I did not expect a chance sighting of the word “throuple” to unlock a whole revelation about my very motivation for starting this bisexual writing project, but the world works in mysterious ways.
But. To begin with: I do not like the portmanteau throuple. I would even go so far as to say that I hate it — which feels strange to say as a long time fan of portmanteaus.
The problem, for me, with “throuple” is that it is a portmanteau that has no need to exist. If you want to tell someone that you are in a three person relationship, there is already a perfectly good word for that. It’s a triad. That’s a very good word for a group of three people, the same way that quad is a very good word for a group of four people. (Once you get past four I think you are probably relegated to using “polycule,” a word I find corny but forgivable given the lack of other options. To call your five person relationship a “quintet” just doesn’t quite work.)
So why does anyone use “throuple”? I mean, I can only guess, but to me there are two basic explanations:
- You have never encountered the word triad before, possibly because you did not make it past elementary school math
- You desperately need people to know that group relationships are weird and cool and that you could have been in couple but you added a third person and made it a THRouple (get it?) because you are very cool and invented group relationships
It’s that latter motivation that gets me totally irritated. “Throuple” is a word that needs to call attention to itself by emphatically letting you know that it is not the word couple, rather than just calmly existing as its own separate thing, the way that triad does. It is showy, not simply because it is different, not simply because it is visibly different, but because it is constantly calling back to the thing that it is not, to remind you that that is normal and this is not that.
It is simply, to be blunt, not chill.
In thinking about the word throuple this morning, I realized that it is this very energy — this insistence that everyone must know and understand that you are weird and different and do weird and different sex that you invented because you are very cool — is the crux of what I have often referred to as “corny” or “cringe.” It is the crux of why I find so much writing about what we used to call “alternative lifestyles” — not just bisexuality, but queerness and kink and polyamory and gender fuckery — to be utterly offputting.
And so when I started this project by saying that I wanted to create a space for writing about bisexuality that wasn’t corny or cringe, I think what I was actually saying was that I wanted to write essays that acknowledged that a) bisexuality has been around forever and is honestly so mundane a variation in human sexuality as to be honestly unremarkable and b) that there is nothing about my bisexuality, or anyone’s bisexuality, that inherently makes them cool.
What I wanted was to write were essays that started from a place of recognizing that there are many, many ways to have or not have sex, to be in relationships or be single, and whichever way you land on — whatever practices feel right to you — there is nothing new or novel about it; because at least one of the billions of people who have existed throughout history have definitely beaten you to it.
What I wanted to do was acknowledge that there is nothing interesting about bisexuality, only something interesting about biphobia. Being attracted to multiple genders is just one more way of being a person. What is interesting is the way that society has worked 24/7 to insist that it is not normal. What is interesting is the ways that society has been structured to punish and ostracize people who are attracted to multiple genders. What is interesting is how we’ve become convinced that a truly boring and mundane natural human variation is worth extensive commentary.
So hopefully I’m succeeding.
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