3 is not a Crowd

John Warren Wells 3 is not a Crowd

Introduction

“Three is not a crowd.”

A few years ago, this variant of an old cliché began turning up with increasing frequency in personal advertisements in the swinger publications which first appeared in New York and Los Angeles. Ever since then, more and more couples seeking to enlarge their sexual relationships through contact with others have expressed their willingness to engage not only in two-couple swap sessions but in threesomes as well. Two is tedium, one infers, but three is not a crowd.

While this may be seen as a new direction of sorts in the swinger subculture, there is nothing wildly revolutionary in the idea of three in a bed. One is reminded of the Hollywood titan taken on a tour of a friend’s garden and shown a large brass sundial. When its function was explained to him, he shook his head in amazement. “What’ll they think of next?” he marveled.

And of course the ménage à trois is as much an invention of antiquity as is the sundial. The one is the result of man’s desire to know the time, the other of his even stronger desire to make that time pass more pleasantly. One recalls that both Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar dwelt deep in the bosom of Abraham, that Jacob married two sisters, that Lot tumbled both his daughters. (One may believe, in the last connection, that the girls were moved solely by filial piety and the urge to provide their father with male heirs. One may also believe that Lot didn’t know what was going on. One may further believe that the Earth is flat and the moon a wheel of Camembert.)

But however one may feel about the literal truth of the Bible, the simple endurance of these stories testifies to the age old occurrence of troilistic relationships and, even more, to the propensity of human beings to find such relationships of interest. That the contemporary sexual underground has embraced the ménage is hardly remarkable.

For quite some time now, I have been peripherally involved with America’s sexual underground. The rising tide of mate-swapping and other forms of ritualized extramarital sexual relations has lately proved to be neither a fad on the order of the hula hoop nor, as was often charged, a creation of the sensational press. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly evident that the tribe of swingers constantly wins new recruits and has emerged as a fact of life in contemporary America. Whether this trend will continue is moot. That it is quite real is indisputable.

At first glance, one may easily regard the threesome as a component of the swinging scene, of no special importance in and of itself. That a couple with a preference for group sex is willing to participate in an occasional threesome does not seem overwhelmingly significant. Indeed, one of the reasons many swingers will emphasize in their ads that “three is not a crowd” simply because a threesome is often more easily arranged than a four-or-moresome. The world of mail-order adultery is strangely competitive. Many ads draw surprisingly few suitable responses, while many responders find themselves writing dozens of letters and getting distressingly few letters in return from advertisers. Couples do find each other, certainly, and a pleasant evening with a couple will lead to other presumably pleasant evenings with that couple’s friends but the initial plunge into the pool can be difficult to arrange.

On the other hand, I have found that single swingers are in abundant supply. A couple expressing a willingness to swing not only with couples but with singles as well is virtually guaranteed a full mailbox and as full a bed as they desire. This is most notably the case when the couple wishes to swing with single males: the couple seeking an extra girl will not experience nearly so great a deluge of applicants.

When I first began encountering examples of troilism in swinging circles, I tended to attribute this partly to convenience and partly to that desire for variety for its own sake which is a hallmark of the swinger. And while these factors undeniably play a role in a large proportion of cases, they do not begin to tell the whole story.

In one way or another, I have been made acquainted with quite a number of cases in which the threesome is the preferred, even the exclusive form of sexual liaison. Neither convenience nor experimentation begins to explain these instances. Moreover, the persons involved can often not be called swingers in any real sense of the term. Their fixed sexual triangle constitutes the whole of their sexual experience, and no outside contacts are sought or permitted. They are, in essence, a sort of plural marriage.

I became sufficiently well acquainted with four of these triangular relationships to report on them at length in the pages to follow. While I prefer to let the facts — indeed, the participants — speak for themselves, some introductory observations might not be amiss.