I
received this question from our anonymous Have A Question page a few days ago:
Can we swap wives for sex (intercourse) in a marriage?
We are told that there is a website on christian “swinging” (wife swapping).
How christian is this in a christian marriage?
Is this allowed in a christian environment?
And while I’ve mentioned it before, I’ve never written a post with swinging in the title, so it’s not easily searchable. So, here we go, just for those who go searching for the topic:
No, it is not okay to swap wives for sex! Not husbands either!
It’s adultery, plain and simple. It doesn’t matter if you have permission from your spouse or not, it’s still adultery. Sex is designed to be shared, with your spouse, only with your spouse, and only within your marriage (with that same spouse). There are absolutely zero situations where it is okay to have sex outside of your marriage.
Period.
So, why do people keep asking?
I think we have two problems in our society that drive people to ask about this.
Society teaches that lifetime monogamy is to be avoided
I’m defining lifetime monogamy here not as one partner at a time, but one partner for your entire life. Just one.
I remember having a conversation at work once with people, and through the course of the conversation, it came out that I’ve only ever had sex with my wife. They were incredulous. They couldn’t understand the concept. They had questions like:
Don’t you get bored?
How do you know you’re any good in bed?
How do you know your wife is any good in bed?
Now, at the time, we had a largely sexless marriage, but still, the answers to these were simple.
Do I get bored with sex? No, I wasn’t have enough of it to get bored. I didn’t tell them that, but at the time, I was fairly newly married, so sex was relatively new still. Besides, when we had sex, it was pretty good. So, I could truthfully answer that sex was certainly not boring.
How do I know I’m any good in bed? I didn’t. I still don’t. You know what I know? That I’m good enough for my wife. She’s happy, and that’s enough for me.
How do I know my wife is any good in bed? I didn’t. I still don’t. But again, who cares. I’m happy. Why on Earth would I want something to compare her to that might make me less satisfied?
So, lifetime monogamy has it’s advantages. Some very clear advantages, especially when it comes to being satisfied with your spouse.
But many people have this fear that they need to get more experience, either to be better in bed, or so that if they end up with a less satisfactory partner, at least they’ve had their chance at a good sex life.
And so I think what happens sometimes in Christian marriages is that they did the right thing, they waited until marriage, and then they get taken in by this lie, that they have to have the experience of multiple partners. And so, this idea of Christian swinging was devised, to make the lie more palatable. But, make no mistake, it’s a lie, and you’re damaging your relationship, both with your spouse, and with God.
Society teaches that a relationship that is monogamous becomes monotonous
Now, I haven’t been married that long: just short of 15 years. But I can definitely say that monogamy does not need to become monotony. Our sex is so much improved from what it used to be that I couldn’t hope for any better. And yet, it keeps improving, year by year.
And that’s the benefit to a monogamous relationship, that the only situation you can compare yours to is your prior, same, relationship. Your not competing against anyone but yourself.
But this growth take work. It’s takes vulnerability, it takes being truly intimate. And that’s scary for some. For others they don’t even know how to start. Some never had that modeled and don’t even know it can exist. To them, things are only better when they’re exciting, and they’re only exciting when they’re new.
And so, how do you get a new sexual experience when you’re in a Christian marriage and you don’t know how to work on deepening your marriage? Well, you buy the lie that Christian swinging is the answer.
Instead of investing in their marriage, in finding out what a Christian married sex life can actually be like, they try to take a shortcut, and in doing so, run right off the road.
If you’re considering swinging as a way to spice up your sex life, please stop. Learn how to communicate, learn to be really intimate and you will find that a monogamous, Christian, married sex life is far more exciting and satisfying, with much less risk and long term costs. The investment is well worth the work.