlfriends or one night stands. We seem to emphasize things like earning potential, kindness, humor, how good of a parent he / she will be, whether or not our parents like them … and deemphasize physical attraction, sexual attributes, and sexual prowess as something superficial or overrated …
… until we get years into it and want to start fucking people we’re actually attracted to.
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This is more common than I’d like to admit. Many of our foursome partners have been attractive women who are with nice, professionally successful dudes who are on the low end of the manly meter or otherwise not aesthetically in the same league. We have a term for it: “not equalies.”
Equalies are hard to find. It’s an odd phenomenon of the ENM lifestyle … and something that we have to work on deemphasizing if we want to be able to go out and have wild sexual experiences with others.
I often put it like this:
If you want to hook up with someone that you think is ultra hot then use Tinder, Feeld, FetLife, etc and go out on a solo date. If you want to fuck model-level women then go to a gangbang that features a porn star. But if you want to have a foursome or orgy with your partner then value the overall experience over the particular attractiveness of any individual.
My wife and I are not looking for a one-and-only couple that we will mutually date over and over again; no, we are looking for high volume of fun erotic experiences to have with other people.
… fun experiences to have with each other.
It may sound counterintuitive, but, for us at least, hooking up with other people isn’t about the other people but my wife and I sharing a sexual adventure together. How attractive the other people are isn’t completely irrelevant but it does get pushed down below our other criteria, such as how comfortable we feel with them, what styles of group sex they’re into, and what their internal ENM dynamics are like.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we don’t have any standards. My wife doesn’t fuck fat dudes: “If they can’t even take care of themselves they can’t expect me to want to have sex with them.” While I’m into curvy women, when it’s clear that they don’t put any effort into personal upkeep I don’t go out of my way for a pursuit. We also don’t usually go for partners who are more than a few years older than us.
Overall, I guess you could say that we take the slut route. We like playing often and voluminously. We like adding on multiple new sex partners each week. We’re not poly and are not looking for relationships. We’re only after sex and want as much of it as we can get.
So we reduce everything to the raw basics when selecting other partners because what really matters is the connection that happens between my wife and I — the experiences that we can have and the stories we can live together. The other people are mere props in this endeavor … and ideally we serve the same roll for them.
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