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The Trärchen Year Two boyfriends and a contract on the kitchen wall

Throuple life in Frankfurt - a three-page relationship contract on the kitchen wall, one very good year, and the slow way it came apart.
EN·14 min read· ·Published inLove, Sex & Identity
A young man stands in the doorway of a quiet apartment living room in early morning light, seen from behind with a backpack on one shoulder, looking back at a couch with a blanket folded into a square on the armrest
The living room I erased myself from every morning, for three months Image: AI-generated with google/nano-banana-pro by lui.vn

Every morning I deleted myself from that apartment.

Blanket folded into a square and squared off on the armrest. Pillow back into the closet. Toothbrush, deodorant, the shirt that wasn’t in the wash, all of it into an orange backpack that lived behind the couch where nobody would trip over it. Wipe the sink so there was no hair in it. Wipe the mirror. Nothing of mine on any shelf, in any drawer, on any surface, anywhere in those rooms. By seven in the morning the living room looked like nobody had ever slept there, and that was the whole idea, because I was a guest, and a guest leaves no marks.

Nine months earlier I had dumped one of the two men who lived there.

How you end up on your ex’s couch

I ended that relationship. He didn’t want me to. He was still fully in it, still looking at me like a man with plans, while I had been quietly running the numbers for weeks and not liking what came out: one year built on physical excitement, intellectual sparring, and appetite. Three good things. None of them love. So I said the sentence you say, we went our separate ways, and we stayed friends – actual friends, not the LinkedIn kind.

What I didn’t know was that he kept me. Not in a creepy way – in a filed-away way. I went on living in a head that had a lot of rooms and a very active decorating budget.

Then Frankfurt did the Frankfurt thing. New job, wrong end of the city, and I had already handed in notice on my old place like a man who assumes the universe schedules itself around him. So I asked my ex if I could sleep on his couch until I found something. He said he’d talk to his boyfriend about it.

That sentence is the first thing I remember clearly from this entire year, because it was the moment it landed that I was asking to walk into somebody else’s home.

White wine and pastries

They invited me over so the new boyfriend and I could meet properly. He opened the door: wild curly hair, glasses, a smile that took up most of the available face, both hands already gesturing me inside like I was late for something good. My ex stood behind him in the hallway with his usual expression, which was the expression of a man reading a spreadsheet, and looked at me over the top of his own glasses.

They’d just moved in together and the place was, annoyingly, great. Big living room. Big bedroom. A kitchen that had opinions about itself. We sat down with white wine and pastries from the bakery on the corner and did the whole introduce-yourself-again routine, and somewhere in the second glass it became obvious that the new boyfriend already knew everything. He knew about our year. He knew my ex still carried something for me. He’d known before he rang the doorbell on his own life.

And the two of them fit like cà phê and sữa. Same hobbies, same very specific nerd humor, same way of holding a thought – which honestly weirded me out a little, the way it does when you meet someone’s new partner and find a better-tuned version of a machine you used to operate.

The couch was mine for as long as I needed it. No rent, no conditions, nothing except one request: spend some good time with us. Movies. The cinema. Cocktails at bars with too much brass and not enough light. They promised nobody would come into the living room at night so I could actually sleep, and I promised nothing, because they hadn’t asked for anything.

So I moved in. Sort of… A wanderer passing through. And I folded that blanket every single morning for three months like the apartment was going to be inspected.

Three months of very careful friendship

We got close fast. Most nights ended with the three of us on that couch under one blanket, white wine again, salty snacks and gummy bears, some series running that none of us was fully watching. We went out and presented as three close friends, which we were, and which involved a lot of hugging for three close friends. I did things with each of them alone, too – museums and long aimless walks across the city with my ex, cocktail bars and shopping tours with his boyfriend. The shopping tours were boring. I went anyway.

Then one evening it was just the two of us at home, and he moved closer, and closer, and then he kissed me.

Nothing else happened. Kissing, holding, the blanket doing what blankets do. And afterwards he said, in the tone of a man confirming a delivery: yeah, this could work.

Nothing more. I imagine I looked like Spock at the moment the eyebrow goes up.

The next morning was a Saturday. Fresh pretzels, buns, coffee, all three of us around the kitchen table, and my ex put down his cup and said we need to talk.

They’d had the idea for a while. That was the part I didn’t see coming. The kisses haven’t been a moment, they have been a test – the last open item on a proposal the two of them had been drafting between themselves for weeks. Vibes: confirmed. Chemistry: verified. And now the offer, which was that I join their relationship as an equal partner. Couple to throuple. I could keep my own apartment, they said, and I already had one lined up two streets over.

Trärchen was the word my ex used. Trio plus Pärchen, welded together the way German welds things together when it can’t be bothered to explain itself. It’s not a real word, but it is now.

I said yes. I want to be precise about what I was saying yes to, because I said it clearly at the time and I’ll say it again here: it wasn’t love. I told them that on the day. What it was, was real – honest, deep, mutual, with sympathy and attraction stacked on top and a curiosity none of us wanted to leave unexplored. I thought that was enough. For about ten months, it was.

