Is "Spice Things Up" Code for We've Lost Each Other?
Couples who ask for novelty are often asking to feel close to each other again.
“We’re just looking to spice things up.” It’s the sentence couples reach for on a club’s sign-up form, in a dating profile written for two, or across the kitchen bench when one of them finally works up the nerve to raise the idea. It sounds light and adventurous, and sometimes it’s exactly that. Often, though, couples use it to cover for something neither person wants to say out loud: we have lost each other somewhere, and I want us back.
I wrote last year, in Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough, about loneliness in a relationship, the strange ache of feeling disconnected from a person you share a bed with.
“Surely this is one of life’s paradoxes: feeling lonely while being in a relationship? It’s the emotional equivalent of being hungry while standing in front of a full fridge. Everything appears to be in order from the outside, but something essential is missing.”
That kind of loneliness rarely arrives all at once. The deep intimacy fades a little at a time, conversation thins into logistics, and one day you realise you have become housemates who used to be lovers. A couple in that spot usually knows something is missing, but naming it feels dangerous, like an accusation one of you might not recover from. So they reach for a friendlier word instead. Spice.
Which brings me to the swingers scene, because that is where a surprising number of these conversations end up. Ask why couples start swinging, and you’ll hear plenty of answers, curiosity and confidence among them, but spicing things up leads the list. Swinging itself needs no defending from me.
I have argued before that there is no single correct way to structure a relationship, and the research on couples who swing is clearer than you might think. The largest survey of the lifestyle, a 2000 study by sociologists Curtis Bergstrand and Jennifer Blevins Williams covering more than a thousand swingers, reached a conclusion that startles people who assume the scene is full of broken marriages.
“Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the happiness of their marriages and life satisfaction generally as higher than the non-swinging population.”
The couples in that survey were doing well before they ever walked through a club door. Jennifer Reeves, a marriage and family therapist who works with swinging couples, puts the caveat squarely.
“It should never be a tool utilized as a last ditch effort to ‘save’ a relationship. Most couples who start to swing are already in a happy relationship and are just wanting an enhancement.”
The pattern in the couples-therapy literature runs the same way. Swinging tends to deepen the satisfaction of couples who were already connected, communicative, and trusting, and tends to go badly for couples who use it to paper over a gap. That makes sense once you look at what the lifestyle actually demands: constant negotiation, complete honesty about desire and jealousy, the ability to say “I wasn’t okay with that” the morning after and be heard. Those are precisely the muscles a lonely couple stopped using years ago. If you cannot talk about what’s missing at your own kitchen table, a room full of strangers will not teach you.
So the couple hoping to use swinging to save a relationship is usually asking the night to do the talking for them. What they want is rarely novelty for its own sake. They want to reignite intimacy, to feel chosen again by the person beside them, and they are hoping the sight of each other in a new setting will shock the old feeling back to life. Occasionally it might. More often the two of them drive home feeling further apart than when they arrived.
The order matters here. Before anyone books a night out, try one question at home, phones down: “What are we hoping this gives us?” If the honest answer from either of you is some version of “I want to feel close to you again”, then that sentence is the work, and it costs nothing except courage to say. A couple who can say it to each other, and stay in the conversation that follows, might later walk into the scene connected and curious, which the evidence suggests is the only good way in. Or they might find the night out no longer feels necessary.
Say the quiet sentence first. Decide about the club afterwards.