Trust in a relationship is akin to a precious vase held jointly by each partner and carried along with care. When one partner cheats on the other, it is as if one of them lets go of their side of the vase without warning, leaving the vase to fall to the ground to shatter.

Rebuilding that vase is no simple matter and in many cases, the betrayed party feels no desire to put the once beautiful vessel back together. They cannot imagine that a stronger and better relationship may await them if they have the strength to endure it and the ability to forgive, but not necessarily forget, their partner’s betrayal.

What is perfectly clear is that attempting to rebuild the same level of trust as existed before is a fool’s errand. Why recreate the exact same situation that lead to betrayal in the first place? Why attempt to just return to the way things were when the way things were brought about deception and anguish?

In putting back together the pieces of trust, the goal has to be for far greater and stronger trust, which invariably means far greater honesty. Both partners have to open up to each other to a much greater degree and reveal their thoughts and emotions in ways that most would find too uncomfortable or exposed.

When one partner cheats on another, there is a deception involved in how one partner feels about attractive partners outside of the marriage. Often partners hide from each other how much they are attracted to others by repeatedly claiming lack of interest in others or how their partner is the only one they’d ever love or desire. Regardless of one’s belief in monogamy as natural or unnatural, someone who has cheated on another has already demonstrated that they are attracted to more than one person at a time. At the very least, they have shown they can lust after one while still loving the other.

It is important for these couples to acknowledge this natural desire and to bring it out into the open. A strategy that has worked for some couples and has proven in many cases to be quite entertaining is to hang out together in a bar or similar establishment where attractive members of each sex come to flirt with each other. Each partner discreetly points out which individuals they find attractive and why. At first it can be a little uncomfortable admitting you find some extremely young buxom redhead very desirable or finding out that your partner likes men with firmer buns that yours. However, knowing that your partner is honesty expressing who they are attracted to and why helps to rebuild some of that trust. If it’s no longer a problem to express your (usually temporary) admiration or even desire for another, you can stop worrying about whether your partner is lying to you when they say they don’t find so-and-so attractive.

Another far more intense strategy for rebuilding trust is moving intimacy with your partner to higher levels that require greater trust. Allowing your partner to photograph you nude or filming both of you during lovemaking creates an initially scary but ultimately exciting new avenue for sexual intimacy between couples. Exploring new expressions of sexual desire between each other can help couples re-ignite their relationship and build a stronger connection of trust in each other’s mutual desire. Many couples don’t fully explore the multiple avenues of sexual pleasure and adventure available to them for fear of offending each other, going against long-held moral and/or religious beliefs, or because of their own shyness. Many expressions of intimacy are left unexplored due to their negative image in today’s society. Allowing your partner to tie you up requires a tremendous amount of trust especially from a partner who has been cheated on.

It is crucial to first allow the rage and hurt from the cheating to subside. It will subside! Only when anger and other emotions are under control can you really properly decide whether there is value in rescuing the relationship or parting ways. Making any life-changing decisions while in the throes of intense emotion can often result in disaster.

If you decide to try and rebuild, proceed with care. Don’t rush into too much too soon. Respect each partner’s comfort level. Although many of these sexual intimacy exercises will require initial discomfort to one degree or another, each couple has to be given a safety line or some way to not completely lose control. Don’t get huffy or impatient with a partner’s reluctance or fear. It is important that they come to this willingly and not out of a sense of guilt for having betrayed the relationship. If they see it as important to reconstructing the link between each other rather than as a punishment for a transgression, they are far more likely to put their heart into the rebuilding.

To the old saying “To err is human, to forgive divine” one can add “to rebuild is to live anew.” Sometimes, there is no way to escape the harshest of life’s lessons, but there are ways to take those lessons and build something new and more sublime in its place. Most humans fail in one way or another and many will fail those they love in the worst possible way. Turning that failure into an even happier outcome is the best revenge against fate.

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Hint: It’s not the same thing as love!

Jealousy is such an unpleasant emotion! Most of us have felt that sick, painful feeling in our stomachs at one time or another, telling us that something is very wrong. Jealousy usually happens when a new person comes on the scene and our partner seems attracted to them, or they seem to be attracted to our partner. Both situations result in the original partner feeling insecure. Sometimes jealousy can present itself as anger towards the new person, the “interloper,” but really the foundation of all jealousy is insecurity and fear: a fear of losing one’s partner to someone else, and/or a fear of being alone.

This fear can be quite strong and scary. After all, we enjoy being with our partners and the thought of losing them to someone else is painful. To many people, the thought of being alone and without a partner at all is terrifying. So many of us, both men and women, go from partner to partner to partner, never really experiencing what it is to live alone, perhaps believing it is impossible to live a happy life without a partner. For all these reasons, jealousy rears its ugly head and makes us feel miserable.

