Action: A Book About Sex (26 page)

“Sorry—we thought you were down with threesomes?”

You 52-pick-up the cards and, in your disbelief and anger, throw the deck at the Ming vase they’ve (cleverly, you have to admit) fashioned into a bong, smashing it. How dare they! Just because you had glancingly mentioned a pleasant evening you recently passed in a threesome doesn’t mean you are CONSTANTLY open to getting boned in tandem all the time! How assumptive, rude, and card-game-destroyingly bland of them.

I have been in this exact position—well, save for the gin rummy (but not the Hpnotiq)—and I felt disrespected and unconsidered. The couple in question were some girls I knew, and whose nascent friendship I enjoyed, from hanging out at this one dance party we all frequented on Monday nights. The thing that sometimes sucks about taking a relaxed approach to group sex, and having it present itself in the strands of friendly conversation, is that people try to Simon Says you into a threesome without your consent because they see you as a point of entry. Barf.

That behavior roundly munches sewage… but I get its incentive. If a person has intimated they love the sonorous musicality that often comes with
playin’ the triangle
, a complex, beautiful genre their audience has long considered beyond the reaches of its talent, it might be tempting to ask them for lessons. That’s fine! The pivotal point of that sentence, though, is the word “ask.” Would you demand that a known triangle solo artist whip out their wand and give the virtuoso performance of a lifetime with nary an inkling’s notice? No, you have never done that—you’re not that rude.

Don’t expect a threesome of someone solely because you know, or are guessing, that they have had one before. Don’t expect a threesome of someone even if you’ve had it with the same configuration of people before! People’s angles are less rigid than those found in geometry. You are not treating that person as a person, which is the most essential part of the approach to group sex in general: No one is anyone’s sexy attaché. Everyone has the right to say what their limitations are not only during, but before.

•
In an intergender couple, the person of the same identity (if there is one) as the person being asked does the actual asking.
Sorry: This suggestion feels archaic. But there’s a lot to be said for considering the perspectives and experiences of your target, then deploying whichever member of the home team might relate to them most closely. I like having one person act as the amanuensis and point of communication for both others, and that person should be the one whom the other two trust, collectively, the most—across the interpersonal board, and as applied singularly to this situation.

This can speak to a diffuse range of considerations: Maybe the third has known one of the players in question since goon-times, or perhaps shares a CSA with another. Most commonly, though, this is going to boil down to good old-fashioned gender essentialism. When I’m closer with the male figure of an equation, I am persuaded that a situation is cool, on the level, and a potentially entertaining passage of a Thursday evening when the female arm of a twosome reaches out to me. Since we’re going to be, for a time, body doubles playing an at least somewhat similar role, no matter how disparate our interpretations of it, I want to know that we’re countrywomen—that we’re each heading into the threesome knowing what the other’s deal is, and how to make her feel good and psychically protected. If you are all three of diverse, or identical, genders, go ahead and dispatch the person who speaks to them most effortlessly about how wild the
ninth grade was, or this week’s CSA selection of root vegetables, or whatever point of connection you’ve decided is basis enough for a bout of group sex. (Both topics have worked fine for me in the past.)

•
Do it with ANOTHER couple.
Having sex with another allied force means that everyone is approaching the four-way with just as much to lose!! Hee, I kid—look at it the other way, and you are viewing it correctly. Empathy will come more easily to a couple in your same romantic situation, and
close
friends might be more considerate of one another’s feelings and careful not to homewreck your shit.

•
Three strangers or loose acquaintances are least messy after the fact.
I
love
a threesome comprising three randeaux. There are no lingering love-politics about which to have Serious Check-Ins (aka the WORST part of relationships, even though I know it’s, yes, necessary and healthy—hard conversations are the vegetables of romance). Each and all parties are equal, and equally ready to party.

•
In any case: GET KINDA DRUNK.
But not too drunk, doye.

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A note on asking a previously platonic friend to take part in a threesome:
You’re always going to face some risk of offending someone when you make a pass at them. A unilateral truth: That risk winnows when you hint at your interest and gauge if the other person reciprocates it with genuine curiosity and levelheadedness (rather than going, “Oh, he smiled back—SHAGADELIC”).

If they’re freaked out? They have the right to be surprised, but they also have to respect your sexual
realité
as much as you do theirs, so end the conversation if they decide that a cool way to respond is by insulting or berating you. I have never had that happen, and I hope you don’t either!

•
A note to special guest stars:
The key to nailing your walk-on role in someone else’s relationship: It’s best not to try and steal the show here. While this is a fun and light evening for YOU, the people with whom you’re sleeping are going to maintain joint
custody over this memory for the rest of the time they’re magnetized to each other. While it’s up to them how they approach your encounter—there’s no way to control other people’s feelings—you have some responsibility to contribute to its emotional tenor. How are these two treating each other? Are they looking at each other with great devotion and intensity? Don’t try to hop in on that. I’m thinking of the words “equal” and “equitable.” Wreathe both parties with affection and attention equally: Make all parties feel sexy, included, and accounted for. Ménagin’ is the best—have fun.

OPEN RELATIONSHIPS

One method of maintaining a loving partnership that includes sex from outside forces: non-monogamy. I’m not at all proud to admit that I’ve cheated on almost every boyfriend I’ve ever had except for a few, including my last one—although that doesn’t mean I stopped hooking up with other people when we were dating. The difference is, in that relationship, my foremost love associate knew about (and was cool with) my liaisons. It’s taken me a while to admit this, but in the past few years I’ve come to accept that I mostly prefer romantic relationships that don’t require me to be sexually faithful. I think a lot of people find this “deviant” or weird, but, unlikely as it may sound, it’s actually not that complicated.

