Wide Open: The New Marriage

Side by Side by Side

The term “group marriage” is generally used to denote a marital relationship (in fact if not in law) of more than two persons. One can further assume that both sexes are represented; I have never heard the term applied to a group exclusively male or female.

In this sense, a threesome, or ménage à trois, composed either of two women and a man or of two men and a woman would be considered a group marriage. I think it is worthwhile, though, to consider such unions separately. The differences between threesomes and all numerically larger plural marriages seem to be sufficiently great enough to constitute generic differences. Since it may be difficult to determine the reasons why this is so, perhaps we should first learn how it is so.

First of all, a threesome is considerably more likely to evolve spontaneously. Plural marriages of more than three persons are often consciously planned and arranged, with the concept of such a relationship preceding the actual selection of partners. A philosophical commitment to the idea of the group marriage comes first, to be followed by the actual selection of members for the group.

Threesomes may also be formed in this manner, of course. It is not uncommon for a husband and wife to come to the decision that their lives together would be enriched by the addition of a third person, whether male or female, to the family circle. This sort of decision in advance of specific opportunity has been happening more widely in recent years, as more persons are intellectually aware of the possibilities of experimentation in marital structure.

But many threesomes, like Topsy, just grow. A third person is gradually drawn into the sphere of a marriage, becoming at once a friend of one partner and a lover of the other. The extramarital relationship is either confessed or discovered, it serves not to force the three principals apart but in fact draws them together, and the three ultimately come to regard themselves as husband and wives — or husbands and wife, as the case may be.

The manner in which threesomes come into existence, and the sundry psychological aspects that render them particularly attractive, are largely outside our area of concern here. We might more profitably try to learn what forms these troilistic relationships take once they have been established as presumably permanent alliances.

It is as tiresome as it is awkward to keep referring the reader to one’s other books, but it would be unrealistic to display sudden symptoms of false modesty. I have examined the subject of troilism at length in Three Is Not a Crowd, and would urge readers who are particularly interested in the evolution of threesomes to consult that work. The book consists of interviews in depth with three permanent trios and one couple who have participated extensively in temporary threesomes and are actively seeking a partner for a permanent relationship. While we will consider these cases briefly in the pages to follow, the book renders them in far more scope than we have room for here.

Another difference between the threesome and the group marriage lies in the sort of people who become involved. Group marriage, as we will see, appeals for the most part to a rather well-defined class of the population. Threesomes, on the other hand, are apt to occur in virtually any stratum of society, among educated and uneducated, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, innocent and sophisticated, urban and rural.

It is important, I think, that we distinguish clearly between permanent threesomes that constitute de facto marriages and the temporary threesomes that exist for purposes of sexual recreation. This latter class is infinitely more numerous, and a cursory glance at any of the correspondence bulletins of the sexual underground reveals that an astonishing proportion of the singles and couples advertising therein are seeking such three-way alliances as either a preferred or an exclusive form of swinging. An overwhelming majority seek triangles of two women and a man, but one also finds a good number of ads placed by single men desiring to join couples and by couples looking for an additional man.

No doubt the threesome’s appeal to swingers has points in common with its appeal to others as a form of marriage, but we will limit ourselves here to permanent relationships.

The threesome exists in a great variety of forms. The two obvious categories are triangles of one man and two women and those of one woman and two men. But within these categories there are a great many variables. A threesome may be heterosexual or bisexual. Incest, actual or symbolic, may be a component. A man’s two wives or a woman’s two husbands may or may not be on an equal footing. One of the three participants may be the apex of the triangle, as it were, with both of the other participants relating more to that one than to each other. The old maxim that all happy families are alike does not apply to threesomes; all of them, happy or otherwise, are quite different.

The examples which follow are by no means presented as a complete catalog of the forms that may exist. They are merely an enumeration of troilistic relationships with which I have some degree of firsthand familiarity. The first four are examined in detail in Three Is Not a Crowd. I have written about a few of the others elsewhere; the rest are noted here for the first time.

1. A man, his wife, and the wife’s younger sister. The sister, after having lived alone, moved in with the couple. Her own sex life was promiscuous and unsatisfying. She and the husband fell in love, had sexual relations. The wife was able to accept this, feeling that relations with the sister did not constitute infidelity, as would a comparable affair with an outsider. At first the husband would bed the two women on alternate nights. Then the three took to sharing a bed; both women, especially the wife, derived voyeuristic and exhibitionistic pleasure from this development. There has been no overt homosexual activity between the wife and her sister, nor has such activity ever been considered by any of the three. The sister has borne the husband a child — the wife has never been able to conceive — and the child is being raised as that of the husband and wife. The family lives in a remote situation several miles from a small town, which has simplified the problem of keeping the nature of the relationship from outside attention.

