So over the last few months I’ve been seeing two people, in what is called a Triad. Essentially three people dating each other. Brief background; I was happily single and the two people I’m seeing have been a couple for 8 years. Like most budding relationships, you will be asked a lot of questions from both significant and non-significant people in your life. The unconventionality of Triad dating has, I’ve noticed, sparked a disproportionate amount of recurring questions, so I decided to lay them out for those interested.

You’ll notice some of these questions are highly directional, asked and responded form a singular perspective. Being the previously singular person dating two people with a relationship history — aka the Third — I have a unique position. I will give my general critique of the questions intermittent with a personal and experiential response to each.

Purpose

Although this is a Personal Piece, I’m hoping as a side note that this post may unintentionally advise some folks who are in a Triad or thinking of becoming involved in one. Receiving some questions can seem obnoxious or insensitive upon initial hearing (particularly when they are in reference to your choice of partner and lifestyle). However keep in mind there’s no common understanding or set script for people in Triads, let alone for people who are not in triads, so all questions should be taken with a grain of salt.

People can’t be blamed for asking questions you find jarring about something they don’t have any intrinsic knowledge about. People’s questions can offer you a grounded perspective you weren’t able to see before, especially in early honeymoon-phases of relationships when we are most easily swayed by our emotions and neurochemistry.

Furthermore, the purpose of this post is not to prohibit questions but quite the opposite; it’s to encourage people to keep asking questions. The more people ask, the more transparency increases. Also, answering has been a reflective exercise into how the questions we ask people about their relationships are telling of both our assumptions of relationships and how we are continuously influenced by society’s expectations. It’s an open invitation to be challenged and to keep challenging… and while ambitious, to possibly make further inroads to deconstructing both the stigma surrounding non-heteronormativity and the social conditioning and biases that reinforce escalator relationships

Now… on to the questions!

How does that work?

This question has a lot of layers and intentions loaded behind it. And the simple answer is that there is no simple answer. Many Triads will have different configurations and agreed fidelity stipulations and I’m not even aware what they can be and yet still be called a Triad as I experience it.

On further inquiry people asking this can mean is it ‘monogamous’ or do the people you’re seeing also have other metamours they see on the regular… put more simply; is it an open relationship?

In my case, no it’s a Closed Triad. As to the ‘how’, it functions like any other relationship; we share, we emotionally regard each other, we debate, we cook, share ideas and books we enjoy, go to museums together, advise and be a shoulder when ones of us is upset or annoyed etc… finally, we are only physically intimate among us three exclusively. As such, I’ve now found myself contriving to make ‘exclusive’ the go-to adjective in my inner lexicon over ‘monogamous’.

I have been — what I would consider — casually mislabelled as Polyamorous because of this experience. However, while Triads may be related to the Poly- realm, there are certain connotations of polyamory that I personally do not align with. (I wouldn’t even engage in an Open Relationship in a dyadic relationship, so being closed/exclusive was a huge incentive for me to be with them).

Do you get jealous seeing your partner with someone else?

Actually no, part of the attraction is seeing them together. I asked my suitors how they respectively felt about seeing their longer-term partner engage with myself and both replied that they enjoyed it for various reasons, but primarily because even observing is a part of being involved.

The peculiar thing is, from a layman’s armchair observation, this question is most commonly asked to me by hetero women engaged in monogamous dyadic relationships… I won’t even attempt to postulate what that could imply as its way beyond the scope of this post.

Are the two people you are seeing doing this to help “fix” their relationship?

Being the “third” person who technically entered into a preexisting relationship, I usually feel that this is a question I don’t have the full authority to answer.

I do know my suitors’ individual and collective reasons for including a third person into their coupledom, although there was months of deliberation into their decision that I was not privy to.

Very rarely is this actually phrased as a question, more often than not it has been phrased as an opinion; “I would be worried that they were using me as a third to fix their relationship”. There’s a benefit of the doubt which could be given whereby a friend could be saying this out of concern for your well-being. Albeit in my experience it is usually subjective and opined as if it were the interlocutor themselves who were the newly third in the triad… notice “I would be” and “using me”.

Another way to highlight that this question can be overly presumptuous is by applying it in different contexts. For example, my sister (Anna) is dating a man (David) a divorced father of two. Would it be tactful to ask Anna if she’s concerned that David is only seeing her because he wants to ‘fix’ his family dynamic?

Similarly, should I ask my father if he is only courting Maria so they can both fix each other’s widowhood?

Or to any dyadic relationship, did you start dating this person to fix your singlehood?

Being the previously single party I’m usually asked what “their” motivation is. Never have I been asked what attracted me to the idea or what I believe I could enrich their lives with.

My original answer for those interested; they don’t treat me as a bandage baby, they nearly stopped trying to find a third because other people they had previously scouted approached them negatively and began turning them off the Triad idea. They met me, they liked me, I liked them and they wanted to keep seeing me. My experience won’t be the same for every Triad alas!

Which one do you like more? / Do you like one person more than the other?

I’ll admit, this is my favourite question because I never cease to be surprised when it arises.

Firstly — on more than one occasion — this question has been explicitly put to me based on the asker’s personal experience with once-off threesomes; in which they obligated themselves into sex with a couple where they were only attracted to one of the two.

I was surprised how commonly this occurred.

This makes me think of the perspective of the person who is disprefered. If I were the disprefered and a person was reluctantly having sex with me because they were only interested in being intimate with my partner, then I would feel pretty humiliated that they were only acquiescing me for their own libidinous goals or self-interest.

