The Secret Lives of Unicorns

When I meet Annie for lunch, we settle into the back of a small Manhattan restaurant.

We’re talking about the threesome she and her husband had last month, and their experience exploring sexual relationships with several female thirds. When another couple sits down at the table next to us a few minutes later, it’s pretty clear that they can hear every word of our conversation.

“Do you want to move?” I ask Annie. She is about to launch into the heart of her story, and I want to make sure she feels comfortable sharing openly.

She glances at the couple and looks back at me defiantly. “No. I don’t care.”

Over the course of our conversation, I come to find that this boldness is a key lesson from Annie’s experience with thirds or, as she calls them, unicorns.

“If I had been the person I am today when I was in my early twenties, I would have been a unicorn.”

A unicorn is someone, usually female, who joins another couple as their “magical” third party. This elusive unicorn is free from emotional ties; she’s not expected to date or develop feelings for the couple. She’s purely there to have a new experience and feel pleasure.

There’s nothing new about threesomes, but the rise of popular dating apps like Hinge, Bumble, and Feeld (dubbed the unofficial threesome app) is increasing their accessibility for singles and couples alike. Young women in particular are making up a new class of tech-enabled unicorns who enjoy exploring their sexuality with the anonymity afforded by their smartphones.

When Annie and her husband first decided to pursue a threesome, they started by creating shared profiles on a few different dating apps. “I had wanted to have a threesome and experiment with women long before I got married, and my husband was very supportive.”

Annie recalls being surprised by the number of young women they encountered on the apps — Raya, Hinge, Bumble, and Feeld — who were actively investigating their sexual preferences. “In my early twenties, I wasn’t having sex so I could explore my own sexuality. I was having sex because I wanted guys to like me! Sex wasn’t about pleasure for me; it was about validation. So it was really refreshing to see all these young women unicorning and focusing on pleasure-seeking.”

Annie and her husband’s first threesome occurred more than a year after they began their search. “Our third was amazing and very experienced. She knew we were nervous, and she shared a lot of her past experiences with us. She really emphasized consent and talked through a lot with us, which helped us navigate our own boundaries.”

After the threesome, Annie found herself thinking about her unicorn often. “I wanted to be in more contact than she did. I think that’s the nature of being with a third who has to set boundaries with a married couple. But it was harder for me. I wanted more attention from her after sex.”

Being with a unicorn had opened Annie’s eyes to a new kind of woman: one who was having purposeful, pleasure-oriented sex on her own terms. “Our unicorn was experimenting with multiple couples, working a full time job, maintaining friendships and dating men. I had never seen a woman own her sex life like that before.”

If you were to ask Isabel’s family, they would tell you she moved to New York City for a job. Isabel says she moved for a wide range of opportunities, but in the back of her head, she was also seeking sexual exploration.

“I grew up in a very conservative home in the Midwest and knew everyone in my college town. I could never have had these kinds of experiences where I was from.”

Dating women had never sparked Isabel’s interest, but she had always thought a threesome could be a fun way to explore her physical attraction to them. One summer night when she was 25 and living in New York, she downloaded Tinder. Sitting on her couch, she swiped through a handful of couples before landing on a duo who looked interesting. “I got really lucky,” she explains. The married couple was attractive, in their late thirties, and both worked high-powered jobs in Manhattan. They invited her to their luxury apartment that night, and Isabel accepted. “I shared my location with a friend, just in case I got murdered,” she joked.

That first encounter was positive, and Isabel started spending more time with the couple. There was something about having a woman involved and knowing that the man in the scenario was married, Isabel says, that made her feel comfortable being so sexually open with them from the start. Sleeping with a man after a date had always felt different. “Even if I genuienly wanted to have sex after a good first date, I always felt like the guy would walk away feeling like he had won.” Because pleasure was the implicit goal in a threesome, Isabel didn’t feel any of that same internalized judgement when she expressed herself sexually. Gradually, she became more comfortable using her voice in bed; asking for what she liked, and trying new scenarios.

As the summer progressed, she started seeing the couple for more than just sex; they enjoyed gourmet meals, invited Isabel to trendy workout classes, and spent weekends together. This, she admits, is where the boundaries got blurred.

“My favorite part of being a third is getting to see a couple up close in their most intimate moments; eating breakfast, getting ready for bed, bickering. It’s taught me so much about what I want in a future relationship, and I find it so fascinating.” But because it was her first experience as a unicorn, she wasn’t familiar with threesome etiquette and didn’t realize how unusual it was to be spending so much time with a couple.

Initially, neither the husband nor wife had given Isabel their real names or phone numbers; they communicated via Tinder and later, when they started seeing each other more regularly, Instagram messages. But by the end of the summer, the husband had started texting Isabel directly. His wife wasn’t included in the text thread.

“He said he had developed feelings for me and that his wife knew; they had an arrangement. I was so emotionally involved with both of them, and the whole thing felt confusing. We started having a secret relationship.”

While Isabel had initially been open with some of her close friends about experimenting as a third, she started sharing fewer details as she got more involved with the husband. She says she was met with judgement from friends who didn’t understand her choice to continue sleeping with him. For Isabel, it became more about sex.

