by Claire Greenwood, MFT

LOOKING FOR A THIRD

If you spend any time swiping on Feeld, a dating app geared towards non-monogamous and kinky folks, you’ll notice a trend: mostly heterosexual couples “looking for a third” to engage in a threesome with. Sometimes they’ll phrase it differently (“Looking for a sexy female to join us!"), but more often than not the identity of the “other” is collapsed into one simple phrase: “looking for a third.” 

Treating ethically non-monogamous (ENM) individuals and couples presents unique challenges. Although surveys indicate that nearly one-third of the adult U.S. population has had an ENM relationship in their lifetime, ENM is still widely misunderstood and stigmatized. It’s quite common for me to encounter clinicians who believe boredom, greed, or confusion are the primary motivations for pursuing an ENM relationship. 

How do we adopt an ENM-affirming stance that still allows patients the dignity of emotional inquiry? I’ve found that traditional psychoanalytic concepts map brilliantly onto ENM cases. Freud’s Oedipal complex comes to mind as a primary lens through which I theorize my ENM patients, especially in cases involving a third partner. 

In Freud’s original formation, the child longs for the opposite sex parent, hates the same sex parent, and only defeats the same sex parent by identifying with them. But who is the parent and who is the child in ENM configurations? Does the heterosexual couple represent father and mother, seeking a novel, childlike other to interrupt the presumed monotony of their bond? Or does the couple actually represent the parent and child dyad, with the intruding “third” being the elusive and powerful second parent? 

Clearly, the “third” symbolizes different things for different couples. For many straight (or straight-passing) couples, a threesome is a way for the woman to experiment with queerness in a way that does not disrupt or threaten heteronormativity and the supremacy of the nuclear family. In this way, a threesome is a kind of “potential space” in which queerness can be played with and explored, but not concretized, the same way a child might experiment with adulthood by playing house. 

Like the original myth of Oedipus, though, this dynamic is often fraught with competitiveness, feelings of inferiority, or even murderous rage. Sometimes the “third” is discarded like an object after she’s been used as an experiment. Sometimes the man (or woman) runs away with the third. Sometimes (this is more rare), the third moves in with the couple. In each of these cases, patients play out, enact, and attempt to resolve Oedipal anxieties. 

What I’ve found useful in treating ENM patients is to bring an awareness of Oedipal overtones without being heavy-handed. Like most psychoanalytic inquiries, I start with feeling and then trace it backward. Some things I explore are, “What feelings did you have with this third person? What would you like to have happen and what are you not getting?” And then, inevitably I inquire if this mirrors the dynamic they encountered growing up. I’ve yet to be entirely surprised by the answer.