2. A man, his wife, and the wife’s college roommate. The wife and roommate had had an intense lesbian love affair during college, had discontinued it after a year, and had been exclusively heterosexual since. After a divorce, the roommate moved in with the married pair, presumably for a week. Before long she was having sex with both the husband and the wife, neither of whom was aware of her relations with the other. Things came into the open after the husband discovered the two women in bed. They now sleep three in a bed, and “everyone does everything to everybody.”

3. A man, his sister, and his wife. The brother and sister had sex together regularly during adolescence. They separated, and he subsequently married. He and his wife participated periodically in group-sex encounters. The sister, on a visit, had sex with both her brother and his wife, and resolved to remain as one of the family.

4. A man and wife who engage in swinging solely with other females. They particularly desire younger and less experienced females as swinging partners, and each plays a quasi-parental role in the sexual relationship. While they have not yet established a long-term relationship with one girl, it is their intention to do so; they have been hampered by their inability to find an ideal permanent partner and their fear of exposure. They have discussed the possibility of “adopting” a foster child and subsequently seducing her.

5. A man, his wife, and his older brother. The brother is married but separated from his wife. He seduced the wife one night when both had been drinking — the husband was working late at the time. He is now a frequent house guest, although he does not officially live with the couple. The husband goes to another room when the wife and the brother desire to have sexual relations. The husband’s expressed attitude is that it is “only decent” for him to make his wife available to his brother, as the brother has no other sexual outlet at his disposal.

6. A man and his two wives. He had been having affairs simultaneously with both women and ultimately persuaded both to experiment with three-way sex. The experiment was successful. The women enjoyed homosexual activity, a new experience for both of them. The three were united in marriage by a friend of the man’s who had been ordained as a minister by a mail-order church. It is doubtful that the marriage has any legal status. At the time I was acquainted with this trio, both women were radiantly pregnant.

7. A man, his wife, and his friend. The man had extensive homosexual relations during adolescence and sporadic contacts afterward prior to marriage. Shortly after marriage, he began a pattern of going out drinking and bringing home a man he had befriended. He would order his wife to have sex with his drinking buddy, an order to which she never seemed to have seriously objected. After watching the two together, the husband would then have relations with the wife. No relationship was ever established which lasted for more than a night, and although the situation obviously gratified the husband’s homosexual impulses, he evidently never had overt sexual relations with any of the other men. Ultimately he brought home a friend whose sexual orientation was primarily homosexual. The friend had relations with the wife, then joined in when the husband was embracing the wife, to the considerable enjoyment of all concerned. The friend moved in with the couple almost immediately, and willingly underwent a vasectomy so that there would be no danger of his impregnating the wife. Both the husband and friend occasionally have sex with the wife when the other is not present. The two men, however, have homosexual relations only in the wife’s presence, evidently because by including her they are able to do so without experiencing guilt that would otherwise bother them. The preferred form of sexual activity for the three is for both men to enjoy the wife simultaneously. She has vaginal intercourse with one while accommodating the other anally or orally.

8. A man, his wife, and another woman. The other woman and her husband, after financial reverses, moved in with the couple. The man and the other woman fell in love and had sex. The other woman and her husband subsequently left, but shortly thereafter the woman separated from her husband and once again moved in with the couple. She soon resumed her affair with the husband, who began planning to arrange a threesome. This worked out well, and the three engaged in a full repertoire of troilistic activity, with the two women performing and enjoying homosexual acts at the husband’s direction. The other woman eventually became anxious, wanted to possess the husband exclusively, also felt a need to keep her marriage intact for her children’s sake, and rejoined her own husband. The man, during my correspondence with him, has expressed a desire to get the threesome back together again but is fearful that any steps he might take in that direction could disrupt the lives of all concerned.

9. A woman and her two husbands. She had been living with one man for several months, then resumed an affair with the other man. Both men wanted to marry her, and each demanded she cease having relations with the other. She attempted suicide. Afterward she declared she could not bear to give either man up. For a time they took turns spending nights with her. Then one proposed a polyandrous marriage, and this was agreed upon. She married both men on successive days, with each serving as best man at the other’s wedding. The clergymen who officiated were unaware of the circumstances. Legally, the first marriage is legitimate, the second bigamous. The men regard themselves as co-husbands, and both have taken the woman’s surname “to simplify things.” They share a house, and the neighbors presumably believe that one man is her husband, the other her brother-in-law. There is no homosexual activity between the husbands.

10. A man and woman adopted a foster daughter for sexual purposes. She shared their bed and performed sex acts with both of them. The discovery of their having attempted to develop a similar arrangement with another girl earlier led to exposure, and the girl was ordered returned to the orphanage. The couple left the state and were ultimately divorced. The girl has sought similar troilistic relationships with older couples ever since. (This ease was reported at length in Women Who Swing Both Ways.)

