I was talking with a friend recently about triads I had been a part of in the past. She asked me if it was something I was looking for. My off-the-cuff answer was that I was open to it, but I wasn’t actively looking for it. Since then, the topic has been bouncing around in the back of my head, so I’m writing about it to try to bring some order to the random thoughts.

There are things about being in a triad that I deeply miss. I miss the energy of having three people in a household. Something about that just makes the household more festive, more like a party. Someone was always doing something, cooking or working on a project or bouncing about listening to music. Even if everyone was feeling low key and wanted to stay in and nest, we still seemed to end up at the table together, getting stoned, playing cards, playing a board game, watching videos together. Somehow, three people felt like a family more so than a couple living “alone”.

On the flip side, being part of a triad was often fraught with challenges. All of my past triads (four of them) were vees, with me as the hinge in the middle. I had a bad habit of assuming it was my job to try to make everyone happy, finding the ideal compromise that satisfied both partners. In hindsight, it felt like such solutions only made each partner half-happy. Worse yet, I tended to push my needs or desires to the side in the interest of making everyone else happy. Ugh. If I were to do a triad again, this is something I would really be on guard about. I think I am a much more self-possessed person now than I was then, but old habits have a way of pulling me back into repeating past mistakes. If the opportunity presented itself in the future, I would be more enthusiastic about balanced triad (rather than a vee), or even a vee with my partner as the hinge instead of myself.

That said, the prospect of finding a third partner with which to build a triad feels daunting to the point of deeply unlikely. Satyridae and I are crazy close, in a way that I think any third partner would find incredibly daunting. We have a long history together, and communicate very deeply and very honestly about issues as they arise. We also both have extraordinarily high libidos, which has been a challenge in past threesomes (short-term play, as opposed to a triad); after an hour one partner is ready to be done for the night while S and I are just getting warmed up and ready to shift into high gear. We either stop when the first person wants to (leaving me and S less than satisfied), or S and I continue which leaves the other person feeling sad and excluded. Additionally, my relationship with S is fairly kinky and has a considerable amount of (consensual, negotiated) power exchange. In past triads and threesomes, this has been extraordinarily uncomfortable for some past partners to be around. So, either S and I curtail certain activities in front of those people (sad), or we “let our freak flag fly” and again risk leaving the third person feeling sad, excluded, and perhaps squicked.

So sure, I would be enthusiastic about a triad in the future. If we could find a partner who was strong enough to enter an existing, very close partnership. If we could find a partner who was enthusiastic about a real, balanced triad. If we could find a partner with an enormous libido. If we could find a partner who was comfortable (even enthusiastic) about kink and power exchange.

Annnnnd -that’s- why they are called unicorns.