How a swinging holiday helped put the spark back in my marriage

A topless mother of three is telling me how much she paid to have a stranger photograph her having sex with her husband. It’s one of the many services offered at Desire Pearl, a clothing-optional, couples-only resort in Cancun, Mexico, which my husband and I are visiting for the first time.

“Was it worth it?” I ask.

She gives me a look that says “yes, of course” . And then she proudly adds: “When the last kid is off to college, I’m framing the photos and hanging them over the bed.”

The mother, like her husband, looks to be in her late forties, but watching them getting intimate in the hot tub, they almost resemble teenagers in their enthusiasm. Soon after, they move to a nearby chaise lounge and have sex in the sunshine.

Some of the other couples - ranging from thirties to seventies, mostly white American, with chiseled abs alongside dad bods, silicones alongside stretch marks - look on. Others continue conversations like nothing unusual is happening.

And they’re right. There isn’t anything unusual about public sex at a place like Desire Pearl and its sister resort Desire Riviera Maya. Public sex (in designated areas) is one of the many unique qualities of the Desire concept. On their website, the resorts are deemed places where “fulfilling your fantasies” is the main objective - and public sex is at the top of the list for many women.

So it’s no wonder that I see it here, and eventually indulge in it myself.

Before visiting Desire Pearl, my husband and I didn’t really know what to expect. The resort had invited me as a journalist because I often write about sex and my marriage. After a little research, we discovered that it is popular with swingers, and this scared us because we would certainly not describe ourselves as such.

It’s not that my husband and I were against the idea of swinging so much as we were unfamiliar with it. We had been adventurous in our sex lives in the past, but since having a child we now spent more time catering to our toddler’s demands, bickering over whose turn it was to do the dishes, and worrying about money. Sex became a thing we did maybe twice a week, and usually when we were exhausted. Our pre-baby sex life seemed like way too much effort now.

Yet the idea of doing something thrilling, somewhere far away from our responsibilities as new parents, was hard to pass up. And that’s not all. Our curiosity about the kind of people who might visit Desire intrigued us. Were their sex lives better than ours even if they’d been married longer than our four years? Were they happy? If there were parents there, and we guessed there would be, did visiting the resort rekindle their romance? Would it rekindle ours?  

Deciding that we’d take things slowly, my husband and I accepted the offer, packing few articles of clothing, and enlisting my parents as babysitters. When probed with questions, we told my parents that we were going to a “nudist” resort, which prevented them from asking any more.

Many of the couples we met there had also given limited information to friends, family, and babysitters back home. But there were also guests who didn’t lie to anyone about their whereabouts, including their children. A man from Ohio proudly told me that his 16-year-old daughter had picked out her mum’s lingerie for the trip. This led to another mother’s story about buying her teenage daughter a vibrator for Christmas. I wondered to myself if I’d be as open-minded as these parents when my daughter grew up. I did like the sound of it.

I was surprised by how many parents I met over the course of our trip and how eager they were to talk about their kids back home. It didn’t matter that everybody was naked, or that somebody might be having sex nearby. Seeing parents talk as enthusiastically about their sex lives as they did about their children taught me that both held equal weight. Happy kids came from happy parents and happy parents had satisfying sex lives. It wasn’t so much a return to a life without kids, but perhaps a reminder of what that life was like.

Though not all couples we met were parents, most of them had been together for many years. Research shows a correlation between long-term relationships and less sex - 15 per cent of marriages are sexless - and Desire seems to work tirelessly to change that.

While some couples might be able to rekindle romance on any holiday with their kids, Desire puts sex and fantasy at the forefront of the experience. Sure, there are candlelit dinners on the beach and couples’ massages like any romantic resort, but there are also bondage kits and erotic photography sessions like the one that mother of three raved about. And whether or not you want to swing or want to watch - we met couples who did everything and others who did nothing at all - Desire is open to all.

For my husband and me, it took us only a few hours to realise what we seemed to have forgotten in our parenting daze. We are way more sexually experimental than ever, and we have a lot more energy than we think. And though we may not have taken the swinging lifestyle back home with us (yet), it’s nice to know there’s a place out there where we can try it again if we miss it.

Erica Garza is the author of Getting Off, One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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