The swinger community has a lot of internal lingo to help let other swingers know what you're into easily. Today we're asking the question “What does Soft Swap mean in swinging?”
The simple tl:dr answer is that soft swap means a swinging situation where there isn't genital to genital penetrative sex. But as with anything else, there are an awful lot of variances to this in real world practice.
Before we go further, though, we should probably define the other half of the term. “Swap.” Swap is the standard view of swinging. Namely a couple meets another couple, they decide that this other couple might be fun to get naked and naughty with, so they go off somewhere as a foursome and swap, or switch partners.
The simple definition of soft swap above is accurate, but not, perhaps, descriptive enough. For some swingers, soft swap excludes any genital play, for some it excludes oral sex. Some allow for strap-on penetration between women, others go so far as to limit their soft swap experience to playing with your own partner, and allowing the girls to play together.
In an effort to standardize terminology, though, we come down firmly in the camp of calling soft swap sex play with someone other than your partner, with your partner's involvement or approval, that can include anything from hand jobs and fingering, blowjobs, cunnilingus, and rimjobs, but stops short of a penis going inside a vagina.
Once that sort of penetration occurs, well then you ought to go ahead and call it full swap.