Being in a Throuple Is…Probably a Lot More Boring Than You Think

My partners and I are at IKEA, in the middle of the kitchen section, arguing about Kilner jars. I’m saying we’ve got enough jars, and that everything in our kitchen doesn’t need to be stored in jars anyway. Andrea*, on the other hand, thinks we need jars for everything—rice, pasta, lentils, and so on. Paul* doesn’t care about the jars, but is getting hungry and wants to go get meatballs. We’re attracting a few odd glances from the couples passing by. They’re trying to figure out our dynamic. There’s three of us, but we’re arguing like a couple. We clearly live together, but we don’t seem like roommates—that’s for sure.

I’m in a throuple—basically, a couple with three people instead of two. First, I should give you some background: Paul and I have been together for just over ten years. We met Andrea three years ago on Feeld, a dating app aimed at people looking for various polyamorous setups, including threesomes. At the time, we were all looking for a casual thing—I guess what you’d call a friends-with-benefits situation, and for a while that’s what it was. But when the COVID lockdown happened and Paul and I couldn’t see Andrea for several months, we all realized the strength of our feelings. As the world slowly went back to normal and the three of us spent more and more time together, the relationship gradually became, shall we say, less casual. We started meeting each other’s friends, then families. We went on vacations together and started talking about the future. Now we live together in a house in East London, with a cat who dislikes us all equally.

When people learn about our dynamic for the first time, we’re often asked: how does that even work? And I get it—it’s a fair question. Relationships between two people can be complicated enough, folks sometimes have a hard time imagining how three people can be together. And yet, imagine they do, and the ideas they come up with about what life in a throuple must look like are often, in a word, not it. Here are a few of the most common ill-conceived assumptions that seem to come up again and again.

Myth #1: It Must Be One Big Fuckfest

People tend to have a hyper-sexualized view of our relationship. This could be because many people’s only reference point for any kind of three-way relationship comes from porn, or a scene in some raunch-com where one lucky guy (it’s always the guy ????) scores a threesome.

According to Dr. Justin Lehmiller’s groundbreaking book on modern sexuality Tell Me What You Want, 97 percent of men and 87 percent of women (non-binary people aren’t mentioned) have fantasized about a threesome—which is to say that people understand threesomes much more easily than they understand throuples. So much so, in fact, that my partners and I have had people we’ve literally just met lean over a table in a bar and ask, “So do you just have threesomes all the time, then?” The answer to that (obviously) is: Well yeah, sometimes—but it’s…not really anybody else’s business?

And because we live together, people are also very curious about our sleeping arrangements. A common (similarly out-of-pocket) follow-up question to the threesome inquiry is: “Do you all sleep in the same bed?”

Yes, we sleep in the same bed. But it’s very large and we each have our own duvet—an important throuple life hack to stop the person in the middle from reaching the molten temperature of a McDonald’s apple pie during the night. Maybe not all throuples share a bed, but we do.

And as for what we do in that bed, our sex lives really aren’t that different from what I’ve experienced in two-person relationships in the past. Sure, during the honeymoon phase we spent whole weekends in the bedroom, and that was great. But as anyone in a long-term relationship will tell you, you need more than just sex to create a life together.

Myth #2: Throuples Are Dysfunctional—Three’s a Crowd, Right?

The throuple dynamic I share with Paul and Andrea is what’s sometimes called a ‘closed triad.’ This means we’re monogamous as a three (I often think there should be a word for this—trigamous?) and all three of us are dating each other. In a setup like this, each person actually has four relationships to think about: their relationship with one partner, their relationship with the other partner, the relationship of all three together, and their partners’ relationship with each other. If that sounds like a lot, well, it kind of is.

Our relationship involves masses of communication. And sometimes (by which I of course mean all the damn time) you have to be willing to do some self-reflecting, too. This relationship has taught me as much about myself as it has about my partners. But that should be true of any relationship, including traditional monogamous ones. Communication and self-reflection aren’t just for polyamory, FYI.

For the record, there are other possible setups within the world of throupledom, including what’s sometimes called an ‘open-ended triad,’ where one person dates the other two people, but they aren’t dating each other. How a throuple is set up (and how well that setup functions) depends entirely on the people within it.

