As an aside, Marie reminisces about an event in her past involving two people she calls "L" and "D". But they are emphatically not the blogger L nor my former lover D. Do I need to rename them? Or is it enough for me to mention this warning, this once, that when Marie uses those initials she means someone else? I'll hope it is.
Anyway, Marie started off as follows:
Huh, my dearest. Ever since you mentioned Girlfriend 1 [in an earlier letter] I’ve been thinking, off and on, about the one threesome I indulged in. (You hadn’t noticed, right?)
And remembering, I’m remembering more my motives, and questioning them a bit.
I think I told you most of this already. I hope you don’t mind if I go over this again, since it’s been in my thoughts.
I think, if I ever do this again, I’ll want to be more careful about making sure it is a threesome, something wanted by all of us.
The one threesome I was in…
Well. I’ve never regretted having done it, and I’ve never felt guilty. (And of course there is the agreeable remembrance of having had a really sophisticated sexual encounter in one’s misspent youth!) But I didn’t like it. And afterwards, I felt that my motives had been questionable, and that maybe there were better motives for fucking (like, desire!) than mine had been.
I remember myself doing it for two main reasons: because L. wanted it strongly, and I very much wanted to please her; and because going to bed with her alone hadn’t worked out so well, and I was hoping that having a guy in bed with us would take the pressure off me enough that I could relax and function better sexually. Both receiving and giving.
(Huh—just realized, this having been on my mind is probably one of the reasons insecurities about being able to give pleasure have been re-surfacing. Receiving being, um, no longer an issue. Cough.)
I was also rereading a LeGuin short story about a man very much in love who’s being pressured into marriage. And in his culture, it would be a group marriage, and he hasn’t even talked with (successfully) the woman who’s supposed to be his bride if he consents. Egged on by a sympathetic outsider, he tracks her down and demands, “Is it honest to marry someone you don’t even like in order to be with someone you love?”
And I sort of feel that way about my having fucked D. Not that I had lied to him, or him to me, or L. to either of us. But I would never have fucked him on his own. And it felt dishonest in some way to screw someone I didn’t really want to screw, in order to screw someone I did.
Self-serving. Even if it wasn’t strictly taking advantage of him, since he’d consented.
(Snort. Thinking about one of Peter Wimsey’s dicta now: “The one sin passion can commit is to be joyless.” Oops!!!)
And on the other parties’ sides…. well, I had the impression that D. would just as soon have been in bed with me alone. That his interest in consenting to the threesome was, that was the only way to get me in his bed. (I had expected most of his attention to be on L., and was taken aback that so much of it was on me.) And L…. well, she liked having me be in love with her, but she was very much in love with him and wanting to please him. So I was never sure how much she proposed the experiment because she thought a threesome might work better than the two of us alone, and how much she just wanted to give D. a treat. (And it was shortly after that that she decided, and persuaded me, that it would be better, and more of an honor and singularity, for me to be her One Best Friend than one among her lovers.)
If we ever do indulge in threesomes, love, I think I’ll be happier if we work it out that we’re all of us clear that we want to be in a threesome, at least on that specific occasion. Not any of us harboring a secret preference to be in a pair.
Thanks for listening to me!
Your Marie
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