Page 76 - AVN February 2020

Negotiating the Three-Way
There are so many people who fantasize about having a threesome that
someone decided to teach a class on how to have one. I took such a class
at the Pleasure Chest in Los Angeles, where sex educator Reid Milhalko told
students, “Find the girls who are bisexual. Try a girlfriend of one of your female
friends who is bisexual—that always works. The secret to threesomes is finding
those bisexual women.”
But what if your partner wouldn’t want a threesome in a million years? Discuss.
As many men have realized, during the post #METOO movement, they may
have been being super creepy and didn’t even realize it. Milhalko himself
realized his own behavior was more obnoxious than he thought, and says that
when negotiating something as awkward as a threesome, he has learned that
men should be “non-creepy.”
“Don’t pressure someone to do something they really don’t want to do,” he
says. “Have you ever tried to get a friend to do something she didn’t want
to do? How did that go? Be polite, but be direct.” If you are already in a
relationship, he suggests “asking for what you want with no shame”—but don’t
pressure anyone. And if you’re single, go to a poly “meet up” or a “How to
Have a Threesome” class. At the one I went to, Milhalko told everyone in the
(packed) class, “Turn to the person next to you and introduce yourself”—a
sort of speed dating for threesome enthusiasts. One guy’s pick-up line to me:
“So, how many threesomes have you had?”
Couples and Their ‘Plus Ones’
If you want to figure out how to have a threesome, just ask a “poly person,” who
will tell you that the biggest obstacle to any consensually non-monogamous
relationship is jealousy. The polyamorists (known as “swingers or wife-
swappers” back then) had it all figured out by the late 1960s. They replaced
jealously with “compersion,” a polyamorous theory that encouraged people
to “find joy in the sexual pleasure of your partner having sexual pleasure with
someone else.” Even if someone is pleasuring your partner right in front of you.
People into “the lifestyle” will tell you that they actually get turned on watching
someone else doing their partner. No jealousy, no problem. With this thinking,
“wife swapping” can turn into consensual “wife tasting.”
But eliminating jealousy in a monogamous relationship is the big challenge.
Sexologist Dr. Jess O’Reilly cites a 2018 study that found that of those married
couples who had engaged in a threesome, 50 percent of them reported that it
had “no effect” on their relationship, 14 percent said it “caused tension in their
relationship” and 7 percent of them said that it caused them to break up. But
the most interesting take-away from the study was the 17 percent of couples
who said they “felt closer” after the three-way. Who knew?
“Another challenge couples face after a steamy ménage à trois involves latent
feelings of insecurity, which can surface during or after an intense experience.
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