11. A man, his male lover, and the lover’s sister. The men had lived openly together for some time. The brother and sister had experimented with incest in early adolescence and both had since become exclusively homosexual. The sister became a close friend of her brother’s lover. They fell in love and had sexual relations. The three now live together. The brother and sister do not have sex with each other.

12. A man, his wife, and the wife’s niece. The niece moved to their city and roomed at their house before getting a place of her own. She actively seduced first the husband and then the wife. When the husband wanted to leave his wife and marry the niece, she told him of her affair with the wife. (The wife had already known that the girl was having an affair with the husband, and seems not to have objected.) The three now share a bedroom.

“I thought it would be more of a hassle than it is. To the average person, the idea of a man and two women living together and having sex together is a total mindblower. But the thing is, the only people who know are people who figure to be cool. Neighbors, people in the building, people at work, they don’t have to know. It’s not thrown in their faces. They may know that the three of us live together, but they don’t know that Doreen and I both sleep with Frank, or that Doreen and I have sex together. They may suspect things, depending on where their heads are at, but that’s not the same thing as knowing.

“Before we got into this, I lived with a black guy for almost a year. Now that was a hassle, because it was so obvious. If you think about it, an interracial couple is a far more common thing than a threesome. More people would be uptight about a threesome. But an interracial couple — anybody who sees you on the street together gets the whole picture at once. And the looks you get! That’s basically why we broke up. I couldn’t handle the whole scene. He wanted to marry me, I wanted to marry him, but I knew I couldn’t hack the constant irritation of an interracial marriage. My friends were completely cool about it. My family had no strong objection; my father was opposed to my marrying him, because he felt I would be unhappy myself, and that was the conclusion I came to...

“In this threesome thing, the opinion of outsiders is no problem, because they stay outsiders, they don’t know what’s going down. With our friends, there’s no hassle. They can accept a threesome as a legitimate scene, even if they’re not into it themselves. Of course, this wouldn’t be true if we lived in some small town in the middle of nowhere, or if we weren’t basically hip ourselves, which means that friends of ours are basically hip in the first place.”

JWW: Lily is twenty-four, short, slender, with very large, intense eyes. She makes jewelry, which is sold through several Greenwich Village shops. Doreen, twenty-two, tall and full-figured, is an artist’s model and amateur sculptor. Frank, thirty, is heavyset, with a full beard and a receding hairline; he is a commercial artist employed by an advertising agency and is the father of two children, who live with his ex-wife.

I was introduced to Lily by a friend who was aware of her relationship with Frank and Doreen. She was quite willing to discuss this relationship. Later she introduced me to Frank and Doreen as well, While they were cooperative enough, Lily was better able to articulate the manner in which the threesome evolved and the way it presently functioned.

“I had known Frank enough to say hello to for a couple of years. One night we ran into each other and went to a movie together. We went back to his place afterward and found out that we liked each other enough for me to stay the night. Neither of us expected at the time that it would lead to anything heavy. I went home the next morning. He said he would call, but I wasn’t sure whether he would or not.

“Then we drifted into a thing where we would see each other a couple of nights a week. I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else at the time. He was seeing an old girlfriend now and then and picking up a one-night stand when he could. I didn’t know this at the time. I don’t think I would have minded. I was casual about him and wouldn’t have felt I had the right to feel possessive.

“One night he asked me if I had ever had sex with another girl. I said I hadn’t. This was not strictly true. While I was in high school my best girlfriend and I did a certain amount of fooling around, touching each other’s breasts and kissing. That was as far as it went, and we never considered what we were doing as homosexual; we would take turns pretending to be the boy — that’s what it amounted to. And once in college a girl admitted to me that she was a lesbian and asked me to let her make love to me. I let her go down on me, but I was very uptight about the whole scene. It excited me, but I made her stop before I could have an orgasm.

“I didn’t get into any of this with Frank, though. So he said it was something I would probably enjoy, that most women were able to get into bisexuality enough to enjoy a threesome. He was petting me as he talked about it, and all of this got me excited. I admitted that the thought turned me on. It also obviously turned him on, and we made love, and it was very satisfying.

“Afterward, he asked me if I’d be seriously interested in a threesome. He said there was a girl he knew who enjoyed that kind of scene. He said he had told her about me and she would be interested. I said I wasn’t sure I could really go through with it but that I might be interested sometime later on.

“He called the next day and asked me to come over, and when I got there Doreen was already there. He hadn’t said anything about this over the phone, and I realized immediately that this was the girl he’d referred to and that he wanted the three of us to go to bed together. I got simultaneously excited and uptight. Also I had mentally pictured an older and more experienced girl, and Doreen was younger and seemed very innocent, almost naive. I had a lot of trouble getting all this together.

