How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Stoya and Rich here. It’s anonymous!
Dear How to Do It,
My boyfriend really wants to have a threesome, but only with a woman. I’m bisexual and love threesomes and would honestly love to do that with him. There’s just one problem—and it’s driving me nuts.
As much as I love FFM threesomes, I also love threesomes with two men. My boyfriend was honest from the beginning that he is not into that and never will be, despite the fact that he’s bisexual. Apparently, he just doesn’t want to share me with another man.
It feels unfair that I have to give that up, but he gets to live his two-woman fantasy. I sort of want to decline on principle, but I also love sex with women so I’d be depriving myself of enjoyable experiences too. What should I do?
—Three’s a Crowd
Dear Three’s a Crowd,
Your brief letter does a great job of outlining a pitfall of acting on solely principle here: It would have the practical effect of you denying yourself sex that you would like to be having. Kind of silly, right? We can’t always have all the kinds of sex that we want, so it often makes sense to take what you can get and enjoy it for what it is and not decry it for what it isn’t. Your boyfriend’s hard line may strike you as unfair, selfish, or any number of negative things. If he hasn’t explained his position well, that can add to the resentment that comes from you being denied what you want. But it’s important to respect his boundaries regardless of the reasons behind them. This is where he is now. You know where you are. Where you intersect is your playground.
There’s no downside to having a fun sexual encounter in this capacity. There’s no upside to blocking one, other than the ability to think to yourself, “Ha! I really showed him.” Opening up can happen gradually. While you should assume your boyfriend’s boundaries are his boundaries until he states otherwise, you may find that experimenting with other female partners later opens the door for male ones—he may get more comfortable with the situation as he accrues experience. Or maybe he gets comfortable with you having the MMF encounter that you crave without him being one of the Ms. Saying yes has a way of facilitating more yeses. To do so with the hope of added benefits would be to play a longer game, and again, there are no guaranteed results here. In the immediate future, you could either have no threesomes or limit yourself to the threesomes that both you and your boyfriend are into. I think you’ll agree that some threesomes is better than no threesomes. I think you should go for it.
—Rich
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