We had to confront the lingering serpent of jealously and the still more poisonous viper of rivalry. The sometime hostility of the outer world to our alternate family was also a threat. Legally, we didn't exist at all. The psychoanalyst R. D. Laing wrote, "The family's function is to repress Eros." He didn't live to see the nuclear family crack open and its core melt.

All the President's programs and mouthings will never put the marital Humpty Dumpty together again. Out of convenience or principal, Americans today live together about as often as they marry. But they remain as couples and play by the old rules of fidelity. Instead, we decided to make up the rules as we went along. We sought, as Jeanne Moreau proclaimed, "joy rather than happiness."

We found that menage a trois, from initial infatuation to the sometimes bitter end, plays out in exaggerated form the repertoire of romance. Either you become a loving family or split up — with a broken heart or two or three. We failed to create an ideal union, but we avoided descending into a so-called love triangle.

The tabloids inevitably make hay with three way relationships. Stories that end in vituperation and divorce, or even murder are exploited to sell papers. The couple-directed news media cannot fathom the idea that three people can form an enduring connection. Our menage lasted because it thrived on honesty, which is the opposite of backstairs adultery. Cheating is poison, infidelity manageable. It takes diplomacy and respect for the delicate balance of egos.

Yet in time our threesome began to feel isolated, apart from our peers because we worshipped outside the church of coupledom. Hosts feel uncomfortable inviting a menage to dinner and at restaurants there are no cozy tables for three. Try dealing with the legal or insurance complications of an unrecognized union. Still more, we yearned for a philosophical connection, a history of who and what we were. Without efforts along these lines there would have been no gay/lesbian movement, no gay marriage, and certainly no constitutional amendments attempting to turn back the social/sexual clock. It was our personal love story that evolved into the first history of the menage a trois, Three in Love.

One afternoon at my university, skimming entries in the Lexis-Nexus database, I plugged in the words: "menage a trois." Jackpot! It was like the slots at Vegas. Here were the threesomes past and present we had wondered about, the great and lesser lights who dared to enlarge their romantic horizons. Until the computer age, this genre of love story, and not so lovely stories, remained in the twilight, smutty, taboo, good for a giggle. Though there had been a Sexual Revolution, the menage a trois, let alone the three of us, had not come out of the closet. We decided to trace the lineage of threesomes — for the others out there in darkness and for our own pride. We would create the tradition we sought.

In its country of origin menage a trois literally means "a household of three." The French stems from the Latin mensa, meal or table, and a menage is a domestic institution. A trio breaking bread or seated around the hearthside fits our vision rather than the hasty liaison dubbed "a quicky." We qualified as a full-fledged threesome practicing a distinctive style of love which evolved over time and space. Comforted, we found that menages a trois have a deep and extensive history as the oldest alternative form of family.

In the beginning Adam and Eve may have lived in paradise but they achieved nothing until the Serpent, both phallic and womblike, gave them a hiss. In Three In Love we focus on the serpent — the third, an energetic force that moved a stagnant, awkward couple forward to create humanity. Throughout history threesomes have birthed art, poetry, books and movies, and what is still more remarkable — entire cultural movements.

The Age of Reason was nurtured by Voltaire's live-in liaison with the marquis du Châtelet and his scientist wife. Voltaire kept Emilie happy and loaned money to the marquis, whose influence kept him out of prison. From the Enlightenment to the bisexual film comedy French Twist, the French have flown the tricolor of menage a trois, if frequently creating dangerous liaisons with lies and hypocrisy.

Simone de Beauvoir quipped, "Marriage finds its natural fulfillment in adultery." She and her lifelong partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, shared details of their "contingent love affairs," and usually they bedded down the identical contingency, male or female. Beauvoir's The Second Sex was instrumental in awakening a feminist consciousness. Her letters to Sartre, published posthumously, exhibited an unrelenting voyeurism that reinforced the trisexual nature of her sexual liberation.

The foundation of the Beat movement in America and that of the Bloomsberries in Britain was built on one or more menages a trois. But you will find the details in our Three in Love: Menages a Trois from Ancient to Modern Times, published by Harper Collins in 1997. After a long string of rejections which disparaged not the book's writing but its authors' morals, we were thrilled to bring this bouncing baby into the world, to show off the child of our alternate family. It was aimed at a sophisticated audience that we hoped wished to learn about the philosophy and dynamics of threesomes.