Dating Pitfalls – The Oldest Swinger in Town

Posted on October 11, 2015 Updated on October 9, 2015

No, I’m not referring to the popular dance halls of the Ireland of the 1950s and 60s where Jazz and Swing music was the preferred soundtrack to shake your booty to.

I’ve said before that one of the strange spin-offs of being separated or divorced is that you find yourself mingling in a very, very altered singles market from when you last searched for a mate. (2002 in my case).

In that time, “Swinging”, the act of swopping sexual partners via mutual consent, has evolved from throwing your car keys into a “Lucky Dip” bowl in suburbia.  It’s now an organised, members club, based in Limerick and run out of a warehouse of all places.  Have I been?  No. Can’t claim I have and have no desire to but you have to admire a group of people getting together and acknowledging they have no desire or ability to sleep with just one person for the rest of their lives and doing something realistic about it.

A friend of mine ended a 20-year, monogamously faithful marriage once the kids went off to College and went on a rampage of sexual experimentation for a year or two before settling down with someone new.  Along the way he discovered the Munster swinger scene via a specialised online dating site called FAB.  In this way, I got to hear vicarious insights into how it works and what sort of people go.

It tends to be an older crowd – mostly early 30s to late 50s and clearly they aren’t shy about baring all in front of strangers despite being a diverse mix of body types.  Apparently that’s part of the accepting freedom of the scene, it’s the Irish version of all the Naturists and Nudists we used to giggle at on the beaches of France in the 1980s.

They also have to restrict single male members as otherwise it would be over-run with men outnumbering women. (As to why – that’s a whole other debate).  In keeping with the original “couples” origins guys are encouraged to find like-minded females on FAB to pair up with in a buddy system, before being approved for party attendance.  However if you are already an accepted member of the club yet find yourself single again, you aren’t necessarily expelled, exiled and alone until you manage to pull.

They also do field trips, booking swinger nights in hotels under the guise of some innocuous -sounding convention title.  Cue much corridor-hopping and being crammed orgiastically into smaller rooms rather than floating seductively round a more open-plan space to observe and ponder joining in.  When a recent event in a city-centre hotel in Cork was unmasked beforehand, outraged listeners to local radio phoned in to express their horror and disgust at such shocking, unholy goings on.  They demanded the hotel manager’s head on a platter as though he was some sort of lKingpin of an International vice and hookers ring.  The manager calmly released a statement to the effect that what people did in the privacy of their own hotel room was their own business and the offended few stood down a planned pitchfork raid on the hotel.

My aforementioned friend hit the jackpot and found love while at a swinging party.   We both agreed that was the best possible outcome for him as I couldn’t see him going back to being happy with one sexual partner for the rest of his life.  It would have meant a life of deception and pretence that the sexual need of his for variety and exhibitionism didn’t need to be met.  He’d have made himself and some poor faithful monogamous type like myself utterly miserable.  The joys of being in your 40s is you know yourself better, and learn to accept yourself and work with what you have rather than pretend to be something you aren’t.

As for me, while it’s an interesting world to receive postcards from, I’ve no desire to move to Swingersville.  I’m old fashioned and vanilla in my sexual preferences,  just one guy to one girl in the privacy of your own room.

The thought of getting naked under the bright lights of a warehouse full of strangers literally leaves me cold and I don’t know how couples in that scene successfully manage jealousy as I know myself well enough to realise that as the loyal faithful type, I need my partner to be the same. Like the “Friends” character Joey Tribbiani and his desserts, I don’t like to share.

As a dating pitfall therefore, I have no desire to meet a swinger in disguise on a mainstream dating site like Tinder or Plenty of Fish.   Luckily I can ask my swinger friend to check out any promising dates to see if they also have a profile on the FAB website and give them a miss.   Unlike those of us just looking to find love and then get the hell off a dating website as fast as possible never to return, Swingers rarely remove their profiles from Fab.   Even in a relationship they are by nature, always looking for a new partner. It all sounds a bit too exhausting for me,  it’s a struggle to find one great person to sleep with not to mind and orgy-ful.