Why Unicorn Hunting Doesn’t Work
Imagine you met someone, A, and you became good friends. You got along great, had a lot of stuff in common, and you had a feeling that your friendship would last a lifetime.
Your friend has another friend, B. One day they ask you if you’d be down to hang out together. You agree and you hang out.
Unfortunately you don’t have the same level of connection with B. Like, they’re an okay person, but you don’t vibe as well and can sense you’re not going to be as close.
“Sorry,” says A. “We can’t be friends anymore.”
“What?” you say, shocked. “Why? Did I do something wrong?”
“No. Nothing’s wrong with OUR friendship. But we can’t be friends unless you’re also friends with B.”
“But we like each other! I feel we really connected. Did our friendship mean nothing to you?”
“Not as much as my friendship with B. If you don’t like each other, I’ll always choose B over you.”
“I feel really unimportant in this situation and uncomfortable that you’re letting someone else choose what to do about our friendship. The fact is that me and B don’t get along as well. What do you expect me to do about that?”
“I don’t know, deal with it. It’s both of us, or forget it.”
“That’s not fair at all. And it doesn’t make sense that B can make decisions about our friendship. B isn’t even involved in our friendship!”
“We agreed that B has power over who I can be friends with. We only forge friendships together, never separately.”
“But you’re two really different people. Don’t you think that it would be quite difficult for someone to get along with both of you? Also, even if I did like B, what if we took a longer time to get close?”
“I have no idea. But we’re going to find a special friend eventually who will be able to do that for us and meet our needs.”
“But what about MY needs? I really like you and I think our friendship could be really beautiful. And it sounds like you’re setting down all these prerequisites for a friend, like you’re shopping for a toy on Amazon, instead of really getting to know me properly as a person.”
“Your needs are not as important as mine and B’s, and I don’t care that you only like me, because you don’t like B.”
”Right. Hypothetically say that I DID like B. And we all have a great friendship. What if one of the two friendships ends later on?”
“Well, if one of the friendships ends, then the other has to as well. We can’t deal with the jealousy if the other person continues to be friends with you.”
“It sounds like you don’t really view yourself as two separate people. And that you’ll do anything to protect your friendship and hurt people like me in the process. I don’t feel it’s fair that I will have to deal with two friendships ending just because there was a problem in ONE of the friendships, and then you two skip off into the sunset while I’m left all alone. I would feel like I’m being punished for something that wasn’t even my fault.”
“We don’t care. We’ll just keep ruining friendships and other people until we find someone who will submit to everything we want.”
The above example uses a toxic friendship as an analogy for unicorn hunting, with the intent of showing how ridiculously toxic the practice is when applied to platonic relationships. Unicorn hunting is a practice which is very much frowned on in the poly community, but it is unfortunately depressingly common (read: I am literally bombarded with posts about this every single day) with people who are new to polyamory. Essentially, it’s what happens when a couple (usually a man and woman) seek out a “third” (usually a bisexual woman) to “add” to their relationship, where the couple is non-negotiably a package deal – the unicorn must date both of them, or neither of them – and usually with the additional demand that the unicorn must be exclusive to the couple to form a closed triad.
Hopefully, you can see the immediate problems with this arrangement: unicorn hunting ensures that the safety and security of The Couple™ is paramount, while shifting all the risk onto the poor unicorn. The moment the unicorn doesn’t live up to the expectations of The Couple™, the moment she starts causing problems and jealousy in their relationship, she is discarded – and the privileged couple simply shrugs and moves on to a new person, while the unicorn is left alone to process two breakups through no fault of her own.
What such couples are looking for (usually phrased in various cringey ways like “adding a third”, “inviting someone into our relationship”, “seeking our queen”, “finding someone for both of us” etc) is extremely unethical, not to mention unrealistic. Seasoned poly people always strongly advise that such couples do not start off with a triad, unless they want their brand new poly relationship to implode. I’ve personally seen too many couples who think they can just ‘share’ a new partner together, and they end up fighting over her, being jealous of the other person getting time with her, failing to sort through their codependency issues, and breaking up. Additionally, each member of the couple might be looking for different things in a woman, and often have conflicting expectations that a single person simply cannot meet. It’s also unlikely that the woman would be interested in both members of the couple in exactly the same way, not to mention develop relationships with both people at exactly the same rates so as not to threaten one of the two with a jealousy attack – meaning that the unicorn, once again, has a high risk of being tossed aside the moment it doesn’t work out.
The point is, unicorn hunting rarely works out long term, because a lot of new couples end up treating the unicorn like an object – not respecting her as an individual, demanding that she forgo her own boundaries to submit to the needs and expectations of The Couple™, and only seeing her in terms of how well she can “fit” into the existing relationship. The unicorn is discussed in practice as a fantastical idea, but reality often does not match up to expectations – after all, when you put it into practice, you are literally dating a living, breathing human with needs and expectations of her own, which may conflict with what you want either initially or later down the line. Simply put, a new partner is not someone you can just slot in there comfortably, because she is a person too. And she is not “joining” anything, but rather creating two (yes, two) brand new relationships with each of you, not a single relationship with The Couple™.
My top advice for couples new to poly is to date separately – it helps them ease into the relationship style and develop independence as individuals, which will lead to longer lasting and healthy relationships in the long term. And if you are a person who can’t imagine doing anything without your partner…well, see, that is the exact issue. The main reason why unicorn hunting is so prevalent is because our society creates a culture of codependency in monogamous relationships. The narrative of your partner being “your other half”, or the person who “completes” you, encourages couples to become overly reliant on each other for everything, to spend all of their time together, and basically to merge into a single identity.
This does not fly in polyamory. The fact is that, try as you might for it to be otherwise, you and your partner are and will always be two separate individuals, not a single unit. If dating separately sounds scary to you, it means that you haven’t done enough work to disentangle, and to have an individually fulfulling life that your partner is not necessarily involved in all of the time. This oft-cited article, The Most Skipped Step When Opening a Relationship, breaks down the key steps to effective disentanglement and polyamory success, and explains it all far better than I ever could. Boldly Grow on YouTube also helpfully breaks down the statistically unrealistic nature of unicorn hunting in her video “Why Can’t We Find A Third?”.
That is not to say that triads are impossible. I know plenty of people who are in healthy, long-term triads. I myself have been involved with people who happened to also be dating each other, and my current partner and myself have also occasionally come across people who happen to be into both of us. I can tell you from personal experience it is truly beautiful to see two people you love also loving each other, but the only way this can work is if the triad is formed organically, and where each pair bond (A+B, B+C, and C+A), as well as the relationship between all three of you (A+B+C) is cultivated and nurtured separately, to fully blossom. Demanding that the outcome of one relationship necessarily has to influence the other will just lead to hurt for everyone involved.
To learn more about couple privilege, read this article from More Than Two and this article on Facebook on polyhierarchy which break it down quite well. Additionally, here’s another article by a person who has been in relationships with many couples with great advice on what not to do. And here’s yet another with a comprehensive breakdown of how to react if someone calls you a unicorn hunter.
And if you still want to find your unicorn, then here’s a full breakdown on the statistical likelihood you will find one. In essence, “unicorn hunting is the relationship equivalent of spending every day sitting at home imagining what you will do ‘when you win the lottery’, rather than going out to work and building yourself a viable business.”
I hope this advice will gently point newly poly couples in the direction of letting relationships form naturally, to date separately, and to seek partners to love, not a certain relationship dynamic for your partners to fit into.
