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If you are a golfer wouldn't you periodically do a little self evaluation and assessment to try and improve your swing? If you are a fisherman wouldn't you keep abreast of the latest and greatest research on fishery management and fish biology and behaviour to try and learn a few more tricks to increase your success? Why is this any different? If you could learn from other peoples experiences to help improve your success wouldn't you do it? There is no training manual out there. We are all just following our gut instincts and flying by the seat of our pants. My gut instincts may be wrong. If I can learn some cold hard facts from some digging around maybe I can learn a few things that will decrease the number of times I fail and increase the number of times I succeed. If others benifit from that as well all the better. This is area where the more success there is for everyone, everybody else benifits as well.

rpu3 ... I'll hold your coat while you're on the soapbox, you are not alone. What is swinging and what is not is a never ending debate on here but in my mind it's rather simple, swinging is consentual sexual play with others. And to head off an 'others definition' tangent, I'll just say ...you all know what I mean. We did mostly couples, some mfm, and she had an ongoing relationship with a b/f for years. He was a platonic friend of hers long before we ever met and her first encounter with him was after we'd been married almost 10 years. It was something she had 'on the side' with no involvement on my part in their activities, and yet it was something her and I shared and delighted in. I didn't pursue like activities, that just wasn't in our realm of interest. Can that be called an open marriage by definition or by opinion? Kinda some degree? I believe the important thing is that it's something we were both comfortable with and, equally importantly, it wasn't to fix anything. And, by the way, explaining a venture into the lifestyle because of 'boredom' or to 'spice things up' are interchangeable motives by and large, just a matter of degree and depending on how one expresses it. I mention that to differentiate between those motives and trying to fix something that's broke. Rob

Given I'm one of the few on this board who actually admits her status as being in an open marriage, I think I'll take this opportunity to jump in with my two cents as a form of counterpoint based on my experience. To start, our marriage is not a trial separation or business association nor have we lost any intimacy to our marriage. Actually, I thought we were even closer, if that was possible, due to our commitment to honesty and full communication with each other and everyone else involved, just like the straight-up swingers. I don't see this changing, even if someone spit out the study or numbers showing that my marriage is more likely to fail than a vanilla marriage or a swinger marriage. It can and does work for some... There's certainly failure of marriages associated with swinging or poly as there are with open marriages. A screwed up relationship isn't going to survive swinging, cheating, poly or an open relationship arrangement. Someone who moves into an open marriage or swinging because they are bored, or want sanctioned cheating or unfulfilled already has issues prior to doing this. It's certainly no different than married couples that enter swinging to try to fix their marriages or who decide they are poly in order to sanction their cheating somehow. The reasons why people go into open marriages, polyamory or swinging to me is more indicative to the potential to successfully maintain the current marriage or relationship. Expectations for/upon entering into a non-monogamous also seem to play a huge part. The state of the marriage or relationship before entering into an alternative arrangement is yet another huge factor. And this is what seems to have been revealed by the OP, that there may be factors out there that may indeed indicate problems already that may indeed end in a broken marriage. But it isn't going to be necessarily because of an open marriage. We could substitute any number of alternative relationships in place of the term "open marriage" and the potential for failure will remain the same because of the potential underlying issues that exist before even entering the alternative sexual relationship arena. I know this is your opinion, and my response is not intended to be an attack. I read this, and my first thought is who is to say that people in an open marriage are not enjoying this adventure together? When did proximity become the qualifier as to enjoyment? Okay, I'll get off my soapbox. It was kind of lonely up there anyway since I'm in the minority position here.

Chicup, Yeah, you are probably right, but don't rain on their parade yet. We all get to our place in life at our own pace. Part of that is terminology. Grey may be using the words that he knows But he found his way here. Will this work for them? Who the hell knows? But give them time. S

Playing alone as a swinging couple seems to be essentially the same as an open marriage as you describe it. Pondering this as the male half of a couple that has decided to explore playing alone, and knowing that single males in the swing lifestyle have fewer opportunities than single females, the open relationship language seems to offer greater promise. Meaning, if you meet women with whom you would like to play, saying that you are in an open relationship would be more acceptable to a woman than saying that you are a swinger who plays alone. Forgive me if I am off topic from this thread. These thoughts just occurred to me as I have been reading. All of the many designations of variations on lifestyles make up a continuum in a huge gray area. So much overlap. This all sharpens the boundary between people in the lifestyle and in the vanilla world, because people in the lifestyle are not so hung up on labels and meaning. They are immersed in exploration and pleasure. Maybe you use the label that you think will work the best with whomever you are talking.