Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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How NOT to ask for a threesome
It began, as so many delicious pieces of WhatsApp gossip do, with a single word.
“Franki”
I knew something good was coming.
“Remember that guy I was hooking up with for a bit last year? The one with the lovely flat.”
I did remember. I don’t pretend to keep a log of all my mate’s sexual partners but a straight guy with a lovely flat doesn’t come along every day. As I recall they’d hooked up a few times and then he’d stopped responding to her texts, as people do when they’ve had enough of a situation but are too childish to actually communicate that in a kind or reasonable way. That he might have nevertheless popped up again thinking his penis might be welcome in her life didn’t seem at all far-fetched to me. So I thought I could see where this was going. And while I wasn’t a million miles off the mark, I confess this caught me off guard.
“As if,” my friend continued in her message to me. “AS IF he has shown up after he ghosted me *more than a year ago* to ask if I want a threesome!!!”
As we marvelled at the gumption, I started thinking about the many other stories I’d heard about people being propositioned for a threesome and how they all came with this flavour of audacity, this sense of throwing caution to the wind, of wild, and often deeply inappropriate, opportunism. Over the years I have heard so many tales of people being offered, lobbied, invited to, and propositioned for threesomes in truly baffling ways. Stories to which your the only response can be, what on earth were they thinking? But, as you know, I rarely stop there, because once I’ve asked myself that question, even rhetorically, I want to dig into the answer. What were they thinking?
There seems to be something about this particular sexual scenario (and let’s not forget, it’s the number one sexual fantasy) that makes people throw common sense, not to mention a sense of timing or occasion, out of the window. I wanted to talk to someone who would have genuinely informed critical insights, but where do you find an expert on threesomes? Well, Coventry University, as it turns out. I called up Dr Ryan Scoats, sociology lecturer and author of Understanding Threesomes: Gender, Sex, and Consensual Non-Monogamy as well as numerous other research papers on the subject. It’s not every day you get to chat to a doctor of threesomes and I was excited to know what he thinks it is about the old ménage a trois that makes people go a bit doolally.