Third Place Relationships
Surrogate partners, slippery intimacy, my favorite coffee shop
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There’s a coffee shop near my house that I’ve adopted as a co-working space. In Austin, shops like these are an endangered species: shaggy, poster-filled bungalows with local art on the walls, plastic dinosaurs marching along the counter, busted couches carrying decades-old genetic matter of butts past. You know this place.
I’ve recently become friends with Stan, an elderly man who comes in daily on a walker. Genteel with cropped hair and tucked-in shirts, Stan holds court with the regulars, but always makes a point to stop by my “desk” (uneven table that I shimmed with a napkin) and say hello. He’s got a gossipy queen quality I find rather delicious.
“You won’t believe what I just heard,” he says, and he’s right. I never do! It could be recycling comes on Mondays now (the nerve), but I sip whatever tea my man brings me.
And what of the management? That would be Josh. An echo of old Austin, much like his coffee shop. I moved here when scruffy musicians were our city’s representatives, and Josh carries the torch well. The man does not scan as “business owner,” he scans as house shows, no cover. Longish hair, a t-shirt his friend probably designed, thrifted women’s cardigans. The type of ‘90s male styling I really miss.
Like a benevolent king, Josh checks on each of us when he’s not behind the counter. A man of the people. A man who rode in on a Craigslist bike, and that bike has gotten repaired several times.
Down the street, there’s another coffee shop.
White subway tiles (first red flag). Maple countertops. A blackboard meant to suggest quirk. The kind of focus-grouped decor that feels both tasteful and generic, a layout that is service-efficient without being particularly communal. I don’t know if it has regulars. But it definitely has customers.
Business is thriving and undeniable at the other coffee shop. They’ve opened up several more locations around town. I honestly kind of hate it.
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I’ve been hearing the word “community” every day now, several times a day, for the past three and a half weeks. I clutch “community” like a vigil candle, huddled as I would in a dark room. Was I naive, out of touch, or both?
The feeling is this: groping for furniture I can’t see. Trying to get my bearings. Letting my eyes adjust while waiting for the first bad thing to happen. Are there ax murderers here with me in the dark room? Or clowns hired for the birthday party? Also, how the fuck did I get in this room?
But community. Community! At least we have each other. You won’t believe what I just heard. I really can’t.
And as it happens, I am unusually needy at the moment. I need my community.
Not just because of the election. Someone close to me is dying. I don’t know if I feel ready to even talk about it, except for the times it’s the only thing I want to talk about. I took a walk the other day and leaned against a tree, telling it everything. It listened, I cried, and when I felt I’d exhausted its patience I laid down on a rock and told it too. Water ran below us.
I’d broken the fourth wall of human/nature separation, I realized. Fully merged. This was my true self. I lived here now, with my inanimate companions.
Leaves crunching. An animal panting. A golden retriever jogged by with its owner close behind, Barbie pink Lululemon. The spell broke and I sat upright, flustered and embarrassed.
I called a friend. Because as it turns out, I need more than a tree and a rock.
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For these reasons and more, I’ve been thinking about “the third place.”
The third place is a concept in sociology that is not home, nor work, but the hangout spot. The place to let your hair down. My coffee shop. Cheers. The arcade. The Bada Bing. That pub in Star Wars. Rick's Café Américain. For some people the gym. Pickup basketball. The barbershop. The beauty parlor. You get the idea.
The third place is an anchor of community life. You have no obligations at the third place (except to pay your tab). Interactions are free-form and loose, creative and on-the-fly. Regulars set the tone, conversation is the main activity. I’m writing this from the coffee shop I just told you about, Stan and I played Wordle an hour ago.
But I have also been thinking about something else.
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“I’m working on a piece about third place relationships,” I announce to my friend Danny. The Olympics podium with three levels comes to mind; a plucky gymnast gets their bronze.
“How would you define relationships that aren’t with lovers and aren’t with friends, but are a sort of third thing? There’s intimacy but it’s…slippery?”
I’m using Marco Polo, ergo – monologue. The wind kicks up.
“NOT SEXUAL PER SE BUT THERE COULD BE SEX?” I bellow over the wind to my phone and indirectly, the neighbors. One of them declared herself a witch a few months ago. My phone dings.
“So the relationships you have with your kin, those are the relationships that bring up your shit,” says Danny, a very smart friend I turn to whenever I’m trying to work out a new concept. We met as aerialists, then quickly realized we were both sex nerds, book nerds, general nerds.
“Those relationships can trigger the fuck out of you and make you confront your shadow,” says Danny. I nod solemnly. In front of the witch house.
“But the relationships you’re talking about do something else,” they continue. “They reflect you back to yourself, as you see you.”
Nail techs, hair stylists, Danny’s tattoo artist Travis: they mention these types of relationships, the less deep yet slightly intimate ones, the ones we didn’t get to have much over Covid. We didn’t have our mirrors! Just our phones. People mirrors > black mirrors.
“When you experience that intimacy, I believe you’re being seen for the better part of yourself. Not that that doesn’t happen inside kinship. You get the good and the ugly there. And of course, strangers can still trigger the fuck out of you,” Danny says. I think about every person who’s ever honked at me in traffic, devils all.
Danny explains that third place relationships, as I’ve described them, reflect the little bits you’ve created as an idealized version of yourself. Which we all need. Bringing our entire, complex, messy selves to bear on every interaction would get exhausting. Sometimes, I just want someone to look at me like I am:
A good mom
Smart
A loved daughter
Someone who could probably jump a car (can)
Someone who could probably change a tire (can’t)
Competent
Clearly needs help, lol
A man (will probably never happen but how interesting would that be?)
