A healthy sexual appetite should be expected from any normal individual and, in many cases, can be satisfied within a marriage. However the difficulty for many men and women is that sexual freedom today operates at a level that allows almost anything to be viewed as acceptable provided all parties agree. This modern view of marriage and wife swapping continues to be ignored by the Church which sanctifies the marriage vows and continues to stipulate the rules that govern the concept behind marriage. Perhaps wife swapping was never a consideration when the first marriages were arranged, the idea being that when an individual was ready to settle down with one person they married them and thereby denied themselves intimate access to A-nother.
Christian marriages have existed for more than 2,000 years with no change to the intention that marriage must prohibit the intimate contact of either individual in a marriage partnership outside that relationship. The reason for this long standing arrangement is possibly more concerned with retaining the family as an institution than it is with forcing two people to remain together after an initial attraction may have worn off. A marriage becomes much more complex when children arrive hence laws around the world provide, to varying degrees of competence, responses that apply to divorce between two individuals and two individuals plus children. Every country recognizes that a marriage breakdown can damage the child/children within a family group and whether you are an adult swinger or not harming a child’s development courtesy of an unstable marriage is no defence. It is arguable that wife swapping should not automatically indicate an unstable marriage except when the marriage vows are revisited.
So what about a married couple without children? Does wife swapping offer them a means by which they are able to retain a close relationship? Wife swapping might be considered as a convenience for those dissatisfied with their immediate partner in the sex arena, or those who are simply unable to refrain from searching for sex elsewhere. As a drug sex can be considered addictive for it provides stimulation together with a temporarily heightened sense of pleasure and contentment.
Whether wife swapping makes marriage redundant is doubtful what it does however draw into question is whether those who marry and take up wife swapping should bother getting married at all? Marriage is intended as a commitment and possibly offers individuals an opportunity to achieve more with their lives in a spiritual sense than a physical appetite for sex could ever nourish.
Marriage has stood the test of time and exists as an established formula that unites two people found in every civilization around the world for thousands of years because it offers an intangible element that people have needed and continue to need no matter how liberal they may view themselves.