How to be a swinger and destroy your family

It does not surprise me that a world with few rules is also awash in loneliness

Credit: Hulu

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So there’s a new show out on Hulu called The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Because I come from the world of Mormonism and live in Utah, this show has filled my social media feeds. I initially had no plan to discuss it, largely because I have never seen any reality TV since the 90s era Real World that I haven’t found boring.

What changed my mind and prompted this post, however, was learning that a scandal preceding the show actually torpedoed multiple marriages and friendships. And this seems to perfectly capture what I was talking about a few posts ago, when I wrote about divorce shattering villages. I will reiterate the caveat from that post that I’m not arguing against divorce. But I can’t think of any better recent cautionary tale than the experiences leading up to The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (SLOMW). It’s a story that perfectly captures the way seemingly private actions, behaviors we might treat as nobody’s business, actually reverberate across entire communities. It’s about the wreckage that follows self-centrism.

Put another way, I have never had a clearer understanding of why every culture comes up with a bunch of rules about sex and marriage than I did while learning about this sordid story. And ultimately the situation hints at the need for guardrails that push people to set aside their own pleasure for the sake of the community.

To make this argument, I’ll have to provide some background on this social media scandal-turned-reality TV soap opera. Apologies in advance. But the gist is that there was a group of ostensibly Mormon moms who posted videos on TikTok. The most famous of these moms is a woman named Taylor Frankie Paul, and the group was known as “MomTok.” In 2022, this group blew up when Paul announced she was getting divorced after participating in “soft swinging” — allegedly swinging that stops short of full blown sex — with other members of this community. Paul then reappeared this year as part of the cast of SLOMW on Hulu.

I’ll be focusing here on the pre-SLOMW drama, and referring to the show only inasmuch as it sheds light on the scandal’s fallout. Also, apparently, Paul was the only member of the swinger group who agreed to appear on screen, so the other characters and drama on SLOMW are largely beyond the scope of my argument here.¹

Relevantly to the pre-show drama, Paul recently appeared on a podcast during which she provided more details about what happened. Apparently the swinging wasn’t quite so “soft.” And unsurprisingly, everything blew up when various swingers began to get emotionally attached to people other than their spouses. Paul’s husband also expressed concern that one of the women could get pregnant and no one in the group would know who the father was. Another revelation in the podcast — which I include less because it’s relevant to my argument than because it sheds light on these folks’ character — is that they were having drunken orgies while their kids were sleeping upstairs with a white noise machine. So, fantastic parenting.

From the podcast, it sounds like there were three couples involved in the swinging, plus another that watched but didn’t actually participate. And Paul mentions, in the context of her husband suggesting they pull back from the sex parties, that she enjoyed the scene because “this is fun.”

That’s fair. Everyone likes to have fun.

But the cost of that fun turned out to be incredibly high for everyone involved: Paul reveals on the podcast that not only did her own marriage end, but so did the marriage of everyone else who participated in the swinging. Even the couple who watched eventually got divorced. It was divorces all around.

Paul took plenty of heat when the scandal broke out² — unfairly perhaps, because all of the swingers including the husbands made their proverbial (and literal!) beds — but more recently I’ve seen this framed as some sort of hero’s journey. Paul went through difficult things and is now bravely talking about it. With the show live on Hulu, discussions have also expanded, as illustrated by this Slate piece, to topics such as gender and religion in the context of the other SLOMW characters.

But I’ve seen very little discussion about what a TikTok swinging scandal means for any of the other people in the swingers’ lives who didn’t sign up for sex chaos. The most obvious people in that category are kids. As the name MomTok implies, Paul and other members of this swingers group are parents. Maybe the kids of these families will be fine. But researchers have many times found connections between divorce and childhood trauma, PTSD, psychiatric disorders and other problems.

Obviously, in some cases divorce makes sense even if it heightens the risk that kids will experience elevated levels of trauma. It’s less damaging to see your parents split up than it is to be raised by an abuser, to point out the most basic of examples.

But that’s not what seemed to be happening with the MomTok swinging scandal. Instead, these are people who, in the parlance of the internet, literally f---ed around and found out. The parents had some fun, but the kids are paying the price.

Trauma is also just the tip of the iceberg, and the kids will now be raised in financially divided families as well. Rather than pooling resources in ways that might have lasting effects, a bunch of moms and dads will end up wasting money on attorneys, doubled up housing, etc. There will be friction over child support and wasted energy regarding the logistics of shared custody.

The MomTok swingers seem never to have considered any of this. In fact, stunningly, one of the storylines in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives follows Paul as she experiences a new pregnancy with her rebound boyfriend — a man who is struggling to stay sober even as Paul proudly declares that she’s “getting f---ed up tonight.” What is that kid’s life going to look like? Again and again, the guiding philosophy seems to be “this is fun,” all others be damned.

Kids aren’t the only ones who suffer. During one scene in the first episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Paul has a discussion with her mom about the new pregnancy. Paul’s mom seems generally aghast about her daughter’s behavior. But what’s really telling here is that the Mom actually seems to be doing a fair amount of the childcare. (Paul mentions having her kids 50 percent of the time, and it seems like her mom is on the verge of making a quip about how much she is actually the one watching those kids — but she holds back.)

During this conversation, Paul’s mom delivers the best line in the whole episode: “I’m just so tired of you doing everything to this family” (emphasis added).

