3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)
Table of Contents
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Introduction
Gordon & Rita & June
Jerry & Peggy & Kay
Peter & Wanda & Grace
Bob & Carol & Whoever’s Handy
About the Author
Excerpt: The Sex Therapists
3 Is Not A Crowd
John Warren Wells
Lawrence Block
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copyright © 1971, 2012, Lawrence Block
All Rights Reserved
Introduction
“Three is not a crowd.”
A few years ago, this variant of an old cliché began turning up with increasing frequency in personal advertisements in the swinger publications which first appeared in New York and Los Angeles. Ever since then, more and more couples seeking to enlarge their sexual relationships through contact with others have expressed their willingness to engage not only in two-couple swap sessions but in threesomes as well. Two is tedium, one infers, but three is not a crowd.
While this may be seen as a new direction of sorts in the swinger subculture, there is nothing wildly revolutionary in the idea of three in a bed. One is reminded of the Hollywood titan taken on a tour of a friend’s garden and shown a large brass sundial. When its function was explained to him, he shook his head in amazement. “What’ll they think of next?” he marveled.
And of course the ménage à trois is as much an invention of antiquity as is the sundial. The one is the result of man’s desire to know the time, the other of his even stronger desire to make that time pass more pleasantly. One recalls that both Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar dwelt deep in the bosom of Abraham, that Jacob married two sisters, that Lot tumbled both his daughters. (One may believe, in the last connection, that the girls were moved solely by filial piety and the urge to provide their father with male heirs. One may also believe that Lot didn’t know what was going on. One may further believe that the Earth is flat and the moon a wheel of Camembert.)
But however one may feel about the literal truth of the Bible, the simple endurance of these stories testifies to the age old occurrence of troilistic relationships and, even more, to the propensity of human beings to find such relationships of interest. That the contemporary sexual underground has embraced the ménage is hardly remarkable.
• • •
For quite some time now, I have been peripherally involved with America’s sexual underground. The rising tide of mate-swapping and other forms of ritualized extramarital sexual relations has lately proved to be neither a fad on the order of the hula hoop nor, as was often charged, a creation of the sensational press. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly evident that the tribe of swingers constantly wins new recruits and has emerged as a fact of life in contemporary America. Whether this trend will continue is moot. That it is quite real is indisputable.
At first glance, one may easily regard the threesome as a component of the swinging scene, of no special importance in and of itself. That a couple with a preference for group sex is willing to participate in an occasional threesome does not seem overwhelmingly significant. Indeed, one of the reasons many swingers will emphasize in their ads that “three is not a crowd” simply because a threesome is often more easily arranged than a four-or-moresome. The world of mail-order adultery is strangely competitive. Many ads draw surprisingly few suitable responses, while many responders find themselves writing dozens of letters and getting distressingly few letters in return from advertisers. Couples do find each other, certainly, and a pleasant evening with a couple will lead to other presumably pleasant evenings with that couple’s friends but the initial plunge into the pool can be difficult to arrange.
On the other hand, I have found that single swingers are in abundant supply. A couple expressing a willingness to swing not only with couples but with singles as well is virtually guaranteed a full mailbox and as full a bed as they desire. This is most notably the case when the couple wishes to swing with single males: the couple seeking an extra girl will not experience nearly so great a deluge of applicants.
When I first began encountering examples of troilism in swinging circles, I tended to attribute this partly to convenience and partly to that desire for variety for its own sake which is a hallmark of the swinger. And while these factors undeniably play a role in a large proportion of cases, they do not begin to tell the whole story.
In one way or another, I have been made acquainted with quite a number of cases in which the threesome is the preferred, even the exclusive form of sexual liaison. Neither convenience nor experimentation begins to explain these instances. Moreover, the persons involved can often not be called swingers in any real sense of the term. Their fixed sexual triangle constitutes the whole of their sexual experience, and no outside contacts are sought or permitted. They are, in essence, a sort of plural marriage.
I became sufficiently well acquainted with four of these triangular relationships to report on them at length in the pages to follow. While I prefer to let the facts—indeed, the participants—speak for themselves, some introductory observations might not be amiss.
First of all, the reader will note that all four of these triangles consist of one man and two women. One ought not to infer that this is the standard or even the most common form of the triangle. In swinging society per se, I would say that it is by far the most frequently sought—far more couples seek single girls through ads than single men—but that it is less frequently achieved—infinitely more single men respond to such ads. I am not statistically inclined, nor is my sort of research the kind that involves a large enough sample for statistical conclusions to be drawn. However, I would guess that the majority of more or less permanent and stable threesomes do involve a man and two women rather than a woman and two men. Generally speaking, a man may willingly share his wife with another man for a night or a weekend, but permanent polyandry seems to go against the grain of Western culture.
