Even if your experience with threesomes extends only as far as Sex and the City reruns, there’s one golden rule that almost anyone with just a little common sense can suss out: you probably don’t want your third to be with anyone who you know on anything deeper than an acquaintance basis. After all, it’s not exactly rocket science that sex with a best friend and, say, your long-term partner (or vice versa) could create tension in even the most progressive of romantic relationships, right?
Even with the obvious aside, the question remains: what the fuck else do you need to know before adding an extra body into your tried-and-true sexual configuration? It seems simple enough—how much could one additional person really change the dynamic? But in actuality, the potent combination of sex, vulnerability and straight up human feelings can complicate things, and fast.
So when we had the chance to catch up with Amy Rose Spiegel—who expertly covers the basics of the experience in her book, Action—we knew we had to consult her on the ins and outs of the act. Here’s everything we learned (we’ve fittingly broken it out into three steps because, well, we love a theme).
1. Set the Tone
“Set the tone for someone else to match. If it's something that you want to try you have to treat it like it's no big deal. If you go into it like it's a panicked, crazy, abhorrent thing, that’s what you’re suggesting to other people. If instead you pose it in a way that's calm, rational, and sweet; you set the stage for calm, rational, sweetness to come about.”
2. Embrace Your Nerves
“I think it's okay to be nervous about something as long as you are nervous in an, ‘I'm nervous because I like this,’ [way], as opposed to, ‘oh fuck, I'm doing this and it's the wrong thing to do.’ With threesomes, they are the most natural thing in the world as long as you treat them as the most natural thing in the world.”
3. Communicate—and Set Boundaries
“You just go with the feeling, you talk about it, you check in, of course, and say, ‘oh, do you want to go talk in my apartment and we'll go from there?’ You can typically tell whether people are into it, versus when they're not; and that is predominantly dictated by how casually and gently you treat it.
“If you are a part of a couple, you do need to talk about it with each other first. You have to; and not just say, ‘oh, let's try it!’, or, ‘oh, she wants it for her birthday, so I'll give her a threesome and we'll not talk about it before and it'll be a sexy surprise.’ That has a higher probability of going wrong. You really have to set the terms beforehand, and when you do that, and you've set the rules of how not to hurt somebody and you've been honest about that.”