FRIENDS & BENEFITS

I Accepted a Dinner Invite and Ended Up in a Threesome

A strange predicament.

Welcome to Friends and Benefits. Follow Tootsie Haine, our sex and relationships columnist, into the lives and psyches of men and women, young and old, gorgeous and tragic, divine and insane. All names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the bachelors in question.

Shortly after my 24th birthday, I was invited to have a threesome—my first threesome. The couple was in their thirties. I’d met them at a Halloween party a few weeks earlier, dressed as a sexy milkmaid.

I’d accepted their dinner invitation with genuine innocence. I thought I was making friends; Mina and Ram were a very recent match—they were each other’s rebounds, Mina had explained—and I found them both charming.

As requested, I brought two bottles of wine. Ram loitered in the kitchen preparing vegetarian quesadillas while Mina and I debated in the living room. She was the type of person who quizzed you on your convictions. I liked that; it was something I wasn’t used to. Spending time with her made me miss my once-international life, the years I spent growing up abroad.

Dinner was served. They emptied the bottles, then brought an offering of artisanal baklava and digestif. I got incredibly drunk. While Ram washed dishes, Mina brought me to the bedroom and asked me if I wanted to stay.

Only then did I realize their intentions, so I said sure, but I hadn’t prepared. In other words, I was weeks late for a wax and had fuzzy armpits, though I’d had, for some reason, the compulsion to shave my legs before coming over.

Mina said I could use her razor and shower, so I washed—but didn’t touch my bush, for fear of ingrowns and rapid forest-regrowth—and emerged clean. She and I then made out some as Ram continued in the kitchen. The rest of the night was blurry, but I remember a few things.

Mina was completely blank down there. I went down on her, having always wanted a taste of my own medicine. In my early sexually active years, there was often a cautious omission of oral sex from some male partners, which instilled in me a fear or at least some trepidation about it, a misogynistic, self-loathing reflex—the idea that men didn’t like doing it or that it was a favor disproportionate to the act of giving a blow job.

With Mina, I found it fun, easy, and not at all gross, though I couldn’t help suspecting her ecstatic response was hyperbolic.

Another memory, albeit far less pleasant, is how long Ram’s fingernails were and how, when he touched me, it hurt.

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He wasn’t permitted to have sex with me, though, so I watched on as Mina trilled “F--- me, Ram!” and he obliged. He asked if he could kiss me; Mina said no, but he did so anyway.

I awoke the next morning with a crucifying hangover and something to call my girlfriends about. I didn’t speak to the couple again, though a year later, Mina set me up with a friend who turned out to be very charismatic, but also unattractive.

Cynically, I felt the setup was a kind of payback, since she admitted our threesome had destabilized her romantic world for a few weeks, though I think she and Ram are still together.

The following Halloween, I was again dressed as a milkmaid and invited to dabble with another couple—equally new in their relationship, but this time my age, and hailing from the suburban provinces of the tri-state area.

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I’d met the girl a few weeks earlier at a dance recital and, as it turned out, her partner was someone who’d lived on my dorm floor one year of college: a preppy boy who loved techno music and whom I’d thought was equal parts cute and cloying.

We went over to his apartment and again, after some symbolic girl-on-girl making out, I spent most of the night watching the couple have sex. I was surprised by how unerotic it was to be in the same room as people having sex. I resented that they probably prided themselves on being experimental while I was barely involved! I sat on the edge of the bed, or maybe even on a distant chair, making mental notes for a novel.

I had no contact with the guy afterward. The girl reached out to me, however, saying she’d love to get a drink, and that she was more interested in me than she was in him. I didn’t quite believe her, or care to meet up. They subsequently got engaged.

They say that, as far as threesomes are concerned, it’s best to be the guest star. Well, Samantha in Sex and the City said so, at least, before suffering through the prospect of a threesome with a younger woman desperate to steal her boyfriend—until, with her man’s approval, she kicks the other woman out before anything X-rated even occurs. All that’s to say: I don’t know what a cameo role gets you. The couple, if they care for each other at all, are surely both overtly anxious to make each other feel preferred, which inevitably makes the stranger feel excluded. Orgasms for the third seem unlikely.

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My impression is that the whole performance—for the main characters—is, well, performative, to add something to their relationship. That seems useless, except maybe it isn’t; maybe it’s something they couldn’t survive without. But I’ve never needed it in a relationship, and in retrospect, I wonder what my reasons for partaking even were.

Got a question about dating, an opinion on intimacy, or a comment about Tootsie’s tales? Share your thoughts with our dating columnist at tootsie.haine@thedailybeast.com.

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