The reader will further note the presence of incest as an exceedingly strong component in these three-cornered sexual relationships. Two of the cases which follow involve genuinely incestuous situations while what I would consider symbolic incest plays a part in the others. One might argue that incest plays a subliminal role in all sexual relationships, that any lover is playing roles of parent and sibling and child at one time or another. But I do feel that incestuous overtones are far more strongly present in the threesome—in any threesome—and I think it is more than the workings of sheer chance that two of these cases do involve actual incest.
• • •
The stories which follow are told insofar as possible in the actual words of the participants. They are the product of a great many lengthy interview sessions, with the results of these interviews edited and rearranged but the content essentially undisturbed. I have tried to eliminate the backing and filling, the questions and answers which characterize most interviews, and to keep my own observations to a minimum while permitting the speakers to present a cohesive and straightforward narrative.
Beyond this, the only changes I have made have been the automatic changing of names and places and any similar material which might enable anyone to identify any of these persons. Any such attempt will be a waste of time.
• • •
Just how common is this sort of thing?
A good question, and one for which I have no good answer. In fantasy, certainly, the ménage à trois seems to be universal. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that every red-blooded American man spends a certain amount of time dreaming of having t
wo wives or two mistresses or what you will. While the same man may in fact be incapable of satisfying one wife in the manner to which she would like to become accustomed, nevertheless the fantasy persists.
But in actuality how often does this go on?
More often, certainly, than one would at first suppose. The stable ménage à trois is as easily concealed a form of unorthodox sexual behavior as exists, with the possible exception of compulsive chastity. One must realize that the presence of an extra female “relative” in the household of a married couple occasions little comment in even the smallest and most provincial town. Whether she is indeed a relative, and just how she is related, and by whom, is rarely even a matter for speculation. The suspicion of homosexuality is almost automatic in these enlightened times when two men or two women live together, but equivalent suspicion is rarely visited upon a properly cloaked troilistic union.
I have learned two things well in the course of several years of absorbing (if occasionally hectic) research. The first, is that, in the realm of sexual behavior, there is absolutely nothing that the mind of man can envision which is not being enthusiastically practiced by someone somewhere. You may give your imagination free rein, you may concoct the most impossible sexual fantasy, and you may take it for granted that someone is at this very moment doing precisely what you’ve just invented, and has done it before and will do it again.
Secondly, the extremes of sexual behavior float, like icebergs, with their bulk well below the surface, forever unexposed. Thus not only does everything exist, but everything exists to a far greater degree than visible evidence would seem to indicate. Most men and women lead lives of quiet depravity.
We can interpret this as we wish. We can view it as evidence of the extreme decadence of our culture or of the immensely evil and perverse nature of humankind. Or, on the other hand, we can rejoice in the fact that, however desperate and disparate our urgings, we are not alone.—JWW
Gordon & Rita & June
JWW: Gordon and Rita Parris live on a thirty-eight acre farm in southern Ohio not far from the Kentucky line. They do not work the farm. Gordon owns and operates a hardware and plumbing supply business in a town about fifteen miles from their home. While the business is prosperous, their life style does not reflect this. The old house is simply furnished. A color television console and a new station wagon are the sole marks of affluence. Gordon and Rita share the house with several dogs and cats, their three-year-old son, and Rita’s sister, June.
Gordon is tall, balding, thirty-eight, with rugged mountaineer features and a warm but infrequent smile. Rita, thirty-four is dark and although slender, her body remains soft and feminine. Her manner is withdrawn and introspective. June, thirty-one, bears a strong resemblance to her older sister but appears more than three years Rita’s junior. Her face is open where Rita’s is reserved, and there is more warmth and vitality in her conversation.
At the time of the interview June, the sister, was several months pregnant, and just beginning to show.
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GORDON: Something like this, now, you tend to look back off it and try to say just how it started. Rita and I will be married eight years next spring, and it’s just over four years that it all got started with June. But sometimes it seems as if it was going on long before that, see, because the desire was always there. Even before we were married, when Rita and I were first seeing each other, of course June would be around a lot, and I always liked her. We always cared for each other.
Of course I never thought of all of this in terms of going to bed. Of having sex. Not that I didn’t think, well, it would be nice to go to bed with that girl. You take a normal man and put a good-looking girl in front of him and he’s going to have that sort of thought whether it’s in his mind to do anything about it or not. It’s just in the nature of a thought. Like I might have the thought, now, if that wasn’t Rita’s sister, or if I weren’t seeing Rita, now, I might want to do something about that. But at the time it never went any further than that, not even in my mind. It was the same as you’re driving along the street and you see a girl walking down the street and you have the thought that she’s attractive, that you wouldn’t mind getting next to her, but it’s no more than a thought and you don’t even hit the horn, you don’t even slow down, you just keep driving along to get wherever it is that you’re going.
