The Meaning of Ménage À Trois

From Plato to Sleaze

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THREE PEOPLE become romantically entangled with one another, in a more or less positive way, and one, at least, leaves a record of the relationship and its outcome? Especially if the arrangement lasts, it's called a "ménage à trois." The term is universal, and it has aged long enough in the American language to dispense with French accents. Although a Texas newspaper complains that many of us pronounce it "Men Age at Roy's," we all recognize the term and suppose, mistakenly, that we know its meaning. We don't. An otherwise sophisticated film producer told me that if you grew up in Brooklyn, you thought it always involved a dog.

The phrase in its country of origin literally means "household of three." The French ménage stems from the Latin mensa, meal or table, and ménage à trois has a domestic ring. The vision of a trio breaking bread or seated round the hearthside fits into our plan more appropriately than the sort of hasty liaison dubbed "a quickie." A full-fledged threesome is a distinctive style of love demanding not only several persons but their interaction over time and space. Ménages à trois have a deep and extensive history as the oldest alternative form of family. But this is not to neglect the role of the menage as a favorite sexual fantasy for both men and women.

The usually authoritative Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as "an arrangement or relationship in which three people live together, usually consisting of a husband, his wife, and the lover of one of these." This description is stale and limited. It is true that a menage has tended to be made up of two members of the same gender and one of the other, and often enough it begins with a restless couple. The arrangement has at times overridden a monogamous marriage and at others buttressed it.

The usages chosen by the OED include the following:

1891 G. B. Shaw Quintessence of Ibsenism 116. An elderly gallant who quite understands how little she [Hedda Gabler] cares for her husband, and proposes a ménage à trois to her.

1933 Times Lit. Suppl. 19 Oct. He meets and marries a highly sexed waitress, who inevitably tires of the mother's dominance of the ménage à trois.

1959 Norman Mailer Advertisements for Myself 285. A ménage-à-trois was completed -- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

1959 Times 28 Dec. This happy ménage- à-trois-- the errant wife, the lover and the unsuspecting husband.

Sex is not the sole defining feature of these relationships. Typically, the OED has chosen arrangements that aren't necessarily positive. In Ibsen's drama, Hedda Gabler, despite her husband's connivance, chooses death over a backdoor affair with a man she dislikes. Loveless sex would have reinforced the hypocrisy she could no longer stand. In the final example, the so-called menage is "happy" because the husband is ignorant of the affair, so it is really an instance of cheating. This confusion of the ménage à trois with adultery is unfortunate but common.

Norman Mailer, on the other hand, uses the ménage à trois as a metaphor for the "three-way union" whose virtual offspring was the hipster. Actual menages do form with such ideal goals in mind, and they have given birth to works of art, heroic deeds, and entire literary movements. Either the triad has a multiplying effect on each person's talents, or it creates a dynamic all its own.

A curious old term overlooked by the OED is the "metaphysical ménage à trois," which indicates a spiritual or symbolic coming together. Sigmund Freud thought of himself, the deceased Nietzsche, whom he considered his mentor, and the alive and beautiful Lou Salomé along these lines. The New York Times has referred to Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Janet Malcolm -- who wrote a biographical meditation on Plath and Hughes -- as a metaphysical threesome. Composers Robert and Clara Schumann had the younger Johannes Brahms as a longtime houseguest, and each influenced the others' music. An erotic current between Clara and Johannes may have sped Robert's nervous breakdown. Their music, played on the same program, is called a ménage à trois. The metaphysical menage, like the sexual, is the linking of several energies into one to produce a remarkable result.

Nowadays, depiction of the intense magnetism that was supposed to draw lovers together, whether by twos or threes, has largely been replaced by books and articles on genetically determined sexual preferences. This type of evolutionary psychology generates heat over whether biology favors monogamous marriage or polygamy of some sort. Helen Fisher, in her often cited Anatomy of Love, makes a case for "natural patterns that prevail around the world." She sees forming into pairs, mating, and separating to repeat the cycle as the natural reproductive strategy of certain species, including humans.