As a result of these common beliefs, many people think jealousy is natural and understandable. Some people even equate it with love: “If my partner isn’t jealous of me, he must not really love me,” or “I’m only jealous because I love my partner and want to keep him or her with me.” However, what is less commonly known is that some people don’t feel jealousy at all (yet they still love their partners very much), and others have learned to deal with and overcome their jealousy (yet they still love their partners very much). Whether or not you believe jealousy is natural and understandable, wouldn’t it be nice to be free of the green monster for good?

The good news is that it is possible to overcome jealousy. It may take time, and some help from your partner, but it can be done – and counter to the beliefs above, it will significantly enhance the bond you have with your partner.

Being less jealous, and therefore less fearful and less controlling with your partner, will create a more loving relationship between you.

Overcoming jealousy is both an individual and joint effort. This is because although our fears come from inside ourselves, our partners and others around us can reinforce our fears or help us feel less fearful with their actions and words. So it’s important that you both agree that jealousy is not the same as love, and that there are better ways to show you love someone than by getting jealous. Reaching this agreement is an important step towards overcoming jealousy: merely agreeing it is not a productive emotion, and starting the conversation about jealousy.

Then it’s time to talk more specifically about what makes you jealous and why. Your partner can’t help you overcome jealousy if they don’t understand what you are thinking. Which means it’s important that you do some soul-searching so you can tell your partner exactly what it is that’s making you jealous.

When you find yourself feeling jealous, rate your fear from 0 (not at all afraid) to 10 (extremely afraid):

• How afraid are you that the person making you jealous will take your partner away from you?
• How afraid are you that you are not as [good as] [pretty as] [handsome as] [sexy as] this other person?
• How afraid are you of not having a partner at all?

Figuring these things out for yourself and sharing them with your partner is the biggest step towards eliminating jealousy from the situation. In most cases, the threat is more imagined than real. Sure, the new person may seem exciting or good looking, but that doesn’t mean your partner has any intention at all of leaving you for that person. Get it out in the open and share your feelings. After all, if you can’t talk honestly with your partner, are they really the right person for you? If this new person really is a threat to your relationship, shouldn’t you know about it before things get worse? If you treat each other with care and sensitivity (i.e., listening and reflecting, not accusing your partner of anything or reacting defensively), you will increase the intimacy between you. Being vulnerable with each other is one of the greatest ways to strengthen your bond.

Of course, it is possible that one day your partner may indeed become more interested in someone else than in you. It does happen. Learning how to deal with that reality will be an even bigger step in eliminating jealousy from your life forever, and is the subject of our next article:

Overcoming Jealousy: Believing in the Power of YOU.

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It’s kind of amazing to me actually how swinging has become so popular these days. The amount of couples getting into the lifestyle seems to grow every day. With this sudden influx of “newbies” it made us think back to our first year in this lifestyle and seeing as how we are in the advice business we thought it appropriate to share our experiences and thoughts on the subject.

The first thing we noticed when we tried to join the “lifestyle” was that we seemed to have a problem attracting “seasoned” veterans. They seemed to shy away from us at every turn especially when we told them we hadn’t really done anything yet. We honestly couldn’t figure it out.

We started looking at our ad to see what the heck we were doing wrong and we did notice a few problems. For one we had made all sorts of conditions that made us less appealing. We had things like “she can play with another woman, he just watches and plays with me” and other such nonsense. I call it nonsense because we now understand what we were really doing, and, what the more seasoned swinger saw in those words. It was saying we had jealousy issues that hadn’t yet been resolved.

Luckily we don’t give up that easy, we redid our ad several times over and started being honest about ourselves in the ads and most of all we started being honest with ourselves about what we both wanted out of this. We had always been very open and honest in everything but we had to break through that last boundary of completely trusting each other. We had to realize, and even verbalize to each other, the fact that no matter what happened with others we would always love each other. Nothing, nor anyone would ever change that or come between us. Phase one complete!

That did change our responses a bit but then we hit another snag. We had decided early on that we wanted to really get to know the couples/singles we had met over the web before actually meeting with them in person. Let’s face it…there are a lot of nuts out there and we thought we were just being careful. This basically meant lots of email back and forth. Mistake number two! As we now know swingers hate this email tag just about as much as anything else. It’s not that they want to jump in bed with people 10 minutes after they meet (even though some do) but this practice brings up several problems. First off is the fact that there are a few so-called swingers who never meet with others, they just use the email as fantasy to boost their private sex life. They basically use these swingers and the email as foreplay.

Secondly are the dreaded picture collectors. These are usually guys who manage to pawn themselves off as couples and hold long drawn out email “relationships” attempting to get pics from the couples they contact. These are without a doubt the dregs of the earth but they are out there and most “seasoned” swingers get very suspicious when someone contacts them but never wants to meet or at the very least speak via phone. So we started meeting couples sooner than we had originally planned. We still were cautious in who we met, using public places to meet and usually speaking with both parts of the couple just to be sure.

