Kate Hamilton was deeply involved in her failed marriage, despite the fact that she could barely bear to be in the same room as her husband.
So when he proposed an unlikely solution to their problems, she found herself going along with it.
Hamilton claims she was reluctantly “pimped out” to strangers in the suburban swing scene for two years. But the world she describes is far from a world of playful dinner parties, fishbowls and car keys.
“We became swingers living in the conservative, Republican, hyper-religious South,” she writes in her new book: Mad Woman: A Memoir‘So swinging felt intensely taboo and shameful from the start, something that had to be hidden at all costs.’
The only swinging club in town was hidden in a soulless strip center, near a Dunkin’, with blacked-out glass walls that obscured what was really going on inside… which looked a lot like any other club, but with one crucial difference.
The world of swinging she describes is far from a world of playful dinner parties, fishbowls and car keys
The only swinging club in town is a lot like any other club, but with one crucial difference
The first time her husband, Rick (she changed his and her own name in the book), suggested they go swinging — when they were newlyweds and feeling sexually adventurous — she went along with the idea for a while.
But when she finally heard another man’s voice on the phone – the man she was going to have sex with – she knew she couldn’t go through with it.
“My stomach dropped,” she writes, “I left the room. I told Rick no. We have this precious, pure thing between us, and once we break it, it’s gone forever.”
He didn’t bring up the subject until seven years later – during which time they had two children and received a lot of couples therapy, while their marriage slowly deteriorated.
“What had started as a real union… had become an arena in which I fought for resources with an opponent who was becoming a stranger,” she writes.
His solution was once again to invite strangers into their relationship. But she only discovered how far down that path they were when she returned home from a business trip to find that he had been advertising the couple on a swingers website for months.
“He created our portfolio where ‘we’ expressed ‘our’ desire to meet a nice, hot couple to have sex with,” she writes.
“He had chosen snapshots that showed my body… Innocent photos from our life together turned ugly.”
She adds that he blackened her eyes to protect her privacy, but she still felt violated.
“Rick,” she says, “had been promoting me and my body online for months.”
Many will find it difficult to understand how she could finally capitulate; why she wouldn’t just leave him when things were that bad. And she admits she can’t fully explain it to herself.
But by way of explanation, she says, “I was exhausted by the urgent onslaught of Rick’s exhortations. He made me feel terribly guilty because our marriage was so bad…that he had to resort to this. I knew he wouldn’t stop until he got what he wanted.”
One of the least surprising things about swinging, she discovers, is how much alcohol is consumed; to loosen inhibitions, almost certainly. But also to, as Hamilton describes, “numb the part of me that didn’t want this, that wanted a different kind of marriage, that wanted swinging as a way to give that up.”
Behind those darkened windows, the club looked much like any other club. There were dance floors, bars and seating areas. What made them different, however, were the ‘rows of curtained shelters’ along the walls.
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This was where couples – or any number of entangled adults – could tumble when the action on the dance floor started to heat up.
Hamilton explains, “Since the vast majority of swingers are not only middle-aged, but also in the child-age range (36-55), it makes a lot of sense to offer swingers ways to ‘get a room’ without having to go home. to go.’
There were also closely followed rules and etiquette to learn. For example: ‘Women always approached first. “It was absolutely unacceptable for a man to express interest in another man’s wife or date before the couples had met and decided (‘mutually’, it was assumed) that they were all interested in interacting with each other.”
Last month, Dax Shepard was forced to deny that he and his wife Kristen Bell were hosting wife-swapping parties after rumors spread that they were Hollywood’s hottest swingers.
However, one star who admits his love for swinging is ‘Silicon Valley’ star Thomas Middleditch, who claimed in 2019 that it saved his marriage to Mollie Gates.
The couple filed for divorce the following year, a month after a woman named Hannah Harding alleged he groped her and another woman without their consent at a now-defunct Los Angeles club called Cloak & Dagger in 2019.
But as Hamilton enthusiastically joined in, she began to wonder how many women out there, like her, had never actually taken up swinging; who were present under duress.
‘It was a strange display of chivalry, designed to make women feel like we were making the choices and in control, whether we were or not.
“I wonder how many of these women I met at the club, between meetings and carpools, with not enough energy left after a long week, announced that night, ‘Honey, what I really want is more sex, more complicated things. to negotiate, more people to manage”?’
The majority of swingers, she writes, are “middle to upper class, well educated and well into their marriage, and have been married for an average of 11 to 20 years” — meaning most are burdened by things like jobs , mortgages, houses. and children.
“While swinging often comes from a desire to get through such a rut before it can consume any remaining passion, my experience and that of many women I met confirmed the statistics: we were usually not the ones with the energy and drive to start swinging.”
The couple stayed in the scene for almost two years. “Rick wanted me to swing with him,” she writes. ‘He insisted I do it and emotionally manipulated me into doing it, meaning he bullied me into having sex with other people.
‘Swinging, like couples therapy, became something we did in a desperate attempt to stay together, which showed how far apart we were already.’
This period also coincided – unsurprisingly, considering she was regularly naked with strangers – with a kind of extreme body obsession that ensured she always looked good, not only in person but also on camera.
Thomas Middleditch discussed swinging with his wife Mollie Gates. The couple has now divorced
Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell had to deny rumors that they hosted swingers parties
“I started being in front of the camera a lot,” she says – from Playboy-style semi-clothed shoots to full-on pornography.
“I kept a spray-on tan all year round and was perfectly Brazilian,” she writes, describing her slim body as “magazine beautiful.”
Those photos—a hard drive full of them—remained a painful, shameful reminder of that part of her life long after it was finished. Still, she found she couldn’t remove them.
“After swinging was over, after the marriage was finally over, after I gave up the self-punishing behavior that my beautiful body produced, I found it difficult to let go of the photos and videos from that period.
“Even though I couldn’t bear to look at those photos, and couldn’t bear to remember what I was doing when they were taken, I still held on to the photos,” she writes.
But eventually, after enough time had passed, she was able to see those photos, and the woman in them—”the thinnest version of myself teetering on stilettos”—as something that wasn’t beautiful, but rather sad; a body shaped by fear and self-loathing.
‘I found the images shameful and embarrassing, something my children should never stumble over. Knowing that I didn’t know how to completely clean the hard drive, I asked my partner to do it for me. I left the room, just like he did.”
Mad Wife: A Memoir by Kate Hamilton is published by Beacon Press