The Swinger in the Mirror

Kim Lee is a psychotherapist with more than 20 years of experience helping clients work through difficulties with relationships and break-downs in communication, including issues of trust and infidelity. Along with her husband, she is also a swinger, a secret unknown to even her children or closest friends.
In this memoir, Kim Lee takes readers inside the secret society of swingers, also known as “the lifestyle.” Sex plays a dominant role, but the book’s focus is also on human connection and relationships beyond sex. She shares the difficulty of working through her husband’s affair and navigating relationship issues that both swingers and non-swingers commonly face. Lee invites the reader to learn from her mistakes and see how to better safeguard their own relationship, regardless of niche lifestyle choice. While marriage is imperfect and hard, she demonstrates that it can also be vibrant, healthy, and even sexy, if both partners put in the work and communicate honestly with each other.

Kim Lee is a practicing psychotherapist and an active lifestyle participant. With over 20 years of experience, she offers counselling to adults dealing with a range of issues, including relationship difficulties, infidelity/trust, family conflict, anxiety, and depression. She maintains a full-time practice in Toronto, Ontario.

Kim Lee
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 261
Bibliographic Info: appendix, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2023
pISBN: 978-1-4766-9423-8
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5167-5
Imprint: Exposit

Acknowledgments ix
Author’s Note 1
Prologue: 2015 5
1. Family Ties 15
2. Love at Last 22
3. ­Four-Year Itch 29
4. Weekend ­­Get-Away 35
5. New Church Friends 45
6. First Foursome Experience 54
7. Trouble in Paradise 59
8. Meet the Neighbors 66
9. Women’s Retreat 74
10. Our Little Secret 86
11. Downtown Hotel Night 90
12. What Annie Wants, Annie Gets 99
13. Even the Score 108
14. What About Us? 114
15. Vegas Weekend 119
16. My BFF 127
17. Red Flags 133
18. Give an Inch, Take a Mile 141
19. Second Vegas Trip 146
20. Blurred Boundaries 150
21. Surprise Birthday Party 154
22. Sex and Lies 158
23. The Breakup 162
24. I Was a Fool 168
25. The Affair 172
26. Fight or Flight? 178
27. The Aftermath 186
28. A Fresh Start 193
29. Lifestyle 2.0 198
30. Communication 101 208
31. Unfinished Business 215
32. My Emotional Affair 219
33. Day of Reckoning 226
34. Dr. David 231
Epilogue 239
Appendix: Swinging 101 Primer 243
Further Reading 249
Index 251

“It was EXCELLENT! Swinger in the Mirror is part steamy sex novel, part emotional evolution memoir. As someone outside the lifestyle, I was impressed by how so many of Kim’s inner thoughts felt relevant.”—Meredith Hackwith Edwards, host of Meredith for Real: The Curious Introvert