How a Queer Throuple Taught Me To Reclaim Myself

Sarah Jayne Brown (above) is the writer and director of Unicorn’s Dilemma, a darkly comedic erotic drama that follows a bisexual woman’s polyamorous relationship with an older man that starts off as thrilling but soon grows dangerous. The film is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo.

Summer of 2022. That chaotic window after lockdown lifted, where everyone moved through the world with feral energy, unsure if we’d be forced back inside again. It was also the morning after I spent the night at Luna and Julian’s place. Julian slept on the couch. Something about Luna walking in on us kissing while she was grocery shopping might’ve crossed a boundary. This was a boundary that was never communicated to me.

Luna didn’t want me sleeping on the couch. Her insistence on me sharing her bed wasn’t about closeness. It was about control. As we lay in bed laughing, I joked that I mostly date men because I’m too lazy to make the first move. Luna cackled. Julian, standing in the doorway, looked like he’d stumbled into a conversation in a foreign language.

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler famously writes, “Gender proves to be a performance, that is, constituting the identity it is purporting to be.” Being agreeable earned me praise. Working in customer service, I earned the art of smiling through the phone while de-escalating a Karen mid-crashout. But nothing made me more aware of my performance than male-female-female throuples.

With men, I performed softness—demure, people-pleasing, eager to be chosen. With women, I performed strength—grounded, emotionally attuned, caretaker mode activated. If I was Jessica Rabbit on sedatives with the men, then with the women, I laughed too loud, my voice dropped a register, and I allowed myself to take up a little more space.

My first throuple at twenty felt radical. A thirty-year-old Irish school teacher, me, and a woman my age. We thought we were defying convention, building something open and modern. Monogamy felt restrictive, heteronormativity felt outdated, and polyamory promised a new way to love without ownership or shame. For a moment, it felt like we were writing our own rules. I didn’t realize I wanted the validation of being desired by men, coupled with the emotional nurturing I felt I could only get from women.

But slowly, the dynamic tilted. He adored me in public, but chipped away at me in private. One day, he’d gush about how good we looked together. Two days later,
he’d tell me I should fix my teeth. He shamed my girlfriend for being a sex worker, but guilt-tripped me into unprotected sex. After six months, I was unrecognizable. What started as expansive ended up shrinking me. I thought leaving him ended the pattern. It didn’t. I had internalized that love was something I had to earn through performance. The cycle continued.

My last throuple was in 2023. It looked different but felt familiar. Again, with the man, I was hyper-feminine, agreeable, oxygen-starved for validation. With her, I thought I was more “myself” until the moment she saw through me. We were mid-performance, me and him—while she watched from the edge of the bed. Mid-fake orgasm, our eyes locked. She winced. She knew. I knew she knew. I wasn’t performing desire. I was performing worthiness. But it wasn’t just about men. I performed for her, too. A few weeks later, I watched her quietly close her daughter’s door before doing a few lines of coke. That moment gutted me. I didn’t confront her. I shrank. I knew that script too well.

With men, I performed softness. With women, I performed strength. But both were performances. Both were survival strategies.

My mother’s schizophrenia had made her unable to care for me. Watching someone else’s daughter get quietly sidelined opened a wound I hadn’t realized was still
bleeding. I remember the day my grandmother sat me down and told me that my mother couldn’t raise me because she was schizophrenic. I couldn’t have been more than eight. She made a gentle, concerted effort to make sure I knew I wasn’t a burden. That I was loved. That I was wanted. She told me my mother didn’t leave because she didn’t love me. She left because she couldn’t stay. But even as a child, I picked up on what wasn’t being said. If love alone wasn’t enough to keep a mother present, then maybe love had to be earned. My grandmother’s kindness softened the blow, but somewhere deep inside, I told myself a different story. If I wanted to be loved, I would have to work really hard for it. That meant being good. Sweet. Pleasing. Desirable. Whatever the other person needed the most. That moment became the blueprint.

Once I believed that story, I started moving through the world in a particular way—always adjusting, always trying to belong. I performed so well that I forgot I was
acting. That’s the real danger of survival narratives. We repeat them until they start to feel like the truth.

Around age twelve, a gray cloud settled over me. The kind that never storms, never clears. Some days, I couldn’t stop crying and didn’t know why. It just hurt to be in my own skin. That heaviness stayed with me until I was fifteen. My braces had come off. I had filled out. I learned that eyeliner and lip gloss could change how people looked at me, like I had bloomed into someone worth noticing. On the outside, I looked like a girl coming into herself. But inside, there was still that gnawing emptiness, a hunger I couldn’t name, let alone feed. That was around the time I discovered Myspace and chat rooms. Places where I could curate a version of myself that felt wanted. Where attention felt like affection, and validation was as easy to get as it was to mistake for love.

In real life, I felt like no one saw me. At school, I was quiet and had too many thoughts I didn’t know how to say out loud. I had friends, but always felt slightly out of sync, like I was moving at a different emotional frequency. No one ever seemed to notice when I was hurting. That early invisibility taught me to adapt. To take up less space. To shape-shift into whatever would make me feel wanted or included, even if it meant dimming parts of myself. Years later, in throuples, I realized I was still performing–softening my edges for men, performing strength for women–always trying to calibrate myself to what I thought they needed. The stakes were higher, but the script was the same: be what they want, so you’re not left behind.

