Going The Distance

Our unending quest for interesting approaches to making marriage work takes us to Northridge, north LA, and Jeff and Kris. Married for over 20 years, no kids, and big players on the LA swingers scene for the last 10 years or so.

Mike and I, after the prudish debacle of the nudists, were determined this time to ask all the questions which popped into our heads. Jeff and Kris were fantastic: totally open, funny, charming, and as a result, we got a great interview. We asked how they got into swinging: after 12 years of marriage, they heard about a swingers dance and thought they’d go along. After all, they could leave if they didn’t feel comfortable. From the dance, they went on to a party, and both ended up having sex with other people. They really enjoyed it, and their involvement went from there. They said that it’s unusual for a couple to take to it so quickly, normally people dip a toe in the water over a period of months before committing to The Lifestyle.

There are public and private parties. Public parties tend to be more tentative affairs - with the couple usually staying together and working to find another couple they are both attracted to. Whereas at private parties (usually with the white collar great and the good), people are much more relaxed, they tend to know most people, and it’s not unusual for the couple to split up for the encounters.

When I asked about jealousy, Kris said it was simply not a factor in their relationship. She and Jeff are comfortable enough with each other and the lifestyle to know that they’re ok. Other couples sometimes set up rules, and other swingers know to respect and honour other couples’ rules. One thing that is always true in the swingers community is that no always means no.

They said that swinging had had an immensely positive effect on their relationship: they both felt hugely more self-confident (you have to be confident to make the most of swinging – they said that you can usually tell a swinger by how outgoing they are), they got lots of inspiration from encounters with other people which they could bring back into their own love making (sex between them never gets stale), and they feel stronger love for each other, realising that they have a strong and loving relationship as the foundation for their play.

We asked about chat up lines, and they range a fair bit apparently. They can go from (the worst) “everyone else at the party has turned me down, you’re my last shot…” to Kris’ usual “hey, wanna play?”

Kris oozed a confidence and sexuality which I could see would make her hugely attractive to other men and women. One of the things about swinging, and the nudists had said the same thing, is that the basis for a good party is that the women have to feel comfortable. If they are, then it will work. It seemed to me that women actually get more out of swinging – Jeff said that men at first can be disappointed with the reality of swinging: women are much slower to trust a male newcomer, and couples will find that the woman gets all the attention and men don’t at all. That changes as couples find their feet, but it can be dispiriting for men. Jeff said that one of the really positive things about it is that everyone finds their level: Kris was more sexually adventurous, so she could exercise that.

When they started swinging, Jeff had started to read up on sex, and started to meet experts in the field of sex. So he decided to share all this fascinating learning and established The Erotic University, www.eroticuniversity.com. He created it on a real campus which lasted a couple of years, until it had been chased out of existence by the surprisingly prudish folk of LA, so he has now set it up online. Users sign up, pay a fee, and become students at a virtual university where virtual instructors deliver lessons on everything from poledancing to becoming an adult journalist.

The effect of meeting couples with different ideas about marriage is really positive on Mike and me. Without wanting to sound too cheesy, we feel lucky to meet people who can make us see behind the stereptype: it’s true of the polygamists, the nudists, and now the swingers. Not to say necessarily that we’re going to embrace these different ways, but it’s great to hear what’s going in people’s heads. And how content they are!

I’ve been stalking Charlyne Yi for a while now. She is the star of the film, Paper Heart, a documentary/drama about love – on national release in the States at the moment. She sets off on a journey like ours, across the States, to find out what love is. Like us, she meets with “experts” in the field: scientists, lawyers, couples. In addition to this, she and Michael Cera (of Juno fame) have a fictional romance. It’s an adorable film, and she herself is totally adorable.

She agreed to meet us before her stand up show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Given how similar our project is to hers (though it’s not exactly the same… she was out to prove that love didn’t exist, where are Going The Distance is more out to find out about the dynamics of lasting love), we really wanted to pick her brains about her project.

She was fabulous. We asked her how she came up with the idea – and it was that, aged 19, she wasn’t meeting new people and really doubted whether she’d ever fall in love. So she wanted to go out and find out what love actually is. Her advice to us what that we shouldn’t listen to anyone else’s advice. Like us, she found that every love was different, no two stories or feelings were exactly the same, so what works for one person may well not work for another.

We then saw her show which was as quirky as she is!

One thing we’d wondered about doing when we hit LA was getting our teeth sorted out. When in Rome and all that. I have a yellowing cap on my front tooth which has been bothering me for a bit; Mike has the kind of mouth which compounds the Americans’ stereotype about British teeth.

So it was off to J.Lo’s dentist for us. Dr K sorted Mike out good and proper (before and after photos to follow when the caps are fitted on Monday).

Bliss, bliss and more bliss. A wonderful friend of my parents gave us two nights in the Sunset Tower Hotel on Sunset Blvd as our wedding present.

