Tell Me About: Being the Third Person in a Menage a Trois

So, I had my first threesome this weekend, and I liked it.

It was myself, my SO, and a friend of ours. It was a first for all of us. She spent the night, we had breakfast the next morning and hung out, and we all hugged and said goodbye.

I know how I feel; I know how my SO feels. It’s all very positive on our end. And she says she had a great time too, but she’s also “processing her feelings.”

I’m not asking you to predict her feelings, but I’m just wondering if any of you who have been the sort of “outsider” in a menage a trois could tell me about your thoughts during or after such an encounter.

It would also help if you told me whether you knew the folks ahead of time, what prompted the coupling, anything you might think is relevant.

I’m really looking for the emotional stream of consciousness on this on.

Thanks!!

I truly believe that it works better with three people who are NOT in love with each other in any combination.

I was the third person with a couple once. It was okay I guess, until it was time to go to sleep. They cuddled up & stole all the blankets; I laid alone in the dark shivering and awake because I can’t sleep with a radio on.

Another time I was with a guy I was madly in love with. (I was very young.) He had a crush on a beautiful married friend of his, and he and she decided we should switch. Well, I didn’t really want to, but they insisted, and her husband was cute. So we had a good time, it was actually very nice, and we emerged in about an hour. Then we spent the next 2 or 3 hours waiting for them to finish, because they were not compatible and couldn’t manage it. They never did get off, and were very grumpy about it.

Another time, a different boyfriend wanted to include his best friend. That was awesome; until my boyfriend freaked out & left. He spent an hour downstairs outside our window howling and generally freaking out. What a mess.

In my experience, with a love match +1, it’s pretty rare that somebody doesn’t eventually have a problem. Also, beware of girls who may think that you two must not be too committed (for obvious reasons) and decide to take your man for themselves. One sees this a lot.

Technically, I’ve never been the third person, but this is something I’ve done a few times. In our case, it works because, so far, the “other person” has been part of a couple with whom we are friends. And they’ve had an open relationship for years, so they taught us about navigating the waters, open communication, developing rules that work, etc. The only “problem” we’ve encountered is that us two girls need to indulge the other guy (instead of my husband) next. It’s not like we’re really keeping score, but we want to make sure he feels the love too.

This is why we have only done threesomes with half of a couple. They’re great friends and all, but there’s no way we would try to split each other up.

My thoughts are that it might have worked better if the other participants weren’t completely batshit insane. They managed to hide their insanity till after the threesome was done, and then it appeared. I had to be really mean to them to get them to stop pestering me. At one point they wanted me to move in with them. She also accused me of trying to steal her man. Firstly, I didn’t want him anyway, and secondly, what would I have done, kidnapped him? Dude would have walked out on his own if he wanted to do so.

The best threesome I’ve ever had was with two girls and none of us were involved with any of the other ones.

The worst threesome I had was with my wife and her best friend–wife had a crush on best friend, didn’t realize till later that best friend agreed because she had a crush on me.

Best foursome was with another married couple we met at a swinger’s club, it was very chill and they kinda mentored us into it.

Worst was with friends of ours who are engaged, similar to brujaja we had mutual incompatibilities because they were the type of people for whom 2-3 hours was a reasonable short lovemaking session, and we more typically did 45min-hour, so aside from the tab A/slot B problems the expectations weren’t being met on either side.

Having never been the “outsider” but having been an uninvolved-in-love party I would have to say that the biggest thought problems I had were (as I was still a relative youth) separating my long-term feelings for the girls (acquaintances that I was in a club with) from the short-term feelings of closeness/affection generated by the fact of sex. Since then, I’ve been more typically either experimenting within the bounds of polyamory (where attachment is A-OK) or, rarely, in a specifically swingers club-type situation (where temporary attachment is fine because you aren’t going to interact with them enough for it to even try to gel into something problematic)

Hmm… this is kind of a staple of mine. surprising then it maybe to say that it doesn’t happen as often as I would like.

I have several girlfriends but only two of them make for the best experience. Curiously enough they are not best friends or BFF forever types. We hook up around once a month if we are all in town.

I have tried this with other girls who have a closer relationship with each other and after a few times the dynamics shift and I know they are trying to score points off each other or there is an undertone which is… I dont know but definitely not satisfactory.

Warning: The following post is long, definitely TMI, and though I’ve omitted the most explicit details, reads something like a bad letter to Penthouse. I don’t care. The OP has asked for threesome stories, and I have one. I’ve very much enjoyed typing it and I wish to share. I swear every word is true. Feel free not to read it. :wink:

I was 19 and pretty inexperienced sexually (a couple fumbling encounters and no real relationships to that point).

My randomly-assigned dorm roommate (“C”) was a few years older, having done a stint in the Army before college, and was comparatively much more sexually accomplished and confident.

We got along very well in a raunchy 80’s buddy-comedy movie sort of way. Even though he turned out to have all sorts of problems, I looked up to the guy. I was a geeky, gawky kid and he took me under his wing – think Pinto and Otter in Animal House.

C began dating K, a girl from the next building. She had apparently been fairly inexperienced as well, and he delighted in telling me about all the various things he’d gotten her to do with him as their relationship progressed. I didn’t mind; I kind of enjoyed the vicarious thrill.

