Calling It Now: Throuples Are About to Put Love Triangles Out of Business
Reminisce with me about the balmy days of June: cruel summer was nigh, the successor of Waystar Royco had yet to be crowned, and the American pop culture landscape was being razed by a wrecking ball known as “Scandoval.” Amidst the televised mayhem of Vanderpump Rules’ most titillating tryst, one brazen admission tumbled out during a confessional interview with the accused herself.
Raquel Leviss told the producers that she had pitched her illicit lover on a reimagined relationship model. “What would Ariana think of me being an addition?” she mused about Tom Sandoval’s nine-year relationship with costar Ariana. Bravo’s audience, bloodthirsty as a coliseum crowd, melted down at the thought—a throuple, and nonetheless, this throuple. But now, we can call the reality star what she was: a trend forecaster.
Even beyond the chaos of Bravo story arcs, throuples are unquestionably having a moment in 2023. Did you see the TikTok throuple that went viral after a group trip to Korea? Or, ahem, maybe you checked out Cosmopolitan’s Couples and Throuples issue when it hit newsstands last spring. Mainstream culture is clearly fascinated by (and increasingly comfortable with) non-monogamy, and as a result, the Overton window of “provocative content” has shifted: What was once sexually explicit is today TV-MA, and classic romance is now, well, cringe. Hollywood has followed suit, giving us a smorgasbord of hot throuple representations to feast on across three buzzy new films. With these offerings, screenwriters are showing an appetite to thoughtfully and boldly probe three-pronged relationships, without dialing down the innate raciness of these arrangements.
What does this mean for boring old love triangles, those familiar movie stalwarts about our messy, human tendency to love more than one person that always wrap up neatly—onscreen, at least—with a final victor, order restored via a partnership of two? Methinks their days are numbered. Who cares which of her moony-eyed suitors Rory Gilmore takes to the dance marathon? Call me when they go on a triple date to Luke's.
Consider recent indie hit Passages, or the highly-anticipated forthcoming projects Fingernails and Challengers, each of which dives into the complicated sexual dynamics of steamy three-player relationships, but also, and in equal measure, explore the rich emotional layers present in a triad. These movies don’t simply fetishize a bed that sleeps three. Instead, they show what a more evolved image of modern love could look like, where a wandering eye is not necessarily the result of temptation or immorality. It’s just human nature, baby.
Let’s start with Passages, which introduced the agonizing, arthouse, devastation-kink throuple. The French drama, a surprise hit amidst a strike that delayed many summer releases, follows a gay couple whose marriage is redefined when one of them sleeps with a woman. Passages forgoes the tired post-infidelity plot lines of yore and instead sees the couple flatten out and open up, exploring relationships with other people, while holding onto their own. When the aforementioned woman learns she is pregnant, the cast of characters even considers the possibility of forming a single family unit unmoored by parental binaries. If you’ve seen the film, you know things get messier from there, but even the simple existence of this conversation onscreen forces audiences to consider a new and atypical family structure. Passages isn’t clean, and it doesn’t deliver an idyllic happy endings. Its rawness is what makes it real.
Then there’s Fingernails’ existential, dystopian, Black Mirror–coded throuple. The forthcoming sci-fi romance features steadily rising stars Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White, and Riz Ahmed. Landing on Apple TV+ this fall, the film exists in a world in which medical technology can affirm a couple’s compatibility by testing their fingernails. The connection between Jessie’s Anna and Jeremy’s Ryan has been hard confirmed by this futuristic technology, guaranteeing a singular perfect match, and yet she finds herself bored by her relationship with Ryan and drawn to her coworker, Riz’s Amir. Fingernails promises to stretch the monogamist’s imagination to consider the possibility that people can fit together with many different people, and often at once. How delicious.
And by now, I’m sure you’re aware of Luca Guadagnino’s hotly-anticipated sports drama Challengers starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist as young tennis champs (and certified hotties) who cross paths on the court and in the bedroom over decades of sport. The steamy trailer nearly broke the internet, thanks mostly to the image of Josh and Mike simultaneously feeding on Zendaya’s neck, a scene that will be studied for generations. Although we don't know the plot details just yet, Luca, who previously helmed the romance epic Call Me By Your Name, hinted in an interview that queer undertones are abound in this new project and got audiences salivating at the prospect of a genuinely throuple-y sexual thriller.
As a Certified Film Girly (I have a film minor from a state school, tyvm), I am obliged to remind you that the onscreen throuple has been sighted as far back as 1962, when François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim hit theaters and became a French new wave classic. But Jules et Jim was considered avant-garde for its time and for many decades after, anything gesturing at polyamory on film remained exceedingly rare and exotic.
That’s starting to change finally. The new frontier of modern romance is being charted in threes, proving that if one is the loneliest number, three is certainly the sexiest. Far be it from me to praise the greediest industry in the world for reading the room, and in strike times no less? That said, I, for one, am thrilled to be living in the golden age of the throuple. It’s hotter—and so much more interesting—here. It’s nice to be on Fandango again, to hear S&M-tracked trailers, and to, at long last, be horned up in an AMC recliner.
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