This also helped out in our quest, our contacts became more frequent but still not what we thought they should be. The last piece to the puzzle seemed to be the lack of pics on our ad so we added current pics. I say current because we had seen ads that had great pics but once we started talking to some of these people and got more pics from them we noticed things didn’t quite look right. The pics on their ad were years old. This was our first turn off from couples (and singles) we had contacted. Once again logic told us that if this turned us off it might very well turned off others. Now we started getting emails but unfortunately the problems didn’t quite stop there.

So the emails started coming in but we had noticed quite a few of them weren’t even close to what we were looking for. To be honest it didn’t even make sense why half these people even emailed us in the first place. After some serious head scratching we once again looked at our ad. We did notice that we hadn’t been the normal brutal honest people we really are. We do have to admit that most of these came from single guys so we went back to the drawing board; let’s re-write the ad again. So we laid everything out in no uncertain terms, maybe these folks just needed the information in a no uncertain terms, slap you in the face way to get it. This finally seemed to work. So we have an ad that works, we are getting emails from decent people, everything is just ducky right? Not so fast there babba lou, … we still had a lot to learn.

We then decided since we were new maybe we should stick with others that were new. So we started meeting couples. First meeting, he basically dragged his wife along and told us “she really just watches but maybe she will join in if things get hot enough”…I don’t think so! Another meeting we had with “newbies” was also a disaster. We met a couple who were really nice, had quite a few drinks and decided to try to find a room. Unfortunately there wasn’t a room to be had for love nor money so we decided that since we liked each other and got along quite well we would just get together the following weekend. Within days they started making excuses why they couldn’t meet and finally we gave up on them. After talking to several other, more seasoned vets of the lifestyle, we finally figured out what went wrong. These two needed to be absolutely plastered to do this (which they were) and when they sobered up the next morning they basically chickened out.

One final disaster, just to prove a point, was our fault. Met a great couple that was a few states away and chatted for a week or so. We decided to meet that Saturday night for dinner and what not. That Saturday morning my wife woke up with “you know what” three days early. We didn’t really know what to do but figured we would still go up, meet and if things seemed right we would just meet another time. My wife tried to mention it to her several times but couldn’t get her alone. Afterwards when they asked what we wanted to do we finally got to tell them. They were not at all happy and now that I look back on the situation I don’t blame them one bit. We weren’t completely honest with them from the get go. We all were very attracted to each other so what we basically did that whole night by not telling them was being a tease. Like I said before, our fault completely.

So what’s the moral of this story you say? It all comes down to one word, honesty. Honesty in your ad, honesty in your contact with others, honesty when you are interested and when you’re not but most of all honesty with yourselves. If you haven’t figured out all of your issues with each other do it before you meet another couple (or single). Talk to each other about what you are and are not willing to do and be damn sure you aren’t just saying it; you have to truly believe it and accept it. If you haven’t moved to that point in your relationship yet you are not ready for swinging!

Re-read your ad and make sure you aren’t overstating anything and make sure you are very clear about what you will and will not do. Put pics in your ad, they get twice the amount of emails that non-photo ads get. You don’t have to show your face but don’t just show crotch shots……seen one ya seen them all. What most newbies don’t understand is the fact that “real” swingers are interested in the whole package. They care about personality, compatibility and looks.

When someone doesn’t interest you just drop them a nice note back saying no thanks. Trust me it won’t hurt their feelings like you think it might, they will appreciate the honesty! Lastly don’t feel you have to jump into the sack immediately. Make sure everyone is comfortable with the situation and if it just doesn’t feel right don’t do it. Better to say no than have hard feelings or problems down the road because you were pressured into something you weren’t ready for. Also if something just doesn’t sound right in an ad or email and that person won’t explain it move on. It’s kind of like any business deal…..if it sounds to good to be true it probably is!

The swingers community is an amazingly open, friendly and honest community….it’s not all about sex. It’s about friends and having fun, in and out of bed with great people. The sooner you learn this and what’s been mentioned above the better off you will be.

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While doing our weekly browse though the personal ads to weed out the vermin we decided to actually see how many of the “singles” listed were married or wouldn’t give their relationship status (as far as we are concerned they are married & just don’t want to admit it!). Now we aren’t naive at all but we were astonished to see how many there were.

Do people understand the pain they cause to their mates when they cheat? Even more so do they understand the levels of pain they create by cheating. Obviously they don’t or the statistics on this relational virus wouldn’t be as high as they are. Personally I don’t get why this happens as much as it does especially in these liberal days of swinging, swapping, fetishes & other sexual diversions. This site has never, nor will we ever advocate a certain lifestyle as being better than any other, we actually created this site to celebrate the diversity of these lifestyles, but there is one thing we just can’t tolerate & that is someone cheating on their mate.