“We drank some wine and smoked some grass and got into an extended rap on sex. Doreen had never had a relationship with another woman. Her only bisexual experience was at swings. She had been dating this married guy who was into orgies, and he took her to several, and she got into having sex with other women at those affairs. Since then she had participated in a couple of trio scenes, but always with people she didn’t really know, and in a purely physical way. I remember she said that she had never kissed another girl on the mouth. We talked about how weird this was, to kiss the genitals of a person but be hung up about kissing mouth-to-mouth, and we agreed that it was completely consistent with the kind of relationships (or non relationships) she had experienced.

“Frank suggested we kiss, and we wound up getting into a sort of sense expansion thing. He kissed each of us, and then we kissed each other, and he would touch one of us, and we would duplicate the touch on each other, like I would try to caress Doreen’s breasts exactly as he had done mine.

“We discussed the male fantasy of having two women, and how it was a machismo thing. I said I thought it was impossible to relate sexually to more than one person at a time. Doreen and Frank both said this wasn’t true, that you could learn to open up to more than a one-to-one relationship. We got to the point in conversation where I knew it could stay talk all night, and where nobody was particularly horny, but I had this desire to try it, if only to get it out of the way, with the feeling that the evening would be incomplete if we didn’t finally get it on. So I said something to the effect that I wanted to give it a try, and we all got undressed and went to bed.

“It wasn’t very good. Frank couldn’t get an erection. We went down on each other. I was holding Doreen’s breasts and kissing her while Frank went down on her, and she had an orgasm then. I found that very warm, thrilling in an emotional sense. I felt very close to her at that moment, as if I had shared the orgasm with her. I didn’t come myself, although I was close a couple of times. The big discovery for me was that I was able to relate to Doreen’s body, that I enjoyed making love to her, and also that she and I could relate to each other as people. The sex we shared was not satisfying as sex, but it brought more emotional satisfaction to us than good sex usually did. Doreen said that after a swing she always felt soiled, but that with the two of us she felt beautiful.

“We got together the following night, and this time everything got going the way it was supposed to. I guess having been together the night before and having found out that we still liked each other kept us from being uptight, and we were all into it this time in both an emotional and a physical way. I got real pleasure out of everything that happened. I went down on Doreen while Frank fucked me, and I could feel what both of them were feeling, and it was just tremendous.”

JWW: In the early stages of the three-way relationship, there was no thought of the participants living together. Lily regarded the trio as essentially experimental and did not expect anything more permanent to come of it.

“What happened was that we all gradually began to realize just how much we liked being together. The sex was what made us seek each other out. And it was really fantastic. I was never really into sex that completely. I had always enjoyed it, it was always important to me, but I had never tripped out on sex to anything near this extent. I became conscious of my sexuality for the first time. I think a sexual relationship with someone of your own sex can make you understand your own body in a way you can’t reach otherwise.

“We become important to each other in ways that went beyond the sex. I had never had a friendship with another girl that was anything like the friendship I had with Doreen. Maybe this was because I had always had latent lesbian desires and they unconsciously kept me from letting go completely in a friendship, possibly because I had echoes from the petting I had done with my girlfriend in high school and was afraid of getting into anything like that on an adult level. I don’t know. Whatever it was, Doreen and I really came to love each other.

“Frank found that for the first time in his life he did not desire other women. In any relationship, he had always had a desire for outside sex. This had been true throughout his marriage, for example, although he hadn’t done anything about the desire for the first few years of the marriage. He had reached a point where he felt it would be impossible for him ever to get into a relationship involving any commitment on his part, because he would never be able to be true to one woman. Now, although there was no feeling on anyone’s part that he ought to be committed to the two of us, he just didn’t have any desire for outside sex. He has said that he thinks he found with the two of us what he must have been looking for all along. He is not sure what this is exactly. Maybe he kept chasing women to prove his manhood, maybe all his previous sexual relationships were somehow unsatisfactory, but whatever it was, he just wanted me and Doreen.

“It finally came up in conversation that we all wanted to live together. Each of us had come to this conclusion, but we hadn’t voiced it because of fear that the others wouldn’t feel the same way. When it all came out in the open, we were still not certain it was possible. While we were all hip and unconventional people, we were not all that unconventional. The three of us are fundamentally middle-class people with the usual middle-class attitudes underneath.

“Frank rented a larger apartment. I suggested maybe Doreen could move in, and I would spend nights there. She said she wouldn’t actually live there unless I did, too, and I decided I could always move out if things got too heavy. I never moved out, and neither did she.

