Kate Hamilton was deeply committed to her failing marriage – despite barely being able to stand being in the same room as her husband.

So when he suggested an unlikely solution to their problems, she found herself accepting it.

For two years, Hamilton claims she was reluctantly “pimped” to strangers in the suburban swinging scene. But the world she describes is far from one of 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, The Mad Wife: A Memoir“so from the beginning, swinging felt intensely taboo and shameful, something that must remain hidden at all costs.”

The only swinging club in town was tucked away in a soulless strip mall down the block from Dunkin’, with dark glass walls that hid what was really going on inside… which was just like any other club, but with one crucial difference.

The swinging world he describes is far from one of happy dinners, fish bowls and car keys

The only swinging club in town is just like any other club, but with one crucial difference

The first time her husband, Rick (he changed his name and her own in the book), suggested they try swinging — when they were newlyweds 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 and 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 a lot of couples counseling as their marriage slowly deteriorated.

“What had begun as a true union … had become an arena in which I fought for resources with an adversary 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 and discovered he had been advertising the couple on a swinger’s website for months.

“He created our portfolio where ‘we’ expressed ‘our’ desire to meet a nice hot couple to have sex with,” she writes.

“Selected snapshots that showed my body… Innocent photos of our life together turned ugly.”

She adds that he 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 they could finally capitulate; why wouldn’t she leave him if things were that bad. And he admits he can’t fully explain it.

But she says, by way of explanation, “I was exhausted by the onslaught of urgent urges from Rick. It made me feel terribly guilty that our marriage was so bad… that he had to resort to it. I knew he wouldn’t stop until he got what he wanted.

One of the least surprising things about swinging, she finds, is how much alcohol is consumed; to loosen inhibitions, almost certainly. But also to, as Hamilton describes it, “quench the part of me that didn’t want it, that wanted a different kind of marriage, that was changing as a way of letting go of it.”

Behind those dark windows, the club was just like any other club. There were dance floors, bars and lounge areas. However, what made them different were the “strings of curtained hiding places” that covered the walls.

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This is where couples – or any number of entangled adults – could crash when the action on the dance floor started to heat up.

Hamilton explains, “Since the vast majority of swingers are not only middle-aged, but also of child-rearing age (36-55), providing ways for swingers to ‘get a room’ without going home has great a lot of sense”.

Rules and sets of etiquette to learn were also closely followed. For example: “Women have 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 surfaced 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 saved his marriage to Mollie Gates.

The pair filed for divorce the following year, a month after a woman named Hannah Harding alleged that he groped her and another woman without their consent at a defunct Los Angeles club called Cloak & Dagger in 2019.

But as Hamilton enthusiastically participated, she began to wonder how many women out there, like her, had never taken up swinging; who were present under duress.

“It was a strange performance of chivalry, meant, I think, to make women feel empowered – that we were making the choices and in control – whether we were or not.

“I wonder how many of these women I met at the club had, between dates and cars, with not enough energy left after a long week, announce that night, ‘Baby, what I really want is more sex, more complicated things. to negotiate, more people to manage”?

Most swingers, she writes, are “middle- to upper-class, well-educated and well-married, having been married an average of 11 to 20 years” — meaning most are burdened by things like jobs, mortgages , houses. and children.

“While swinging often stems from a desire to get through such a grind before consuming any remaining passion, my experience and that of many women I’ve met confirmed statistics: we were usually not the ones with the energy and desire to initiate swinging”.

The couple continued on stage for almost two years. “Rick wanted me to swing with him,” she writes. “He insisted I do it and emotionally manipulated me into doing it, meaning he intimidated me into having sex with other people.

“Swinging became, like couples therapy, another thing we were doing in a desperate attempt to stay together, which just revealed how far apart we already were.”

This period also—unsurprisingly, given that she was stripping with strangers on a regular basis—coincided with a sort of extreme body obsession that ensured she looked good at all times, not just in person but on camera as well. .

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“I started being on camera a lot,” she says—in everything from semi-clothed, Playboy-style shoots to full-on porn.

“I’ve maintained a year-round spray tan and a perfect Brazilian,” she writes, describing her lean body as “magazine beautiful.”

Those photos — a hard drive full of them — remained a painful, shameful reminder of that part of her life long after they were taken. However, he found he couldn’t delete them.

“After the swing ended, after the marriage really ended, when I abandoned the self-punishing behaviors that produced my perfect body, it was hard for me to let go of the photos and videos from that time.

“Even when I couldn’t bear to look at those photos, couldn’t bear to remember what I was doing when they were taken, I still held on to the photos,” she writes.

Eventually, though, after enough time had passed, she was able to see those photos and the woman in them – “the skinniest version of me teetering 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 should never have to stumble upon. Knowing that I didn’t know how to completely wipe the hard drive, 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