‘They said to me, you were the best sex toy we ever had’: the pain, pleasure and paranoia of life in a throuple

Caitlin from London lived with a couple in Marseille, but it ended in tears when feelings got complicated. Photograph: Kate Peters/The GuardianView image in fullscreenCaitlin from London lived with a couple in Marseille, but it ended in tears when feelings got complicated. Photograph: Kate Peters/The Guardian‘They said to me, you were the best sex toy we ever had’: the pain, pleasure and paranoia of life in a throupleFrom Hollywood movies to confessional memoirs, three-person relationships are everywhere.

But is it really possible to keep everyone satisfied? Happy trios, bruised couples and rejected lovers tell allPriscilla 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.View image in fullscreenPriscilla (on the left) and Kiara, who are engaged, had a shared girlfriend who left them earlier this year. Photograph: Kendrick Brinson/The GuardianSometimes 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