Dan remembers one evening, sitting on the sofa and talking to his husband, Hugh, about Charles. “It was the most amazing experience because we were really falling in love with this person,” he says. “And we could talk about it with each other, like: ‘Isn’t it amazing about him that he does this thing?’ I remember taking a deep breath and saying: ‘This is becoming something; this is something real.’”

Dan and Hugh, who live in Sydney, have been together for eight years, but this was about five years into their relationship. They had met as students at a party. “At some point, the cops came and shut it down,” says Hugh. “I said to a whole load of people in the street: ‘Do you want to come back to my house?’ I wasn’t ready to stop having a good time. Dan and I started talking, and on the way home we talked about Carl Sagan and Beyoncé. We covered a pretty wide range of topics.”

They carried on talking all night, and “danced to Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves the Sunshine really quietly at one point in the night so as not to wake up my housemates. And then the night was over and Dan was one of the last people there. He said: ‘Goodbye, Hugh.’ And I thought: ‘Oh my God. I have no idea what this guy’s name is. I really like him.’”

Hugh tracked him down on Facebook, and they went on a date about three weeks later. “We stayed together all afternoon, and then it got dark, so we went for dinner and then for a romantic stroll,” says Dan. Hugh continues: “We had our first kiss. And then Dan said he wouldn’t come home with me, which also made him very attractive.”

“It had been such a perfect night,” Dan says, “and I thought: ‘I don’t need anything else.’ Anyway, we got together the next night.”

They moved in with each other after about two months, and held an unofficial wedding in 2014, before same-sex marriage in Australia was legal. They legalised their marriage in 2018, and this time Charles attended.

Charles and Hugh had known each other since university, although not well, and Charles and Dan had also met briefly. Later, Charles ended up renting studio space from Hugh. “We became friends again, and then really good friends. And then I became friends with Dan through Hugh,” says Charles. They started hanging out as a trio, going swimming or having dinner and watching a film.

“Before the three of us got together romantically and sexually, I remember feeling the happiest I’d ever felt with Dan,” says Hugh. “And then when we met Charlie. It was like this extension of a really positive energy. Charlie just slotted into that, seamlessly, without any of us trying to make it happen.”

Dan and Hugh had had an open marriage from the start. “I think gay men are able to negotiate that quite easily,” says Hugh. “But I don’t think Dan and I ever thought that would extend to an emotional romantic involvement.”

Charles also had a boyfriend, but that, too, was an open relationship, “so we weren’t necessarily breaking any rules”, he says. “But we were going to the beach together a lot because it was the start of spring. I remember one morning, the three of us had just gone to the beach and Hugh had a meeting, so Dan and I drove Hugh back to the studio. And then Dan drove me back to my suburb and dropped me off. I think he leaned in and kissed me. We were parked outside my apartment block and I looked across the street and saw my boyfriend. In that crystallising moment, I realised that I was in an emotional relationship with these two people.”

They all got together in late 2017. Was it strange to join an existing relationship? “In many ways, it felt completely normal and natural,” says Charles, “but there were these habits and rituals that these two people had built up over the years – things such as where you go in the morning to get your coffee and all that. I guess the challenge for me was knowing when to roll with it, and when I needed to make sure that I established my own routines and rituals – and my own stake in the relationship.”

How did Hugh and Dan navigate bringing someone else into their marriage? “I guess like we’ve navigated every other part of our relationship,” says Hugh. “By being honest about what we’re feeling, and talking to each other. And not having any expectation of how we were meant to behave and feel. Allowing each other to feel different emotions, whether it’s jealousy, resentment, anger, happiness, joy, connectedness.” Dan says: “I always try to impress upon people just how easy and natural it was at the beginning, as any burst of love is when you first get together with somebody.”

It was “more strange”, says Charles, “for the people around us than it was for us. We’re fortunate in that we all we run in very liberal circles, and all our families are very progressive. But most of the people we spoke to, the first thing they would say would be: ‘Oh, I could never do that myself.’ It’s unfathomable to so many people.”

Hugh and Dan live together, and Charles lives five minutes away. “Hugh and I exist in our marriage, and that’s one thing. And we also have our relationship with Charles,” says Dan. “We both try to keep that healthy by seeing each other individually, and then the three of us spend a fair bit of time hanging out as well. Like any relationship, it’s still changing.”

During the lockdown, Hugh and Dan are not seeing Charles in person but doing a lot of video calling. “We talked about being together for a lockdown, but we don’t have enough space,” says Dan. “That aside, we don’t think this is a good time or reason for us to begin living together.”

Is there jealousy? Do they worry that one day two of them will go off with each other and leave the third? “People always say that,” says Dan. “And sometimes I do. But being in an open relationship means that you actually confront those feelings, you start to look at the reason for them and you can work on eliminating them. I am a far less jealous person now than when I started my relationship with Hugh and also with Charles, too. It forces you to do quite a bit of self-reflection because it puts you in these quite intense situations.”

The relationship works, he says, “because everyone still wants to be in it”. A thruple makes sense, Charles says, because they’re not trying to get all their needs met by one partner: “I get something quite different from Hugh than I get from Dan. And I hope that I offer Hugh something that Dan can’t, and vice versa.”

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