As monogamy goes out of style, throuples are TV’s hot new trend.
On Valentine’s Day, a few shows addressed the topic, pushing to normalize sexual relationships among groups of three. Predictably, several media outlets embraced the edginess.
Based on the real life experience of show creator Lucy Gillespie, the new web series Unicornland focuses on one woman’s exploration of her sexuality by sleeping with other couples. But this journey only begins after a broken marriage, highlighting a disturbing tendency among showrunners to promote polyamory as an antidote to failed monogamy. In You Me Her and The Real O’Neals, throuples are also explored in response to marital breakdown.
In a Feb. 14 article about Unicornland, Glamour’s Cady Drell gushed about the “eight hilarious, poignant, sweet, and—yes—very sexy episodes that show how sleeping with people can be a powerful tool in self-discovery.”
“It’s really about love and self-care and falling in love with the world, and feeling like an agent and feeling excited about your future and the options available to you,” Gillespie said of her show. “That’s really a joyful, kind of necessary story.”
You Me Her, like Unicornland, is dedicated to the concept of polyamory. When married couple Jack and Emma feel their fire dwindling, Jack begins dating a neophyte escort Izzy. But Emma, a closet bisexual, finds she is also attracted to Izzy, and the show revolves around the trio’s three-way relationship. Reacting to a “kiss me” competition between them, US Weekly’s Elizabeth Streisand gushed: “That’s love, people.”
Despite what some liberals might say, homosexual marriage was not the last frontier of the liberal sexual agenda. Show creator John Scott Shepherd confessed his agenda to Deadline Hollywood, describing his attempt to "mainstream" polyamory and make it "relatable."
A blossoming throuple also appeared in Feb. 7’s episode of The Real O’Neals, a show that thrives on anti-Catholicism and sexual perversion. When divorced couple Eileen and Pat meet Eileen’s new lover (and Pat’s best friend) Clive for dinner, they explore the possibility of hanging out as a threesome despite their complicated relationships.
“Hey, we could be like a three person couple,” Pat proposed, to which Clive responded: “A throuple!”
There is an increasing understanding in the entertainment world that monogamy is an unattainable ideal. In a recent interview with Playboy magazine, actress Scarlett Johansson called the practice “not natural.”
E! News Writer Kendall Fisher noted that several other stars, including Shailene Woodley, Ethan Hawke, Cameron Diaz and Emma Thompson joined Johansson in her views.
In an interview about the film Love Actually, Thompson told parenting website Mumsnet that “monogamy is an odd state.” She further wondered whether horror over infidelity was “quite realistic” and whether there were possible alternatives to the traditional monogamy model.
Eric Barry, comedian and creator of “sex positive” podcast “Full Disclosure,” echoed as much in an op-ed for The Huffington Post. High failed marriage rates, he argued, hinted at a deeper issue.
“Perhaps the problem isn’t that people aren’t staying married,” he argued. “Maybe the problem is that monogamy, as an institution, is itself inherently flawed, incompatible with much of the evolution of the human species.”
This view is increasing among Millennials, only 20 percent of which are currently married. As Rolling Stone writer Alex Morris noted in 2014, Millennials’ notions of relationships are more casual than those of their parents. There’s more casual sex. There are “committed” relationships that are designated non-monogamous. There’s more experimentation.
And TV will only exacerbate the trends.
