Two may be company, but three is a research project sure to turn Arno Karlen`s old professors green with envy for having spent their time analyzing bucolic images in late Restoration poetry.
”I`ve been thinking about going back for a Ph.D.,” the 51-year-old Karlen said. ”I`m a graduate-school dropout. But after two decades of writing about human behavior, I finally may be ready to get something out of studying psychology.”
Karlen devoted the last few years of his ad hoc scholarly career to
”Threesomes,” a book-length study of what happens when a couple invites a friend over for an X-rated pajama party. Like all good scholarship, it began with a confession of ignorance.
Back in the 1960s, Karlen recalled, an old high-school chum asked what he knew about menages a trois. Although Karlen had just finished a book on the sexual revolution, he had to reply: Not much. So he promised to consult the experts and get back to his friend. The fellow had more than an academic interest in the possible consequences of such an arrangement.
When Karlen relayed his chum`s concerns to Paul Gebhard, who helped Alfred Kinsey make his pioneering studies of human sexuality, the Indiana University professor also had to admit to a gap in his otherwise encyclopedic knowledge of sex. Nor was he alone, Gebhard added. In all his years of attending seminars and workshops, threesomes was one subject his professorial colleagues had never discussed.
”If it threatens sex researchers, you know you`re on to something,”
Karlen said. In the years since, he has taped the memoirs of 50 subjects who at some point had had two lovers, quite literally, simultaneously. Most were middle class, though the very poor and very wealthy also were represented, as were all age groups. Another 200 individuals who either couldn`t or wouldn`t submit to full-length interviews nonetheless contributed anecdotes or insights that went into the making of ”Threesomes” (Morrow, $18.95).
”Most of us have a preconception of what goes on in a menage a trois, even the so-called experts,” Karlen said. ”They`ll say: `Oh, isn`t that when two men and a woman live together, like in the movie ”Jules and Jim”
?` Actually, the big majority of the threesomes I studied involved two women and a man. And they didn`t take turns visiting, two at a time, in separate bedrooms. All three got together for their lovemaking sessions.”
Karlen makes it a policy not to talk about his own sex life, lest the message and the messenger be confused.
”It`s a no-win situation,” he explained. ”If I say I`ve been involved in a threesome, critics would claim that the book is self-justification. If I deny being a participant observer, other folks ask how I can know what something tastes like, if I consider it nonkosher, too.”
If he learned anything from working on the book, Karlen said, it`s that this species of forbidden fruit has been a dietary supplement for more love lives than he might have imagined. When he appears on a radio talk show, the proceedings take such a regular form it almost seems they were scripted.
”The host always begins by apologizing for me and the book, as if he had been forced to bring on Attila the Hun under the FCC`s equal-time provision,” Karlen said. ”Then a listener calls to say: `I can`t give my name, but I`ve been part of a threesome. I wouldn`t recommend it for everybody, but it taught me a lot about myself.` ”
Given the psychological geometry of the phenomenon, Karlen observed, it is not hard to see what those anonymous phone callers are saying.
Most people probably go through life without experiencing a threesome, yet virtually everyone has been involved in a love triangle. Indeed, the boy- falls-for-girl-who-chases-another-boy story is a universal literary theme. The experience, of course, is both poignant and painful, though most of the time we suffer in silence.
”Something about the human psyche makes it tough for people to own up to feelings of jealousy and anger,” Karlen said. ”But when a triangle gets acted out in bed, the participants don`t have any choice. Either they talk about those feelings, or the relationship explodes on them.”
One of his informants, ”Ann,” reported that she got involved in a threesome thinking the arrangement would somehow help her transcend the mundane emotions that had limited her boy-girl relationships. The first night, though, disabused her of that notion.
”Ann told me that everything went fine until she had to leave the room for a few minutes. `All the while,` Ann related, `I was fuming, mad as hell that she was getting all of his attention,` ” Karlen recalled.
In fact, Karlen wasn`t very far into his research before realizing that
”Threesomes” would be as much a study of communication styles as sexual gymnastics.
That discovery, he recalled, offset the prurient interest and kept him at the task of tracking down threesome alums, most of whom, like his talk-show callers, don`t advertise.
”I`ve got a Rube Goldberg kind of mind,” Karlen said. ”It gets bored going along a straight line and much prefers to leisurely wander over some intellectual landscape.”
That was how he was attracted to sex research, Karlen added. From high school on, he was always hung up on whether to major in science or poetry. At 19, he already was publishing his verse in the Kenyon Review and the Nation but still feeling he ought to be studying microbiology. Eventually he split the difference, and after a brief season as a graduate student in English at the University of Chicago went into journalism. In the 1950s and `60s he worked for the New York Post, Newsweek and Holiday magazine.
When a publisher came to him with the idea for a book on the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the project finally brought his varied interests together. The success of that book, ”Sexuality and Homosexuality,” also allowed him to become a full-time writer.
In years since, Karlen, who is married, has alternated publishing volumes of his poetry (which, incidentally, avoids erotic themes) with popular and scholarly studies of human sexuality.
”What I like about sex is that it doesn`t have firmly defined boundaries,” Karlen said. ”To research it, you have to study animal behavior and the social sciences. But you also have to know something about the human heart.”
His research into three-way love affairs has convinced Karlen anew of Freud`s dictum that we spend our adult lives working off the psychological injuries of childhood. Many of his informants were products of emotionally barren households.
”They had grown up knowing only the example of an unsuccessful monogamous marriage,” Karlen said.
”So unconsciously, and in a few cases quite consciously, they decided to hedge their own emotional bets by bringing another actor on stage, as it were. ”One of my subjects, `Roger,` said: `The special pleasure in a threesome didn`t come from my having sex first with one girl, then with another, but because the three of us were there together and interrelated,` ” Karlen recalled.
Like many self-help therapies, though, this one rarely has long-range success.
Only a minuscule number of menages a trois sustain themselves for more than a few months, although some of Karlen`s informants reported going from one such arrangement to another over many years.
Even the best marriages involve some jousting for power. Add a third partner, and a relationship assumes a volatility that it rarely can survive.
Still, most of Karlen`s informants said they came out of their threesome in better shape than they entered it, even though the breakup might have been emotionally wrenching and stormy.
Intimacy, Karlen notes, is a double-edged phenomenon: As poets have always observed, all human beings need it. Yet psychologists recognize that intimacy is the very thing that many of us shy away from.
It is also, curiously, a prerequisite for a threesome. Two people can tumble into bed with a minimum of verbal communication, Karlen observes. But getting three people to that same destination necessitates their talking it over until each overcomes the taboo.
One of Karlen`s informants, ”John,” deserves an entry in the Guinness Book of Records under the rubric ”persistence”:
It took him 16 years before his wife became comfortable with the idea of sharing their marital bed with another woman.
The relationship continued for several years, until the other woman left to get married.
Feeling as if she had divorced him, the husband in turn emotionally
”divorced” himself from this wife. The marriage was cooled for some time, though the couple still are together.
In the aftermath of a failed menage a trois, the couple may spend months debriefing each other on just how it was that they had come to such an arrangement.
For many of his informants, Karlen observed, it marked the first time in their lives that they had been able to talk about their needs, physical and emotional, so directly.
”One woman summed it up rather nicely,” Karlen recalled.
” `Whatever else it was,` she said, `our threesome was the emotional can opener of my life.` ”
