The Complexities and Pitfalls of Throuple Relationships

Priscilla can pinpoint the moment she realised that her throuple was falling apart. Her fiancee, Kiara, had started kissing their shared girlfriend, Olivia, in a way that went on for just a little too long. One night, after the three of them had gone out for a romantic dinner in Savannah, Georgia, where they live, Olivia and Kiara started kissing in the front seats of the family car and it seemed as if they were never going to stop. About 10 minutes in, Priscilla tried to reach out and touch her fiancee’s shoulder, but her seat belt was buckled. Unbuckling and leaning forward felt intrusive. And, anyway, Kiara and Olivia seemed to have forgotten all about her. Watching the kiss unfold, squashed into the back with all the baby seats and toys, Priscilla thought about how by rights it was her turn to sit up front. She was always in the back seat. She felt a flicker of something competitive. “I worried, am I desired less than her?” she recalls now. “Will I be replaced?”

In the early days, Priscilla felt giddy with the excitement of being in a throuple. She and Kiara had been together for eight years, and adding a third person to their relationship felt like a way of exploring non‑monogamy without losing one another, because every new romantic experience would be shared. Olivia was an old friend, so Priscilla and Kiara’s children were comfortable with her. When the kids were in bed, they would walk to the beach holding hands as a three, to watch the sunset. At night, they would curl up to sleep together, and form a kind of cuddle chain. Priscilla would cuddle Olivia, and Olivia would cuddle Kiara.

Sometimes in the night, Priscilla would wake up alone on one side of the bed, and see Kiara and Olivia cuddling without her – at first this didn’t bother her. “I felt a little left out, but I was happy that Kiara was happy,” Priscilla says. The problems really began when both Priscilla and Kiara moved beyond lust, and began to fall deeply in love with Olivia. “The thing about throuples is that when real emotions get involved, things get more complicated.”

In a throuple, three people commit to forming a romantic unit together – just like a couple, but with one extra person. In other forms of non-monogamy, you might have multiple partners, but you are typically only ever in bed with one partner at a time. Throuples are different, because they date and have sex and sometimes even raise children as a three.

In Britain, 9% of adults are open to being in a polyamorous relationship, according to one recent poll, and while no official data about throuples exists, anecdotally they seem to be on the rise. In 2017, three men in Colombia became the first throuple in the world to form a legal union. Earlier this year, the author Lindy West released a memoir about falling in love with her husband’s mistress. The three currently live together in a 100-year-old log cabin in the woods outside Seattle – one of many cities in the US where activists are now fighting for legal recognition for multi-partnered households. Eight cities across Massachusetts and the west coast of the US now have some form of protection in place to prevent polyamorous people from being discriminated against by their employers and landlords.

It used to be that the throuple was the object of curiosity and mild ridicule in popular culture, the kind of offbeat relationship configuration you would only see on television if it was being investigated by Louis Theroux. But on screen today, you see throuples everywhere. In cinema, the couple has fallen out of fashion, with films such as Passages (2023) and Challengers (2024) exploring the pleasures of experimenting with a third partner. One particularly tender recent representation was HBO’s DTF St Louis, in which David Harbour plays a suburbanite who finds out his wife is having an affair with a neighbour. Instead of flying into a jealous rage, Harbour’s character does something radically different: he tries to develop sexual feelings for this neighbour, so they can live and love as a three. This role was a telling choice for Harbour because his estranged wife, Lily Allen, released a tell‑all album last year about their real-life open marriage (although in Allen’s account, Harbour’s actual experiments in polyamory were much less sweet and wholesome than in the show).

But as the throuple becomes more commonplace, there seems to be a growing backlash against this relationship structure. Recent research suggests that younger generations are rejecting the complications of polyamory and beginning to yearn again for the perceived safety of traditional coupledom. An analysis of sexual fantasies by the Kinsey Institute suggests that gen Z are turning away from polyamory, with 81% fantasising about monogamy instead.

