This was not the threesome with my husband I imagined
When I imagined a threesome with my husband, let’s just say I was picturing something a little more… recreational. Something with dim lighting, maybe a tasteful playlist, and—oh, I don’t know—enthusiastic consent from all parties involved. What I did not anticipate was an uninvited third partycrashing our marriage like an unhinged wedding crasher with no regard for personal boundaries. But, as they say, life comes at you fast—and sometimes, it brings a plus one.
Threesome stories: this was not the threesome with my husband I imagined
I never had any specific plans or intentions regarding the idea of having a threesome with my husband when we decided to get married. However, I was somewhat open to the concept, as I certainly do not consider myself entirely closed-minded. Yet, when he unexpectedly introduced an uninvited stranger into our marriage, I found myself with little choice in the matter.
The first year of marriage brings with it many revelations. There’s the moment when you look at the love of your life and wonder how come you hadn’t realised until now that they were this annoying.
When you discover they don’t know what ‘clean’ means. And that, surprisingly, there are no limits to just how petty and passive-aggressive you can be when the moment truly calls for it. Now, throw cancer into the mix, and welcome to our life.
The ‘Break the Mold’ t-shirt is for those who refuse to be boxed in.
Brendan carried a small secret, which significantly added some extra emotional baggage to our life as newlyweds. Picture it as the proverbial elephant in the room, with Brendan metaphorically chained to this weighty issue. This elephant was certainly not the person I would have chosen to include for a threesome with my husband. You see the elephant's name was Leukemia.
You can’t not talk about this stranger. It’s there knocking over stuff, forcing you to clumsily manoeuvre around the mess it makes. We found all kinds of tools to learn how to communicate as a couple, like Love Languages or ‘I’ and ‘feeling’ statements (‘I feel like you’re annoying, for instance).
But there weren’t many resources on how to talk about cancer and leukemia in marriage—so we left our humanitarian jobs and decided to create some. We also had to tackle the whole husband and wife threesome stories conversation. Because, let’s be honest, when life throws you curveballs, sometimes you start reconsidering your bucket list. And speaking of reconsidering… last week, we met the most beautiful couple at a tapas jazz bar—charming, adventurous, and very, very open-minded. But that’s a story for another time… or maybe a future research project. Stay tuned. 😏
According to WHO, nearly every family in the world has been touched by cancer. As we reflected on our own communication challenges around threesomes and ‘the Big C’, we wondered how many others were going through the same thing, and what could we do about it?
So we decided what the world needed was a book of funny cancer cartoons that would help people navigate a new diagnosis of cancer (and of course keep my husband's dream of a threesome alive).
The book we wrote was called the Glossary of Awkward to help people answer the question, ‘How can I be a better partner or friend to someone living with cancer? And, how can I do it authentically?’.
This funny cancer book is a collection of quirky funny cancer cartoons that illustrate the uncomfortable moments that come up when you live with cancer. For both of us, saying ‘I have cancer' or ‘my husband has cancer,’ was typically met with really awkward responses that were sometimes hurtful. The funny cancer cartoons in the book are inspired by these real-life conversations.
For example, after Brendan told a friend he had cancer, the friend asked, ‘How long do you have?’
My former boss once told me to tell Brendan that he shouldn’t tweet so much (as if to imply that it made people doubt he was really sick).
One friend even said his cancer was due to Brendan holding onto ‘bad energy.’
There is a whole range of emotions that make it uncomfortable to talk about your loved one’s diagnosis.
For one, we’re afraid that cancer can happen to us – thinking about their mortality makes us think about our own.
As a result, we end up saying things resembling blame or shame to distancing ourselves from a loved one’s cancer. It’s like a protective barrier.
We felt defining and naming these emotions was important because it’s harder to talk about or resolve a feeling you can’t describe.
CML became that thrid wheel in our threesome sex stories!
Humour, for us, was a great way to do that. Comedy allows us to confront painful truths with a laugh. After all, tragedy plus time equals comedy when talking about cancer.
Brendan will play the threesome ‘cancer card’ at home from time to time. If we’re both trying to avoid doing a particular chore, he’ll quip, ‘But I have cancer!’
It’s impossible to beat that.
But I laugh and let him get away with it because if there is one silver lining, we’ll take it.
For us, this laughter feels empowering. We felt like humor took away some of the elephant’s scariness because we were able to look directly at it and confront all of the emotional baggage it came with.
While cancer can bring people together, it can also tear them apart. People living with cancer often lose friends who might distance themselves when they don’t know what to say or how to be there. The rates of spousal abandonment when terminally ill are sadly all too high.
They also lose romantic partners and face significantly higher divorce rates (as if cancer weren’t a big, steaming mess all on its own).
We wrote Glossary of Awkward to bring people closer together during a difficult time. To take away cancer’s power to make us feel so uncomfortable, so we can all get better at being there for the people we love.
And so, while this wasn’t the kind of husband and wife threesome stories I ever expected to be part of, life has a funny way of surprising you. We fought, we cried, we endured—and somewhere along the way, we learned that love, much like a well-balanced ménage à trois, requires patience, teamwork, and occasionally, a really good sense of humor. And hey, who’s to say that, after everything we’ve been through, we didn’t eventually find time for a little… celebratory experimentation? But that, my friends, is a story for another day. 😏
Corinne Gray is a Fulbright Scholar and MIT Sloan Fellow passionate about entrepreneurship and innovation as drivers of social change. She founded URevolution: a social enterprise to transform media representation of disability and aspires to philanthropy.
Her work focuses on neglected communities , including refugees, disabled populations, and incarcerated youth. A former UNHCR Innovation Unit Deputy Lead, she developed entrepreneurship and corporate innovation strategies for humanitarian challenges.
Now, she leverages private sector capital to drive sustainable social impact , advocating for entrepreneurs in aid and development . Her experience spans mentoring asylum-seeker entrepreneurs in South Africa to using theatre as a tool for incarcerated young women.
She is always eager to collaborate on world-changing ideas and explore solutions to global challenges.