“The actual living situation is very good. Fortunately, the apartment has space. Actually, not space so much as a lot of small rooms, so that each of us has a room of our own. I think this is important. You have to be able to be by yourself when you want to.

“This is one of the good things about a relationship of three persons as opposed to the usual marriage. An individual can be alone without depriving the other of companionship. When you live with one other person, if he wants to go to the movies and you don’t, either you go anyway or you force him to go alone. If Frank wants to go to the movies and I want to read, I can stay here while Doreen goes. In this way there’s more personal freedom. Of course, it took us awhile to work this out. Early on we thought we all three had to do everything together, but you get over that stage soon enough.

“Friends will ask us things like do we fight over who does the housework. The great thing is that not only don’t we fight over it, but we each have only half as much to do because there are two of us. We alternate cooking and doing laundry and like that, and all those tasks are a lot less of a pain when you have to do them only half of the time.

“Another question is, don’t we get jealous of each other. The only way to answer this is to say no and let it go at that, because the whole concept of jealousy is just impossible for us, and people either understand that intuitively or they don’t. How can I be jealous of Frank’s feeling for Doreen when I love both of them? I suppose if there were no sexual relationship between the two women in a trio, there would naturally be jealousy. But I can’t conceive of a threesome in which everybody wasn’t into sex with everybody else. It wouldn’t be a real relationship otherwise.

“An interesting thing is that people tend to take it for granted that a threesome is desirable for Frank but think that Doreen and I get cheated on the deal. Girls will say that they could go for the idea of living with two men, for instance, but that they wouldn’t want to share a man with another woman. I personally don’t think I could get into a threesome with two men. If they had sex together it would turn me off — don’t ask me why, but it would — and if they didn’t, it would be unnatural. Also the men in a situation like that would have to compete with each other. I don’t see how it could work out to anybody’s advantage. I think in any relationship there has to be a leader, and it’s natural for the man to play that role. If you had two men, you would either have two leaders, or one would be in the other’s shadow. Doreen and I can be equals and sisters and lovers and everything, and it works out fine, because Frank is the dominant member of the family.”

JWW: In Three Is Not a Crowd, all four cases consisted of groups of two females and one male. In noting this fact, I observed there: “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 kind 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.”

Since the publication of that book, I have become acquainted with several two-men-one-woman threesomes, some of which have been briefly described in the foregoing pages of this chapter. And I am more firmly inclined than before to state that they constitute a minority of troilistic relationships. Lily’s arguments seem creditable in this context.

“One attitude we’ve noticed is that people are inclined to think that we’re interested in sex outside of our relationship. The idea being evidently that if you’ll go for a threesome you’ll go for anything. This is absolutely not the case with us, and none of us have had any outside sex since we started living together. Guys tend to come on to Doreen and me more aggressively than if it were just one of us living with Frank. I would guess that’s because they can’t really conceive of a threesome as a permanent thing.

“Part of this is because of the law. Two people can marry each other. Three people can’t.”

JWW: I mentioned some of the marital attempts trios have made — going through a three-way marriage ceremony, going through two separate ceremonies.

“We’ve discussed that. Maybe it makes some people feel better, but we don’t feel it would make sense for us. It’s inconsistent to go through a legal ceremony if it’s not going to be legally valid, and to do it just for the sake of the ceremony with some far out minister — we don’t need that. We feel that we’re married. Each of us is married to both of the others.

“I made wedding rings for the three of us. It was never said that they were wedding rings, but that’s the understanding we have of them. I copied the design from an old European ring I saw in a shop once. Three snakes intertwined with each other. The symbolism is pretty obvious, isn’t it?

“We would all like it if we could get married. If three-way marriage was recognized as legal. I don’t think this will ever happen, though.

“As far as having children is concerned, I don’t see that it would be a problem. Doreen and I are both on the pill. Eventually I’ll probably want to have a child. Doreen already has a strong desire for motherhood and has talked about going off the pill sometime in the fall. I think it would be much easier to raise a baby in a household like ours. The mother wouldn’t be nearly so tied down with another woman to share child care with her. I’m sure I would love a child of hers as if it were my own, and vice versa. We feel that anything that comes from our relationship is the product of the three of us.

“There’s the question of how the child would be affected by the whole scene, and that’s not something I can answer. I don’t really know. I can see how it might be bad for him to grow up to discover that his parents have a relationship which is condemned by the rest of the world. But I would think that in a loving and open household, problems like that could be worked out easily enough. A kid would have to be better off with three parents who love each other than two parents who don’t. Frank has two kids he hardly ever sees. Any kids he had with me or Doreen would have to be in better shape.”

JWW: Members of a successful unconventional marriage tend to sound almost messianic on the subject. This is not hard to understand, certainly, but after Lily’s unequivocal hymn of praise to the joys of the threesome, we might do well to hear from a couple of people who became involved in threesomes that subsequently failed. The first speaker, Dana, is in his early thirties. He had been married for three years and has one child. The relationship he is discussing ran its course ten years ago.

