Unicorn Hunters and the quest for the perfect bisexual woman

Two people looking for another person to form a closed triad are not always unicorn hunters. However, after 9 years of being on Fetlife, and seeing a whole lot of personal ads, I’ve found that there are certain words and phrases that indicate that the people involved are unicorn hunters. Some of them can be found here and even one of these characteristics/phrases is a red flag persuading the elusive woman to run in the opposite direction as fast as she can.

Fairly or unfairly, a single, bisexual, polyamorous woman who’d been around the block more than once sees these red flags and sees them as a giant sign that says, “We have no experience with polyamory whatsoever, and if one of us gets jealous, we’re going to both dump you. Also she has never been with women in the past and will eventually admit that she isn’t really into women/you after all. Definitely not worth the drama.”

Why do these women think that? Why are there so few women looking to be with an established hetero couple?

Let’s look at it from a polyamorous queer woman’s perspective.

She could participate in the substantial LGBTQ+ scene in her local area and date as many of her queer polyamorous friends as she would like. She wouldn’t have to be closeted and she wouldn’t have to be anyone’s experiment. During holidays she can have chosen family to spend time with or her relatives will have just have to deal with the fact that she’s bringing both Aidan and Mary. She can be as visibly queer as she wants. Hell, she can decide down the road that she’s non-binary and her community will support her and she’ll still find dates. That same community has members who have been polyamorous for 20+ years who she can go to if she’s struggling. She has community and a certain level of legitimacy.

Or: she could take a chance with a couple. She’d likely be closeted. Can she even bring her partners to Thanksgiving with her family? If she goes to one of her partner’s family’s Thanksgivings will she have to take the chance that her partners will call her the wife’s friend to their families? Can she take her partners out in public and be affectionate with both of them? Even in the couple’s home town? Will the woman of the couple go back into the closet when facing community censure of LGBTQ+ folks? Will the couple looking for a third speak up against homophobic friends and family and coworkers? Or will they deny their relationship with their unicorn to protect their jobs or their standing in the community?

The prospective unicorn has to take the chance that the woman of the couple isn’t looking to be in a triad just to please or keep the man. She also has to take the chance that the woman will be attracted to her, that the woman won’t get squicked out going down on her, or even that the woman is even any good at oral sex, especially compared to other queers who have been munching carpet for 10 years! She has to take a chance that the couple she is dating will be OK with her undercut, or her need to wear a chest binder or her love of the show Wynonna Earp. She has to take the chance that the couple’s straight friends won’t hate her or say queerphobic things to her. She has to worry that if she presents as too masculine, or if she decides to transition, either or both halves of the couple won’t want to date her anymore because they are only into women. She has to give up dating absolutely anyone else, even that cute trans guy who flogs her just right.

As part of a closed MFF triad she would be marginalized in a very different way. She would have to give up on having a community because it’s rare for the couple to have queer friends or make connections themselves to the queer community. She would not have the same amount of support from other poly queer people should things go pear-shaped. She would have no standards to compare as to whether a relationship with this couple is good or healthy.

So I recommend that the female half of a couple come out as bisexual to friends and family members first and that she start dating women separately from her male partner. Queer women, especially bisexual women, have legitimate fears that they will be exploited by the couples who find out that the reality is harder than the fantasy. The female half of a couple needs to earn that trust by building up a reputation that this isn’t just an experimental phase for her.

I say this because queer women are understandably wary of you and are not going to go anywhere near you, male half of the couple. So many men are cruising for triads or threesomes without the consent or knowledge of their female partner (if there even is a female partner!). So, so often it becomes obvious that the couple is doing it to fulfill the guy’s fantasies, not the woman’s. Also guys: it’s very very difficult to not come across as creepy; even if you think you aren’t being a creep, you probably are.

Queer women don’t owe you their time or their bodies which is why they’ve gotten so good at avoiding unicorn hunters. Bisexual women with experience in polyamory don’t want to be a couple’s training wheels on the off chance that the couple will deal with the transition to non-monogamy well and that they will also treat the woman they’re dating like a human and not a plaything.

Why couples looking for a third* drive polyamorous people stir crazy

Theory hat on

Hetero couples seeking another woman to “add to their relationship” represents what happens when people steeped in toxic monogamy culture encounter polyamory. Polyfidelitous triads are seen as a “safe” way to engage in polyamory without having to embrace a full-on rejection of toxic monogamy culture.

Polygamy, or having “sister wives” is a template that many people are familiar with. Network polyamory hasn’t really existed before in Western Eurocentric culture. Network polyamory being here defined as individuals involved in intimate relationships with multiple people who are also involved in multiple intimate relationships with the full knowledge and consent of those involved.

Network polyamory is inherently feminist. That is, it fully requires that we reject women as being property. It also requires that we respect women as autonomous people able to make their own decisions about their sexuality and relationships and to pursue intimacy for its own sake decoupled from the need to form a family and have children.

Polyamorous people reject a whole lot of Western mainstream premises about love, such as:

• true love exists and that it’s only with one other person
• relationships’ value is based on the length of time involved with them
• the only way to show commitment is through exclusivity
• one romantic partner must fill all of your needs
• jealousy is an acceptable way to show how much you love someone
• jealousy is a good way to control your partner
• the only natural outcome of love is marriage and children

That’s a whole lot! And it’s a pretty scary thing, to give up all of these ideas of what love and relationships should be. It’s a big leap in thinking to be OK with the ideas that relationships can last for a short amount of time and still be meaningful, or that relationships are valid even if they don’t result in marriage, or that relationships can exist for their own sake and not because of what they might become in the future. It’s also a radical idea that women can pursue equal and open romantic and sexual relationships with other people. That privilege had previously been mostly the wheelhouse of wealthier men who were free to pursue mistresses while their society consciously chose to ignore that extramarital relationships were happening. The women who became mistresses in times past were also shut out of societal standing because they were fucking but not creating a household.

How do closed MFF triads attempt to have their cake and eat it too?

• Both women and men can have multiple intimate relationships with women but not with men. They don’t have to buck deeply ingrained societal notions that a woman fucking multiple men is unnatural and dirty and promiscuous and wrong. [Note: there are multiple kinds of intimacy, and polyamory doesn’t have to involve fucking, but Western Eurocentric society at large views relationships as fundamentally being about fucking]
• Commitment is defined by exclusivity; the participants don’t need to muck around and figure out a way to have commitment that doesn’t involve limiting each others’ activities
• Two romantic partners will fill all of your needs rather than one
• Jealousy can be avoided through relationship configuration rather than through dismantling why and how we feel jealousy and possessiveness of others.
• One single home remains the site of family and reproduction and closed MFF triads just become nuclear families plus one, rather than imagining alternate kinship networks

I think that newbies in search of closed triads drive many of us polyamorous people crazy because in many ways we’re trying to create an intimacy revolution. Meanwhile others think that they can take a shortcut and not do the mental groundwork to change their assumptions, and still get all of the benefits. For me it’s a wish that these newbies would dream bigger, and look at the ways in which Hollywood ideas about love and romance box us in to an impossible ideal.

*Couples looking for a third meaning hetero couples looking for a woman to join them for a polyfidelitous triad. AKA Unicorn Hunters. But that doesn’t make for a very snappy title to say that. :p

(This blog post inspired by this poly.land post and the book Love’s Refraction, as well as this post about men and nonmonogamy. Thanks also to Fetlife user _SummerStorm_ for checking me on my Eurocentrism and Fetlife user mehitable for her suggestion to make this writing to be a bit more clear as to exactly who I mean. I definitely do not mean all people looking to be in triads but instead the people commonly referred to as “unicorn hunters.”)