Thanks for the clarification there! I wonder why triads don't have much of a success record? I guess it's hard for all three people to stay in love with each other.
I think of it this way. Love is an amazing, unlikely thing. I mean, what are the chances that you're going to really, truly love any given person enough to want to trust them with your heart and soul, and care for them enough to accept the huge responsibility of safeguarding their heart and soul in return? Pretty dang low. Love is a surprise every time.
Let's say you find it with someone. Incredible, wonderful! Let's say, being poly, you're lucky enough to find another, simultaneous love that's so deep and real that it also pulls you in and owns your deepest parts! Now, what are the chances that of all the people in the world you could find a second magical, mystical, stars-aligned, cosmic-vibrations-attuned connection with, that it should happen to be with the partner of the first person? What are the chances that lightning will not only strike twice but will also strike just a hands-breadth away from where it struck the first time?
Now, clearly I'm being over dramatic to make my point, but in essence I think that captures my take on it. Threeway sex, easy as pie. Threeway affection and compatibility, totally doable. Threeway deep love that's passionate, romantic, and companionate all around, muuuuch much harder to find.
It happens, but as Nyc mentioned it seems to happen serendipitously. When a triad is the goal I think it puts a lot of pressure on any situation that's close to that ideal to mould itself into that, and then *someone* is generally stretching to make that happen and in time that can cause cracks. Staying relaxed and flexible seems to be much safer and more successful. As you can see in my explanation of my own situation above, there's a lot of gray area when it comes to three-person relationships, a lot of wiggle room for the people involved to follow their feelings and find a shape that fits them best and that they can define however feels right.
As you can also see from my story above, I have my own experiences which almost certainly form certain biases. Perhaps I'm hard on the concept of the triad because I envy it and it's not what I ended up with. But I'm really, really glad there was no expectation for a triad ideal put on any of us when we started out, because that would have made it so much worse when it didn't happen. If we had felt like Eric was supposed to be my boyfriend, and maybe even called him that because we did have great sex and did care for each other, then I think the fact that we didn't form a bond of mutual love the way Gia and I did would have been a much bigger sore spot for me. I would have felt like my boyfriend didn't love me back, because, well, he didn't, and how freaking painful is that? Instead, all I had to deal with was that my friend didn't love me back and, hey, that wasn't *fun* but it's also something I could deal with, unrequited crushes on friends being something within my realm of experience.