“I moved to New York the summer after I finished college. I was living in a rooming house and trying to find an apartment I could afford. I ran into Fritz, and we had lunch together a couple of times. We had known each other in college, always got along well, but were never close. He graduated a year ahead of me. Anyway, the guy he had been sharing a place with joined the Peace Corps, and I was still looking for a place, and he couldn’t afford all the rent himself, so we decided to share.

“He was going with Alicia at the time, and he confided that one reason he was glad to have me as a roommate was that otherwise she might have wanted to move in with him, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for that. He was serious about her but didn’t want to get too serious too soon.

“I was in a bad way socially. Just before I graduated, I had broken up with a girl I was very serious about. I had wanted to marry her, and she didn’t want to marry me, and the whole thing left some scars. I was desperate to have a relationship with a girl, but at the same time, I was afraid to put myself in a position where I could be hurt again. As a result, I was very clumsy with women. I was very bad at getting dates, and when I did go out with a girl, I behaved badly. I would be obsessed with the desire to score, which is the one thing that will keep you from scoring. All of this made me frustrated and unhappy.

“This may have helped draw me to Alicia. I was able to relax with her, because she was out-of-bounds for me, she was my buddy’s girl, so I wasn’t expected to score with her and could relax and just get to know her as a human being. We both thought of it as a brother-sister kind of thing. I enjoyed spending time with both of them. Occasionally Alicia would get me a date with a friend of hers, but nothing ever worked out very well in that direction.

“I had never really had a female friend before. It was a new experience for me, and I liked it. Of course, all along I was falling in love with Alicia without realizing it.

“The inevitable happened. She came over one night to cook dinner for the three of us, and then Fritz called to say he had to work late. Since dinner was already on the stove, she decided to stay, and we would eat together. We had wine with dinner. All through the meal there was this sexual tension that we both felt. We both realized it was dangerous for us to be alone together, and we joked about it, and it just wasn’t a joke. After dinner we listened to records, and she looked at me and asked how long I intended to wait before I kissed her, and I reached for her and kissed her, and once I did that, it was all over, Nothing could have stopped us. We fucked like maniacs.

“Afterward I was just stunned. I couldn’t believe what I had done. She was completely calm. She said we’d had too much wine and we had both been drawn to each other for a long time, and no one had been hurt by what we did. It wouldn’t happen again. She wouldn’t tell Fritz, and of course, I mustn’t tell Fritz, and everything would be the same as it used to be. I was amazed that she could be so casual about it. I wondered if maybe she was less moral than I had thought. But I also thought she was right in what she had said.

“I found it impossible to be as I had been with Fritz. I was very uncomfortable now spending time with the two of them. Also, I wanted to make love to her again. I couldn’t stop wanting this, and one day I went over to her apartment and got her to go to bed with me. She didn’t want to at first, but I persuaded her. This happened a few more times as well. Each time, we would swear it wouldn’t happen again, but when it kept happening again, we had trouble believing ourselves.

“I kept wanting to tell Fritz. One night I finally did, without planning to. The two of us were sitting around the place having a few beers. He was talking about a girl in his office that he was thinking about making a play for. I resented this and said something about Alicia not approving. He said he wasn’t married to her yet, and that anyway he didn’t think men could go through their lives being faithful to one woman, that even if he married Alicia, he would probably want to get something on the side now and then. I asked if Alicia would have the same rights, and he said that men and women were different that way, that she would not have trouble being faithful.

“At which point I blurted out the whole thing. He didn’t believe me at first, and then he started saying how great it was that I’d told him, or he might have made a fool of himself by marrying her, and that it was good he knew about her, and I wound up defending her, and then he cried and said he loved her, and it just went on like this for hours. We were both pretty smashed, drinking booze on top of the beer.

“The next day, he had a big scene with Alicia, at her apartment, and then they both came over, and we all talked it out. She said she loved us both and didn’t know what to do, and maybe she should just move out of town and never see either of us again. I said I would move out, get out of their lives. Fritz said maybe I was better for her than he was, and he would move out.

“It was Alicia who suggested that we could both be her lovers. She had to say it a couple of times before either of us took her seriously. The more we talked about it, the more sense it seemed to make. God knows why.

“She would come over and cook dinner for us every night, and then one of us would take her to bed, depending on whose turn it was. Then she moved her stuff in and would sleep one night in my bed and the next night in Fritz’s. One night I went to sleep alone and woke up with her playing with my penis. She said Fritz had made love to her and had fallen asleep, and she still felt like doing it some more. We knocked off a quick one, and then she went back to his bed to sleep. He never knew she’d left.

