After three months and 30 dates I met Joanne. Her story was similar to mine. She’d just come back to the UK after living in Spain, had been through a traumatic separation with her fiancé and been online dating for six months. Within an hour of meeting we were in bed. Laughing, comparing histories. Like me, she was wary of commitment. She had a temp job in IT. She wasn’t sure how long she’d stay in Glasgow. She was 38. “Life is too short” and “You only live once,” she said. She just wanted to have fun. We had fun. Seeing each other once a week. Sex games and toys and stories. But after a time the stagnation started. We both needed something more but were distrusting of sinking back into couple mode. Two escapees, we didn’t want to end up shackled to each other. So the erotic fantasies started. Checking out swinging sites. The questions: had she ever done it with a woman? No. Was she curious? Yes. Had I ever been with a couple? No, but I was curious. We talked about it. It could be cathartic. Could help us break the mould we’d both found so damaging in the past. We agreed – we’d join the scene and she would have her first woman.

It was maybe the fascination with that that pulled us through. So many abbreviations to learn: Nump – No Ugly Men Please; Spark – Single Parent Raising Kid; HWP – Height/Weight Proportional; FA – Fat Admirer; BBW – Big Beautiful Woman; MBA – Married But Available.

We e-mailed and chatted with dozens of couples. Took our first sex pictures. Posted them on our ad. Swapped them online. Made up fake names as the sites recommended. We were Dave and Shelia. Our first couple called themselves Tony and Joan.

You call on mobile phones not landlines. You arrange to meet in a public place. For safety reasons. As a get-out, you have a secret “safety word” prepared – if you don’t fancy the couple you drop “pizza” or “shopping” into the conversation and your partner knows to call it a day. We had our safety word prepared and agreed to meet in a bar. It was exactly like a first teenage date. The nervousness, the adrenalin, the sense of daring – the anxiety over whether you’d see it through, whether you wanted to.

Whether it be over sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or personal space. Everything commences only from a point of trust and consent within a group. If one person dissents then it’s a “no”. We told ourselves that at any moment either of us could call it off. But Tony and Joan had us laughing from minute one. This surreal scenario of being with a couple of strangers in a pub, openly discussing the terms and conditions. Condoms? Of course. Will the two men be having sex? No. The two women? Yes. Full partner swap? Yes – but Tony didn’t like other men looking at his penis. All this in a public bar surrounded by 50 people who talked about “normal” things – Big Brother, nightclubs, Posh & Becks. No safety words said, we were invited back to their house.

In my year I must have come across every social type apart from that one: a stand-up comedian; a call-centre girl and her partner; a male model; two professors; two heavy-metal heads. No hint of the suburbs – and mostly everyone under 40. Tony worked in insurance, Joan worked at Tesco; they lived in a housing scheme. Once they’d shown us in and we’d had a drink they revealed their real names: Steve and Sally.

The feeling is of an almost-socialist utopia of open-mindedness and tolerance. You get invited into the homes of people you wouldn’t normally socialise with. It’s like being in a hobby club – stamp collectors, or model-aeroplane makers. There’s the foreign-ness of their décor, their taste in music. And in an hour you’re having sex together.

Before we got down to business, Sally and Steve talked about how long they’d been doing it – how it had brought them closer, how so many couples strayed after the seven-year mark, how it contained the threat of infidelity (Steve travelled a lot with work), and how it made them love each other more (76 per cent of swingers rate themselves as “very happy” as compared to 54 per cent of non-swingers). They wanted to know all about us. How long we’d been together? How often had we done it before? We confessed it was our first time and they were thrilled to have some “newbies” – they talked excitedly about this whole world that would open up for us. Very strange, very unlike the usual monogamous boy-meets-girl processes of seduction. There was a lot of laughter.

Steve and Sally made it clear that they were not in this just to have one-night flings – they wanted to develop friendships. They knew many other swinging couples and sometimes they just hung out. We didn’t need to have sex tonight if we didn’t want to. They liked us, they’d love to see us again. And it was us two who came across as pushy, wanting to get the deal done. Still, it was a relief and a release to talk with a couple so openly about love and sex and relationships, shedding so much baggage. Sitting in their lounge surrounded by pictures of their family members. At some point it was agreed that we’d all get naked. And Joanne had her first lesbian experience. I watched, for the first time, my girlfriend having sex first with a woman then with a man. Then I took my turn with Sally. I made the mistake of watching Steve having sex with Joanne. He covered his penis with his shirt. Me and Sally sat watching, sipping warm Liebfraumilch.

Over the next six months we had five different encounters – and constantly wanted more. The list of erotic possibilities had to be seen through. There is a sense of accumulation within swinging. Once things like good looks, age and class background have been dispensed with, people then generally tend towards quantity – bigger tits, bigger dicks, more people at the same time. So it was that she wanted to have – and she felt embarrassed by this because it was a clichéd fantasy – a black man with a big dick. So just like shopping on ebay, I found her one. Twelve miles away on the outskirts. He was 5ft 11in tall, aged 23, worked in a call centre, did a bit of modelling, was very good-looking. Again a bar meet and we trusted him. He drove back to his, we followed. He owned the property he said, had a tenant, he’d just split up with his girlfriend, it was best if the tenant didn’t know we were there. We were to be discreet. He and I took turns having sex with Joanne. She said she had never been happier in her life.