Three pages, two thumbprints too many

My ex was German the way a filing cabinet is German: strict, organized, structurally committed to paperwork. He’d been sitting on this idea since our own relationship and had never had the occasion to deploy it. Now he did.

He wrote us a relationship contract. He’d picked up the concept from How I Met Your Mother and adapted it with the seriousness of a man who has never seen a joke he couldn’t formalize. Three pages. An official-looking header. The typography and clause structure of a statute book, the tone of a bureaucrat, and the vocabulary of, well, three horny men in their twenties. It was half a bit and half completely sincere, and the ratio changed depending on which paragraph you were reading.

I don’t have it anymore. I went digging through years of photos looking for a picture of the thing and came up with nothing, which is its own small tragedy. Yet, what I still remember:

There were another ten or fifteen clauses I’ve lost. At the bottom: place, date, three signatures, and three thumbprints, because apparently signatures alone weren’t binding enough for a document that legislated pizza toppings.

We sealed it in plastic and hung it on the kitchen wall next to the fridge.

Over the following year, photos accumulated around it. Then ticket stubs. Postcards, a couple of letters, the debris a life leaves when it’s going well. The contract sat in the middle of all of it like a founding charter, which is exactly what my ex intended and exactly what I found funny about him.

A kitchen wall beside a fridge, with three printed contract pages sealed in a plastic sleeve pinned at the center and surrounded by taped-up photos, tickets, postcards and letters
Three pages, two thumbprints too many, and a year of evidence taped up around themImage: AI-generated with google/nano-banana-pro by lui.vn

What a throuple actually looks like on a Tuesday

I moved into my own flat the week after, which made sense on paper and almost never in practice. I slept there maybe five nights a month – when I needed silence, or when I was too wrecked to be around anyone. The rest of the time I was at theirs. Not on the couch. I got upgraded. All three of us in one very large bed, and by some genuine act of grace none of us snored or thrashed, so we slept well, with an amount of cuddling that would embarrass me to quantify.

The physical part was active, inventive, and almost daily, and I’m not going into it beyond this: two gay men and one pansexual one, all three driven by curiosity as much as by lust, worked through the available combinations and mechanics with something close to method. It was thriving. It was also the least interesting thing about us.

Because the rest of it was so aggressively ordinary: we did groceries. We went to friends’ places and introduced ourselves as a throuple and watched people’s faces do arithmetic. We held hands in public, three-wide, which is logistically stupid and we did it anyway. Picnics on the Main in the gold hour with Hugo and somebody’s EDM playlist. Monopoly and Die Siedler von Catan, sometimes just us, sometimes with friends in the apartment that wasn’t mine but felt like it. Day trips by train. Hotels on longer holidays, one room, three men, one reception desk not asking questions. We went to doctor’s appointments together, which probably is the single most married-sounding sentence in this post.

Three figures seen from behind sitting close together on a blanket on a grassy riverbank at sunset, with bottles and glasses between them and a hazy skyline of office towers on the far bank
Gold hour on the Main, three people and one speaker nobody was in charge ofImage: AI-generated with google/nano-banana-pro by lui.vn

We even had a working division of labor, and it wasn’t assigned – it just showed up.

My ex ran administration. He proposed rules, amended rules, monitored the balance of give and take, and made sure nobody was quietly carrying more than his share. His boyfriend ran events, which meant we had a life outside the four walls at all. And I was, direct quote, the exotic glitter-rainbow-unicorn: the one who supplied escalation. Spontaneous trips. Bar crawls that became parties. New ideas for keeping things hot when routine started to sand the edges off. Teddy bears, streamers, confetti, for reasons that made sense at the time.

They were settled. Grounded. I was the unknown constant in a system that otherwise ran on schedule.

The problem with getting everything you wanted

Ten months in, I had it. Stability, peace, a good life. Two men who loved me, and I use that word for them and not for myself, because that’s how it actually was: my not-ex had real feelings for me, his boyfriend had feelings that were more careful and no less real, and I had something warm and enormous that I still would not call love. No money problems. No hardships. A sex life most people would describe in italics. I could have seen myself doing that for years.

And that is precisely where it started to go.

I wanted to LIVE. I wanted to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where – okay. Joke aside: I was bored. Everything was good and nothing was happening, and it turns out that for the man I was at twenty-something, those were the same sentence. Stability read as stagnation. Peace read as a waiting room.

So I told them I wanted to see other people, and I told them honestly, up front, before doing it. They were disappointed – but also understood, and they said that if this was what it took to keep the three of us intact, then fine. They asked one thing: commit to us, and do the work of figuring out what you actually want.

That was meant to be a temporary sub-paragraph. A patch, not a rewrite. We never even printed it.

I read it as a letter of marque.

Tinder, Deutsche Bahn, and a bar in Cologne

Grindr and Tinder became my daily companions and I stretched that paragraph until you could see through it. I started sleeping elsewhere. I stopped coming home – to theirs, and to my own place, which I still paid for and barely visited. I rode Deutsche Bahn across half the country going from adventure to adventure, from, um, physical kick to physical kick. I got wasted. Sometimes into blackouts. I spent stupid money on parties, trains, hotel rooms.