Unfortunately, replies Robert Wright in a Time cover story titled "Infidelity: It May Be in Our Genes," research has discovered that humans are not a "pair-bonding species. Women are promiscuous by nature, desiring more than one mate, and men are even worse." Writes the neo-Darwinist Matt Ridley, "The best that men can hope for is a good-looking younger mistress and a devoted wife who is traded in every decade or so." This would lead to a proliferation not only of first-but of second-and third-wives clubs, providing the sequels to a very successful book and movie.

Can we humans learn anything from our fellow creatures? Percy Shelley claimed that the polygamy of the noble horse offered a model for humans. Animals can and do form ménages à trois. According to a leading North American breeder, the ideal ostrich family is two females and one male. Gorillas, who are very sensitive, with a childlike, emotive intelligence, have been known to mate by threes, and sometimes cats, who are nothing if not willful, do it à trois. At Washington's National Zoo the female panda Ling-Ling and her selected mate, Hsing-Hsing, had trouble getting together. He preferred to chew bamboo shoots. A second male, Chia-Chia, was imported from London, but he turned out to be a wife beater. However, his presence awakened Hsing-Hsing, who now found Ling-Ling more to his liking. The offspring of the three was a bouncing baby bear.

Three in Love is about choice, not genes. Our approach echoes that of Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote, "Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality." Humans love and breed by numerous arrangements, all of which have their defenders. Sir Richard Burton, nineteenth-century seeker of the forbidden and the exotic, traveled from the Nile to Utah to investigate "the Mormon ménage à trois." He found church elders who praised male polygamy as the will of God. But he decided that the Mormon version, lacking the mystery of harems and veils, had all the monotony of monogamy, only multiplied.

The ménage à trois is as venerable as the book of Genesis. In the U.S. Senate debate that led to the denial of federal benefits to the partners of single-sex marriages, Jesse Helms cracked, "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." That same God also created a third, the Serpent, an androgynous symbol of both male and female. According to Genesis, the human race began when Adam and Eve, growing weary of Eden, became intimate with this Other.

In order to understand the ménage à trois, to set its bounds, we need to borrow the logic of the philosopher who was born into the Golden Age of Greece and whose name has been given to a form of love. Plato spoke of four steps by which his pupils could know a subject: name, definition, image, and knowledge (that is, the facts). We have dealt with the evolution of our subject's name and the confusion surrounding its definition. To wrap our minds around the ménage à trois, to understand what it means, we'll look at examples of three in love but also, because concepts are defined at their margins, we'll see where menage shades into something else.

First, the "trois" part. The number three has a magical and religious significance. There were three Magi, three Graces (brilliance, joy, and bloom), and three bears in the fairy tale. We give three cheers, hope for three wishes, and admire a triple threat. According to the I Ching, the mission of three is to turn darkness into light. The Romans worshiped using a tripod to hold the sacred flame, and they raced in three-wheeled chariots because this configuration provided an inherent stability. In Scandinavian mythology the tree of life that supports the universe has three roots.

Plato's mentor, the mathematician Pythagoras, described the sequence of numbers as follows: "The one [male] is the creator which produced the primal motion or dyad, the two [female], which in turn produced the first number, three, which is a symbol of the cosmos." Pythagoras held one and two to be in opposition, the finite versus the infinite, joined "in a triangle [when] the three was in action." Plato taught that three was the original number, animating the universe as fire, air, and water. These semimystical ideas underlie the nature of the couple versus the triad, indicating that the latter is a superior development of the former.

Traditionally, some native peoples regard three as the grouping required for conception. The anthropological pioneer Robert Briffault observed that the New Zealand Maori believed that "the moon is the permanent husband or true husband of all women." The moon was thought of as masculine. Though a Maori woman married a man, he couldn't impregnate her without the intercession of the moon spirit, the paternity of the child being shared. The belief in the need for a third party to fecundate the womb, to potentize the male sperm, also plays a crucial role in the Judeo-Christian nexus.

