Nothing is more important than time. When you are splitting your time between 3 people instead of yourself or one other person, it is important to make time in different ways.
Write notes, share emails, post pictures and share your daily activities. Stay connected in ways that make those connections choice. Your partner can click when they have time away from work or other responsibilities. Dunno how thruples did it before the internet. Carrier pigeons?
Make time for one another a priority. But above all else, make time for yourself. This relationship is rewarding and challenging in unique ways. Making sure you don’t lose yourself in a relationship is just as relevant in a thruple as it is a couple.
Task Sharing
Honestly, having three grown-ups to do the adulting is kind of a net benefit in a thruple. Appreciate each other’s talents. Maybe one of you is a whiz with finances and the other enjoys home repair. Maybe the third is fantastic as overthinking and long-range anxiety processing of potential dumpster fires that your family can avoid with their keen sense of disaster detection. I will let you decide which is which in our marriage.
Having three people who likely have slightly different interests and skillsets is fantastic. Making sure to appreciate each contribution is key. Allow for growth as well, though. Maybe one of you wants to learn a new skill. Great! The other two can work in tandem as a support team.
Chores can be distributed differently in this arrangement. If you are particular enough (looking at a mirror as I say this) come up with a chore rotation or charting system to avoid one person feeling like they are always stuck with the chore they hate or carrying too much of the burden.
Money Sharing
This might be where the fight happens. Learning how to share finances and figuring out what budget works best for you is critical. Contributions might be split differently. Ideally, all things equal, you each make roughly the same, right? Yeah, probably not.
One of you might make the bulk of the income in the home or carry the insurance. One of you might work from home or as an at-home parent or spouse. Every contribution is valid, remember that when you get angry about spending or debt. If there is a need or desire for someone to stay at home feel happy that they take care of some really tedious and exhausting tasks that you might not have the bandwidth to deal with when you come home from your more “conventional” job.
Take the time and make the effort to write a budget that you all agree upon and discuss openly. No matter how open-minded you are somewhere along the way someone will get upset about finances. What you want to avoid is a team against one person in the scenario. Or…pick up a 4th and vote every day for a split, that could work too. Maybe not? Shake the 8 ball and let fate decide.
Idea Sharing
This one is a bit more existential. Share your ideas. Share yourself. This is not to be confused with giving pieces of yourself away until you no longer exist, that is different and if your relationship calls for that whether it is with 2 or 20 people, then it is toxic.
Share what your dreams are. Decide your direction. Being an individual should not be any more challenging than it is in a conventional relationship. If you don’t have dreams right now, share a space in your heart and mind for those dreams to be built. After all, you have two more people who should cheer you on and work to make them happen.
Good partnership is appraisal of desires against the drive to make them tangible.
Give space to your partners for their ideas. Solicit conversations about their needs without weighing them against your own at first. This rule should work in any relationship, but if you find the reflex to be selfish a bit stronger in a thruple make space to address that and deal with it head-on.
Being in a thruple might be a little tough to digest. You probably have questions. Or maybe this was just what you needed to help you make the leap into a relationship taboo after years of considering the possibility. Wherever you are in your interpersonal life, always make space, time and accommodations for yourself. Listen to others and share experience. Give freely and I hope positivity will be given back to you.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com