The foecal wafts of San Simeon’s campground are a world away…

During this time, we interview one of LA’s many bit-part actors hoping to hit the big time: Dominic Pace and his wife, Geraldine. He has appeared as one-episode parts in various hit series such as Prison Break, Cold Case and Desperate Housewives. (His IMDB profile: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0655124/)

We wanted to know what kind of a strain living in the shadow of a dream puts on a relationship. Dominic is the manager of a great restaurant on Sunset Blvd called Ketchup, www.dolcegroup.com/ketchup, a funky, minimalist, all-American spot, a job which he is good at but doesn’t see as a vocation. Geraldine has just had their second child, Benedetto, 7 months. Managing a restaurant is stressful, having two young boys (Dante, 4) is also stressful, and Dominic was very candid about how hard he was finding the chaos of family life, not least with the calmer temptations of gorgeous LA ladies around (there were mild, unspoken undercurrents of an infidelity). They talked a lot about the future, one where they are a little more financially stable – perhaps he has hit the mythical, acting jackpot. When we asked him what love is, he replied with “I can’t feel it right now… Love will be when we have a little more financial freedom, when we have that freetime, we are able to connect again in complete peace, where we can be on the same page again”. I think it was one of the most honest interviews we have had so far. Not that other couples haven’t been honest, but these guys are in the middle of a really tough time, and they weren’t afraid to tell us that. Kids change couples’ dynamics dramatically – everyone had said it – but this was our first time seeing it.

We found a great couple who run a winery together. Seth and Magan Kunin of Kunin Wines (www.kuninwines.com), established in 1998, their wines get rave reviews. A great couple to represent Santa Barbara’s burgeoning wine industry.

They have just set up a tasting room in downtown Santa Barbara, so we met them there. It was alive with tasters, making the most of the Labor Day weekend to get their $8 worth of Kunin tastes. Magan is effortlessly gorgeous – without make-up, and with her 7 month-old daughter, Phoebe, on her hip. Seth is the master wine man, he’s knowledgeable, he’s passionate and he loves what he does. We get a great interview with them - Seth doing most of the talking, but with Magan adding really sage and eloquent points at junctions. They met through wine: she was distributing in Chicago, he making wine. Both were in their late-30s and never previously married, we were able to ask lots of questions about why they waited and why the other finally convinced that marriage could work.

We were then treated to dinner by some fine folk who happened to be tasting during our interview with the Kunins and who were inspired by the madness of what we’re up to.

California coast spectacular as ever. The only shame is that the rest of the world agrees and is proving it by converging on it over the Labor Day weekend.

Clears have to beg, borrow and steal to find campsites.

High point is at San Simeon: the last site at the campground. A disabled patch with no surrounding land, in the shade of the loos. Everytime the wind changes, Camp Clear is enswathed with the fumes of mountains of human waste.

Not that different from a regular night in a tent with Mike, I suppose.

Austin Vince and Lois Pryce, both adventure motorcyclists, have written a song celebrating the joys of Russian 3 wheel travel. We were lucky enough to score cameo appearances in the “music video” for Come Ural With Me, a Vince/Pryce original.

I’m an adult. I am able to listen to people’s stories with empathy, ask interested questions, understand their choices. But it would appear that I’m not so adult when presented with a resort full of naked people. I started giggling at the very first willy.

We were at Lupin, near Los Gatos, California, the oldest clothing-optional resort in the US, to meet the couple who own and run the place, Glyn and Lori Kay. They are laid-back, hippy artist types, but this being Silicon Valley, they are also fiendishly bright and talented (Glyn was at Yale, with a Stanford MBA; Lori Kay is a very successful sculptress). They have been together since 1982 and married since 2001, with 8 year old twin girls to prove it.

It was Rob, one of the fabulous Ural mechanics, who suggested this couple to talk to. So we headed from San Jose to Los Gatos and headed off the main roads to find the place. We pull in and it’s immediately wonderful: yurts, teepees, tents; swimming pool, tennis courts, clubhouse; a great atmosphere of relaxation and holiday. Then one of the holiday makers wanders towards us in all his Meat and Two Veg glory.

Mike and I walk, our Knievel suits as usual attracting lowlevel attention, past the normal poolside, as a normal game of normal volleyball is underway. Normal children throw a normal beach ball to each other, and normal grandparents lie on normal loungers reading normal books.Everything’s normal, everything’s normal, everything’s normal.

But oh look, they’re all naked.

The long and the short of it is that we’re so busy trying to pretend everything is normal that we forget to ask Lori Kay and Glyn WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE NUDIST, especially on their relationship. The one bloody question that we were there to ask, the elephant in the room (if you will). Idiots. It’s only when we’re miles from the place and back to a fully-clad that we realise what fools we have been.

As for disrobing, we really thought hard about giving it a go, but there were a few things stopping us:

First up I had a Chernobyl sized melt-down about half an hour before we arrived, letting out a primeval scream when my dark visor flew off my helmet. Poor Mike detoured off the freeway, and back around to crawl along the hard shoulder in search of it. The intercom wasn’t working, I felt so frustrated at being cooped up the last few days in the office and again now in the sidecar, I was livid and couldn’t put my finger on quite why. So being charming with naturists moments later was a hard character shift, even for my schizophrenic self.

Secondly, we’re British remember? At school we’re taught that men have the anatomy of an action-man, and women that of a barbie. There are no genitals in Britain.