Being happily polyamorous requires a daunting degree of patience and thoughtfulness, because you have to continually debrief with your lovers to check that their needs are being met – but throupledom seems to require even greater reserves of emotional maturity. Managing the desires and insecurities of three people at once is a feat, and even within polyamorous circles, throuples have a reputation for being fraught. In The Ethical Slut, a 1997 guidebook to polyamory known colloquially as the “poly bible”, authors Janet W Hardy and Dossie Easton issue a specific warning about throuples, noting that lovers tend to compete with one another for affection within the triad, like “siblings in a family”.

In Britain, about 42% of marriages end in divorce (in some European countries it’s more than 50%). It is possible to argue that coupledom has been a failed experiment, and that it is time we tried a new form of long-term commitment. But what really happens when you attempt to settle down as a three? I have spent the last six months talking to people who have been in throuples that have gone spectacularly wrong (and some that are going spectacularly right) about how to manage infighting and rivalry in three‑person relationships. How can you make a throuple work? And what happens when a throuple implodes?

In The Ethical Slut, the authors write that in any menage a trois “there are actually three couples, A&B, B&C and C&A”. What makes the throuple unstable is that, at any time, the mini-couples within the throuple can become more estranged, or entwined, and there can be dramatic reversals in allegiances. In Priscilla’s throuple, it was initially she and Olivia who were the closer pair – and Kiara who felt excluded. In the first weeks of the relationship, Kiara discovered that Priscilla and Olivia had been having sex while she was at work. Sex as a twosome wasn’t technically against the rules of the arrangement, Kiara tells me, but “it was very hurtful and it broke a lot of trust”.

Kiara – who is in her mid-30s – is an executive chef at a popular wedding venue, and the first time I speak to her, on a video call, she is propped up in bed after a long shift. It’s a brief moment of calm in her day, she explains, because their young children are playing quietly downstairs. Priscilla, 28, is sitting on the bed beside her, and the two of them pass the phone back and forth between them, talking about the betrayals that had rocked their faith in one another with the kind of honesty that the average monogamous couple can only dream of. Kiara is visibly upset, and Priscilla keeps reaching out to take her hand – but it seems that there is nothing they can’t say in front of one another. At one point, Priscilla takes the phone to tell me there was a period of time when Kiara would call Priscilla from work multiple times a day because she felt so panicked that sex might be happening without her. “But then things changed,” she says. As the months went by the dynamic shifted, and it became Kiara and Olivia who were closer, and whose kisses went on for longer.

Alissa, 50, tells me a similar story about the power-flip that happened in her throuple. I speak to Alissa for the first time over the phone from her home in Connecticut, and we have to pause the conversation a couple of times because I can hear her teenage son coming in and out. Alissa and her husband, Rob, have got five children aged 14 to 22, and, while the older children are aware that their parents have experimented with an open relationship, they don’t know the details.

After 21 years of marriage, Rob revealed to Alissa that he was bisexual. Experimenting with another man together seemed like a way to cope with that revelation without it breaking their marriage. Initially when they met Michael, 33, who lived in a neighbouring city, Alissa felt anxious. She worried that Michael was only pretending to feel an attraction to her in order to get to Rob, and remembers one awkward early date where Michael was all over Rob in a cab, and the two of them barely looked at her at all. But as the relationship progressed, Michael and Alissa developed an intense bond, and Rob felt increasingly threatened.

One night when the three of them were in bed together, Alissa and Michael started kissing, and Rob became so distressed he had a panic attack. Alissa had put on new underwear, and Rob started interrogating her about why he had never seen this lingerie before. “He was, like, ‘Well, you haven’t put that on for me lately!’ – but the truth was that Rob and I hadn’t been having sex with each other because we saw Michael two times a week, and who is having more sex than that?” Rob began to have trouble breathing and lay on his side on the bed, unable to speak for nearly an hour. Shortly after this incident Michael decided to leave the throuple because he couldn’t stand the infighting any more.

