'I just like it. I'm sexual,' the actor explains.
Thomas Middleditch is sharing intimate details about his love life.
In a candid new interview with Playboy, the Silicon Valley star says becoming part of the swinging lifestyle "saved" his marriage to wife Mollie Gates.
"I don't know how much I can say, because I don't want my wife to be mad at me," begins Middleditch, who has been married to Gates since 2015. "Only after I got married was I like, 'Mollie, I'm sorry, but we have to get nontraditional here.' To her credit, instead of saying 'F**k you, 'I'm out,' she was like, 'Let's figure this out.'"
"To be honest, swinging has saved our marriage," he continues. "We have different speeds, and we argue over it constantly, but it's better than feeling unheard and alone and that you have to scurry in the shadows. By the way, it's now called being 'part of the lifestyle.' The term swinging is old."
Middleditch adds that this lifestyle wasn't something he originally aspired to have with Gates.
"I self-deprecatingly call myself a pervert, but that's not what it is. I just like it. I'm sexual," he explains. "I'd always thought I was a romantic and that when I fall in love, that stuff fades away. It does for some years -- enough to be like, 'I should get married, and I'll be different,' but it's part of me. If that's part of your being and it feels important to you, find a way to explore it, because repression sucks."
"Mollie and I have created our own rules, and compared to most of the people we've met who do this kind of s**t, our rules are strict. We're not off on our own; we're together, a unit," he continues. "It's a perpetual state of management and communication, to the point where it's like, 'All right, we've got to stop. Chill.' I'm gas, and she's brakes. This is actually the premise for a comedy series we're writing together."
Middleditch first hinted at his and his wife's nontraditional marriage while speaking with Interview magazine in July. At the time, he shared a story about bonding with Godzilla: King of Monsters writer Zach Shields at an adult swingers club.
"There’s my wife and your girlfriend, Kelli. We all had a double date, and we went to this fun little place in Atlanta called Trapeze, which is a known adult swingers club," Middleditch explained. "The first night that we're all bonding, we saw each other naked. We didn't do anything, but we certainly witnessed what a swingers club on Sunday night at like 1 a.m. is like. It's pretty sparse, let me tell you that."
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