Rita and I didn’t get married right off. We were seeing each other for about three years. I was working for a man outside of Dayton, he had a hardware business there, and I wasn’t making much money and out of that I had to support my mother. I have a brother in the Merchant Marine and he would send money when he could but even so I wasn’t fixed well enough to get married, especially with trying to put money aside for a business of my own. I would drive on down here after work and than we would go for a ride or see a movie or just sit and have coffee with June and their Pa, and then I would have to drive on home.
We would be seeing each other quite regular, and then not so much for a while, and then regular again. Sometimes I would see other girls in between, but it never stuck. I would be all the time trying to think of something to say to them, whereas with Rita I would just relax and be myself. I never felt uncomfortable. Even if it was just a matter of sitting in front of the television and neither of us saying much at all, I always felt at ease with Rita, and I guess I knew a long time before we talked about getting married that sooner or later I would marry Rita.
I was always easy with June, too, as far as that goes. It was much the same in some ways, although of course it was Rita I was going with and June was her sister, her kid sister. And June being younger she did seem like a kid in certain ways. She was a kid to Rita, and their Ma being dead for so many years, Rita tended to be the mother of the family and to be always looking out for June.
Now and then when things weren’t going right with Rita and myself it would cross my mind that if Rita went and married somebody else I might think about getting something started with June. But that was just in the back of my mind once in a while and nothing more than that.
RITA: I think I always knew Gordon and I would get married. All the time we were going together, I knew it. We were just right for each other from the beginning. Once I was through school and spending all my time here with Pa and June, I never really saw anybody. I dated some in high school but not so much, you know, and except for Gordon I scarcely saw anybody once I started seeing him. Once in a while I would meet a boy and we might go to a movie, but then either he wouldn’t call again or I wouldn’t want to see him, so I never really went with anybody but Gordon, and I knew it was just a question of when he would be in a position to marry me, with his mother and getting a start in business and all of the rest of it.
As for Junie, I never thought about her and Gordon that way. I was just glad they liked each other, they got along so well together. But Gordon got on well with my Pa, and it was the same way to me, and I thought about it the same way and was glad the same way, that he was like one of the family to them.
GORDON: Rita and I commenced having intercourse just under a year before we got married. This was something that was a long time coming. I had had some experience but not very much of it. It was mostly with girls that were that way, that they would do it for anyone, and you went out with them once and had it with them and that was all there was to it. There were other girls that I would go out with regularly before I met Rita, but I had never had intercourse with any of them, only with what you might call the tramps, the easy girls. There were, I guess, seven of those, and twice with prostitutes when I was in the service, and that was about the whole extent of it. Of course with the girls I dated we would park and pet, but there was a big difference between parking and petting and having the whole thing. I don’t know why it should be that way, thinking about it now, but there was always a great distinction between going all the way and not.
When Rita and I finally got to having intercourse, as I said it had been a long time co
ming, and by this time we had gotten in the habit of parking for years, you know, or petting in this very house when June and her Pa were asleep. So eventually there was this one night when we had both had a couple of beers and we were feeling pretty good, and instead of stopping we didn’t stop. So, after that we talked a great deal, and talked about getting married, and all things being equal we would have gotten married immediately. But at the time my own mother was very sick and it was just a question of time before she was going to die, and it seemed to us that it would be for the best to wait until this happened. Anything that would be a shock, anything in the way of a change, wouldn’t be good for my Ma, so we waited until nature had taken its course, and then when she did die we waited another two months and then we were married.
RITA: During this time we were continuing to have intercourse. I wouldn’t have felt right about this except that I knew we were going to get married and it was just a matter of time. I felt that we were already married in every way but the official way and that it was right for us to be together.
GORDON: Actually it was foolish of us to wait as long as we did.
RITA: Yes, but that’s looking back on it, only it didn’t seem that way at the time. As far as bringing up my own children nowadays, well, Prescott is too young now to tell him anything but to do his business in the toilet and not in his pants, which he still has his trouble remembering—
JUNE: Oh, he’s not so bad.
RITA: —but when the time comes I would tell him to do what he wants if it’s someone he loves, that it’s nothing but foolishness to wait for no particular reason at all. And I would say the same thing to a daughter. A lot of people will say that to a son, but I would say it to a daughter as well. And I would rather have a son of mine have sex with a girl he likes and respects than with a girl he has no feeling for—in the way Gordon did when he was younger. I think that must be awful, to do it for someone when there’s no other feeling.