“All this time, no one knew about what was going on. No one ever did. As far as anyone outside was concerned, she was Fritz’s girl.

“One night, when it was my turn to sleep with her, Fritz came into the room. He said he thought it might be fun to watch us together. I learned later that Alicia had suggested he do this. I was going to suggest he leave, but his presence excited her tremendously, and I went along with it. As soon as I finished, he took my place. I was uncomfortable watching them. I didn’t find it exciting that time, but that may have been because I had just finished making love. Later on I did find it exciting to watch.

“I never realized at the time just how completely she dominated the relationship. She really initiated all the developments. It was her suggestion that we all sleep together, with her in the middle. It was also her idea that we both make love to her at once. She would take one of us in her mouth while the other one fucked her.

“As time went by, this very weird love-hate thing began to develop. Fritz and I both came to despise her. We found her amoral and disgusting. I was also disgusted with myself. I began to wonder what was next. With the three of us having sex all together, there was invariably a certain amount of Fritz’s and my bodies touching. I never got over being uncomfortable about this. I was worried that he would want to have sex with me, or that my distaste for it stemmed from subconsciously wanting to have sex with him. It also seemed to me that sharing a woman with another man was a way of having a homosexual relationship with him, and this was a source of deep concern to me. I don’t know how much Fritz thought about any of this, or how he may have felt about it.

“I went through a period of impotence, which is a very scary thing. I picked up a prostitute — I had never done this before — and was able to perform with her. Then the next day I tried again with Alicia, and I couldn’t. This made it even more obvious to me that I was involved in a sick situation and I had to get out. Then my potency with Alicia returned, but I still wanted to end the situation, and we ultimately got it out in the open and I announced I was moving out. Ostensibly I was simply taking a place of my own that would be more convenient as far as getting to and from work was concerned, and we would still have this sexual thing together. But we all knew it was over. Fritz and Alicia pretended to be unhappy. That is, Fritz pretended — I know he was secretly relieved. Alicia really was unhappy.

“It took me a long time to get over all of that. I did a lot of serious drinking, and when I got drunk I would either curse myself for separating from them or curse them for the mess they had made of my life. I had fantasies of killing one or both of them. That scared me enough to get me into psychotherapy, which I stayed in for almost two years. The therapy seemed to help a great deal.

“I’m able to understand Alicia better now. She and Fritz got married about a year after I left. The marriage lasted a little over a year. Fritz remarried and lives in Connecticut. I haven’t seen him in years. I’d like to see him sometime, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever try to get in touch with him. Someone told me that Alicia is living with a lesbian. That was a couple of years ago, and I don’t know if it was true at the time, or what she’s doing now.

“There are times when I think our trouble was that we were born ten years too soon. Kids who are the age we were then can adapt to that kind of a situation nowadays a hell of a lot better than we can. Alicia was ahead of her time, sexually emancipated before the term existed, and Fritz and I were not able to handle that kind of emancipation. There are other times, though, when I look at my marriage and realize that I could never be comfortable with any relationship involving more than one man and one woman. I consider myself lucky to have gotten out of it as easily as I did. Suppose Alicia had become pregnant and didn’t know which of us was the father? Even now I get a chill thinking of something like that.”

JWW: For Dana, a threesome was a distinctly unpleasant experience. For Kirsten, threesomes are pleasant enough; she maintains, however, that it is a mistake to think of them as permanent relationships. She is about twenty-five, a fragile blond with an absentminded air about her.

“I tend to get into trios a lot. I don’t know why, exactly. It happens. Being bi probably has something to do with it. When I’m with a man, I tend to want to be with a woman, and vice versa. A trio rounds it out for me. I guess I must give off vibes that way, because it’s common for a couple to come on to me as if they know in front that I’m into their scene.

“The thing is, people think it can last. ‘I love you and you love her and she loves me and it’s beautiful.’ One person always splits, and then the two who are left either try to make it as a couple or try to get a third person, or split up and look elsewhere. Because splitting from a trio is a very easy thing to do. Sooner or later somebody gets uptight. Two of you will have a stronger thing going than either has with the third, or one person is uptight about the whole idea of the thing, or somebody just splits because something interesting is happening in Denver and he wants to check it out.

“A permanent relationship means one man and one woman and a house and a station wagon and children and the family dog, and it’s got to be as straight as possible so that it’s very fucking hard for you to split from each other. I could not possibly handle that straight a scene the way I am now. I’m not ready for it, I have no desire for it. But someday I will be a little older and a little more together, and this is what I will want. And I’ll want the whole trip. One man, and I’ll marry him in a church, and after that I’ll never fuck anyone but him, and if he fucks other women, I will not want to know anything about it.

