Kate Hamilton was deeply committed to her failing marriage – despite the fact that she could barely stand to be in the same room as her husband.
So when he suggested an unlikely fix for their problems, she found herself going along with it.
For two years, Hamilton claims she was reluctantly ‘pimped out’ to strangers in the suburban swinging scene. But the world she describes is far from one of frisky dinner parties, fish bowls and car keys.
‘We became swingers while living in the conservative, Republican, hyper religious South,’ she writes in her new book, Mad Wife: A Memoir, ‘so from the start, swinging felt intensely taboo and shameful, something that must remain hidden at all costs.’
The only swinging club in town was hidden in a soulless strip mall, down the block from a Dunkin’, with blacked-out glass walls concealing what was really going on inside… which was much like any other club, but with one crucial difference.
The world of swinging she describes is far from one of frisky dinner parties, fish bowls and car keys
The only swinging club in town is much like any other club, but with one crucial difference
The first time her husband, Rick (she has changed his and her own name in the book), proposed they try swinging – when they were newly married 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 supposed 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 broach the subject for another seven years – during which time they had two children and much couples counseling, as their marriage slowly deteriorated.
‘What had begun as a true union… had become an arena in which I scrimmaged for resources with an opponent who was becoming a stranger,’ she writes.
His solution, again, was to invite strangers into their relationship. But she only discovered how far down that path they were when she came home from a work trip to find he’d been advertising the couple on a swingers’ website for months.
‘He created our portfolio in which “we” expressed “our” desire to meet a nice, hot couple to have sex with,’ she writes.
‘He’d selected snapshots that showed off my body… Innocent photos from our life together became ugly.’
She adds that he had blacked out her eyes to protect her privacy, but that she still felt violated.
‘Rick,’ she says, ‘had been advertising me and my body online for months.’
Many will find it hard to understand how she could eventually capitulate; why she wouldn’t just leave him if things were that bad. And she admits that she can’t fully explain it to herself.
But she says, by way of explanation: ‘I was exhausted from the urgent onslaught of Rick’s exhortations. He made me feel terribly guilty that our marriage was so bad… that he had to resort to this. I knew he would not stop till 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, ‘deaden the part of me that didn’t want this, that wanted a different kind of marriage, that was swinging as a way of giving up on that.’
Behind those blacked–out windows, the club was much like any other club. There were dance floors, bars, and seating areas. However, what made them different were the ‘rows of curtained hideaways’ lining 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 began to heat up.
Hamilton explains: ‘Since the vast majority of swingers are not only middle-aged but of child-rearing ages (36-55), providing ways for swingers to “get a room” without going home makes a lot of sense.’
There were also closely followed rules and sets of etiquette to learn. For instance: ‘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 hosted wife-swapping parties, after rumors emerged that they were Hollywood’s hottest swingers.
However, one star to admit to a love of swinging is ‘Silicon Valley’ star Thomas Middleditch, who claimed in 2019 that it had saved his marriage to Mollie Gates.
The pair filed for divorce the following year, a month after a woman named Hannah Harding claimed he had groped her and another woman without their consent at a now-defunct club in Los Angeles called Cloak & Dagger in 2019.
But, while Hamilton participated enthusiastically, she began to wonder how many women there, like her, had never actually initiated the swinging; who were present under duress.
‘It was an odd performance of chivalry, intended, I think, to make women feel empowered – that we were making the choices and were in control – whether or not we actually were.
‘I wonder how many of these women whom I met at the club had, between meetings and car pools, with the insufficient energy remaining 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 marriages, having been married an average of 11 to 20 years’ – which means most are weighed down by things like jobs, mortgages, homes and children.
‘While swinging often results from the desire to bust through such drudgery before it can consume any remaining passion, my experience and that of many women I met confirmed statistics: we weren’t usually the ones with the energy and drive to initiate swinging.’
The couple continued in the scene for nearly two years. ‘Rick wanted me to swing with him,’ she writes. ‘He insisted that I do it and emotionally manipulated me into doing it, which means he bullied me into having sex with other people.
‘Swinging became, like couples therapy, another thing we were doing in a desperate attempt to stay together that just revealed how far apart we already were.’
This period also – unsurprisingly, considering she was getting naked with strangers on a regular basis – coincided with a kind of extreme body obsession that ensured she looked good at all times, not just in person but on camera.
Thomas Middleditch discussed swinging with his wife Mollie Gates. The pair are now divorced
Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell were forced to deny rumors that they hosted swingers parties
‘I began to be on camera a lot,’ she says – in anything from semi-dressed, Playboy-style shoots to full-on pornography.
‘I maintained a year-round spray-on tan and perfect Brazilian,’ she writes, describing her lean body as ‘magazine beautiful’.
Those photographs – a hard drive full of them – remained a painful, shameful reminder of that part of her life long after it was done. Yet she found she couldn’t delete them.
‘After the swinging was over, after the marriage was finally really over, when I had abandoned the self-punishing behaviors that produced my picture-perfect body, I found it hard to let go of the photos and videos from that period.
‘Even when I could not bear to look at those photos, could not bear to remember what I’d been doing when they were taken, still I held on to the photos,’ she writes.
Finally, though, after enough time had passed, she was able to see those photographs, and the woman in them – ‘the thinnest version of myself tottering on stilettos’ – as something not beautiful, but rather sad; a body shaped by fear and self-loathing.
‘I saw the images as shameful and embarrassing, something my children must never stumble across. Knowing I didn’t know how to wipe the hard drive absolutely clean, I asked my partner to do it for me. I left the room as he did.’
Mad Wife: A Memoir by Kate Hamilton is published by Beacon Press