Merely being tolerated — particularly when our esteem around sex is involved — can be pretty horrible thing to feel, so I doubt I could ever falsely use someone like that or be able to mislead another person into thinking I wanted to be with them intimately.

Secondly, being in a once-off or infrequent sex threesome is not the same thing as maintaining a relationship among three people. And usually if it’s just a sex threesome, the emphasis on liking or preferring one person over the other refers to being more physically attracted one of the two.

While people can have ‘types’, it’s also possible to be attracted to two different people who do not bear physical resemblance. This isn’t uncommon for a lot of people, and it can be even more common for those who are bisexual. The key points though are the non-physical aspects encompassed in Personality. Traits have high variability but thankfully I have a compatibility with both of their traits. More importantly I’m compatible with their expressed and behavioural values from what I’ve experienced so far. If you know what you want from a partner, you wouldn’t enter into a dyadic relationship with someone whose personality or values you clashed with, so why would you do it with (one out of the) two people?

Does it bother you that they live together and you have live away alone?

The short answer; No!

This can be broken down into a multitude of reasons but I’ll stick with the pertinent few. Being a new experience, my interactions with them have been mostly all three of us together and rarely one-on-one with any of them. We’ve talked about this –as is always recommended — and they mentioned that on those rare occasions, there has been no cause for jealousy for the absent person.

Now in regards to me living alone, I will reiterate what I mentioned about Personality Traits. Knowing your own traits and having realistic expectations and hindsight helps to keep you grounded. Being heavily introverted along with my strong values of being independent, I need my own space and quietude. Need, not want! So it helps to have my place to return to. They have their lived-in comforts. I have mine.

Also, coming into a preexisting relationship, is inherently going to come with default “unequal” arrangements. By being realistic, you know that your suitors have a life that predates you. Accepting these dynamic differences you can all work towards how your needs are met. Figuring out what it is you all want to give and need from your relationship, both individually and collaboratively, can help build ways you can all achieve fairness, which at present seems more grounded than contrivances of equality.

I’ve known people in Triads/threesomes and it never worked out.

Again, this isn’t a question but it’s an opinion or example usually given but again — benefit of the doubt — perceived to come from a place of concern. My only response to this is that a lot of relationships in general don’t always work out… and that’s okay!

Goals, personal aspirations and desires can change between two people over time, so it’s only logical to think that these things have a greater chance of changing when an additional person is brought into the equation.

Personally I’m not checking for a shelf-life or an expiry date on this experience, regardless of what anecdotes and blogs which predict higher likelihoods of relationship-decay… who does that anyway unless they were never willing to commit in the first place? To bring it back to another contextual example, for any endeavour that is in statu nescendi, do you usually greet it with examples of failure only? If someone just enthusiastically broke the news about their marital engagement, do you reckon they wish to hear there and then how many examples of failed marriage you’ve witnessed in your life?

A constructive way to respond to these situations is to consider two things; firstly, the fact that people are aware of them to a degree can be taken as a sign that Triads are not such an alien concept as people still try having them. Secondly, it could be a good opportunity to ask if the person knows why the Triad didn’t work out or if they know what worked well when it was sustained.

Addendum — “The Sex”

I gave this post to a few ‘reviewers’ before publishing it. While the following comment wasn’t a frequently asked question I have received initially, it has since become one as consequence; “I thought you were going to include something about the sex”. Like I stated, direct questions about the sex didn’t arise, — maybe because I live among a notoriously repressed and expressively circuitous nation — however in hindsight I now believe the sex could have been one of the implied intentions under the ‘How Does That Work?’ section.

I generally don’t talk about my own intimacies involving significant others because I feel their boundaries and privacy deserve to be respected. If instances of the topic were mine and mine alone, I would be more liberal in discussing and analysing somewhat publicly.

What I can say though, is that in the beginning I had concerns about splitting my focus with partners as to not unintentionally neglect one over the other. The more I aired these concerns the more we were able to include and involve everyone more naturally. They taught me how to relax and be in the moment. There’s also chances to be creative, for example if you’re with one the other can do their own thing with one or both of us simultaneously. If there’s another take home message it could be that challenges in triad sex (and sex in general) can a good chance for growth.

Not to mention that little non-sexual ‘everyday challenges’ about dating two people — which goes against the grain of the norm — won’t stop at the bedroom either. As I mentioned previously; “part of the attraction is seeing them together” and I would like to add part of the intimacy is also being correspondingly seen by one while with the other.

Expanding your comfort zones can lead to fun if you find yourself open for it. Communication I find is always paramount to learning to relax among one another. If you’re the Third, it helps to remember that although your significant others may have come into this together on a joint effort, they still can have their own individual apprehensions when it comes to private bedroom matters and public matters, so be open to listen to them respectively.

Conclusion

As this experience is relatively new, I’m sure there is much more to learn and the everyday challenges yet to come — be they unique to Triads or not — are numerous. I can imagine that either FAQs will cease over time or at least change in their nature. The funny thing about non-conventional dating is that telling some people in certain contexts can kind of feel like ‘coming out’ in different ways all over again. People will be surprised, some may even vociferously object. While it can be hilarious to see some reactions, for me the important thing though is how I defended and honoured myself in those moments in a way that does less to profane my situation.

The things I said here are not intended to be wholly representative of being in a Triad, as not everything I have written here will be applicable every configuration, but hopefully you found something at least mildly insightful.

If there’s anything further you’d like to ask or critique about anything that’s been written here, please feel free. Or if you have advice about Triads and non-conventional dating you would like to contribute, it is welcomed.

Thanks for reading.

River.