3 is not a Crowd

Introduction

“Three is not a crowd.”

A few years ago, this variant of an old cliché began turning up with increasing frequency in personal advertisements in the swinger publications which first appeared in New York and Los Angeles. Ever since then, more and more couples seeking to enlarge their sexual relationships through contact with others have expressed their willingness to engage not only in two-couple swap sessions but in threesomes as well. Two is tedium, one infers, but three is not a crowd.

While this may be seen as a new direction of sorts in the swinger subculture, there is nothing wildly revolutionary in the idea of three in a bed. One is reminded of the Hollywood titan taken on a tour of a friend’s garden and shown a large brass sundial. When its function was explained to him, he shook his head in amazement. “What’ll they think of next?” he marveled.

And of course the ménage à trois is as much an invention of antiquity as is the sundial. The one is the result of man’s desire to know the time, the other of his even stronger desire to make that time pass more pleasantly. One recalls that both Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar dwelt deep in the bosom of Abraham, that Jacob married two sisters, that Lot tumbled both his daughters. (One may believe, in the last connection, that the girls were moved solely by filial piety and the urge to provide their father with male heirs. One may also believe that Lot didn’t know what was going on. One may further believe that the Earth is flat and the moon a wheel of Camembert.)

But however one may feel about the literal truth of the Bible, the simple endurance of these stories testifies to the age old occurrence of troilistic relationships and, even more, to the propensity of human beings to find such relationships of interest. That the contemporary sexual underground has embraced the ménage is hardly remarkable.

For quite some time now, I have been peripherally involved with America’s sexual underground. The rising tide of mate-swapping and other forms of ritualized extramarital sexual relations has lately proved to be neither a fad on the order of the hula hoop nor, as was often charged, a creation of the sensational press. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly evident that the tribe of swingers constantly wins new recruits and has emerged as a fact of life in contemporary America. Whether this trend will continue is moot. That it is quite real is indisputable.

At first glance, one may easily regard the threesome as a component of the swinging scene, of no special importance in and of itself. That a couple with a preference for group sex is willing to participate in an occasional threesome does not seem overwhelmingly significant. Indeed, one of the reasons many swingers will emphasize in their ads that “three is not a crowd” simply because a threesome is often more easily arranged than a four-or-moresome. The world of mail-order adultery is strangely competitive. Many ads draw surprisingly few suitable responses, while many responders find themselves writing dozens of letters and getting distressingly few letters in return from advertisers. Couples do find each other, certainly, and a pleasant evening with a couple will lead to other presumably pleasant evenings with that couple’s friends but the initial plunge into the pool can be difficult to arrange.

On the other hand, I have found that single swingers are in abundant supply. A couple expressing a willingness to swing not only with couples but with singles as well is virtually guaranteed a full mailbox and as full a bed as they desire. This is most notably the case when the couple wishes to swing with single males: the couple seeking an extra girl will not experience nearly so great a deluge of applicants.

When I first began encountering examples of troilism in swinging circles, I tended to attribute this partly to convenience and partly to that desire for variety for its own sake which is a hallmark of the swinger. And while these factors undeniably play a role in a large proportion of cases, they do not begin to tell the whole story.

In one way or another, I have been made acquainted with quite a number of cases in which the threesome is the preferred, even the exclusive form of sexual liaison. Neither convenience nor experimentation begins to explain these instances. Moreover, the persons involved can often not be called swingers in any real sense of the term. Their fixed sexual triangle constitutes the whole of their sexual experience, and no outside contacts are sought or permitted. They are, in essence, a sort of plural marriage.

I became sufficiently well acquainted with four of these triangular relationships to report on them at length in the pages to follow. While I prefer to let the facts — indeed, the participants — speak for themselves, some introductory observations might not be amiss.

First of all, the reader will note that all four of these triangles consist of one man and two women. One ought not to infer that this is the standard or even the most common form of the triangle. In swinging society per se, I would say that it is by far the most frequently sought — far more couples seek single girls through ads than single men — but that it is less frequently achieved — infinitely more single men respond to such ads. I am not statistically inclined, nor is my sort of research the kind that involves a large enough sample for statistical conclusions to be drawn. However, I would guess that the majority of more or less permanent and stable threesomes do involve a man and two women rather than a woman and two men. Generally speaking, a man may willingly share his wife with another man for a night or a weekend, but permanent polyandry seems to go against the grain of Western culture.

The reader will further note the presence of incest as an exceedingly strong component in these three-cornered sexual relationships. Two of the cases which follow involve genuinely incestuous situations while what I would consider symbolic incest plays a part in the others. One might argue that incest plays a subliminal role in all sexual relationships, that any lover is playing roles of parent and sibling and child at one time or another. But I do feel that incestuous overtones are far more strongly present in the threesome — in any threesome — and I think it is more than the workings of sheer chance that two of these cases do involve actual incest.

The stories which follow are told insofar as possible in the actual words of the participants. They are the product of a great many lengthy interview sessions, with the results of these interviews edited and rearranged but the content essentially undisturbed. I have tried to eliminate the backing and filling, the questions and answers which characterize most interviews, and to keep my own observations to a minimum while permitting the speakers to present a cohesive and straightforward narrative.

Beyond this, the only changes I have made have been the automatic changing of names and places and any similar material which might enable anyone to identify any of these persons. Any such attempt will be a waste of time.

Just how common is this sort of thing?

A good question, and one for which I have no good answer. In fantasy, certainly, the ménage à trois seems to be universal. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that every red-blooded American man spends a certain amount of time dreaming of having two wives or two mistresses or what you will. While the same man may in fact be incapable of satisfying one wife in the manner to which she would like to become accustomed, nevertheless the fantasy persists.

But in actuality how often does this go on?

More often, certainly, than one would at first suppose. The stable ménage à trois is as easily concealed a form of unorthodox sexual behavior as exists, with the possible exception of compulsive chastity. One must realize that the presence of an extra female “relative” in the household of a married couple occasions little comment in even the smallest and most provincial town. Whether she is indeed a relative, and just how she is related, and by whom, is rarely even a matter for speculation. The suspicion of homosexuality is almost automatic in these enlightened times when two men or two women live together, but equivalent suspicion is rarely visited upon a properly cloaked troilistic union.

I have learned two things well in the course of several years of absorbing (if occasionally hectic) research. The first, is that, in the realm of sexual behavior, there is absolutely nothing that the mind of man can envision which is not being enthusiastically practiced by someone somewhere. You may give your imagination free rein, you may concoct the most impossible sexual fantasy, and you may take it for granted that someone is at this very moment doing precisely what you’ve just invented, and has done it before and will do it again.

Secondly, the extremes of sexual behavior float, like icebergs, with their bulk well below the surface, forever unexposed. Thus not only does everything exist, but everything exists to a far greater degree than visible evidence would seem to indicate. Most men and women lead lives of quiet depravity.

We can interpret this as we wish. We can view it as evidence of the extreme decadence of our culture or of the immensely evil and perverse nature of humankind. Or, on the other hand, we can rejoice in the fact that, however desperate and disparate our urgings, we are not alone.

— JWW