Is love the answer to all questions? Not quite. It also provides quite a few. Psychologist and couples therapist Oskar Holzberg answers them all.
In a nutshell:
We always suffer in love relationships. But if there are three of you, the chances are even greater.
Now in detail:
In "Dandy", a hit of the 1960s, the Kinks celebrated a notorious riot with the line "Two girls are too many, three’s a crowd and four you’re dead". Loosely translated: "Two are too many, with three you can no longer see through and four wipe you out." It was then that the sexual revolution was just beginning. Today it is not uncommon to live as polygamous as the "dandy" for at least part of your life. And some do not want to limit themselves to a single partner even in permanent relationships.
But when two become three, not just one is added, but the entire network of relationships changes. Because instead of one relationship there are now three. If you see the relationship as reciprocal – the one I have with you and the one you have with me – then there are already six relationships. If we look at the relationships that everyone has to the relationships of the other – then it slowly becomes completely confusing. And the more complex a system is, the easier it is for tensions, misunderstandings and conflicts to arise.
© Ilona Habben
In addition, threesomes are often not really threesomes. Because often only one or one of the three has intimate, intense relationships with the other two. Although they know about each other, they have no independent relationship with each other. And whenever two are together, the third is excluded, which is also the classic affair situation. We experience feeling excluded emotionally as threatening. Even when the head may say that we are not forgotten, we lose the feeling of secure attachment. And that is the ground on which jealousy and separation fears sprout, where anger and hatred arise.
Most of us know a three-way relationship from her own childhood: in the mom-dad-child triangle. But in many families that wasn't exactly a hit either, but rather an experience that makes any subsequent triple constellation difficult before it even began. The child is daddy's confidante and mom is out. Or it's mom's eye star and dad is out. Some pairs of parents form such a solid unit that the child always has two against them, and it's out. Parents separate, and then irreconcilable tensions reign in the former triangle of love. Triangulation is called the process by which a child learns to divide his love between two. Threesome relationships are always more difficult than simple couple relationships anyway. And if mom or dad, or both of them, have failed, then every subsequent three-way relationship arouses these old fears and insecurities.
From double beds to double rooms, we live in a couple culture. Our pop songs, our literature, are about togetherness. We learn them unconsciously. Trinity – a word that my spelling program immediately circles in red because it doesn't exist – is strange, unknown territory. We get lost in it, we find it difficult to find the emotional security here that we seek in love relationships. And yes, then we suffer.
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