Swinging is about protecting our relationships not risking them. At Liberated Christians we totally support swinging, but our real interest is real intimacy, polyamory and overcoming jealousy by love not by avoiding any real intimacy. But this is much harder than just having recreational sex with relative strangers. Both swinging and polyamory can be dangerous to your prime relationship if your relationship is not built on a firm foundation of true love and honest communications. In polyamory, you may have all equal relationships or you may have a prime and other secondary relationships.
Open relationships magnify existing conditions within a relationship.
If trust, love, commitment and openness exist, then the relationship is usually further strengthened. If, however, there is jealousy, insecurity and lack of honest communications, these problems will be painfully magnified in an open lifestyle. Working through these problems, however, in an open lifestyle, can help all aspects of the relationship, since issues may come up that are never dealt with otherwise. I've seen many examples of this happening and sometimes relationships break up because of these issues. But that may even be good, since it uncovered problems that may have eventually doomed the relationship anyway.