“People tell me, like, that I have very unrealistic ideas about marriage. That if a person has been around, has been hip, they can’t handle the hassles of the kind of marriage I’m talking about. I don’t think this is true. I think the more you’ve been around, the more you know it’s all shit and the easier it is to say fuck it, enough of that, and make a marriage work. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know.

“Other things don’t last. That’s what it keeps coming back to. They don’t last. If something lasting is important, then a trio is the wrong place to look for it. The same as a commune. Even the communes that go on and on, it’s always people coming and going, coming and going, joining and dropping out. Like the subway, people getting off when it gets to their stop, and new people getting on.

“The first trio I was into, it was very bad for me when it broke. By this I mean the first trio I was into in a heavy sense, not just a one-night thing. What happened was that the other girl got pregnant, and he decided to marry her. The idea was that I could still live with them, but I got paranoid and felt she got pregnant on purpose (which maybe was paranoid, but I still think she did) and felt that they wanted me out of it, and I left.

“Since then, I still get into these things, usually with another couple, but once with two guys, and it’s good for me, because I’m not looking for something to last. And trios don’t last.”

JWW: But sometimes they do last. Perhaps the failure rate for troilistic relationships is greater than for traditional marriages, but I am not even sure that this is true.

Some trios, certainly, are more successful than others. It is a simpler matter to assert this than it is to explain what makes some succeed while others fail. I simply do not have a broad enough sample to make absolute statements on the subject. With that understood, let me attempt to list the factors that seem to me to be characteristic of those threesomes which appear to be most satisfactory to their participants, and which appear to endure.

1. The participants tend to idealize the relationship. I suggested earlier that Lily’s attitude might represent compensation for society’s hostility toward threesomes. In any event, successful trios share this enthusiasm. One hears talk constantly about the “beauty” of the relationship, about the extent of mutual love, about the inherent naturalness of three in bed. Members of successful threesomes do not merely feel it is all right for them to live as they do, but are positive that their lives are enriched for it, that their union is a noble thing.

2. The living situation is such as to facilitate concealment. The household is located either in a rural area, where no one is in a position to know what is going on, or in a large city, where no one cares. Or a blood relationship either exists or is purported to exist so that the presence of a third person in a household elicits no suspicion.

3. The same sex partners are either bisexual or siblings. Not a sine qua non by any means, but jealousy and or competition usually manifest themselves when this is not the case.

4. The roles of the same-sex partners are clearly defined. This is less a matter of you-do-the-cooking-I’ll-scrub-the-floor than a subtler proposition of me-mother-you-daughter or me-big-sister-you-little-sister. A trio has a better chance of stability if both co-wives (or co-husbands) perceive their relationship in the same way.

5. The male (or the elder male) is the dominant partner. There are trios of two men and a woman in which the female is dominant, to the evident satisfaction of all concerned. My experience indicates that they are not often inclined to endure. In the case Dana described, both he and Fritz were uneasy in a relationship that Alicia dominated.

6. The participants are not excessively neurotic. This is a requisite of any relationship, however many persons are involved. I mention it because a large portion of those who experiment with threesomes are excessively neurotic — as are a large portion of the people who experiment with anything. I mention it, too, because I’ve spent most of the past two days reading books and articles by psychiatrists, and one comes away from this sort of thing with the impression that most of the people in the world are crazy. (It is unfortunate, I think, that such a great amount of the significant writing on sexual themes is done by psychiatrists who deal constantly with severely disturbed persons. There are well-adjusted homosexuals, but one would never know it on the basis of psychiatric literature on the subject — because happy and well-adjusted homosexuals do not wind up on the couch.)

7. None of the participants is much concerned with the opinions of specific others. More especially, the judgment of parents is not an important factor. In one case after another, parents were either deceased, or lived far away, or had limited influence on the child.

JWW: Do threesomes have a future?

I would agree with Lily that it is extremely unlikely that troilistic marriages will be legally sanctioned in the near future. If they are to win public acceptance, the victory will more likely come through the increasing recognition of the legitimacy of non-marital relationships and of the extension of the concept of marriage to include unions that do not now enjoy legal standings.

A great many of the persons I’ve interviewed expressed the wish that they could be open about their relationships. As our concept of universal monogamous marriage continues to erode, as I feel it shall, the several unconventional alternatives to that state will become increasingly respectable.

It is altogether fitting and proper that this should happen. When people are sufficiently committed to an enduring relationship to continue it despite the social necessity to keep it clandestine, that relationship is obviously a fulfilling one for them. I would not argue that plural marriages ought to be legalized, as such a step would serve principally to enrich divorce lawyers and estate lawyers. But I’d agree with the Bard that one ought not to the marriage of true minds impediments attach — whether those minds be two in number, or three, or more.