Polyamorous vs Swingers

Actually Marcus, I was responding to the I'm mistaken Turk/Algerian comment that London made.

I actually have a hard time seeing the difference between saying "I'm poly, not a swinger" and saying "I'm from other ethnic group not this one" if it's to be framed that way. There is usually one person who thinks that but making a distinction between my lifestyle/experience/heritage, in somehow rejecting or that I have a negative view on the other. That's a leap.
 
Actually Marcus, I was responding to the I'm mistaken Turk/Algerian comment that London made.

I actually have a hard time seeing the difference between saying "I'm poly, not a swinger" and saying "I'm from other ethnic group not this one" if it's to be framed that way. There is usually one person who thinks that but making a distinction between my lifestyle/experience/heritage, in somehow rejecting or that I have a negative view on the other. That's a leap.
That's the point. There isn't anything wrong with saying "I'm poly, not a swinger" or "I'm from this ethnic background, not that ethnic background". It's when one says "I'm x, not y" and then goes on to imply that being y is inferior to being x that a problem arises.
 
It only has a negative impact because people generally view swingers negatively. Even poly people. They do this because the rules of swinging are pretty much "have sex not only outside the confines of a loving relationship but also outside the loving relationship you're already in". It doesn't only breach the monogamy "laws", it breaches the promiscuity "laws" too.

I don't think joining in the consensus is healthy in regards to this issue. I also think if you agree that sex outside the confines of a loving relationship is morally wrong in that way, it would serve you well to examine your general views about sex. That's not to say that everyone should be having that type of sex or have relationships with people who desire that type of sex, but one certainly shouldn't be condemning other people who do.

Again, going back to my ethnicity issue, I can understand it being problematic that people believe I'm a terrorist, but my issue should be with racial stereotyping, not that people think I'm Muslim/Algerian/Turkish.
 
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Re:
"Again, going back to my ethnicity issue, I can understand it being problematic that people believe I'm a terrorist, but my issue should be with racial stereotyping, not that people think I'm Muslim/Algerian/Turkish."

That makes sense to me.

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Okay, idea: When outing oneself to the uninitiated, perhaps one could say, "I'm not a swinger, but I am a polyamorist." Then one could just answer whatever questions the other person might have about that statement.

If the other person answered me by saying, "It's the same thing," then I suppose I'd say, "Well you have to understand, swing is more about casual sex whereas polyamory is more about emotional attachment."

Suppose the other person then tells me, "Who are you kidding? You polyamorists are just as fixated on sex as swingers are." Couple of ways I could respond, one of which might be, "Well gee, I think the human species as a whole is rather fixated on sex -- and I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing."

In any argument that develops, I don't want my objective to be winning the argument. Instead, I want to try to make sure that whatever I say is stuff I can feel good about saying when I think about it later on.

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If I understand what's being argued in this thread, the problem is that too many swingers are too fast and loose with sex and as a result polyamorists get a bad reputation because it's assumed that polyamorists, too, must play fast and loose with sex. The implication, essentially, would be that the percentage of unprincipled swingers is greater than the percentage of unprincipled polyamorists, and therefore polyamorists are receiving undue criticism for a greater amount of bad behavior than they're actually guilty of.

If I have misunderstood what's being argued in this thread, then I am willing to receive criticism/correction so as to get a better understanding of the issues. But in the meantime, my response (to my own assumption) is that I don't know that many swingers, so I don't know how "guilty/dirty/shallow" they are as a whole. I tend to be an optimist about such things, but if the pessimistic view is the correct view in this case, then I'll admit it's a shame and a bum deal for ethical polyamorists as well. Still, what can I do, other than try to explain what being polyamorous means to me personally when I out myself?

If swing per se is being looked down upon as being less noble than polyamory by definition, well, that's nothing new among polyamorists. I personally feel that swing per se is just fine, even if it's not my cup of tea (or even just not the path I happened to end up on in life). I don't mind defending swing in one conversation if the other person isn't yet ready to learn about how poly differs. Understanding what responsible non-monogamy is, in my opinion, is higher-priority knowledge to impart to others than is the difference between poly and swing. I can get around to explaining the difference between poly and swing in some future conversation.

The important thing, I think, is just being able to know that in some small way, I helped (or tried to help) another person gain a better understanding about some subject that is in some way related to polyamory. Swing is related in the sense of being another type of (presumably responsible) non-monogamy. That's close enough for now, given how much ignorance about non-monogamy exists in our society.