A sister (will literally never happen, I’m an only child, but I like it when someone looks at me that way)
Like an old friend
Anonymous to the point of invisibility
Just one! Just one quality on the list. That’s all I want sometimes.
Of the ways I crave to be seen, of the ways you crave to be seen, simplicity can be nice. I don’t need everyone in the entire world to hold me like a kaleidoscope. To get these single dimensions affirmed every once in a while feels good.
Is that what third place relationships are about? Looser bonds where the intimacy is slippery, so too our collection of selves? Isn’t that liberating and necessary, to be received often as just the one thing?
We haven’t touched on any sex stuff, Danny and I. After shouting that one point, I kind of de-emphasized it elsewhere on the Polo. But there’s another friend I want to call.
Someone I suspect has an entirely different take on all of this.
I call Miranda, who recently became a surrogate partner.
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“I’ll talk to you while I drive to the sanctuary,” says Miranda, my friend and, like Danny, fellow sex nerd. “Sex nerd” is reductive for what Miranda means to me; she’s also a married mom, also a writer, also a former Christian. Pastor’s daughter. The sanctuary is the place where she sees clients.
Miranda and I both just listened to an interview with Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry. A big thrust of the interview is getting out of binary thinking – Tricia’s all about finding magical portals in your day that are neither productive nor unproductive. These portals are a secret third thing, an exit ramp off production-thinking entirely.
“So what if we applied that to relationships?” I ask her. “Third place relationships, where you’re not friends, not lovers, but something else?”
A less sophisticated mind might say “situationships” and, OK, I am that less sophisticated mind. Which is why I’m talking to Miranda.
“Where I go with that is me and a client. The third place is that thing created between us,” she says, emphasizing thing like a tangible object.
“I’ll send you something that maybe applies,” she says.
I open a Google Doc, an essay she wrote for her own newsletter, and this entire passage gets me:
“What I’ve learned in working with bodies is that attaching a story to every emotion that surfaces is not always needed.
From an intimacy guide perspective, what can be more important than the story is the body’s ability to feel safe enough to feel the landscape of emotion.”
She’s talking about a client, one she’s been seeing for a few sessions now.
And because they are deep in the work, she doesn’t have to play teacher as much. She can soften into a partner, because they both feel safe.
Once again, I’m struck by the radical possibilities of surrogate partner work, where the “thing” (an intimate connection) created is real, but ephemeral. Miranda will not date this client. They might have sex. But that’s not the point. The point is a felt sense of safety they’re creating together. Safety that will allow this client to heal their relationship to intimacy, to re-establish body sovereignty and finally, to learn how to care for another person. Miranda.
And. Like Tricia Hersey, the safety is a portal.
Because the relationship between Miranda and her client is a crucible of healing. She’s not stoic, not holding back – she’s forming a legitimate attachment to this person, because the client needs to feel it. What it’s like for someone to trust you. Isn’t that weird, how bodies pick up on those kinds of things? How energy can be read that way?
“Can I share part of your essay when I write this?” I text her. Heart reaction.
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Like “community,” I’ve also been hearing the word “stories” a lot. “They can take everything away from us, but they can’t take our stories.” That’s the refrain, or — something like it.
To me, third place relationships allow us to retell our stories, which isn’t the same thing as lying. We can offer just a bit of our story – the headline – or the whole heavy tome to another soul. Maybe it depends on what you need in any given moment.
Keep in mind: this is a concept I made up. There is no hard and fast definition. Maybe your third place relationships are deeply intimate but not so traditional, like surrogate partners. Maybe they’re fleeting and lightweight, a swig of medicine to ward off a cold. But I do think they’re essential, this category of relating that exists outside of strict partners, and strict friends.
I float it by Josh as he cleans up for the day. I turn the laptop toward him, highlight the sections with his description. Two weeks ago, he almost lost this coffee shop. Then, the regulars stepped in to save it. Its name is Genuine Joe.
I pack up my things, tell him Stan’s in my story too, wave goodbye as he hunches down to straighten the books on the coffee table.
Interesting and enchanting.
I am well down life’s path, having two “primary” relationships, with never the “third” or surrogate accompanying relationship. Your coffee shop – back in my work-world those existed on a regular basis. Generally, however they were most often visited with colleagues. I would observe others, singular others, hanging out as regulars. They were there to be around other people. Between relationships I first learned of that attraction. Just people. I just needed other people. Not even to talk or interact with, but to be occupying the same space. If only for a time.
Your quest for a third place relationship, or just to explore the concept philosophically provokes many thoughts. Self, spouse are my primary relationships. Siblings, children, and grandchildren are an ebb and flow relationship. They get very busy with their own lives and relationships.
So many of my peers, in succeeding relationships, battle with the “relationships” that preceded their now primary relationship. When “mom” is not “my” mom. When “dad” is not “my” dad. An emotional caldron. Perhaps morass is more descriptive.
Just another human, to share their story/stories they yearn to share. Separate and apart from what is shared in the primary relationship. It seems to me, we need people, social creatures that we are.
As life evolves, I have been exposed to couples where they were “everything” to each other. Inevitable one passes – death or divorce. The loneliness which ensues I have observed destroys the survivor. Perhaps a third, or surrogate, relationship evolves into a survival relationship. We are all guaranteed to pass. Rarely do we get to pass “together”.
Great, thought-provoking piece. My main third place and third relationships are in my recovery group. It is a no judgment setting where people share their innermost thoughts, dark memories and worries, where they can ask for help without shame. Not every third place or relationship will be like that but such groups (tellingly called a fellowship) are extraordinary in today’s world, in which the emphasis on self-sufficiency, status and one’s affiliations or identities actually isolate us and deprive us of the incredible power of community.