Aliit ori'shya tal'din

We are introduced to the Throuple via MB’s narration, laying out that Arada wants Ratthi, Ratthi wants Pin-Lee, and Pin-Lee is sort of along for the ride.  But we do need to remember that MB’s perspective and narration is limited, and it is very bad with emotions.  So we’re supposed to read deeper into that relationship than just what it says.  There is a lot more going on with them than those lines—suggesting an awkward love-triange in classic sitcom fashion—would suggest.  The show uses the Throuple to deconstruct how the audience might look at such a thing, and by utilizing that particular term, the audience is set up with an expectation that can then be taken apart as we are gradually introduced to a different culture with a different perspective on love, sex, and intimacy.

We see the start of the relationship come in the form of the contract.  I saw people not happy about this because this isn’t how polyamory is ‘supposed’ to go.  The fandom has had a bit of an issue with assuming the worst-faith takes when it comes to the showrunners and the production, and I really saw it at play with this relationship.  From the off, some people were convinced that by portraying PresAux as open and loving the show was ‘mocking’ them, when I perceived the show as loving them.  MB is clearly wrong about them (as they are often wrong about it), but it slowly embraces them throughout the course of the show as they chip away at its cynicism simply by being themselves (and thus also chipping away at the cynicism of the audience too, because boy howdy are a lot of the audience deeply cynical).  It doesn’t get all the way there by the end of the season.  It still needs to find itself, but the love they instilled in it is growing. 

So the audience has to learn about how love works on Preservation, don’t they?  Since love in all its forms lies at the heart of their relationship to MB, the audience needs to see some of those forms.  Preservation is a society where polyamory is completely normalized.  We see this in Mensah’s casual mention of her marital partners, but we needed an onscreen example of how this could go, which also works as character-building for everyone involved.  Thus, the throuple.  Which, much like all of PresAux, is lovingly portrayed as flawed, emotionally open but still sometimes missing the point, loving beyond what many audience members are comfortable with, and so, SO human.  They are all Cringe, and they are all free, and I want to be more like them.

Through them and how this throuple plays out, we learn more about Preservation, and honestly?  It feels like such a healthier approach to sex, love, and intimacy than our own.

Let’s start by talking about the contract.  It clearly delineates what is expected in the relationship, but is not a requisite for such relationships on Preservation (we are told this by Pin-Lee, as they think that their last addition didn’t work out because there was no contract).  The contract is a bit of character-building for Pin-Lee, as we learn that they want it, and it makes them feel more comfortable existing within a well-defined legal framework.  The society gives them the tools to build the relationship—contracts are non-necessary but sometimes useful part of relationships—but they need to implement them for their own comfort.  Pin-Lee wants a contract, and the other two accept that.  Arada is much more free-wheeling, I think, and wouldn’t necessarily want that framework on her own, but it makes her spouse happy, and so that’s fine.

But what Pin-Lee struggles with is that, even within a contractual framework, people are still people, and they are going to bring unpredictable elements.  Ratthi brings a completely different dynamic into their relationship simply by being himself.  That’s what Arada wants, and Pin-Lee accepts with their own stipulations.  This is a couple trying to work through their individual needs, but, as we see throughout the course of the throuple, still needing to get better at open and honest communication.

We are told later in the season that the contract has a clear time delineation.  This is not a marriage.  Ratthi is likely being brought into their relationship for the duration of the survey, and that’s it.  This is supposed to be a fun engagement with one another, bringing a new dimension to already-established relationships.  And that, for me, totally reshaped how I was looking at sex, love, and Preservation.

The Western monoculture very much gears people toward seeing sex and love through an extremely narrow lens.  You should be In Love when you have sex (casual sex Wrong and Immoral), and sex should be Deep and Meaningful only.  And Love is for the long-term.  For a single pair of heterosexual people to procreate through. 

And through the throuple we see how effortlessly Preservation explodes all those limiting notions of what sex and love can be.  Sex can be engaged in between colleagues on a long, boring survey for fun, because sex is fun and casual if you want it to be.  With futuristic birth control readily accessible, one assumes, and without the power dynamics inherent in our own current work culture, why wouldn’t colleagues get to engage in casual sex?  Why wouldn’t you pull in a friend into a sexual relationship if they’re into it?  What is the boundary between the platonic and the romantic?  Is there a need for a boundary?  This will vary person to person, but the society creates a framework through which labels and boxes can be exploded. 

Love is ever-present, but its form is changeable for the situation and the people involved.  And that is partially why the throuple works as a way to explore the personalities, quirks, flaws, and natures of the three people involved in it.

Ratthi has a very refreshing, different relationship to sex and love than we usually see on television.  He takes his relationships in all their myriad forms very seriously; they seem like the most important parts of his life and personality.  He is defined by his relationships with others, and perceives himself best through them.  He falls in love easily, but also lets those relationships go very easily.  I honestly think there is no particular delineation for him between friendship, romance, sex, and casual intimacy.  He loves his friends, he’s in love with his friends, he would happily have sex with any of his friends who would want him, and when a sexual or romantic component to a friendship no longer works out he lets that go without complaint.  He moves along the continuum of platonic-romantic and sexual-sexless with incredible ease, because it’s all love to him.  He is overbearing in his love because he feels it so intensely for everyone around him.  Learning to regulate his expressions of that love is going to be a long-term character arc for him, I think, but the fact that he feels it so strongly and openly is so refreshing.  The fact that he was raised in a culture where there was no shame around sex or love, so long as everyone is consenting and having a good time, shows how different and healthier someone can be about sex and love when given the space for it.

