“The only convincing love story of our century.”
Like getting a glimpse of a video game’s final boss before your own destruction, unless you’re a real stud, you never get much experience having threesomes. Those who romanticize it have either never done it, or done it so many times that listening to them in the first place would be like taking financial advice from a trust fund kid. It’s nice to be rich.
But outside of a resume piece that only comes up in the screening interviews you have with new women you’re trying to fuck, who’ll assume you’re lying anyway, or a sexual bucket list that you only understand as meaningless once it’s all checked off, threesomes are mostly silly.
This is the reality that every internet guru, selling you thousands of dollars of bullshit and filming those ridiculous looking three-way kisses at foam parties in Cancun, will gladly lie about.
Her name was Candace. We met her on Craigslist. I wrote the ad for my girlfriend to post- I had her screen the replies, and she’d have the decent ones text me. We had a good cop/bad cop dynamic- she was friendly with these women, I was demanding.
Candace had a boyfriend but he was too nice– he lacked grit. She liked that I was in my thirties dating a nineteen year old. This is what women say they hate, and maybe they do on some level, but they’re lying if they say they don’t find it intriguing. After all, what kind of thirty-four year old asshole is dating a teenager? The kind they want to fuck.
As much as the girlfriend tells you that she’s okay with everything, seducing another girl in front of her is going to feel strange. Don’t forget to take mental pictures because this will be the best part of the evening. You watch them make out, and you feel accomplished- I created this, and it is good– but anything after is an awkward mesh of bodies. I defy anyone to find a good way to do this- a queen sized bed isn’t meant to contain this level of idiocy.
I came on her face thinking about how fucking awful it all was- sending her home to her boyfriend after she met some dipshit on Craigslist. The hot shower she’d have to take before getting in bed with him and acting like it was ladies’ night at Barnes and Noble– just coffee and chitchat with the girls, that’s all. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted her to be masturbating in the shower or crying- but one of the two seemed inevitable, maybe both.
And when she finally leaves to take that shower, you feel a tinge of existential horror. You take a beat to wonder why you did it in the first place- what were you looking to get out of fucking a stranger in front of your girlfriend? Threesome is a misnomer- it isn’t chaotic like Final Fight, it’s slower and turn-based like Final Fantasy. Did you really just do it to say you did it? This thought haunts you.
You all shared in the experience, but you each saw something different. You were bent on validation, having something to prove after hitting rock bottom several years prior, breaking your engagement, and returning to the world of the living- but now your victory lap felt flat. Candace was rebelling against a boring boyfriend with the most scandalous and pornographic scenario she could find. Your kid girlfriend was dipping her toes in what she presumed the adult world should be- maybe after too much time on the internet, too much time watching cable TV.
We were all there for different reasons, and none of them were genuine- we did it just to say we did it. We were objects to one another, and each used the other to reach their own end. The sex was necessary but ultimately perfunctory. This bothered me for a few moments before I jacked off and went to bed.
If you couldn’t guess, having a kid girlfriend is fucking hilarious. If you’re riding a wave of indignation, where you suddenly feel righteous flipping a double-bird to the world around you, there is no better way to do it. People will stare and if you’re not ready to play to it like a bad guy pro-wrestler, this type of social norm bucking isn’t for you- and maybe you’re the guy waiting while she’s doing “girls’ night at the book store.” The married couple with the stroller will shoot dirty looks, but you’ll catch hubby stealing a glimpse of her ass every time. The blue-haired checkout girl at Target won’t hide her disgust; the lonely boy working the deli counter at the grocery store will stare longingly- another dagger through his heart.
She was here on loan from down south. Got a gig as a live-in babysitter. The dad would try to get with her when the mom wasn’t around- the perks of having a live-in babysitter, I guess. She moved in after she quit and we spent two weeks bouncing around Mexico to celebrate. Guys would try to hit on her thinking I was her father. We’d drink liquor in the ocean by moonlight and laugh at anyone who didn’t get the joke. We were living in our own world and writing the rules for it as we went along.
Once you realize that men are the only ones held to a social standard, and women are given a pass for morally gray behavior, you’re happy to tell the system to fuck off entirely. When your fiance’s father sits you down and gives you a speech about male responsibility, which translates strictly as paying my daughter’s bills, and the open-ended question that hangs in the air, never to be addressed, is “what should the man expect out of the deal?” What you can expect to hear are crickets.
So men on the street suckered in by lecherous wives, blue-haired retail employees emboldened by a system happy to endlessly masturbate them- I invite you to stare at a man who’s found freedom in not giving a fuck.
A month later we took off to rural Washington state, on a hiking trip where I rented the biggest truck I could find and we climbed mountains and picked blue-berries in deep solitude. Marijuana had just been legalized, so we loaded up on pre-rolled joints and spent our evenings getting high in the jacuzzi tub- and I’ve never felt more alone in my life.
So far out in sticks that the nearest fast food place was staffed by happy people and your meal looked like the picture on the poster. Hundreds of miles from civilization; thousands from home. Far enough away that you didn’t have any rules left to defy.
Far enough away to realize that you were two different people with absolutely nothing in common. She couldn’t hope to understand you, and you never bothered to try to understand her- the real her, the genuine her; beyond what you wanted her to represent. She was an object to you, and now, in total isolation, it became pressing and urgent.
You’re so high that you confide in her the horror you feel watching your parents get old- you’ve always known what was inevitable, but you’ve only recently began to feel it. This angers her- you aren’t supposed to have feelings; you were never supposed to be a fully-realized person. You were always the embodiment of a fantasy- the older man- as a sex object and father figure. She wanted you to stay that way.
We never saw each other as people- we only served as flat images to one other; characterchers on a page, reduced to our defining features; exaggerated and cartoonish. We never saw each other as people- we only saw what we wanted.