The line captures the entire problem with the MomTok swinging scandal. It seems like, in this case, sex between consenting adults is a private matter. Who does it hurt, after all, if a bunch of couples get it on behind closed doors?

But the MomTok swingers behavior clearly wasn’t just their business. It was their kids’ business, because it has fundamentally changed the course of their lives. It was their parents’ business, because those parents now have to step up and provide assistance. It was the business of friends who were not part of the swinger group — the people on the show — because it ruptured their friend-village. It will be the business of future teachers and employers who have to deal with kids who act out due to trauma. In the worst case scenario, it’s the business of tax payers who have to foot the bill for policing and prosecution. (Paul was arrested at one point, so this is already happening. But researchers have also found that children from single-parent households are more likely to commit crime and witness domestic violence. I hope that doesn’t happen to any of the MomTok kids, but the risk is higher now.)

When Paul’s mom says “I’m just so tired of you doing everything to this family,” what she’s also saying is, “your actions are not your own. You are hurting our village.”

The point is that private decisions impacted everyone. And while in this case everything was extra public due to social media, there’s a deeper principle that applies more generally: Flirting with chaos in one’s own life also increases the likelihood of chaos in other lives. A “this is fun” philosophy on the big stuff — relationships, sex, marriage, childrearing, family, finance, etc. — is therefore anti-village. Many people will suffer because the MomTok swingers and others like them were unconstrained in their pursuit of individual pleasure.

Historically, of course, religion³ imposed constraints on this type of behavior. You aren’t supposed to sleep around and have kids out of wedlock because God said so. Plenty of people fall short of that standard, but it is at least the goal in many faiths. And many accept that breaking the rules carries serious consequences (damnation, for one).

But whether you believe in God or not, these types of rules also perform very real social functions. They’re meant to maximize, for instance, the number of kids born into stable families. Or, they clarify financial commitments between family members (e.g. inheritances or childcare) so as to increase stability and minimize things like feuding. And so on. Societies don’t end up with rules about family and sex because everyone is a prudish killjoy. Societies end up with rules in an effort to reduce exactly the kind of community-damaging chaos that resulted from the MomTok swinging scandal.

There has been much discussion in recent years about how people are leaving religion, and also how that process often leaves a God-shaped hole in terms of spirituality.

But what the MomTok swinging scandal shows is that there is also a God-shaped hole where it comes to social organization. Worshipping at the alter of fun is tempting. But, we are seeing in real time, it’s not enough to hold a community of family and friends together. A world with no relationship guardrails is, it seems, a world in which relationships are too precarious to form the foundation of village-like groups. I have almost certainly underestimated this concept⁴ and the social function of behavioral constraints, but upon reflection it does not surprise me that a world with very few rules is also a world suffering from a “loneliness epidemic.”

I don’t have a neat solution to propose — this is a question humanity has wrestled with since the beginning. But in the search⁵ for an ethical relationship framework, the wreckage of the MomTok swinging scandal⁶ offers hints at where to start: Don’t do things that increase the likelihood of chaos to the people around you. Consider risk in the context of a community. In all things, think first of the village.

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1. I watched the first two episodes of the show in the interest of fairness and reportorial duty. This show is very much not my cup of tea and the drama on the show itself was beyond the scope of what I was writing, so it didn’t seem essential to watch the entire season.

2. The podcast gets into the idea that when the divorce and soft swinging information came out, Paul was portrayed as a villian and home wrecker. Inasmuch as that is true, it is also probably unfair because there were a bunch of other people who were apparently equally involved. In other words, it’s not that Paul specifically transgressed against her friends. It’s that the swinging friends transgressed, as a group, against their community.

3. There is a raging debate in my social media feeds about whether the characters on this show are perfect avatars of Mormonism (the case most ex-Mormons are making), or the antithesis of Mormonism (the argument of the faithful). I suspect most people understand that reality TV is fake, so the answer is neither. But I will also say that in my experience most Mormons are not swingers, don’t drink, etc. As is the case with all religions, there are plenty of people who break the rules, but the swingers specifically seem like outliers to me.

4. My blog posts here are filled with caveats like “do whatever you want” because I’ve tended to be what I might describe as a moral libertarian. This blog post, however, is me reconsidering the viability of that position, and of the extent to which we can pick and choose from traditional cultures and expect traditional results. The outcome of the MomTok scandal (along with many other things) makes me think that perhaps life is more of a package deal than I have been generally assuming.

5. Religious people will rightly point out that many faiths offer perfectly functional frameworks for what are and are not appropriate relationships. But consider that the MomTok swingers are an example of religious(ish) people whose faith did not seem to have a significant impact on their behavior. And that seems to be a growing part of the story here. Faith is losing ground, and I don’t think a large number of post-religious people will suddenly find God. So, I think we need an ethical relationship framework that remains relevant in both religious and post-religious settings. If the only reason you don’t do things that introduce chaos into your community is because God said so, then if you lose faith in (or fear of) God you’re also free to torpedo the village. People are throwing the baby (community) out with the bathwater (faith). I think religious people especially could do a better job of articulating how their worldview is not just arbitrarily delivered from on high, but also is the practical means through which a community can exist.

6. The host of the podcast notes that the group was inexperienced and didn’t set boundaries, which some more “experienced” swingers do. And well, idk man, maybe that’s the only problem. But it kind of seems like a fair amount of human history is a story about chaotic emotional attachments. So, I’m not convinced that ground rules are enough to prevent emotional chaos. If you eff around, the odds at least go up that you’re going to find out.