Talk:Ménage à trois

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Cleanup of "In Fiction"[edit]

I did some cleanup in the "In Fiction" section of the article. Some were vague references, or even excerpts from song lyrics. Other were vague plot references from single episodes of TV-series. Please do not re-add your entry if it falls under one of the above categories. Also, I shortened a few entries; names of actors portraying the characters are irrelevant in this section; it is about ménage à trois, not acting or the movie itself. If a person reading the entry is curious about the movie, they can find the according information on the relevant page of the movie. The section looks a lot better now. If somebody has some more knowledge about some of the current entries, please consider which ones are relevant enough, and remove as necessary. Bobber0001 (talk) 07:02, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed a few more. They were vague references or plots about married (wo)men being unfaithful for a while.    SIS  23:02, 27 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Seinfeld[edit]

There is no mention of the Seinfeld episode "The Switch" where Jerry and George use this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.210.64.214 (talk) 13:20, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that's a notable example (?).    SIS  01:15, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Picture[edit]

I've been looking through Commons and Flickr for a better picture (I hate the current postcard[1]) but can't find anything. Suggestions, anyone?    SIS  01:15, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In French?[edit]

Could someone please add a link to the corresponding article in the French Wikipedia? --78.69.55.99 (talk) 08:02, 4 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • I just did. ...But there's no article there! When I clicked the hyperlink, it effectively said the French equivalent of "This article was deleted. Check the deletion log for details." I find it really ironic that this article about a FRENCH TERM!!! :O :O :O would not show up in the French wiki, but would show up here! Another thing I find really strange is that, when I edited this article, I didn't get a red hyperlink for the French version. 4.248.38.218 (talk) 04:02, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]


I looked at it the other day -- it got pointed to[2] I think. Atom (talk) 04:35, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Trivia[edit]

Extended content

The ménage à trois is a recurring theme in fiction and has been the subject of a number of books, plays, films and songs. Some notable examples include:

Literature[edit]

  • Simone de Beauvoir's, She Came to Stay tells the semi-fictional story about a woman named Françoise whose open relationship with Pierre becomes strained when they form a ménage à trois with her younger friend Xaviere.
  • John Updike, in Rabbit Redux when Rabbit, who welcomes Jill in his house, finally hosts Skeeter for a period before the arson of the house.
  • In The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, the scholar Dunstan Ramsay and the stage magician Paul Dempster a.k.a. Magnus Eisengrim end up as the "permanent guests" and lovers of the eccentric Swiss millionaire Lieselotte Naegeli – the three of them occasionally sharing an especially large bed, though "most often in order to have a breakfast in bed or take an important decision" rather than for sex.
  • Science fiction writer Poul Anderson, in his novel Three Worlds to Conquer, depicts an alien species (on Jupiter) for whom a kind of "ménage à trois" is a fundamental biological imperative. A female of that species can only conceive by mating with two different males within a few hours of each other; thus, every individual has a mother and two fathers, and every family is composed of a female and two males.
  • In the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton between Richard, Anita Blake and Jean-Claude. Also mentioned as previously occurring and not described in detail in the series is the relationship between Jean-Claude, Asher, and Julianna.
  • In Between Lovers by Eric Jerome Dickey centers around an American writer who finds himself involved with his former lover, a woman who left him at the altar, and the lesbian that his lover ran to Oakland to live with.

Theatre[edit]

Films[edit]

Television[edit]

  • The Brady Bunch, A Very Brady Sequel: Marcia and Jan are walking home from the last day of school reading each other's yearbook messages. Marcia reads one to Jan that says "ménage à trois". Marcia replies saying "I bet that means 'you're the most'". This joke becomes a recurring gag throughout the course of the film between Marcia, Jan, and her fictitious boyfriend, George Glass.
  • Three's Company
  • Friends
    • (1994): Phoebe meets her biological mother and learns that her biological mother, her father, and the woman who raised her were extremely "close" and all had sexual relations together (#3.25).
    • (2000): In hopes of spicing up the sex life of Ross and his lesbian wife, Phoebe recommends a list of sexual acts he could try, including a ménage à trois with his wife, Carol, and her female crush, Susan, who is Carol's actual lover in the alternate universe (#6.136).
  • Seinfeld
    • "The Switch": Jerry Seinfeld attempts to end a relationship with one roommate, and start one with another, using a suggestion by George.
    • "The Label Maker": George Costanza, referring back to the ploy he hatched with Jerry in the earlier episode, attempts to terminate a relationship by suggesting a ménage à trois, only to have it blow up in his face.
  • Star Trek TNG also aired an episode entitled "Ménage à Troi". The title is a pun on the French phrase.
  • Will & Grace saw Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes) remark, on several occasions, the "number of people in a ménage à trois," in the episode "Back Up, Dancer" (#7.02)

