Throuple Trouble

AdviceObsessed calls gaslighting on Carolyn Hax

Original column: Carolyn Hax, November 3 2019 (scroll down to letter from “Embracing the Third”)

My take: Hello friends! With this post, AdviceObsessed returns to that seemingly endless topic: Sexual Mores Today.

The letter-writer* has old and close friends who have been a non-monogamous couple for years. They each “just dated other people separately and kept it private.” Now, though, there’s “a big change”: They’ve taken on a girlfriend to be “another romantic partner to them both.”

The LW is “having a hard time understanding how to adjust to this.” She asks Carolyn a couple of practical questions about whether she has to include the new person in the dinners she hosts, or at her upcoming wedding.

Carolyn’s answer is brief. “Invite the third,” she writes. “Solves it all.”

Or: What’s the big deal? I see no issue here!

But Carolyn’s answer doesn’t “solve it all.” Rather, it blows straight past the LW’s point, which is that she doesn’t want to do that. She doesn’t want the new girlfriend at her dinners, or at her wedding. “It's weird for me,” she writes.

Are there occasions when we all have to do what we’d rather not? Of course. But this isn’t one of them. If these friends are signaling they’re a package deal, and the LW doesn’t want that, she doesn’t have to invite any of them. This actually would “solve it all.”

You can tell the LW wants to be nice. She writes that she’s reluctant to ask questions of her friends, lest she “pathologize what they're doing.” And she’s right: Questions would be impolite. They’re doing what they’re doing in their own lives, and it’s their business.

But there’s no reason she can’t wind down the formal socializing, since it’s making her feel “weird.” She has to be pleasant when she runs into them, but that’s the limit of her obligation.

What’s more, this goes both ways. The LW needs to leave her friends alone about their own decisions, and they need to do the same for her. She asks no questions? Neither should they. She owes them no explanation for why they aren’t invited.

If they ask, which they shouldn’t, a fully adequate response would be a rueful “it’s just never possible to invite everyone!” Or, if the LW is absolutely cornered, she could resort to: “I wish you all well, but I’m just not comfortable with it.”

But that’s it. No further questions.

The LW doesn’t say why she’s uncomfortable with the throuple, but AdviceObsessed notes with interest that she’s about to get married. This suggests she understands the difference between intimacy and game-playing. Intimacy is what comes naturally to twosomes, when all is well between them. Game-playing is what would happen if the two introduced a third. The LW’s friends are running their own game, and good for them, but the LW doesn’t have to play.

If anyone notices the LW’s discomfort, and professes to be surprised by it, so as to cow her into acquiescence, that’s gaslighting, and she should stand her ground. The defining characteristic of a gaslighter is that her surprise is a sham.

That would certainly be the case here, because everyone knows most people are uneasy about throuples. Carolyn knows that, too, which adds a final irony to her advice to this LW.

Over the years Carolyn’s taught us a lot about gaslighting. Thanks in part to this education, we recognize it when we see it. That’s how we know this LW doesn’t have to wait for her friends to gaslight her. With her response—what problem? where?—Carolyn Hax has already done it.

*The letter doesn’t reveal the sex of the writer, so for syntactical simplicity AdviceObsessed will assume she’s female.