The Real Pain of Cheating

During one of the many discussions I’ve had with my wife the topic of cheating came up. I explained to her that in my opinion the sex involved in cheating isn’t one tenth as harmful as is the betrayal the person being cheated on feels. I also told her about a former girlfriend who I lived with for many years and an incident that involved her cheating on me to get back at me for something or another. The weird part of the story was the fact that when she told me what had happened I forgave her & we moved on with the relationship. Why you ask? For several reasons, most of all because she didn’t do it for any other reason except she was mad (& drunk). I know it sounds strange and no, what she did wasn’t anywhere near right but to me it was a stupid decision on her part that she deeply regretted and she didn’t betray the emotional part of what we had.

That brings me to what I consider the worst part of cheating….the emotional cheat. Let me explain. In my opinion a person having even so much as an email emotional relationship with another is far worse than any one night stand that could ever happen. To live with someone day in, day out…tell them you love them and then go out to another & tell them the same things is just the lowest thing any human could do to another. It’s funny, every time you see a movie where someone has cheated the first thing the other usually says is “Do you love them?”. This is actually probably very accurate because most people feel that to be the ultimate betrayal & I am one of them. Please don’t misread my words, I am in no way condoning the one night cheaters nor will I ever validate what many people are trying to do every day but I also don’t know their specific situation so I have no right to pass judgment on them.

Why do People Cheat?

I think I’ve heard every excuse imaginable when it comes to cheating & honestly some of them make a lot of sense. The biggest mistake I’ve seen is women who use sex as a bargaining chip in their relationship. If the guy screws up they are cut off. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG….Withholding sex to attempt to punish your mate will not only make them go elsewhere but it is probably the fastest way to push them there. The other one I don’t understand is one party who screws like a rabbit when they are dating & then just stop after they are married? Can’t this be considered false advertising?

This relates perfectly to our article on Setting the Mood when we talked about people who forget about the way they look after they are married. It makes no sense to me why this happens, but it does. Lastly (for this articles sake) there are those who, for one reason or another, don’t get the emotional support they need. This is probably the most severe reason to cheat but even this can be solved by either communication, counseling or when all else fails divorce. Why bother cheating, what’s the point & what will it do for this relationship? Simple answer kids, it will do nothing but make it worse than it is now!

Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side?

Love, marriage and relationships are supposed to be about trust in each other & the joy that comes with sharing your life with your mate….basically you are supposed to grow along with each other. Obviously swinging isn’t for everyone but for those who have found the ultimate trust in each other it can be a wonderful sexual adventure to share together. Key word there is share, as in the two of you together.

Throughout the past several years we have met & talked to quite a few of these sexual adventurers & have noticed an amazing trend within the lifestyle. First & foremost they accept each other for who they are & not for someone they are pretending to be. Secondly they tend to be fiercely loyal to their mate & completely honest & open with them. They also tend to have a respect for each other & anyone who is genuinely into the lifestyle unlike anything we have ever seen.

Have they found the answer to the age old question on how to have a happy marriage? For the right people yes they have. Is it for everyone? NO WAY. First of all it will not cure a broken marriage, if your having problems now don’t even think about getting involved until, & only until, your marriage is rock solid. But if you are both curious about one thing or another (sexually that is) it just might be the way to go.

So What is the Difference Between the Two?

The main difference between cheating & swinging is that there is an emotional bond between the couple that swings that is supportive of each others emotions as well as their sexual desires. Plain & simple these couples are not involved in this because they are lacking in their personal sex life, on the contrary they want each other to experience everything they might desire sexually. These couples rejoice in their love for each other & the fact that they are exploring together! They both know that when the evening is over they are going home together & that the love they have for each other isn’t effected in any way by a purely physical thing. They also know & respect each others boundaries in every way & are willing to work together to help each other work towards their sexual goals, once again together.

So What’s the Answer to the Question

Plain & simple the difference is emotional. Whether you swing or just explore together sexually you are doing it as a couple, as an emotional pair, not as an individual betraying your lover. You can choose two paths in your life together with your mate, one that nurtures each others needs or one that ignores these same needs. For those whose relationship is solid yet you feel the call to explore, look into the swinging lifestyle. I personally think you will will be amazed at how great most of the people involved really are. For those of you that feel the need to cheat try looking at what is really wrong with your relationship. If it’s just sex try exploring with your lover & learn to revel in both the exploration & the adventure you take as a couple. Learn to respect each other’s needs & desires. Don’t judge your lover just because they may desire to try something out of the “norm”. By following this route you may someday learn the secrets that so many of these swinging couples enjoy.

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