Thirdly, we were visiting an exclusive club. They had all earnt the right to be there in their special uniform, and they all knew each other (and each other’s anatomy) well. When 2 strangers turn up, especially newbies, it’s going to be interesting to see how they cope (and their new bodies).

Fourthly, they were all much older than us. No disrespect, but our bodies were likely to have been newer, tighter & firmer and more appealing than many of the others.

Last, but not least, Mike was worried about unconscious turgidity occurring in The Captain. Not, he says, due to the naked bodies all around him, but the combination of naked freedom being naturally erotic,and the fact that it would be (presumably) against the rules to show arousal. And The Captain doesn’t take orders from anybody (thoughts please gentlemen?)

Why didn’t we bring up these concerns with Lori Kay and Glyn? We could have had such an interesting interview – but we buggered it up by being uptight.

Ho-hum, better luck for the swingers in LA…

Time for the bike to get some lovin’ before we cross the border and any notion of a Ural dealer for 12,000 miles. We’re with Ski, the Ural supremo for California. What a dude. He has spent three days patiently teaching Mike yet more about the bike (after his early intensive tuition with Mickey in Anchorage). He and his wife, Sam, even graciously offered to put us up (I asked if we could camp on their lawn. I’ve become an arch vagrant…) and seemed happy to have us for an extra night when the tuning on the bike took longer and longer…

www.triquestcycles.com

Brown, Gray and Clear part company (much mirth) and we head on to Dr Judith Wallerstein, author of the US national bestseller The Good Marriage. Published in the mid-90s, the book is the product of Dr Wallerstein’s study of 50 couples in happy, long lasting marriages. It was the first time that anyone had approached happily married couples to learn firsthand the inner workings of successful marriages. As she says in the book, “the advice most couples get is still based on what therapists have observed in troubled marriages rather than what works for happily married people. But I insist – and my work shows - that you can’t build a marriage based on those that have failed. It’s like learning how to stay healthy from studying the dying.”

I love what this woman is saying. When I read about The Good Marriage during one of my long and often-tedious research sessions a couple of months ago, I knew that we had to get her for this film. We had exactly the same approach to the subject of marriage as she did: let’s find out what works.

From 1966 to 1992, Dr Wallerstein was a senior lecturer at UCBerkeley at the School of Social Welfare. Her background is specifically in divorce, and she set up a centre working with broken families and had set up a landmark study of  93 children of divorce over a quarter of a century - and had written books before The Good Marriage about the devastating effects of divorce on the children of divorcing couples, one of which called The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 year landmark study. Her theories are controversial, her most significant finding is that the effects of divorce on children are not short-term, but long-lasting, profound and cumulative. The children in her study view their parents differently and have lingering fears about committing to relationships.

But I put her divorce work out of my mind. It was this work that had lead her to question what makes a happy and “good” marriage, and that’s what we’re concentrating on. I read the book and every page resonated with what we have seen on our route, in our encounters with happily married people. In fact, as I explained to Dr Wallerstein when we met her, I basically wanted her to explain her book in as much detail – because it will be very very useful to us in our final film.

Her conclusions boil down to two lists. First, the classification of different types of marriage (4 types). Secondly, 10 or so tasks which a couple can contemplate in their own hope for a happy marriage. I’m not sure that I’ll go into them all now – this isn’t a relationship help site after all, nor is it my business to type up her work verbatim - but they are fascinating (and will all be in our final documentary!) All her thoughts are formed from the lengthy research which she compiled from the 50 couples she studied.

Our interview with her was fabulous. She is definitely not one to suffer fools gladly – a feisty, straight-talking older lady with strong opinions. Before we even met, when I finally – miraculously – found her home phone number online, she told me in no uncertain terms that I had to read her book before we met. “So often people come here and ask the most benal and mindless questions – like they haven’t read the book. It’s a waste of my time.” So I duly did my homework. I was nervous about the interview because I wanted to get so much out of her – lots and lots of what she says is totally relevant to what we have found.

I explained this to her, with due reverence, and she said “fine” and went on to relate the key content of her book (which she wrote 15 years ago, remember!) in perfect detail. We were amazed and delighted. What an awesome lady. She also lived in one of the most beautiful parts of the world I have ever seen. It’s like Portofino – huge, glorious houses clutter the hillside of a small promontory in Marin county. It’s where the wealthy of San Francisco now live (Dr W and her husband bought theire beautiful place in ’66) and the cars are blinging, the lawns are pristine, and the hillside is steep (so that everyone has their own perfect view over the bay, and it feels totally secluded despite the number of houses).

Mike and I leave delighted by the interview, and cross back over the Golden Gate to downtown San Francisco and the wonderful mates we are staying with. We’re totally in love with San Francisco, what a city. To celebrate our amazing day with Dr Gray, Martin & Josie Brown, and Dr Wallerstein, Mike and I head out for a Date Night (you’d be forgiven for thinking every night is a date night when we’re together 24/7 – but we’re talking actually taking the time out to remember that we’re mates…) in the ace city. Great meatballs. Happy days.