Self-proclaimed “thruple” Leo Barillas, 35, Mary Barillas, 31, and Kimberlee Slagle, 29, from Washington, USA, claim that their relationship has made them better parents to their four children, aged from 4 to 11.
According to them, that’s because three heads are better than two. They talk more about their unusual relationship here:
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Video credit: Rumble
Leo and Mary have been together since he was 15 and she was 13. But after 16 years, they both met and fell in love with Kim and the three have been inseparable since, both in bed and in parenting.
Kim said: “Having an extra body is so useful for parenting, it just means you’re splitting the work between three rather than two.”
Leo and Mary got married in 2005 and have two children.
Because they were in a relationship at such an early age, they decided to explore together. They sometimes invited another partner to the bedroom but such arrangements were never permanent.
But in 2016, they met Kim, a mother of two, at their Crossfit gym. At that time, she had just left a 9-year relationship a year earlier.
Leo said: “We weren’t actively seeking a third – my wife and I were more open to adding an extra occasionally – not to ‘spice things up,’ because it was spicy anyway – but we were together from a young age, so we didn’t get to explore things, so we decided to explore things together.
“Kim came into the picture as an athlete at the gym, we trained her and got to know her. Every morning we would chat and we became friendly and would have her over socially, then that progressed into a sexual thing.
“It was actually Kim who said ‘I don’t know if I can come and hang out at the weekend because I’m growing feelings for you both of you.’”
Kim added: “I understood that they were a married couple but I could feel my feelings changing and so I started to pull away.
“It was incredibly hard for me to tell them how I felt – it was a scary moment for me.”
After talking it over, they went to Vegas a week later to make themselves an official triad.
At the time, neither Mary nor Kim had ever been with another woman.
Mary said: “When I was younger I remember at one point telling my mom that I was bisexual and mom was like, ‘No, you’re just bi-curious because you don’t know.’
“When we first met Kim I was terrified because I just assumed that she was solely going to be attracted to my husband and just want to be with him.”
But going from being a couple to a triad required some adjustment. Leo had even felt “like a third wheel” at first and was afraid he might lose his wife to another woman.
Leo said: “In the beginning, it was kind of a weird thing, the jealousy was on my part because they were really close to each other and I didn’t know how to deal with that.
“I sat down with them, and I told them ‘hey, look, this is not what I signed up for, I felt like, one, I was losing my wife and two, I didn’t have a girlfriend, because they were hanging out all the time.’”
But communication proved to be the key factor and they finally found their stride.
Leo said: “Because we were all in the same boat, it was a learning curve for all of us. We’ve learned that if we do have arguments, it’s better to hash it out with just one person rather than as a group.”
They were also lucky that most of the people in their circle have been accepting of their relationship.
Mary said: “When we go out the three of us holding hands, guys often give Leo all the kudos, and tell him he’s lucky!
“We did have a former business partner who was rude and asked how their relationship would affect the kids and our business, but she was old and very religious.”
Family members have also been accepting. Kim said that before her mother passed away, she gave them her blessing. While her grandmother still believes “in a man marrying a woman,” that hasn’t stopped her from fussing over the thruple and their kids.
Even Leo’s “very traditional Latino” mom, 71, gave the thumbs up, much to his relief.
Leo’s mom said: “I was like ‘that’s not my life, it’s their life’ and if they are happy, then I’m happy.”
The three have also declared their relationship on social media and unsurprisingly, have gotten a lot of flak from it from others online, said Kim.
Mary added: “I think that was the hardest part for me, to deal with people saying that we’re going to mess up our kids.”
But it seems their kids don’t mind.
Keagan, 11, said: “I like it better having three parents because you have more people to talk to.”
Mary insists that they do the same things other couples do such as go to the gym, do family movie nights, and have dinners.
Mary said: “We just use the word thruple just because we are very similar to a couple, there are just three people.
“I think that we live a very normal life. We all work, we all try to stay fit, we have children, we don’t live these insane lives. People think that it’s orgies and drinking all the time and it’s really not like that.”
Mary and Kim have also expressed a desire to each have another child and even want to get pregnant simultaneously.
Leo said: “I was done after two kids, but Kim wants to have a child with the person she loves, so now we’ve come to a compromise that they would get pregnant at the same time and do it in the hospital.”
Mary and Kim also have plans to undergo simultaneous boob jobs later in the year.
Mary said: “We both lost a decent amount of weight, we’ve had kids, we’ve been eating clean, but we have “sad mom boobs” and we want rid of them.”
You can more of an insight into their daily lives on their Instagram account, @pnwtriad16.
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