Unicorn hunting explained

What the term means

A unicorn, in this context, is a single woman who is willing to date and sleep with both members of an existing couple, on the couple's terms, without disrupting anything about their relationship. Unicorn hunting is the practice of couples searching for one.

The name is sarcastic. It refers to how rarely such a person exists in the form couples imagine, and the sarcasm has been earned over a long time by a very large number of couples all looking for the same thing and being surprised to find the market thin.

The term is not an accusation of bad character. Most couples doing this are entirely well meaning and have simply not thought about the arrangement from the other side.

Why it does not work

The problem is structural rather than moral. A typical unicorn-hunting arrangement asks one person to accept a set of conditions that nobody would agree to if they were stated plainly.

• She must be equally interested in both partners. Attraction does not distribute evenly on request, and requiring it eliminates almost everyone at the outset.
• She must be interested in them together rather than separately. A different thing again, and rarer still.
• Her feelings must not become inconvenient. If she develops more of a connection with one partner, that is usually treated as a failure rather than as the predictable outcome.
• She has no standing. Typically no say in the rules, and often subject to a veto held by someone she is not in a relationship with.
• She is expected to leave gracefully. If the arrangement stops suiting the couple, she is the one who goes, having been the only person who took a risk without protection.

The couple's privilege problem

The underlying issue is that an established couple carries enormous structural advantages into a new relationship, and unicorn-hunting arrangements typically add to those advantages rather than compensating for them.

The couple has history, a shared home, shared finances, and a relationship that will continue whatever happens. The third person has none of that and is joining something that already exists. When a conflict arises, the couple has each other and the third person has nobody. When the arrangement ends, the couple continues and the third person absorbs the entire loss.

None of this makes triads impossible, and good ones exist. It does mean a couple starting from a position of advantage has to work deliberately at not compounding it, and the arrangements that succeed are the ones where the couple noticed.

What to do instead

If you are a couple who genuinely want a third relationship, the changes that make the difference are mostly about standing rather than intention.

• Date separately first. Each of you meeting people independently removes the requirement of equal attraction and lets connections develop at their own pace. If a triad emerges, it emerges from something real.
• Drop the veto, or disclose it immediately. If one exists, the person entering is entitled to know before they invest anything.
• Give her a say in the terms. An agreement written by two people about a third is not an agreement. Renegotiate once there is someone to renegotiate with.
• Let the relationships be unequal. They will be. Planning for symmetry guarantees that the inevitable asymmetry reads as a problem.
• Have both partners message. A profile written by one person on behalf of a couple is easy to spot and suggests the other partner is along rather than involved.
• Say what happens if it ends. Whether she loses both relationships at once, and whether either could continue independently. This is the question most often unaddressed and the one that causes the most harm.

If you are the third person

The asymmetry runs the other way here, so a few practical questions are worth asking early. Does either partner hold a veto over this. Are both of them equally interested, honestly. What happens if you connect more with one of them. Would either relationship be allowed to continue if the other ended. Are you expected to be sexually available to both, and what if that changes.

These are reasonable questions and the reaction to them is informative in itself. A couple who have thought about this will have answers. A couple who react as though you are being difficult have told you what you needed to know.

Triads that work

They exist, they are not rare, and they generally do not begin the way unicorn hunting begins. The common pattern is that two of the three people were already involved, a third connection developed independently and gradually, and the triad formed because everyone wanted it rather than because a vacancy was advertised.

The difference is not the shape of the relationship. It is whether the third person arrived as a person or as a solution. For more on how these arrangements get described and negotiated, rules and boundaries that hold covers the agreement side.