Happy Valentine's Day, I got you a threesome.

‘Oh look, they’re in Annandale. That’s close... Wait, no, ARMIdale… Where’s Armidale?’

The answer is seven hours from Sydney by car. The reason I was asking was because I had received a message from a couple wondering if I would be interested in participating in a Valentine’s Day threesome.

A Valentine's Day threesome. Because stuffed toys are creepy and roses are clichéd?  Because the thought of buying another pair of satin boxer shorts is nauseating and last year’s fluffy handcuffs didn’t imply romance so much as a prison sentence?

To be honest, the reason for the event didn't particularly concern me. It's not like I was expecting to get anything myself for Valentine's Day, like I thought my beau was going to buy me a ring and instead I got a ring-in. So I contacted my couple, J. (woman) and M. (man) from ARMIdale, and told them I might be interested, but that distance was an issue, particularly as I couldn’t commit to anything before meeting them. They were surprisingly still super keen and said that they were happy to make the trip as long as I showed up. Since I am good at nothing, if not showing up, it was a date. I was nervous, excited and very intrigued. Ever since I joined the adult website and got my first email from a couple I’d felt like a threesome would be my white whale. The idea of harpooning (sorry) one so early in the year was very appealing.

In preparation of my coupling(?) tripling I went to the beautician for some maintenance. Judging from the photos I’d seen of J. (shots of her in lingerie, in one of which she was pulling down the edge of her knickers) she was a clean slate kind of girl and so I thought it might be good etiquette to do similar. I found I actually cared more about what she might think than I would if I were only meeting up with a man. Usually my attitude is if they like me enough to get to the naked part and if I don’t have a problem with how they style their bits then they shouldn’t care how I style mine. But this was different.

I was tended to by a very enthusiastic young woman who showed far more interest in my foliage than I ever had. My topiarist waxed, tweezed and even trimmed with such care and dedication I could only imagine her living in a house filled with perfectly pruned bonsai lined up on every available surface. I decided against going all the way. I'd gotten rid of every strand once before and found that looking down the end result reminded me of a conch shell or some kind of newborn hairless marsupial. Without clothes on, I wasn’t just naked, I was MORE than naked and so this time I requested a landing strip. The beautician asked whether I would like the bottom, along with the top of said strip to be waxed. I hesitated, but she assured that me the overall effect would be much neater. This is how I came to have a patch of hair resembling a Hitler moustache residing over my vagina. Meiner Kleiner Fuhrer. In hindsight I take this to have been a bad omen.

I started getting ready for my Valentine’s Day liaison almost two hours early, which predictably turned out to not be early enough. If I'd had an hour extra though, I suspect I still would have been late since I only would have used the time to decorate my bedroom floor with more discarded outfits. Choosing the right underwear was the root of my problem. I wanted to wear a sexy set of lingerie, however most of the clothes I deemed appropriate for a potential threesome required a nude bra. Though practical, these items have to be among the least sexy things designed to cover some of the most appealing body parts. I believe this is because they create the unsettling illusion of breasts without nipples. I also decided against wearing my very sexy corset lingerie. Unfortunately, doing up all eleven pairs of hooks and eyes requires immense concentration and the skill of a contortionist. If things went terribly once we got into the bedroom, I figured I might need to make a quick getaway and the thought of running down George Street with a jiggling chest and a corset half stuffed in my handbag was not reassuring.  

Fortunately, J. needed just as long to deliberate over her outfit as I did and we all ended up being half an hour late (an unexpected positive to a woman woman man scenario). We finally met at Opera Bar, Circular Quay. This turned out to be a mistake because the cruise ship Arcadia was berthed on the opposite side of the harbour and from the moment we sat down M. could not take his eyes off it.

‘Do you reckon we could get on that?’ he asked, to which his girlfriend replied (with more patience than I could have mustered) ‘No, I think you’d need a ticket’. Other gems included ‘Fuck, that’s a big ship. They must have had a big shed to build that in’ and ‘Who owns that?’ ‘P&O’ ‘Yeah, but who owns that’. It was like being on a date with the family from The Castle.

As M. stared off into the middle distance, J. and I engaged in polite conversation. She was blonde, petite and very friendly. She spoke with a nasal twang and we had absolutely nothing in common, but that was something I could have overlooked had I not found her boyfriend of seven and a half years to be a wing-nut-eared, passive-aggressive, alpha male, red-neck racist. He had a certain menacing quality to him, the chunky silver chain around his neck and his deep-set stare made me think of a pitbull.

‘So, what do you do for fun?’ he finally asked me.

Aside from meeting up with an increasing number of oddballs from internet dating sites?

‘Well, I’m learning French’. I hadn’t imagined he would think this fun at all, but then J. informed me that M. actually spoke Chinese. I was pleasantly surprised and regretting many of the snap judgements I’d made when M. told me that wasn’t exactly true. It turned out they were staying in a hotel with a lot of international tourists and he had thought it funny to imitate them, but not so they could hear, he told me rather sheepishly. 

I just sat there with a smile frozen to my face. I couldn’t let him think I found this humorous, but for some reason I still felt I had to be polite. Then he continued and said (haltingly because I think he knew what he was saying was not OK) that he found it offensive when he was in a lift with some of these tourists and they were speaking Asian [sic] amongst themselves because he couldn’t understand what they were saying. When this happened apparently he liked to nod along with their conversation making occasional ‘mmm’ and ‘oh yeah’s to imply that he could understand them, even though they weren’t actually talking to him. My smile began to fade and in that moment I knew this was one whale I’d be letting go.

To my surprise, J. seemed to take the news the hardest, she looked absolutely crestfallen. M., on the other hand was quite understanding however they both wanted to know why I had made my decision. I lied. I told them I thought they were lovely people, but it was me. I thought I’d be able to go through with it, but I just didn’t feel comfortable. The last part was true enough, I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of spending any more time getting to know them any better.

I was already wearing my jacket. I had my bag over my shoulder and I was thinking about which burrito I wanted from Guzman Y Gomez when M. made a suggestion. How about, since we were all out in Sydney, we spend the evening together as friends? I asked whether that might be awkward considering our previous plans and the fact that I had sunk them quicker than that other mesmersiing vessel. They didn’t think so.

In the end I felt so guilty that a couple had driven seven hours to Sydney to sleep with me and been disappointed that I went with them to a crappy club in Darling Harbour and even bought the first round of drinks.

It was as bad as I'd thought it would be. It was like every crappy suburban night out at the local club I had never wanted to have. While J. and I two-stepped to bad dj mixes of music I didn’t know on the dance floor, M. sat in a corner glowering and minding our bags. 

Close to midnight, around the time I thought it might be acceptable for me to finally escape, possibly the worst song of the evening, certainly the most ironic began to play. It started out sounding like any other synthetic pop song with lyrics seemingly lifted from 16 year-old girls’ blogs, but then the chorus kicked in:

But tonight I’m fucking you

Oh you know

That tonight I’m fucking you

Oh you know

That tonight I’m fucking you

And I could not look J. in the eyes. I have no idea whether she picked up on it or not, but in that moment she did not look happy. We continued dancing, ignoring the music and I found myself thinking about M. over in his corner of the room. Was he was listening to the lyrics? Was he was aware of the irony? Was he even aware of ‘ironic’ being anything other than a hit single from the 90s? 

  

Shortly after that I left. And I did not look back.

Irony (Tonight - Enrique Iglesias)