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Like london said, the rules are different when you're swinging. Polyamory breaks the rules of monogamy by saying you can have sex with more than one person as long as you're emotionally committed to whomever you have sex with. Swing breaks the rules of polyamory by saying you can have sex with more than one person as long as you want to have sex with them.

I choose not to swing, but not because I think it's a morally inferior model of behavior. Polyamory just happens to be the model of behavior that works for me in my life. So no, I don't mind swingers or what they do at all. And I don't mind ending up in a position where I'm speaking up in their defense. I trust they'd do the same for me.
 
What amuses me is that some of my friends who are swingers have told me I'm cheating on Hubby because I'm in love with Guy.

Some people are going to use the terms that make sense to them. Some are going to use incorrect terms even if they've been informed of the correct one.

To my complete amazement, over the weekend I had to explain the difference between polygamy and polyamory to *Hubby* of all people... he'd heard the words but not the definitions and so didn't realize the difference. So there's often a learning curve.
 
Many people think they know what swinging is, but don't. They associate it with the old "key parties" and Plato's Retreat but don't realize that many swingers hook up with certain people on a regular basis, have good friendships with other couples they swing with, and aren't randomly fucking a different stranger every night. All they know is that married people are going out and fucking people they're not married to, without keeping it a secret from each other.

So, they hear about any kind of consenting non-monogamy and they think it is swinging, if they don't first confuse it with religious-based polygamy.

People have all kinds of misperceptions about poly. I remember talking about it to a guy I met at a bar once. At first, he was obviously intrigued and seemed rather positive about it, until the conversation progressed some more and he said something that clearly showed he thought I was bi. When I told him I am straight, a look of disgust showed on his face and he was aghast. Suddenly, I was no longer intriguing. I was just a sleazy slut in his eyes, for not being happy with only one penis in my life!
 
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I've experienced that type of reaction too... An online friend of mine talks freely about how her husband allows her to have sex with other *women*, but told me flat out that I was "wrong" for wanting to have more than one man in my life.
 
So maybe people are accepting non-monogamy as a "solution" for bisexual people, thinking a bisexual person "has" to have one partner of each gender? Maybe they're only ready to accept polyamory as some kind of necessary evil for "special cases." Which may be progress for some people, who knows.

I wonder if swing as a whole is evolving into a "more poly" version of swing than what it was traditionally? I am certainly one of the people who barely knows anything about swing, so that's admittedly idle speculation on my part. I have met a good number of people who started out as strictly swingers, and then decided polyamory was more what they were looking for.
 
Swinging is what it was at first for Hubby and me. It was his solution to a discrepancy between us sexually; I wanted to experiment and explore, and he'd already done all that in his younger days. So he said I could hook up with other men so I could try the things I wanted to try. (And of course he was also allowed to hook up with other women.) Our initial rules stated that no feelings beyond friendship were allowed with other partners, and I had to talk hubby into even allowing friendship.

It quickly became apparent that neither of us is cut out for swinging. Hubby prefers only having one sexual and/or romantic partner, and I need at least friendship to consider someone as a sexual partner. The whole thing with Guy really came out of the blue; I wasn't expecting it at all, and he and I lost a month and a half of the three months he was in my area because I was so afraid of how intense things were getting that I stopped seeing him. But once I was able to admit to myself--and to Hubby and Guy--how I felt, and both of them not only accepted it but were happy with it, the situation felt like the way it should have been all along.
 
If the issue is explaining to someone else what/who I am-my answer is completely different than what I originally wrote, as I understood the original question.

In response to what to say to others:

I tell them, I live with my husband of 16 years, my boyfriend of 21 years and our kids.

I skip the "poly" term because most people don't know it anyway.
But-the descriptive opening sentence I use, leave them free to ask questions to clarify-without opening up the need for using a bunch of terms that people can't agree on definitions for.
 
Yeah, a word is actually only as worth as much as the amount of agreement that can be had about its definition (in any one given conversation). And I think I, too, on those rare occasions where I come out "to one of them" (e.g. to a new shrink I might be seeing), I don't bother saying "polyamory" either. What's the point? I just tell them that Snowbunny is married to Brother-Husband but also lives with me as if I were a second husband -- and both of us guys know about that and are okay with it. I'd have to explain all that whether I said "polyamory" or not, so I might as well not complicate matters by introducing some "kewl new word" to the conversation.