The men practically got a porn trope with wittier one-liners. The women got a life coach with an edge. But no one ever got the woman alone in her room, crying. That version of me never made it to the stage. But online, it was different. In chat rooms and on Myspace, I could curate how I was seen. I’d post mirror selfies, angling my face just right, eyes half-lidded, lips in a dramatic pout, with heavy eye makeup–even though boys weren’t allowed in my room. My profile song rotated between Panic! At The Disco’s “Lying Is The Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off,” which made me feel scandalous and Portishead’s “Glory Box”, which made me feel sultry and grown, even if I barely understood those feelings yet. The slow, aching trip-hop beat became a soundtrack for the version of me I wanted to be: moody, magnetic, untouchable.

Suddenly, I was desirable. People wanted to know me. Or at least the version of me I had carefully built. Something was intoxicating about that kind of visibility. It felt like power. But it was also dangerous. Once I realized I could be seen that way, I didn’t want to go back to being invisible. Even if it meant shrinking parts of myself or offering up pieces I wasn’t ready to give. Some of the men I talked to online were twenty-two, twenty-five. One of them was thirty. They all knew I was fifteen.

The pattern of crafting a version of myself to be desired never really stopped. It just evolved. At twenty-nine, it wasn’t Myspace—it was Instagram. That’s where I met Julian. He started replying to my stories, reacting to my selfies, making me feel seen in the same intoxicating way. For two weeks, he built a rapport, complimented my style, my wit, the curated persona I had perfected over the years. Only later did he tell me that he and his girlfriend Luna were looking for a third. He claimed I was her type. But the reality was, just like the men from my Myspace days, Julian wasn’t really seeing me. He was drawn to the fantasy. The image. The version of me I had learned to perform so well. My grandma wanted me to practice a bit of normalcy. I could tell she wished I dated boys my own age. That she didn’t have to pull my arm to get me to go to prom. The truth is, I didn’t feel worthy of normalcy because I felt rejected by it. I wasn’t the girl, boys had crushes on. Maybe the girl they asked out as a joke to their friends. My quietness made me invisible, or worse, ‘too much’ when I tried to be seen. Normal teenage rites of passage–dating, flirting, even just being noticed–always seemed just out of reach for me. So I leaned into the fringe option. The one who didn’t expect me to be normal, only available.

In college, chatrooms graduated to dating apps, where I would swipe and get a spike of validation anytime a match would burst on my screen. That constant search for attention—someone to reflect my worth back to me—didn’t stay online. It bled into my relationships, especially the throuples, where I kept performing, bending, chasing connection in ways that always left me empty. That hunger, that drive to find the next fix, the next person who could distract me from this emptiness, followed me until my thirties.

My last and third throuple ended in a kind of violence I had never experienced before. What began as emotionally manipulative soon escalated into physical harm at the hands of the man in the relationship. But in truth…this wasn’t the first time I had been hurt by my own need to be chosen. It was the most extreme version of a pattern that had been with me since childhood—the quiet girl learning to bend, the teenage girl curating her desirability online, the woman softening herself into throuples to feel worthy of love.

After surviving that rupture, I started working with a therapist. For the first time, I learned how trauma lives in the body—how dissociation can look like people pleasing, how chronic vigilance can feel like “being easygoing,” and how mindfulness can help anchor me back to the present. I began to see how the ways I had shown up in throuples—the soft, agreeable girl for the man, the grounded caretaker for the woman—weren’t just random. They were survival strategies. Performances I had learned young and perfected over time. Naming these patterns didn’t erase them, but it gave me the power to stop performing and start reclaiming myself.

But the most life–changing shift came when this therapist recognized something others had missed. I had ADHD. Suddenly, the pattern made sense. The impulsivity. The hyper–sexuality. The rejection sensitivity that let me be shattered by even the slightest sign of disapproval. The deep hunger for dopamine that made attention feel like oxygen. Every time I molded myself to fit into someone else’s fantasy, every time I contorted between softness and strength in those relationships, I was chasing the next hit of validation. Being in throuples doubled the dose of validation I was chasing. What I had called a connection was often my nervous system trying to stay safe.

Julian and Luna were no exception. He slid into my DMs, reacting to the curated version of me I had crafted online. Two weeks later, he told me they were looking for a third, claiming I was Luna’s “type.” But as with the men from my teenage chatroom days, it wasn’t about me – it was about the fantasy I had unknowingly projected. When they decided to stop seeing me because Luna felt threatened by the attention Julian gave me, I was blindsided. A pregnancy scare followed, sending me into a spiral so severe I broke out in hives. Just as I had chased the validation of two people, I felt doubly abandoned in a moment of crisis. My nervous system didn’t know the difference between neglect and rejection—it just registered danger. Learning these patterns didn’t erase my past, but it gave me a new language for my survival. And with that language, I started writing something new. Something truer. For the first time, I’m not auditioning for approval. I’m no longer reciting lines to earn my place in someone else’s story. This new beginning is quieter, but more honest. It looks like saying no without guilt. It feels like speaking in my full voice, even when it shakes. There’s no character to play, no mask to keep straight. Just me, unscripted. And in that unscripted space, I’m finally learning what it means to be seen—not as a performance, but as a person. The road to authenticity is not linear, but it’s a journey I refuse to quit.