“I don’t have time for work anymore,” says a 40ish woman wearing a large pink crystal amulet around her neck, a flowy cream-colored bed sheet on her body, and maybe a pillowcase wrapped around her head. “Managing my relationships is a full-time job.” The twenty or so other people sitting around the poly support circle on Moroccan poufs and mite infested pillows in a humid Bushwick loft that smells of plant food and patchouli snap in approval. The very handsome, much younger shirtless man to her right clasps her hand in support. So does the less handsome 50ish man sitting to her left, whose role in their relationship is probably financial underwriting, logistics, and boudoir photography. A woman with a shaved head wearing nothing but tattoos rubs her shoulders while another person in a cat costume naps in her lap. “We all know that polyamory is the modern, liberated lifestyle choice, but how do we also function in a society that expects us to do things that aren’t just openly dating a lot of people and talking about openly dating a lot of people?” she continues. The room mmmns loudly.
These frank conversations are happening more often in Brooklyn and California as the size of polycules swell and the number of people who are content with only one romantic partner shrinks. Researchers who surveyed patrons in an Oakland coffee shop on a recent Thursday afternoon found that the #1 grievance of polyamorous people was time management. “Everything takes longer,” scribbled one person anonymously in magenta crayon on a fairtrade coffee-stained bamboo napkin that was submitted into the researchers’ vintage Doc Martens shoebox – “it’s romantic communism.”
Polyamory will never been as clinically efficient as monogamy, but there are ways to reduce the time it takes to do poly things. One area that is ripe for restructuring is the threesome, which is to polyamory what marijuana is to meth.
Whereas the average sexual encounter between two people in a monogamous relationship takes 1 minute and 19 seconds, the average threesome takes 11 hours, 12 minutes and 43 seconds. For people who do not live on trust funds in Santa Gertrudis de Fruitera, this is a daunting amount of time to invest into an activity that leads to multiple waves of even more time-consuming emotional meltdowns once the MDMA wears off.
The inefficiency of threesomes begins on Feeld, an app that, when it occasionally works, allows non-monogamous people to meet and celibate Queens-based gamers to post terrifying photos of themselves. Unlike other dating apps, conversations on Feeld begin with an exchange of favorite Marx and Stalin quotes and escalate to a photo exchange of succulents. Once a couple have ensured that a prospective unicorn has tattoos in the right locations and shares their views on Peyote, a FaceTime verification ensues. Provided the unicorn is not twenty years older than their photos and an entirely different gender, which happens only 70% of the time, the couple and their unicorn meet for a matcha or a plant-based appetizer and eventually make their way back to their apartment to talk for several hours about the contents of their compact makeshift bookshelf. Unless they realize they’re all into the same quirky European Netflix series and binge the first season out of shared nostalgia, sometimes they even have sex – punctuated by a relentless loop of may I and you may – before one half-dressed member of the couple runs out of the apartment in tears.
If you are tasked with sourcing and organizing a threesome, you can save all kinds of time and emotional turmoil by choosing the right people, facilitating a more effective pre-threesome content exchange, and setting the correct vibe once everyone is under the same roof in Bushwick. This guide will ensure that all three of you will be doing sex stuff within five minutes of everyone’s arrival and that you will be asleep, blissfully alone in your bed after changing your sheets from your cheap set to your nicer set that you got at the Frette sample sale, by no later than 11pm.
Choose efficient threesome participants.
If you are acquiring a third as a couple, choose this person as you would a dessert at a restaurant: decadent, unhealthy, and good for sharing. A third such as this will turn up in full Goblin mode, which is a highly contagious state that is not at all conducive to prolonged conversation about the latest New Yorker.