In midcentury Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, an influential spokesperson for the Catholic Church, wrote the homily Three to Get Married. In the chapter "Love Is Triune," Sheen criticized the duality -- the essential aloneness -- of coupledom. "If there is only the mine and thine," he declared, "there is impenetrability and separateness." Sheen, a man of the cloth, had heard in confession about the power plays, ego trips, and "mental torture" that characterize many marriages. "Love has a triune character and implies lover, beloved, and love [itself]," he concluded. Perhaps he'd observed that most ritual of courting poses -- a man and a woman seated across a table -- in which lie the seeds of opposition.

"It takes three to make love," asserted the bishop. His point of reference was the Trinity or its third person, the Holy Ghost. Yet he describes fairly the benign, mediating effect of a third when ego is put aside. While jealousy may lurk in the corners of the most successful triad, the dynamic attracts outsiders. A ménage à trois tends to draw satellites, a fourth person. Freud wrote that "every sexual act [is] a process in which four individuals are involved." He referred to each person's double or bisexual identity. In our observation, the actual fourth is something of a voyeur, a witness to the drama who perhaps acts as scribe to record it. When the fourth does join in, he or she usually fails to deflect the feelings among the original three.

A menage may be only two. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, in discussing the original Superman comic strip, termed its crucial love situation "a schizoid and chaste ménage à trois." Lois Lane, a newswoman on the Daily Planet, loves Superman. Since he comes from Krypton, his molecules are too dense for the usual sort of lovemaking. Besides, he's busy saving Metropolis from various fiends. Meanwhile his alter ego, Clark Kent, has a crush on Lois, who thinks Clark is a drip. Throughout the millions of Superman comic books and four movies as well as the television series, three personae who inhabit two characters act out their amorous cross-purposes, forever joined at the hip.

Superman is the epic American hero, no more or less mythical than Rome' Aeneas or England's King Arthur. The original movie, in which Christopher Reeve played the "man of steel," went through a variety of conceptual approaches from Greek tragedy to Broadway spoof, but finally the story captured the tension of "a love triangle in which two [of the] people are the same person." The sequels dropped the chaste element, and though Lois and Superman aren't seen in bed, they soar through the sky together, she on top of him, and Clark can only hear about it and remember.

The ménage à trois can't be defined by number alone. It implies a plenitude not so much of crude sex as of the erotic. It intimates a more communal pleasure than church, state, or the new/old breed of loud-mouthed commentator can tolerate. But a menage is not equivalent to sleeping around, and it is inherently more stable than the serial monogamy famously practiced by a Liz Taylor or Zsa Zsa Gabor or the admitted infidelity of a Magic Johnson. Although menagers are not necessarily bisexual, the expectation that we must limit ourselves to one gender, spouse, or family creates a rickety platform, likely to sink under the torrent of our desires.

Even among the sophisticated, the paradigm of one for one lurks in the recesses of the ego. An amusing instance occurs in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz. The screen version of the director-choreographer's autobiography was filmed shortly before his heart gave out. Fosse (Roy Scheider), while conversing with a beautiful (female) Angel of Death, apologizes because he can't stick to one woman. He fondly recalls how he once lived harmoniously with two women. One morning he woke up to find one of them gone, her note on the bureau: "I can't share you anymore. I want you alone or not at all. Please try to understand."

The Angel inquires if he was upset at losing her. Fosse, a modern-day Casanova, replies no, he was flattered that she took him so seriously. Returns the Angel, "Sure the note was for you?"

A ménage à trois can be not only a physical grouping but also a point of view. Lawrence Lipton, best known as chronicler of the Beat scene, recognized the ambiguous space the menage inhabits when he wrote, "We are here on the borderline between conventional marriage and extramarital varietism." To Lipton, host of an infamous crash pad in Venice Beach during the sixties, the menage appeared conservative. His most knowing observation was that a threesome happens first in the mind. It's a function of the erotic imagination that may apply to anyone.