And I felt fantastic. Work was going well, my life felt loud and wide again, and I could still describe myself as a man in an exotic throuple with two wonderful boyfriends. Which by then I wasn’t. I had soft-quit on the inside months before I said anything on the outside.

They felt it before I admitted it – obviously they did. I came home carrying other people’s scent and other people’s mess, on the nights I came home at all.

And then, in a bar in Cologne, no app involved, no game, I met a girl.

It was a match from the first minute. I felt things I hadn’t felt in a long time and had stopped expecting to: mental, emotional, spiritual pull, the whole apparatus. Butterflies. Rose-colored everything. I started dating her, spent more and more of my weeks in Cologne, and it got serious on every level that matters.

Somewhere in a plastic sleeve on a kitchen wall in Frankfurt, next to the photos and the ticket stubs, there was a clause about this. Everything stays gay, no girls. I had signed it. In ink and in blood, more or less.

I’d be lying if I said I thought about that clause once during those months.

And the honest version isn’t that it was fun. Yes, there were highlights, pun fully intended, but where there’s light there’s shadow, and the shadow was getting bigger every week. Being everywhere with everyone. Inside a relationship and outside it at the same time, and halfway into a third one. It was a rollercoaster with a worsening ratio, and I came out of it hollow and burnt down to the wick. Either I solved it or it ate me.

Termination

Nearly a year in, on another perfectly normal weekend together, I opened it. I said I wanted to end the throuple. Here, now, done. Systematic and cold, which was the only mode I had left.

And they… agreed. Immediately, and with feeling.

They’d been sitting with it. They told me they’d watched me be unhappy in our relationship for months. And they told me – direct quote, translated – that I had become a whoring slut rather than a partner anyone could trust. A damn whoring slut!

Nobody shouted. Nothing got thrown. It was the most honest conversation the three of us ever had, and it lasted maybe an hour, and at the end of it we could still look each other in the eye.

So, for years I told this story as the clean one: no drama, no fight, adults parting like adults. And that framing was true about the volume and false about everything else. They weren’t calm because it didn’t hurt. They were calm because they’d already done the grieving, alone, in the months I was on a train somewhere. I got to walk into a room where the funeral was over.

And I was proud of that insult. That’s the confession. Twenty-something me heard whoring slut from a man I’d hurt and felt a small hot flare of something that was not shame. I liked it. I liked being the one who was too much. And it took me an embarrassing number of years to look at that reaction properly.

We stayed friends. We meant it and we managed it. They stayed together as a couple for years afterwards, moved on eventually to other people and other constellations, and all three of us are still in touch – the now-and-then kind, birthdays and life news, which for a relationship that ended like that is a better outcome than any of us earned.

The girl in Cologne and I lasted a few months. It was mostly desire wearing a serious face. Last I heard, about five years ago, she was well and in something real.

Both things are true

I wasn’t ready. Not for that, not for a long-term relationship of any shape, and not for several years afterwards. I was still in the aftermath of a depression, an escalation, and the clinic stay that came after all of it. I was in the middle of the long project of finding out who and what I was. I’d left the nest and I was wandering, and I said yes to almost everything, partly out of curiosity, partly for the kick, and partly because I was naive enough to think consequences were something that happened to other people.

I should not have said yes to that experiment. Or, if I said yes, I should have said it with my actual conditions and expectations on the table. I didn’t. I signed a three-page contract about pizza toppings and never once discussed the thing that would break it.

But I’m done taking the whole bill. An established couple invited a man who was sleeping on their couch – freshly out of a clinic, visibly unfinished, with nowhere else to be – into an equal partnership they had already designed between themselves. One of them tested me by kissing me in an empty apartment before anyone told me a proposal existed. That was not a smart move either. It also wasn’t malice. Nobody in this story is the villain, and the truth lives somewhere in the middle where it usually does, holding hands with both parties.

What I got out of it, I wouldn’t hand back. How people actually work with each other. How relationships run underneath the part everyone talks about. How to communicate, how to de-escalate, how much of my own sexuality and identity I’d been guessing at. Friendships that outlived the thing that made them. It was wild, it was unplanned, and it came with no blueprint whatsoever, which I’d argue was the entire point.

I’ve had plenty of company since. I’ve never again had more than one ongoing relationship at a time.

Leaving no marks

Every morning in that Frankfurt apartment, I folded the blanket, packed the backpack, wiped the sink, and left the living room looking like I’d never been there.

I did the same thing on the way out of the relationship. Slowly, over months, in Cologne and on trains and in strangers’ beds – erasing myself from a home, one small careful gesture at a time, until there was nothing of mine left in it.

The difference is that these days I’m not a guest anywhere.

I’m in Sài Gòn, and I leave marks all over this place, and there’s one person here who gets a kind of love I never once felt in that apartment. Not adventure. Not chemistry. Not a paragraph in a contract sealed in plastic next to a fridge. The real thing, the unconditional one, the kind I have no intention of sharing with anybody.

Two men wrote that only three of us together could be complete. They were wrong about the arithmetic, and they were right about the reason.

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