Re (from OP):
"I have a hard time accepting that many full-blown swingers describe themselves as polyamorous."

As far as I can tell, that sentence is the actual original topic in this thread. But we've also discussed in this thread a couple of ways a person can be "swing" and "poly" at the same time. That admixture of contrasting ways of relating makes things messy, but it's part of the reality we all live in. How we deal with that reality is perhaps tangential to the original topic.
 
There's not much of a polyamorous community where I live, and those seem to be all single, twenty-somethings, so despite my initial prejudices (picturing cheesy 70's-style "wife-swappers") I delved into my local swingers' community as a way to connect with others my age in committed relationships, but open to non-monogamy.

Most of "the lifestyle" folks I've met preferred some level of friendship with their lovers, some even had morphed into very close relationships with other couples that verged on, if not met, the qualifications for polyamorous relationships.

The difference between poly and swingers, to me, seems to be:
1) swingers are a "couplecentric" society. The swingers I know strictly have sex with others as a couple. It is something hubby and wife do "together" to "enhance" their marriage. The idea that you can fall in romantic love with more than one person at a time is somewhat uncomfortable to them.
2) swinging is geared toward heterosexuals. Though it's accepted for women to be bisexual (emphasis on the sexual), most of the swingers I've spoken to seem surprised at the idea that a woman who isn't a lesbian might actually fall in love with other woman. Bisexuality in men is pretty much frowned upon or kept on the down-low.

Though I live in a hugely gay/lesbian/transgender-friendly city, I haven't met any gay/lesbian/trans couples within the swinging community. I know plenty of gay men who are non-monogamous in one way or another, but they do their own thing amongst themselves.

I've been dating a guy for the last month or so I met on a swingers' dating site. He's divorced/single, hetero. His reasons for meeting people within "the lifestyle" are that he likes to have sex with others watching, he doesn't do well with traditional "dating" as he refuses to engage in any relationship where monogamy is eventually expected, and because he travels for several months a year so he feels he can't commit to a traditional relationship. That being said, he seems to very much be enjoying our one-on-one dates together, and he's as attentive as any man in the first stages of dating a woman.

I think of swinging as a way to engage in non-monogamy while still adhering to many of the norms of heterosexual/monogamous society. Most of the swingers I've met were nice, easygoing people, and the couples are very much in love with each other. Polyamory seems to have a more political, feminist, queer-friendly bent, which speaks to me more than swinging. But, whatever. It's all good.
 
Well what I heard (one time) was that the details of a "swing scene" in any particular city vary from region to region. Is that true? Example: I had heard about the swing-as-a-couple protocol, but was under the impression that some swing regions hold to that protocol more than others. Is that true, do you think?

Posts by people with first-hand swing experience are valuable for me; they are my main source of information about what swing entails and what it's all about.
 
It definitely differs from place to place.

Where we live the poly community and swinging community (and BDSM) are so intermixed as to be almost impossible to define.

The poly's who don't want to swing, tend to not participate in any of the communities.
 
Both

As someone who is a swinger and poly I might chime in. Many swingers actually actively seek out relationships with other couples or singles (usually single females). Many swingers build the friendship before jumping into bed with other swingers, not much different from poly really. However those same people also go to swingers parties and hook up with people just for the night, and I am sure their are poly people who have causal sex too.

Many poly seem to have this air that they are so much better then swingers because being poly is about love - but for me four of my closet friends - people who would pick up up from the airport, be there at family members funerals, cleaned our house when we needed to move came from meeting as swingers - the relationship changed and moved.

Just the like LGBTQ people but aside their differences to help each other out and move their rights along, I believe that swingers and poly folk are very similar and need to put aside their differences and work together. the same things effect both groups and no good comes out of being divided and at odds with each other when really we have very similar principles.
 
I wonder if swing as a whole is evolving into a "more poly" version of swing than what it was traditionally? I am certainly one of the people who barely knows anything about swing, so that's admittedly idle speculation on my part. I have met a good number of people who started out as strictly swingers, and then decided polyamory was more what they were looking for.

Yes in some swinger circles there is a term used called 'progressive swinging' which is swinging with more emotional attachment then just having sex at party however the term is not the best because by the word progressive it implies that the opposite of it is not progressive.
 
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