Years earlier, she had been sexually assaulted. Even though she was in therapy, she still felt trapped in the trauma and had experienced a panic attack during sex with an ex-boyfriend. Because the foundation of her sexual relationship with the husband had been rooted in consent and clear verbal communication, Isabel eventually felt safe enough to ask for something she had been discussing with her therapist: reenacting parts of her attack. While she acknowledges the approach was unorthodox, she says it was profoundly healing to confront certain aspects of her assault, like her assailant’s physical strength.

“When you’re sexually assaulted, people always tell you that it’s not your fault. But I had always blamed myself on some level, or wondered if there was something more I could have done to fight him off.” Role-playing with the husband had shown her that the attack was entirely out of her control. Afterwards, she allowed him to hold her as she cried, and felt safer than she had in years.

A few months later, she broke things off.

“The whole thing just got too complicated. In a lot of ways, it wasn’t healthy,” Isabel explains. But the fact that the husband was, well, a husband, had enabled a sexual awakening of sorts. The boundaries of their relationship and his emotional unavailability had given her permission to try things she doesn’t think she would have felt comfortable attempting with a boyfriend.

“Even though things got weird in the end, it was a life-changing experience.”

Today, Isabel is still a third and has been with several couples. “More than five, but not more than ten,” she offers. But these days, she is in the driver’s seat when it comes to setting boundaries. She uses dating apps that allow her to preserve her anonymity, and only engages with couples when the woman is doing the messaging. She prefers not to spend the night or text frequently with couples after sleeping together.

She also says that, to her, the term “unicorn” feels objectifying and assumes that the third is just a sexual being with no feelings. She prefers not to use labels like “third” or “unicorn” when talking to prospective couples. When asked how she describes herself, she pauses. “I’m a single woman who dates men and has sex with men and women. I guess I say I’m bi. Or just that I like threesomes.”

While she feels proud of the work she’s done to heal from her trauma and explore her sexuality, Isabel still experiences internalized shame and judgement about having threesomes. “Being a third has been a really amazing and empowering experience for me, but I don’t talk about it with most people. I grew up Christian; “good girls” aren’t supposed to do things like this.”

“Being a third is different from being in a romantic relationship with two other people,” says Madeline, a 29-year-old living in New York. “A polyamorous relationship requires communication about feelings and defining the dynamic, but being a third is more about play.”

Between the ages of 26 and 28, Madeline unicorned for a few couples she met on Feeld. For Madeline, the experience was about being open minded; she was taking a break from dating men and wanted to explore her sexuality. She recalls being very careful about boundaries with the first couple she started seeing regularly.

“We tried to be very equal in how we played together so that no one was ever left out. As the third, I tried to be really mindful and let them lead. The couple’s relationship always came first. I wasn’t dating them, and I was always careful not to cross that line.”

Victoria, 29, avoided these emotional entanglements when she unicorned by keeping her guest-starring roles to one-time appearances and meeting couples at exclusive sex parties in Brooklyn. “For me, the fun part of being a third was the anonymity and secrecy of it all. I liked the naughtiness of having a wild experience and then never seeing them again.”

Madeline acknowledges that, much like in Isabel’s story, the dynamic with her first couple became more complicated the more time they spent together. “We always hung out as friends afterwards, and I would spend the night at their house. It felt so natural to wake up the next morning and have breakfast together, and it allowed me to see what it looks like when a couple has such a great connection. But it was a weird boundary to navigate.”

She says that being “chosen” to spend so much intimate time with a married couple increased her sense self-worth and helped her figure out what she wanted out of a relationship someday. “Being with these couples was great. But after a while, they made me realize I wanted to move into a relationship of my own.” Both she and Victoria are currently in relationships with men, and have shared their unicorning histories with their partners.

Noelle, 36, currently unicorns and meets prospective couples through dating apps. For her, the experience of being a third is a thrilling source of confidence. “On dating apps, thirds are a hot commodity. Being a unicorn feels like being a cherished, chosen entity. And when all partners are loving and communicative, there’s something that’s really fun and sweet about it.”

All the women interviewed agree that being a unicorn is a crash course in body acceptance. And they say technology and dating apps are playing a huge role in changing the climate of sex and revealing the beauty in sexual exploration.

“There’s something really cool about seeing how many people are expressing themselves on these dating apps,” Noelle confirms. “People you would never expect: Sally and John from the supermarket are on here exploring threesomes.”

Victoria agrees. “The couple I unicorned for weren’t the types of people I normally dated. But I found myself being really attracted to this middle-aged woman who had a totally different body type than I did. She was hot.” The experience made her feel more confident in her own skin and hammered home a refrain that often falls on deaf ears: “Everyone can be sexy in their own way. So I really shouldn’t be ashamed if I don’t have a flat stomach.”

Annie shared a similar sentiment over our lunch. She had always obsessed over her weight and how her body looked during sex. But being with a unicorn had been like a balm for a gnarly case of body dysmorphia. “I had never been in bed with another woman before. When she was there, all I paid attention to was how soft her skin was and how shiny her hair felt. I couldn’t tell you anything else about her body.”

Being a unicorn, it seems, is a secret, radical lesson in empowerment and self-advocacy. And in a post #MeToo era, young women are latching onto the unicorn framework to heal from past traumas, find their voices, and explore their preferences with consent and respect.

“At the end of the day, you’re sharing space with someone,” says Madeline. “You’re all in it for pleasure and making sure everyone else feels good. And when it’s done right, it can be a great tool for self-exploration.”