“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.”