One day, C told me he’d been working on selling K on the idea of a threesome, and she’d decided she wanted to do it – this weekend! So, did I wonder about the psychological implications on the dynamics of our respective relationships? Um… no. I was 19 and suddenly handed a golden opportunity to get laid. That alone trumped any hesitation I might have had about another guy being there. In fact, in a weird way, I think C made it less awkward than it probably would have been if I were alone with a girl at that time of my life. (More on that later.)

On Friday night the 3 of us went out for pizza and not a little beer. As we got drunker, she got flirtier, and we were all getting horny, so it was time to head back to the dorm. We sat on the bed with K in the middle, and she alternated making out with C and me, with the touching and groping getting heavier as we went on.

At that point, C became the “director” of the proceedings. He sat in a chair and essentially narrated K and me through the act without yet joining in. I admit I enjoyed being told what to do, and it also took a lot of the pressure off a kid who didn’t really know much about what he was doing.

After I finished (which – are you surprised? – was quite soon after I’d started), C and K did the deed as I watched. Then, after we all regained our energy, we started experimenting in various activities involving all 3 of us at once. The mood in general was really playful and loose; at the time I don’t recall there being any weirdness at all. C and I didn’t do anything with each other, though there was some incidental touching of parts from time to time. Again, surprisingly, that wasn’t weird.

The sleeping arrangements? Well, it was a dorm room. I climbed up to my top bunk while C and K slept together below.

In the harsh light of the next morning, there were no regrets. Quite the contrary, in fact. We arranged our mattresses on the floor to allow for better freedom of movement, and kept at it all day and into the night. That remains one of the wildest weekends of my life, and I truly believe it helped me on the road to sexual maturity and gave me some confidence – even a bit of swagger – that has served me well over the years.

Afterward, I was looking forward to our little arrangement becoming a regular thing. That didn’t happen. A few days later, I walked into the room to discover C and K having sex on his bed. I played it cool and was about to leave them to their privacy, when C chimed in with “You can go ahead and jump in anytime here, Wheelz!” K did not appreciate that, to say the least. She flipped out a bit, yelled something at him about respecting her feelings, hurriedly got dressed and stormed out. Yes, it was kind of a dickish thing for him to say, but not entirely out of left field given the things we’d already done together. Looking back, my guess is that K had some second thoughts about what she’d done, but didn’t want to come out and say so. So she blew C’s comment out of proportion to avoid a repeat.

But she didn’t feel bad enough about it to leave our lives entirely. C and K had an on-again-off-again relationship after that, and she and I briefly dated (with C’s blessing) during one of their off-again periods. She definitely continued to enjoy sex – just with one guy at a time. We talked about our weekend occasionally, but there was an unspoken understanding among all 3 of us that it would never happen again.

I never saw K after college. C and I stayed buddies for a few years but eventually drifted apart. If I had to guess, I’d say we all enjoy remembering what happened that weekend.

(First off, this is a bit long, and, but with some good perspectives) I’ve had a few threesomes in my day (BTW, I’m a female). A few of the most memorable are these:

My first one: I was 17. It was my good friend and her “boyfriend.” (She later came out as gay, but at the time, she was experimenting. They weren’t super tight, but anyway.) It was after school, hanging out at her house. I guess you could say that technically, I was the “outsider,” but for all intents and purposes, he was the outsider. My friend and I spent more time playing with each other than him.

The best one I had in college: I was dating a girl, A, at the time. There was another girl in her dorm who was “curious” and wanted some girls with some experience to show her how it goes. A and I had fun showing her the fun of girl-on-girl loving, she had fun learning. We had a very teacher-student mentality going on, so she was grateful for the lesson and we never had any lingering feelings or anything. She went back to men for a while, dated a female friend of mine for a little bit, and, I hear, she’s getting married to a man.

One where I was the “outsider”: In college, a very good male friend of mine, G, was dating a girl, L, who had always wanted to try it with a girl. I had done it with him a couple times before he started dating her (she didn’t know that at the time and I didn’t know he hadn’t told her). The actual threesome was fine. She was a little inhibited, but opened up after a while and had fun. It was the aftermath. I was fine afterwords. I went about my life, thankful for a night of fun with a good looking guy and a hot chick. She, however, thought he was going to leave her for me. (We had been there, done that and both knew it wasn’t going to happen.) Their relationship fell apart.

One where I was “in love” with the guy and shared him with another girl: My boyfriend at the time had a very Chasing Amy moment where he couldn’t get over my past and wanted to do something crazy and extreme. At that point, I was still into crazy and extreme stuff, so I offered him something a little less extreme: a threesome with a female friend of mine. She was a friend from back in college who was visiting for a couple days. She was up for it, we had fun… and then he got weirded out. He kept thinking about it, obsessing over it, insisting we find another girl, etc. He became consumed with the feeling of having two women pleasure him and pleasure each other for his viewing pleasure. We went our separate ways.

And that’s just a sampling of what can happen with threesomes. Each one I’ve had happens differently, with different people, combinations, and ultimately feelings. It’s hard to predict what will happen.

Thanks, everyone.

And thanks Serenata - I appreciate that perspective.

Guess a part of me just wants to know she’s going to be okay and our moments of fun didn’t cause her stress after the fact.

I’ve done a few in my time (always being the third man out), and all have been good experiences. Most were with swingers or other secure couples, or were friends with benefits. Nothing crazy, no drama, no secretive calls or emails from one of them later wanting to hook up one on one.

From her point of view, she had a one-night stand that has no possibility of turning into a relationship. Even in a two-person context, that can be fine, or it can be a source of regret.