Initially, Rob hadn’t wanted to talk to me because he found the breakup too painful to revisit, but a few weeks later the couple call me together so that he can offer his perspective. “I was madly in love with this guy,” Rob says. “Head over heels.” He is speaking to me from his car speakerphone. He says that it wasn’t simply the case that he was feeling possessive over his wife; he also felt horribly rejected by Michael. At one point, Rob discovered that Michael had been texting Alissa about what would happen in the event of his potential death. “He would say things to her like, if something were to happen to him – meaning, if I was killed in a tragic accident – I could picture being with you. If something were to happen to you, Alissa, I couldn’t picture carrying on a relationship with him.”

When a throuple is going right, the amount of love feels almost unquantifiable, because you are “chosen and loved by two people and have two people to love”, Rob reflects. “Having him as part of our equation, I could love her 150% and him 150%”. But when a throuple breaks down, you have to deal with the inverse of that exponential love: exponential rejection. At times, Rob says, he didn’t feel “chosen” by anyone.

Alissa says that her and Rob’s marriage has survived the whole experience, but only just. Sometimes she feels resentful because dating another man wasn’t originally her idea, it was Rob’s. “I was pissed because I had this little tiny seedling that I didn’t even want in the first place and I gave it all the sunlight and all the water, and then when it started to grow Rob was ready to end it.”

Earlier this year, when Lindy West’s memoir, Adult Braces, was published, much of the critical reception centred on the idea that West had been coerced into forming a throuple. Readers wondered whether West, who had previously identified as straight, was feigning sexual interest in her husband’s affair partner as a kind of coping mechanism because she was so desperate to hold on to her husband. (In a since-deleted Substack post subtitled I Am Not the Victim of My Marriage, West refuted this claim.) The criticism of West’s memoir was often cruel, but I think the intensity of the reaction speaks to a real fear many of us have that, as polyamory becomes more mainstream, terms such as “throuple” and “ethically non-monogamous” will be wielded by faithless partners who want to legitimise their desire to cheat. However, having spoken to real-life throuples, the picture looks more complicated because the dynamics in the triad chop and change. The wife who was initially reluctant might end up being the most adored and enthusiastic member of the throuple. The husband who initially begged for it might wind up desperate to leave.

Even within the polyamorous community, throuples are considered messy and potentially unethical – not necessarily because they disrupt an existing couple, but because they exploit the third person who enters the relationship. On polyamorous online message boards, couples who post that they are looking for a third person to join their relationship are often criticised for being “unicorn hunters”. A “unicorn” is a kind of shorthand in poly communities for a rare, bisexual person who is open to joining an existing relationship, whereas the couple are characterised as a pair of unscrupulous “hunters” who seek to use this unicorn as their sexual tool.

Lucy, a self-described “former unicorn” I connect with via Reddit, tells me that the hardest thing about her throuple experience was that she became a kind of second-class citizen in the relationship. Lucy was 33 when she began dating a married couple, and then moved into their home. She initially assumed that the love and care the husband and wife extended to one another would be extended to her, too, but she didn’t have equal rights in the relationship. There was a schedule: on Wednesdays she had an individual date with the wife and on Thursdays one with the husband. “The rest of the week, it was, like, do they want to have a threesome, or do they just want to be together tonight?” Lucy says. She was forbidden from having any sexual contact with the husband outside her allotted days. Lucy was deeply infatuated with the couple, particularly the wife, who was 15 years older than her, so she went along with the arrangement – but she was essentially at their beck and call.

The wife also had a “veto power”, which meant that at any moment – with absolutely no warning – she had the right to finish it with Lucy on her and her husband’s behalf. Lucy says she was unceremoniously dumped twice during the year she was in the throuple, because the wife had become fixated on the idea that Lucy was going to run away with her husband. The first dumping happened in 2020, in the middle of the Covid lockdown, so Lucy was forced to remain in the couple’s home. “I would be in my room with the door closed listening to music and still feel her attention on me, hating me. This permeating loathing feeling was coming through the walls.”

After weeks of giving Lucy the silent treatment, the wife tried to rekindle things, but she quickly became suspicious again. The explosion came when the wife scoured her husband’s phone and discovered that Lucy had sent him a water splash emoji on a