I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about it, like it was J.F.K.’s assassination or something. I was poking around with a friend for a birthday present for my sister at a shop in Culver City, when said friend just dropped that one of her female friends recently gave her boyfriend a threesome for his birthday.
This woman had planned it all ahead of time. She took her boyfriend to Las Vegas for the weekend, hired a sex worker, and instituted some rules—namely, no intercourse with the third party. And reportedly it had turned out great. There are details I’m leaving out to protect the secrets of a couple I see only every two years or so at a backyard gathering, where the boyfriend, without fail, calls me “Laura.” Nonetheless, it was incredible gossip that didn’t help me in any way to find a birthday gift for my sister.
Just so I abide by the sacred rule of threes (pun intended), I’ll share two more incidents I heard about after the gift-shop revelation. First, there was that big Hollywood rumor—maybe you heard it, too—about the now broken-up couple who met on a film set last year and celebrated the man’s birthday by having a three-way with a well-known model-actress. According to my infallible source (friend-group-text chain), the model-actress waited in the hotel bathroom for the couple to arrive.
A few weeks after I heard about that special moment, a work friend, whom I’ll call Dick because I have the sense of humor of a 12-year-old, confessed that for his 31st birthday he was given a threesome by his girlfriend with his ex-girlfriend. This event shall hereafter be known in perpetuity as a Devil’s Triangle™.
To be clear, I’m not trying to argue threesomes are a new phenomenon. I’m sure the first one took place mere seconds after the human race learned to count to three. It’s not like all those Old Testament dudes with their 18 maiden wives and loose caftans weren’t playing sexual Tetris in their desert tents all the time. And every post-pubescent person alive in 1998 was titillated by Wild Things, in which Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, and Matt Dillon sexed on each other in a pool. Even I had a threesome during my halcyon days of youthful debauchery. (Please ask yourself if you would be above bragging about your three-way in print if given the opportunity.)
It’s not the trifecta itself that gives me pause; it’s the giving of it. The sex-with-two-people-as-a-viable-birthday-present of it all, as if group sex was on par with a massage gift certificate or nice dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. As someone who already fears that her facial expression will betray her disappointment when opening a gift, it’s hard to imagine how to handle a birthday surprise when the surprise is a stranger’s genitals.
Which is why Jennifer Musselman, a Santa Barbara–based therapist who does relationship therapy with couples, says that while she’s not against the idea of bestowing a threesome outright, she firmly believes the key to pulling it off successfully is communication. “This is something a couple should have multiple conversations about prior to doing,” Musselman says. “And I mean multiple.” Maybe a good rule of thumb: at least as many conversations as people participating.
My friend Dick and his girlfriend did not do this. It’s not like he came home to find his ex waiting with a red bow in the driveway like a Toyota Christmas commercial, but it was impromptu, having come together at his party. “I didn’t realize that was going to happen really until right before it happened,” he tells me.
In other words, he was incredibly drunk. And so was his girlfriend. While they both remain relatively psychologically unscathed by the night, Dick does say that if there was a next time, he’d want a strategy sesh or two. “I remember it being fun,” he says, “but I was so drunk there’s no way it was one of my better sexual performances.” When they woke up the next morning, Dick was on the couch, his girlfriend was in the bed, and the other woman was gone. Dick remembers: “We both woke up extremely hungover, like, ‘Well, that was that. Happy birthday.’”
It’s hard to imagine how to handle a birthday surprise when the surprise is a stranger’s genitals.
To 99 percent of people, sex with a single human being is a well-trod endeavor. You put your whatever in someone else’s whatever, writhe like beached whales, make noises like Jodie Foster in Nell. Three can be an inherently awkward number, even when you’re prepared for it.
Another friend, let’s call her Petunia, who’s bisexual, had her first threesome on her most recent birthday, courtesy of her boyfriend. Her boyfriend had asked in advance if it was something she’d want, and she’d said yes, but in the moment she found herself feeling left out. “I thought I’d maybe like to see him kissing someone else,” she says. “Turns out, I didn’t.” It was hardly all bad, she admits. “I liked it when it was my turn, though.”
Another friend of mine was the special guest of a couple’s birthday ménage à trois. At some point during a party at a bar, the birthday boy and his girlfriend approached my friend and told her that she was what he wanted for his birthday. Despite the somewhat unsavory phrasing, my friend went home with the couple, where almost immediately the girlfriend fell asleep because she had taken too much Xanax. “We just, like, made out next to her passed-out body for a little bit,” my friend recalls. “Then he walked me home.” To their credit, the couple phoned my friend the next morning and apologized. “I didn’t know quite what they were apologizing for, but I thought it was classy?”
All of which goes back to therapist Musselman’s point about planning. “More than anything, you want to make sure you and your partner are mentally and emotionally prepared,” she says. You don’t want in retrospect to think, “Maybe I hadn’t processed that as much as I should have.” She advises coming up with some ground rules and giving your partner enough time to change their mind if they want to, pointing to a sex community she thinks does consent and communication right: B.D.S.M. “I wish all monogamous relationships had to go through B.D.S.M. training for communication,” she says with a laugh. “They have that on lockdown.”
Re-gifting is usually frowned upon, but as someone who, for her birthday every year, requests a triple-berry cake from Sweet Lady Jane (a gustatory three-way, if you will), I wondered if anyone I spoke to would do it all again. “I mean, I don’t want to be the kind of guy who’s like, ‘Oh, I want a threesome for my birthday,’” Dick says. “But, yeah, if it was offered as a gift, I’m not turning it down.”
For what it’s worth, my birthday is May 12—and I can’t live on cake alone.
Lauren Bans is a Los Angeles–based television writer who remains on strike