But the show doesn’t limit how someone can exist in a culture so open about sex and love, because Pin-Lee and Arada both have very different expressions of what they want and need from sex and love, while still existing within this clearly-established cultural framework.  Arada and Ratthi share an unintentional, non-malicious sort of self-centeredness.  They both assume that everyone around them feels and wants in similar manners to themselves.  They are both incredibly generous, loving people.  They give gifts and acts of physical affection easily and naturally, but both of them struggle a bit to read the room, which can make others uncomfortable. 

Arada is a really interesting example of this, because she is a gift-giver.  She repairs Bharadwaj’s clothes for her after the attack; she gives SecUnit an outfit.  In a BTS comment it’s said that Arada embroidered everyone’s socks for them.  I think that she embraces Pin-Lee’s offer of the Throuple out of that same spirit of earnest and open gift-giving.  All of Arada’s gifts are given without reservation or ulterior motive, so she assumes the same about Pin-Lee.  She doesn’t read Pin-Lee’s slight discomfort with bringing Ratthi in because she’s not looking for that.  Pin-Lee is a people-pleaser far more than Arada properly understands.  Arada is delightfully open about her desires and her needs, but it means that she sometimes steps all over her spouse’s wants and needs without meaning to.  And Pin-Lee chronically doesn’t speak up about it.  They’re so loud and abrasive as a lawyer that their wife doesn’t notice what they aren’t saying, how much they don’t speak up in their marriage.  It’s an interesting dynamic to bring in for Pin-Lee because it goes against the shark-lawyer stereotype and gives them added dimension.  There is lawer!Pin-Lee and spouse!Pin-Lee and those are very different people. 

Everyone is given communication tools.  They have Sweet-Bitter; they have We Can Talk About This.  But being given the tools and actually using the tools are two very different things that all three of these people need to work on.

Their miscommunication is so lightly-done and refreshing, because it never explodes into genuine hurt feelings or resentment or possessiveness or all the other things you might expect to see in a throuple storyline on a television show.  They try on intimacy, and have the cultural framework for a lovely casual relationship, but as much as they should Talk About This, it’s clear they don’t, or if they do they haven’t embraced the sort of honesty that would be necessary for it to really work.  So it’s off from the beginning, each of them wanting something different out of it: Pin-Lee puts up and shuts up, Arada assumes everyone is on her same page, and Ratthi keeps butting in when he’s not wanted.  Ratthi eventually realizes that he didn’t go in with the right headspace, wanting Pin-Lee more than Arada, and realizes it’s unfair on all of them, so he breaks it off.  But they all wanted it done, having each come to the realization that it’s not bringing out the best in any of them.  That’s where that culture of healthy relationships to sex and love and intimacy really pays off for them.  It doesn’t mean their relationships always work out, but it does mean they’re given a framework to recognize what any relationship should do: bring out the best in everyone involved.  And when it doesn’t, their culture gives them the framework to end that relationship in a clean, healthy way, because there are no hang-ups about a relationship having to be only one way to be valid, no shame or preciousness about sex that would make returning to a sexless relationship somehow ‘lesser’.

And hopefully, even when the relationship itself didn’t bring out the best in them, it still let them learn things about themselves that they can continue to explore next season.  This casual, limited-time relationship may not have worked, but that doesn’t make it meaningless.  Failure is not shameful.  Failure is natural, and can be a tool for learning even more potent than success.  And Preservation as a society also gives grace to failure, because it completely de-emphasizes competition.  If there is no particular cultural glory attached to winning, people can fail and still be happy. 

Sex and love and friendship are continuums through with the people of Preservation can move.  They may still be limited by personality, by foibles and hangups, because existing in a better society doesn’t actually make people perfect.  People are still people, and they carry their baggage with them.  These three didn’t work out even on the short-term because they didn’t unpack that baggage, even having been given the tools to do so by their society.  This is never an indictment of polyamory as a whole by the show (again, Mensah and her partners are RIGHT THERE), but rather an exploration of three people’s characters and their relationship with their society through the lens of a relationship.  It is both character-building and world-building, which in a show with a limited runtime, does what everything in this show has to do: serves multiple purposes.

We learn that Preservation doesn’t share our hangups about casual sex through them.  We learn that people are still people, even on a better world, and even with better tools for dealing with interpersonal conflict and miscommunication, they can still fail at it.  But we also learn that failure is okay.  Failure teaches you things and allows you to move into a better place.  We learn that love on Preservation isn’t limited by the boxes that we might ascribe it, and that moving along all the myriad spectrums of love is precisely as difficult or easy as each individual personality makes it.  Love can be platonic, can be romantic, can be both at the same time, can be neither and exist as something else without labels.  There can be as many consenting people involved in that love as you want.  It’s all good.  It’s all cool, so long as it’s fulfilling and brings out the best in those involved.