My First (and Second and Third and Fourth...) Threesome

Photo Credit: yapsnaps

I almost lost my virginity in a threesome. I was playing truth-or-dare with two friends, one male and one female, who had recently broken up, and the game turned increasingly sexy as the cheap wine began to turn our conversation into a soothing platter of hormonal obviousness. “I dare youuuuu,” I slurred, pointing at Michelle, who was the only one I could have been talking to. “…to go down on Gabe, but juss fer a second!” We all took turns agonizingly pleasuring each other in this way for mere moments at a time, not quite ready to leave the relative safety of the “game,” and also seeing just how far we could push each other’s boundaries before someone would refuse. Then out of nowhere, Michelle abruptly turned and headed for the bathroom, where she would remain for the next several hours, head firmly in toilet. Gabe and I, in a move of sheer selfishness that we (and especially I) would pay for dearly later, went ahead and finished our game without Michelle. In her bed.

Since that night, threesomes have become an incredibly common staple for me, one that even almost a decade later, has not stopped coming up, despite my never seeking it out.

Note of historical revision: Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. My last girlfriend and I were in the market for an all-girl threesome a few years ago, something neither of us had experienced. However, we wished a little too hard and ended up in a foursome, which, since we hadn’t planned for it, caused a lot of tearful conversations, lost sleep, and unnecessary laundry. Aside from that time, however, threesomes aren’t something I’ve ever consciously pursued.

Part of the reason I’ve had so many threesomes, I’m sure, can be blamed on that trough of horniness known as college. I was somehow the only out bisexual among my group of mostly straight friends, and on any given weekend, we would get semi-naked, talk about Heidegger, and drink enough booze to sterilize a small lake.

Kara was one such friend, and the first straight girl I fell for so hard, it took years to pick myself up again. Kara and I had made out a couple times, dabbled in a few moments of anxious sober touching, and one time, she and I watched a guy masturbate together, but it never went very far between us. We were like Girls Gone Mild, or any number of frustratingly homoerotic superhero duos. Until one night, emboldened by, I kid you not, "The L Word" season premiere party, she suggested matter-of-factly that we go upstairs to her room and masturbate. She had a boyfriend at the time, so I assumed she was kidding, until I was presented with an array of vibrators to choose from. It was when I was half-naked and straddling her that she sprung the threesome question on me. Since I was high on happy sex chemicals, I said yes, partly because I thought she meant the threesome would occur at a later date. But 10 minutes later, her boyfriend was there, holding two glasses of red wine and asking if we “needed a hand.”

As the years passed, my threesome tendencies became almost habitual. Last year, bored on a plane, I crunched the numbers and found that out of all the people I’d slept with, 60 percent of them had been in threesomes. I always assumed the number would be high, but the actual results were jarring. Most of my threeways involved couples, some married, all in some way or another exploring or taming their desires and fears, a notion I admit fascinated me, but also caused some terrible scenes. The last couple I rode the tandem bike with, Devon and Bob, ended up getting in a huge fight due to jealousy, leaving me alone in their room, naked and confused. Marjorie Garber explained this kind of erotic threesome jealousy in Vice Versa: “[T]he lover gets to gratify both fears and desires: The fear that a partner will be unfaithful is related to a desire to be unfaithful oneself as well as to the desire to know and therefore control the other’s fidelity.”