There are a great number of couples with “bi-curious fems” looking for a woman – so it’s more than just every man’s fantasy of having two women in bed. More often than not they’d say: “partner not to be present”; or “partner to watch”; or, in one memorable ad, “partner to be in same building but not room”.

Swingers often travel great distances to meet. They spend whole weekends together. They eat, sleep, watch TV, walk in the park. One couple travelled up from Manchester to stay with us.

You start writing diary entries like this: “Michel Houellebecq proposes that sex has become commodified – a currency – that there are those who live lives of poverty because they are unattractive, old, poor¿” That sexual liberation has, in fact, oppressed millions of people. But swinging is the opposite – it is a free, open exchange, with no hierarchy or competition, no survival of the fittest. It runs counter to the prevailing consumerist ethos.

One moment, perhaps on our sixth encounter, when I’d been watching Joanne having sex, very complex emotions began running through me. Did I care for her? Did watching other people having sex turn me on? Could I live like this with a female partner – vicariously through other people. It was about this time that I started writing about swinging. To try to put these emotions into place. A novel took shape – about a couple so much in love but still they needed more. I didn’t think at the time that I was being a “naked anthropologist”. I wasn’t doing research for the book. So many couples saying it made their love stronger. Did I want to love Joanne? I realised we had started from the wrong premise. The love has to be there from the start. You can’t find it through swinging. And maybe I was scared of how much commitment it would take to see this through. More so than in a conventional relationship.

Joanne found my detachment frustrating. I encouraged her to see other people without me. As far as I know, she didn’t swing with others – I was her swinging partner – but she did start seeing other guys. I, too, had started seeing other women. And strangely, the confidence that swinging had given me seemed to bring women to me who wanted to explore their sexuality. Over the next six months with three different women, I swung, with couples, with single men and women. And each time it was the same feeling: I am missing something.

The process fascinated me – breaking the cliché that it is men who want to screw around and women who want stability. Of course, many would think this was coercion on my behalf – that these women were only doing this to please me. But in each case, it was the woman who had the guts to see things through.

At times, I interviewed men myself, just like in a job interview – assessing whether they could put my new partners Sam or Julie at ease, make them laugh, whether they could be trusted. A 6ft 5in New Zealander with a ponytail and no sense of humour, a nervous young man whose ad said he was VWE (very well endowed) but who’d lied about his age and sat trembling as I interviewed him in a bar. He ran out when I went to the toilet. The kid no doubt thought he was so unattractive that it would be easier to score with a couple than go through the process of nightclubbing and dancing and chatting-up only to face rejection.

It does attract people who are escapees, or have the wrong motives. Some do it to try to save a failing marriage; some do it to cheat and get away with it; some couples are married but not to each other and swing behind their partners’ backs once a month in other cities in hotel rooms. There are some single men, too, who hire prostitutes for the night so they can swing with a couple (they are usually found out, as part of the process is the chat, the building of trust on the basis of a couple’s past).

The fact remains, however, that the great majority of swinging ads say, “No single men” – and swinging clubs also have a no-single-men policy. Single men are generally only brought on to the scene when a couple have a bi-curious male. Or when a couple wants multiple men. To be picked as a single male you generally have to be “WE” or “VWE” (although I once saw an ad from a couple looking for a man with a very small endowment). Or to be young – another ad from a retirement-age bisexual couple from Cornwall was calling for an “Adonis” to go with them on their second honeymoon to Greece.

You start to see beyond people’s appearances. You feel a bit like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, analysing everyone around you to work out if they’re part of your Revolutionary Sub-Culture. You develop what is called “Playdar” – a bit like Gaydar. Swingers can spot each other in public. A couple once picked me up in a “regular bar”.

My year of swinging ended before I completed my book. I felt I had to stop and take stock and that a novel would be the vehicle for that. The year ended with a prior stage of escalation – an invitation to an orgy at which I realised I’d get much more from it if I was really in love with a partner. My partners had been explorers, not lovers. I was not in love – but I think in that year I learned to love people more, to be more compassionate, more accepting of difference.

I met so many people who claimed their lives had been enriched. And it still makes me ask if the conventions of monogamy are too repressive. Although swingers rarely quote psychologists or radical thinkers, there is an unspoken philosophy akin to that expounded by Erich Fromme and the polyfidelity movement (a sexual variation on communal living): a belief that polyfidelity cures the social problems of loneliness, jealousy, adultery, social fragmentation and emotional boredom.

My year of swinging ended with many new friends who were no longer lovers. Each of us, generally, moved on. Joanne now has a partner and a child. Sally has an on-going relationship with a couple. Which leads me to believe that swinging is, for the committed core, a lifestyle that they live day-in day-out. But for the majority who pass through the websites, it is a stage gone through for a year or so, a volatile stage filled with questions about limits and boundaries. Who I am? How will I live? Can I be happy? Can I love? What is love? Swinging is not so much an answer as a question asked deeply – for as many philosophers say, the only questions worth asking should place your life, and your body, at the heart of the question.

Ewan Morrison graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a degree in Fine Art and went on to become a successful television director. He has directed more than 200 hours of drama, arts and entertainment programmes for Channel4, BBC, Sky and STV, been nominated for four Baftas and was winner of a Royal Television Society Award in 2001. Since 2003, he has held Writer in Residence posts in France, Australia and New York. His first collection of short stories, The Last Book You Read, was published in 2005.

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