Others[edit]

  • Anthony Worral Thompson's first restaurant was called Ménage à trois and was known for only serving starters and desserts.[1]
  • Webcomics site Pixie Triz Comix has the serial Menage a 3, the story about Gary and his inability of have any luck with women until he gets a new pair of roommates, two girls named Zii and DiDi.
  • In the DC Comics series Secret Six, Scandal Savage enters into a polygamous marriage with girlfriends Knockout and Liana Kerzner.

I just removed the above lengthy trivia section from the article. As presented it was inappropriate, far too long and was composed mostly of original research. The content may be valuable in the future if anyone wants to add a concise, researched prose section and needs examples of this social arrangement. ThemFromSpace 21:54, 1 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lord Mountbatten, Louis the wife of Mountbatten and Nehru the founder of modern India had been in menage a trois. [2] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 39.47.218.117 (talk) 15:38, 28 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

References

Too brief; not informative[edit]

Giving a brief list of historical personages who engaged in threeway relationships as the totality of an article is quite lame. Legal implications should be given a more sizeable consideration, while this article has none. For once, I agree that this article should be deleted - or, should have been a decade ago - unless it can be completely revamped. Philologick (talk) 10:01, 5 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Shouldn't this just be a List? Weeb Dingle (talk) 00:15, 7 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There used to be more of a list, removed here. Andy Dingley (talk) 01:48, 7 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

etymology section[edit]

could use a section saying what the word means in it's original language (french i assume) and how it came to be, how it got into popular usage, something like that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tuseroni (talkcontribs) 20:05, 18 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Orphaned references in Ménage à trois[edit]

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Ménage à trois's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "bu":

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT 05:12, 26 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Salomé[edit]

I removed

In 1882 the Russian-born psychoanalyst and author [[Lou Andreas-Salomé]] invited the German philosophers [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] and [[Paul Rée]] to live with her, both of whom were in love with her. She kept her relationship with the two men celibate.<ref>{{cite book |ref=harv |last=Hollingdale |first=R. J. |author-link=R. J. Hollingdale |title=Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zRblXLiiNLQC&printsec=frontcover |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |date=28 April 1999 |pages=149–151 |jstor=2024055 |isbn=9780521640916 }}</ref> Later she married a third man, [[Friedrich Carl Andreas]], with whom she was also celibate.<ref>{{cite news | first=Mark M. | last=Anderson | title=The Poet and the Muse | newspaper=The Nation | date=3 July 2006 | pages=40–41}}</ref>

because "celibate" means "abstinence from sexual activity", thus this is not an example of a ménage à trois which both the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, define as, "an arrangement in which three people (such as a married couple and a lover of one member of the couple) have a sexual, or romantic, relationship while they are living together." The phrase "or romantic" means the same sex couple may not be sexually involved, but are romantically involved. In any case the definition requires at least two of the pairs to be sexually involved.

Thus the sentence I removed does not fit the meaning of ménage à trois. Nick Beeson (talk) 17:41, 10 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment.


dated[edit]

in the US this is commonly used to mean a 3-way (BrE 3-some), not an ongoing relationship. while it can also mean that in certain (literary?) contexts, how often does that come up, really? for the most part, modern usage is more along the lines of "i scored a ménage à trois with 2 cheerleaders last night".

needs to be addressed in the article. 2601:19C:527F:A660:D94A:ECD9:C37E:3734 (talk) 09:50, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why so Christian?[edit]

Why is there so much about Christianity on this article about threesomes/throuples? If it’s relevant, shouldn’t there be other religious context for balance? 81.78.68.31 (talk) 21:05, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]