"Fantasied superimposition," he wrote, is "the least mentioned and most heinous crime, and most widely practiced one, among the avowed adherents of the Judeo-Christian moral code.... It is the unmentionable." Lipton refers to fantasizing that your bed partner is somebody else -- perhaps an actual person you know and want or have glimpsed or seen in the media, but usually someone younger or better looking. In a variant, you imagine your partner is making love to somebody else, again attractive. This may be taken for a homoerotic fantasy, but it is actually a fantasy of three in bed. The longer a monogamous relationship runs, the more likely it is that one or both partners will employ this device -- or find that during sex their mind has been seized by the image of a third.

We all bring to the boudoir the image of the desired one, and often it doesn't match our actual lover. "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" asked T.S. Eliot. He should have asked how he or she got into your bed. While movies and TV inculcate the erotic images of the hunk and the sex symbol, however modified to suit current taste, a more sophisticated strain of advertising plays up threes.

You've seen the ads for Italian clothes: a pretty young model embraces two studs who, gazing at her raptly, are at her service. The designer happens to be a woman. In another ad, this one for jeans, one man has his head on a woman's breasts while he feels another woman's... closeness. A Calvin Klein threesome, androgynous in their underwear, peer at us from the side of a New York bus. They are suggestively blue. While the eye sees, the mind projects.

Lipton finds the enjoyment of such a fantasy while having sex "a sound and beneficial practice." It's a form of voyeurism that for some becomes the engine of their sexual desire. For example, when Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre first coupled at the Sorbonne, they swore to tell each other everything about their so-called contingent affairs. And as their mutual sexual partner Bianca Bienenfeld observed, "Such a promise logically lends itself to a certain voyeurism: whatever one person reveals about his or her lovemaking is provocative and exciting for the other.... The promise to tell all intensifies feelings and emotions [that] become infectious."

In brief, the best definition of ménage à trois can't be found in a dictionary, because it is a charged way of looking at love that demands sharing and imagination.

Preexistent images lodged in convinced minds pose a formidable hurdle to communicating seriously about the ménage à trois. On television's afternoon soaps, the young and the restless are increasingly forming into "torrid trios," often with an incestuous wrinkle. "Three's a crowd pleaser!" crows Soap Opera Digest. On a popular talk show, an average Joe confesses to a menage of convenience: his wife spends too much and is too demanding in bed, so he shares the burden with another man. On a late-night show, a Midwest housewife relates how her husband picks up men in the supermarket to have sex with her while he videotapes the event. Similar goingson typify the $325 million-a-year amateur erotic video business, in which menages a trois are a staple.

These are junk-food versions of the real thing. Three sensationalist styles of sex, the feedstock of the tabloids, have become confounded in the popular mind with three in love: adultery, prostitution, and, for lack of a better word, perversion. Adultery usually leads to a classic love triangle, which mingles erotic excitement with the dread of exposure. Since such affairs involve lying and cheating, the extent to which they exist resists quantification. Adulterers aren't about to confess to pollsters who come into their own homes! This was the actual methodology used by the "Sex in America" survey ballyhooed by the media in the midnineties to prove that "Faithfulness in Marriage Thrives," as the New York Times headlined. Sex spiced with danger, the "fatal attraction," remains a potent lure. A Chicago Tribune feature begins:

Somewhere in Manhattan lives a woman who is convinced her husband would kill her if he learned of the affair she has carried on for five of the eight years they've been married.

"I think I'd be dead, I honestly do, but I can't stop," says the 33-year-old secretary, who meets her lover in a friend's apartment nearly every day after work.

Whether actual or a type, this unnamed woman, out of fear of her husband, has created a second family. Her affair has the routine of married life minus the boredom. It modifies the intriguing thesis of Denis de Rougement (borrowed by Camille Paglia) that the essence of adultery is an external compulsion, a victory of passion over happiness. At any rate, deceit and guilt remain the leitmotif of adultery. There is the challenge of getting away with it, of passing what Rougement ironically terms "the supreme test that one day or other awaits every true man or woman."

Adultery and the ménage à trois do share at their inception a desire to live to the full. But they quickly take diverging paths. Adultery thrives on suspicion, jealousy, and rage. A menage demands honesty and, at a minimum, the acquiescence of three. Their full cooperation would be better. Menages worth writing about depend on the compassion, leading toward love, of all persons in the relationship. Unlike the open marriage of the 1970s, which elevated the run-of-the-mill affair to the status of a learning experience, a true menage is purposeful. It will have an outcome in both the spiritual and the material worlds.

