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.