Monogamy has always been hard for me, even in the context of loving, committed relationships. In the past, the trouble usually began after a few months, when some new heartthrob would swim into my life. Although I knew my then-boyfriends wouldn’t be cool with it, I would start lying about how often I saw said heartthrobs, flirting with them on Facebook and in person, or secretly having “sleepovers” with them that involved a lot of physical contact but no official “fooling around.” I rationalized all of this behavior as
friends bein’ friendly
, even though my motivations were decidedly less pure.

Once I started being dishonest, it was hard for me to stop. Although my cheating usually didn’t involve anything more serious than some furtive makeout sessions, I’d always wake up the next morning smothered in guilt, which quickly morphed into resentment: Why should I feel bad about wanting to fool around with people while I’m young? The answer, of course, was BECAUSE YOU ARE LYING TO A PERSON WHO CARES ABOUT YOU, JERKUS. But I also had a point: It’s totally okay to feel like kissing basically everybody, if you can find a way to do it without being deceitful and/or disrespectful to anyone else. I just hadn’t figured out that way yet.

In one such monogamous relationship, which included a lengthy and serious engagement, I vowed not to cheat, and I didn’t. But after two and a half years, I started backsliding into the realm of backdoor Facebook encounters. When I caught myself typing double entendres to people whose profile pictures I found achingly cute, I broke up with my then-fiancé rather than violate his trust, which I could tell I was about to do.

Even though I was the one who chose to end that relationship, I was overwhelmed by despair and grief when it was over. I wondered if I would ever be able to love someone without emotionally fucking them over with my constant tail-chasing and tomcatting, and I decided the answer was no: I had tried my hardest with someone I was prepared to spend the rest of my life with, and I had failed. Clearly I was incapable of curbing my desire to freaq a sizable fraction of the world’s population, and that, I felt, made me worthy of contempt.

Then I met Wes. We were introduced by a mutual friend on a beach trip two years ago, when I was twenty-one, right before I made the choice to leave my fiancé. A few months after we settled into our partnership, Wes told me that he knew he wanted to go out with me when, upon being picked up at my apartment, I burst into the car and greeted him by affectionately biting his arm. Suave, right? That sense of sexy intrigue intensified for both of us over the course of the afternoon as we discovered we had the
same favorite animal (squid) and compared our imitations of the director Orson Welles. We separated from the rest of the group for a while, and I told him secrets that not even my best friends knew at the time, like why my engagement was ending (and that it was even ending at all). I felt closer to him than I had to anyone else in a long time.

I broke up with my fiancé not long after that day. Even though wanting to be with Wes wasn’t the reason behind that split, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t totally jazzed when we started dating a few weeks later. Despite the intense bond I felt with him, I tried to keep things super-casual for a few months, during which time I refused to call him my boyfriend and dated other people. I didn’t want to get too involved because, as I told him one morning after we’d spent the night together, I didn’t believe in the whole “love” thing. He told me that he was a longtime cheater, too, and, like me, he felt some shame about that, but he didn’t think it exempted us from falling in love with each other, which, yo, we totally were! We mutually decided that non-monogamy was the best option for us as a couple, and I’m so glad we did, because it worked better than anything either of us had experienced before. And guess what? I was very incorrect about love not being real, which is probably the greatest thing I’ve ever been proven wrong about.

Here’s what non-monogamy meant for us: Like many people who are deeply obsessed with their main squeeze, as I was with Wes, I wanted to spend as much time with him as I possibly could without our driving each other crazy. Also like many others who are deeply in love with their person, I occasionally wanted to french people who weren’t him, as did he with not-mes. The difference between monogamous relationships and our thing was that we acted on those feelings, and we didn’t want to sob, scream, or murk each other afterward. There was none of the sinking dread involved with cheating that I was all too familiar with. I got all of the action, with none of the harrowing doubt about whether I’d ever be able to truly love someone without fucking them over. Doesn’t that sound kind of nice?

There are some drawbacks to non-monogamy, of course. I was happy with the mechanics of my romantic situation, but that doesn’t mean others in my life agreed with my choices. Maybe you’re one of those people, in which case, get bent! Just kidding, my dude—I like you just the same, and I’m going to do my best to clear up any misconceptions or stigmas that you, a person who is maybe curious about open relationships but skeptical that they can work, might be harboring. The truth is that it’s more than possible to be in such a relationship without having it wreck your life, and that wanting to try non-monogamy doesn’t make you a misguided perv who doesn’t understand how to do love “right.” For your perusal, I now present this not-comprehensive but still probably kind of helpful list of things worth knowing when you’re figuring out how to screw the world without screwing up your relationship.

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Don’t feel like you need to “identify,” but feel free to check out places where people do.
I’ve never identified as a “polyamorous person” or involved myself in communities based on a shared rejection of monogamy—I don’t like to assign names to anything about my love life, period—but if I had to pick a descriptor for my situation, “non-monogamous” probably fits best. I’m just not that into the identity-based language I’ve seen used by other non-monoggos (ooh, I’m kind of into this newfound term after typing it just now—it sounds like something the Flintstones would eat).

This is not to disparage “polyamorous” or what have you communities—I understand that the big city where I live, and my friends in it, afford me the comfort of knowing others who happen to also be non-monoggo (sticking with this prehistoric delicacy), and that giving a name to any non-mainstream thing you do can help you find others who are into it wherever you are. Polyamory, which most often refers to having more than one long-term partner at a time, mostly isn’t what I do—but continued blessings to anyone who chooses that.