Prostitution and perversion together constitute what we'll dub "the sleaze factor." They may share with the ménage à trois certain athletic feats. But the spirit of these things runs in a contrary direction. Power is an issue in prostitution, and a 1996 Playboy interview with Heidi Fleiss, the notorious madam, opens, "She was among the most powerful women in town.... She had a direct line to A-list stars and studio execs, running the most exclusive call-girl service in Los Angeles." One of these clients was reportedly fond of a $40,000 fantasy. Heidi talked to him while her "whore goddess" associate did what the client wanted. Heidi chatted about other men, the more the merrier, who'd had her goddess. In Nick Broomfield's clever documentary film, Hollywood Madam, Heidi recounts asking her goddess to "tell -- about the time you went to Hawaii with those four Japanese men." She knows the location of a man's most erotic spot -- between the ears.

Multiplicity can be a powerful sexual stimulant. The recent Michael Keaton movie of that name would have been still duller if hadn't led up to his wife spending the night in bed with all four of his clones, each of whom was different enough to be a new guy. Of course, fantasy has its limits. As Heidi reminded Playboy, "you absolutely still need that warm body next to you." She has cheerfully confessed to being stoned and sharing anonymous guys with her buddy Victoria Sellers, calling herself a "total pervert." She's just adding to her Hollywood image; it's guilt and silence that make for perversion.

Alan Bloom, in Love and Friendship, diagnosed America as an emotional wasteland, devoid of eros and courtship. In contrast, those who form triads, whether entirely successful or not, encounter plenty of feeling. Psychoanalyst Arno Karlen, soon after he had begun his investigation into menages, realized that "Threesomes would be as much a study of communication styles as sexual gymnastics." Karlen observed his subjects' initial difficulty in expressing feelings such as jealousy or desire. However, "when a triangle gets acted out in bed... either the [participants] talk about those feelings, or the relationship explodes on them." One woman summed it up: "Our threesome was the emotional can opener of my life."

The reality of threes in Karlen's conservative university set would startle America's best-known sexologist, Dr. Ruth Westheimer. In 1995 in her syndicated column she printed a letter from an elderly man involved in a menage with his wife and the widow of their best friend (a man who had died recently). All three enjoy the menage, but there is a difficulty over oral sex: the widow likes it, the wife never has and resents it being done. "These kinds of situations are always fragile," warns the good doctor; therefore, drop the menage. On the contrary, we find the situation both normal and touching. The widow is seeking a family to make up for her loss. She wants to continue her sex life and has invigorated the sex life of the couple. Now the three will have to talk about what each has wanted, and feared, for the last forty years. Is that bad, Dr. Ruth?

Three in Love is neither a sociological treatise nor a how-to manual. Instead, this is an erotic history of all the good stuff they never told you in school. It is triography -- the three lives of the rich and famous, the starving artist and tortured poet, the successful novelist, the proud conqueror, and the over-the-hill movie star. It weaves a tapestry from the fantasy of sexual abundance that runs through our collective subconscious. It is a book of manners and morals, past, present, and future.

The nuclear family has exploded, that's a fact, and new configurations are emerging from the debris. Patricia Ireland, on assuming the presidency of the National Organization for Women, came out not as a lesbian or bisexual but as a menager. For a long time she has shared her life with her husband, a painter who lives in Florida, and a woman lover in Washington, D.C., where she works. Ireland and her husband met during student days and married in the 1960s, and they are devoted to each other. This "commuter" menage, along with other flex-time domestic arrangements, is bound to grow more common.

Ireland told the New York Times, "What I have described is who my family is, not my sexuality. I don't see why I can't have my cake and eat it too."

Only in a ménage à trois. The cavils of moralists, psychologists, and politicians aside, here's the record of those who have tried it and of the remarkable things they have done.

Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Foster and Michael Foster