Call us a throuple,” Selena Gomez recently captioned an Instagram photo showing her embracing Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz. She was apparently joking, but that’s perhaps part of the problem. While various celebrities seem to be vaguely alluding to polyamory lately, everyone’s being decidedly coy about coming right out and talking about it.
So while the word “throuple” may be having a moment – additionally driven by speculation about the romantic lives of boxer David Haye, singer Una Healy and model Sian Osborne – the internet, as usual, has become terribly excited about something that’s been going on for as long as people have been curious and horny. Even the phrase “ménage à trois”, commonly deployed as a synonym for sex between three people, actually translates more closely to “household of three”: a domestic set-up built around an established three-way relationship, traditionally even involving vows, rather than a brief encounter.