Myth #3: Throuples Only Work for People Who Never Get Jealous

Do poly people get jealous? Of course! I’d even go as far as to say that feelings of jealousy occur a little more often in my throuple than they have in previous two-person relationships. But this isn’t a deal breaker, or even a sign that something is wrong. The key is to confront jealousy and communicate about it, rather than try to ignore it or run away from it.

When we first started dating, I experienced an unexpected moment of jealousy when Paul and Andrea started doing workouts together. I’m not the sportiest person (by which I mean I was a nerd in school and still am now) so seeing them having fun lifting weights together brought back all those old feelings of being picked last for sports in school. I felt like I was being pushed aside—but that was all in my head (because, duh, of course it was). I thought about my feelings, spoke honestly with Paul and Andrea, and quickly realized all those thoughts were flawed and my jealousy was based on totally wrong assumptions. Amazing what, uh, actually communicating with your partners can accomplish! 10/10 would recommend!

So no, being in a throuple, or any other poly relationship, doesn’t mean you’ve somehow developed a super-human immunity to jealousy. Jealousy is an emotion like any other, and feeling jealous isn’t an inherently bad thing. It’s about what you choose to do with that feeling.

Myth #4: Throuples Spend All Their Time Together, It’s Kinda Creepy

One of the best things about being in a throuple is being able to share different things with different partners. Andrea and I, for example, love going to see scary movies and shopping at vintage markets, while Paul would do almost anything to avoid either of these activities. Once, on vacation, Paul and Andrea got up at 5 a.m. to hike up a mountain—a hard pass for me, thanks. I went snorkeling, and we all met up in the hotel bar later to chat about our days. Last week, Paul and I visited a WWII museum, and Andrea was more than happy to sit that one out.

Just as couples don’t need to do everything together, the three of us aren’t joined at the hip(s). But if you are in need of some company, you’ve almost always got someone who’s going to match your energy—even if that “energy” is of the cuddling-under-a-blanket-in-your-PJs- and-watching-Ru Paul’s Drag Race variety.

Myth #5: But You Wouldn’t Meet Each Other’s Families, Would You?

We’ve been incredibly lucky that our families have been open-minded and accepting of our dynamic—we’ve met each other’s parents and even grandparents. That said, not everyone will be as fortunate, and I don’t want to minimize the challenges many folks in non-monogamous relationships face in the extended family area. We took longer to introduce each other to our families than we might have done in a traditional couple, each of us “coming out” individually first, before making introductions. It was an anxious time—we each had reservations about how our families would react. But in the end, they could see how happy we are, and luckily, their happiness for us won out.

Myth #6: You Couldn’t Ever Have Kids Though, Right?

We don’t want kids, mostly because we all like traveling and our careers and sleep. But this is something we’ve talked about, just like most couples would. In our case, we were happy to discover that we were all on the same page, and had never pictured kids in our individual futures.

But throuples (and partners in other polyamorous dynamics) who do want children certainly can raise a family—and many do. In fact, one throuple in San Diego became the first legal three-father family in 2020 after winning a legal battle to all be named on their children’s birth certificates.

Myth #7: Three-Way Relationships Don’t Have a Real Future

Because we’re taught from such a young age and from so many parts of society (movies, pop music, advertisements, and often our own friends and families) that monogamy is the only truly valid choice, people often jump to the conclusion that our throuple is just an experiment, or a fun fling.

When we first started to get more serious, we noticed that we’d actually internalized some of these messages ourselves. We questioned whether we “could” all move in together, for example, and it took a hot second to actually unlearn our own throuple misconceptions. We were somehow imagining that we were “breaking the rules” with our relationship and wouldn’t be allowed to enjoy the “normal” things that couples do, like sharing a home and spending the holidays together.

But then we realized that, actually, we can do whatever TF we want, we’re adults. We’re not breaking any laws (in this country at least, and we’re very lucky to live somewhere where that is the case), and the “rules” we’d been so concerned about before only exist in other people’s heads. We can do everything couples can do (and, IMHO, we do it better).

We kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve, we fall asleep on one another’s shoulders on long haul flights, we send each other funny Instagram reels, we help each other hang pictures on the walls of the home we share, we all feed our ungrateful cat and make sure she’s inside at night, we remind each other of “that thing we have to do,” we text each other to “get milk,” we disagree on who should take the trash out, we pick up one another’s socks from the floor—and yes, we have stupid arguments in IKEA.

*Names have been changed.

Abby is a freelance journalist and fiction writer specializing in sexuality, gender, and feminism. She is based in East London.