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I had to think about this and I'm still thinking! One, everywhere online we read about how sex equals intimacy for men but women need intimacy in order to have sex. In the swinging community, is this true or not? We talk about how we can separate love from sex but how much different is intimacy from love? Intimacy can lead to love and love can lead back to more intimacy. Is that why some couples keep it to one-and-done when swapping? Is the love and intimacy what makes the sex with our significant others pale in comparison to every swing partner we've had? Sex, love, intimacy are intertwined and yes, we can separate them but it seems that it can be only be done successfully with rules, boundaries, and the level of closeness we allow others to become. Second, it depends on what the couple is expecting in their relationship. Do they expect their partner to fulfill all of their sexual and/or emotional needs? Obviously, swingers engage in sexual non-monogamy. And I would see poly couples to be emotionally non-monogamous. Vanilla couples who cheat focus on the sexual and/or emotional infidelity. Swinger couples who cheat seem to focus on the emotional infidelity. Obviously, it depends on the couple and their definition of cheating. I think it all boils down to the cheating partner's lying and hiding the truth. Plain and simple, cheating is the lack of trust one partner has in the other and further breaks it down. The cheating partner didn't trust their significant other to understand how they felt so they had to sneak around and not talk about it. And we don't even have to relate this to sex and emotional needs. What if a cheating partner was laundering money or engaging in tax evasion without telling the spouse? Would it depend on how well they got away with it or is it that fact that they even engaged in it a factor? Perhaps the spouse would have been okay with the money laundering/tax evasion but would have wanted to be involved in it. Perhaps not...is this not the same as couples who prefer to swing together or couples who have a mis-matched view on (non)-monogamy and marriage? To be honest, I can't say how I'll react. Swinging, this forum, and the expansion of my views have helped me greatly in this area concerning cheating. As I've eluded in other threads, both Mr. Sun and I did cheat on each other years ago. I had viewed marriage to be synonymous with monogamy...so I did focus on how it was about sex. And Mr. Sun said it was about sex. However, with what I wrote above, men can equate sex with intimacy. At the time he began cheating (and continued), we had just had our first born, I was still recovering from delivering (it was a bad one), I was working...all of this lead to almost no sex for awhile and no couple time since he was also going to work and school. Of course, I didn't learn about his cheating until a few years later. But this was the situation that bred the cheating for Mr. Sun. So was it just the sex? Was it just the intimacy? Was it both? However, once we had more couple time, more sex, and eventually became pregnant again, would you qualify it as just the sex, the intimacy, or both? When I finally learned that he had been cheating on me, I was on my 4th pregnancy (resulting in our 2nd child). Had the cheating just become a habit that he couldn't break? When I had my affair, it began a few months after having our first miscarriage. So, yes, I would qualify my infidelity as an emotional need that was not met. However, even Mr. Sun has stipulated that he is unable to understand how it is to feel after a miscarriage and could never really fulfill this emotional need. This is why I speak of emotional non-monogamy and why I don't think couples can fulfill each of their needs completely. The conversations (feeling of intimacy) lead to sex and I was cheating, even though I struggled hard against it. Then it moved onto being obsessed with the sex--I couldn't get enough of it. And this may sound like a soap opera but Mr. Sun found out about my cheating way before I found out about his. (I guess I wore my heart on my sleeve.) He continued with his infidelities before, during, and after my indiscretion. Obviously, we have worked through these issues. And I'm sure this post will obliterate any chance we have from playing with any of our esteemed forum posters. But I wanted to put this out there because I don't think sex is just sex (if it were, why would we put up seen and unseen boundaries in regards to what we're comfortable with?). Cheating can be about many things. Now that we're swingers, it's hard to see cheating as being about sex because we believe in non-monogamy in marriage now. Mr. Sun and I differ in regards to poly so he may be uncomfortable going into that realm and won't like it at all if I had an emotional attachment to someone other than him. I am more comfortable with the idea of love and emotional needs being met by more than one so I can't really say that cheating is fulfilling an emotional need that is unmet because even if it is, I'm okay with that. But I can say that cheating would be the lying, dishonesty, sneaking, and break of trust between us. Seeing where we've been, what we've endured, where we are now...I can't see a reason why he would behave in that manner so if he did, it would completely be the end because there really is no need for him to hide anything from me. He can tell me if he wants/has played with someone else. And he can tell me if some else has greater understanding about his feelings/thoughts about something that I particularly don't. Lastly, others may point out that cheating can produce an adrenaline rush that makes them want to cheat again and again. For me, I didn't like the stress, nervousness, and agony it gave me. But then again, I'm not a dare-devil type person and you can achieve that adrenaline rush in other ways. Would this fall in the emotional need that isn't met? Or just a world-class selfish jerk?

I get that you experienced some of what was written as condemnation, but not one single word was meant unkindly, not by anyone. Even the harshest things were designed only to stop what appeared to be an almost intentional relationship-destroying spiral. You don't know the history of the people behind the computers, which means you don't know who among us have had similar experiences and similarly seductive invitations to poison our own lives with our pasts. However, be assured that some of us do. Word of honor.

You could ask her nicely why she is opposed to it. From what you have written, I think she might not want to because of the reason why she went into it in the first place. She and her ex-husband joined in the LS for the wrong reason. You will see throughout the forum how often we advise that swinging does not fix a relationship. It will make a strong one stronger and a weak one fall apart. It exposes cracks and magnifies them. If the couple can see them and work through them, then they have a strong relationship. If a couple sees them (and probably was trying to avoid or cover those cracks) the cracks will widen until there is a breaking point. To her, she might equate that swinging didn't fix her marriage so why would she want to go into swinging again when it might be harmful? Please feel free to post further questions on the forum and in separate threads so they can garner more attention than being buried within this one. Again, I am sorry for my earlier post that had some attitude. I thought that perhaps you might be coming to the forum to berate what we do as swingers.