what it is actually like from the third chair

I have been the single half of five or six arrangements over about eight years, some of them for a weekend and one for three years. There are a hundred threads here about what couples feel and roughly none about what we do, so here is mine, and people are welcome to disagree with it.

The first thing is the drive home. Everyone talks about the drop and it is always the husband’s drop. Nobody has ever asked me about mine. You are in a house where two people are pleased with each other and pleased with you, and then twenty minutes later you are on a dual carriageway and the whole thing is over and you have work in the morning. It is not sad exactly. It is abrupt in a way that took me years to get used to and I still would not say I have.

The second is that I have no standing. If they have a bad month, or move, or she goes off it, I am gone, and there is no conversation about it because there is nothing to have a conversation about. I have twice found out an arrangement was over by the messages getting shorter. Both times I understood completely and both times I would have liked a sentence.

The third is that I am the least worried person in most rooms and everyone assumes I am the most casual. Those are not the same. I think about it as much as anybody. I just do not have anyone to think about it with, because the two people who would understand the specifics are the two people I cannot be honest with about it.

The fourth is the one that surprises people. I am not usually looking for more. I am not trying to break anybody up and I have never wanted to be the husband. The thing I want is the thing I am doing. It just occasionally costs something and nobody expects it to.

I am not after sympathy. I am putting it here because couples on this board ask constantly how to look after their third and the answers are always about rules and check-ins, and the honest answer is smaller than that. Say something the next day. Tell me when it is finished. That is most of it.

Anyone else on this side of it, does that match yours or is it just me?

Thank you for writing this. The paragraph about the drive home is going to sit with me for a while, because we have absolutely done the thing you describe, where the evening ends warmly and then you are simply gone and the two of us reconvene and start talking about you. I had never once thought about what that is on the other side of the door. I am not sure what the fix is. Something better than nothing, presumably. A message the next day rather than a text at the door.

The other single here, and I agree with almost all of it except the part about not wanting to be asked how you are. I do want to be asked. What I do not want is to be asked in front of both of them at the end of an evening, when the only available answer is fine, thanks. Ask me on a Wednesday about something unrelated and you will get a real answer.

The line about having no standing is the one couples should read twice. If your third disappeared tomorrow, who would tell you? And if you disappeared, who would tell him? Most arrangements have no answer to either question and have never noticed the gap.

What strikes me is how much of what you describe is not specific to this at all. It is the shape of any relationship where one side has a whole life and the other side is a compartment in it. The mechanism is the same as an affair, minus the deceit and minus the guilt, which are the two things that usually make people take it seriously. Strip those out and the loneliness is still sitting there with nothing attached to explain it, which may be why nobody names it.