You can love two people

[notmyusualnametoday]

This is just a thought that has occurred to me after reading a few other threads about affairs etc.

People seem to believe that you can only ever love one man/woman at once and if you're married and having an affair with someone else you must not love your wife/husband otherwise you wouldn't be having an affair.

You can have two children and love them both. Why not two men/women?

Not that I believe love and affairs are really necessarily always one and the same. Another thing MN disagrees with. Sometimes it's just sex for both parties irrespective of husbands/wives at home. They see each other, want to shag and simply do. No more, no less. Just sex.

Yes you can love more than one person at once. You can be attracted to someone else and have it not impact your feelings for your partner at all.

I agree you can love more than one person at a time. We have conditioned ourselves to be monogamous. But just because we can love two people doesn’t mean we should, especially if we’ve promised not to!

Seemingly so, my husbands ex waxes on irrationally about how she loves him, but she also loves her other ex and countless others that ditched her. I’m not so convinced.

@TwoBoysTooMany76 - seconded here on multiamory. So great - and the conscious monogamy episode was fab. Out of curiosity, how long did you date your two guys before you decided it wasn’t for you?

@wishfuldreamer I dated both for about 3 months but one I saw quite intensively and the other had a busy life and was still very involved with an ex with a young baby so I had about 10 dates with him over that time... In the end, I ended up things with the latter as it was obvious things weren’t going to progress with him beyond a nice date once we he two weeks... And I had fallen in love with the other... And he had fallen in love with me. I thought being in love with him I had to accept him being polyamorous and I did a lot of soul searching. In the end, I couldn’t and I told him so even though it broke my heart. He did a lot of soul searching too and decided he wanted to be with me and broke things off with the other girl. At the moment, we are very happy together but it’s early days...

We think of love as a ‘feeling’ but actually, in the context of long-term relationships it is actually a verb. It is something we do, not something we feel. And whereas feeling love for somebody can be the easiest thing in world, actually loving them, day in, day out, through all the harrowing, frustrating, or plain boring challenges that life can throw at you, that takes a lot of faith and real effort. So much effort that realistically you can only direct it at one person at a time.

So in a way I think the OP is right - you can feel love for two people at once. But you can only be engaged in the hard work of actively loving one person at a time.

Um, I appreciate that probably sounds like utter bollocks. But it makes sense to me.

I don't think you can be IN love with two people though; it's so all consuming!

I guess it depends on your definition of love. If you define love as something you feel, then as PP have said, you can love multiple people at once. You can also love someone and abuse them and hate them too.

However if you define love as an action: considering their well-being and putting them first, then in many cases (unless they wish you to be poly), you can’t romantically love more than 1 person. However you could love your kids, parents, partner all at once because their well-being and wishes don’t normally conflict and may be positive (it makes me happy that my DH loves our kids, his parents and sister).

@MadCatLady71

We think of love as a ‘feeling’ but actually, in the context of long-term relationships it is actually a verb. It is something we do, not something we feel. And whereas feeling love for somebody can be the easiest thing in world, actually loving them, day in, day out, through all the harrowing, frustrating, or plain boring challenges that life can throw at you, that takes a lot of faith and real effort. So much effort that realistically you can only direct it at one person at a time.

So in a way I think the OP is right - you can feel love for two people at once. But you can only be engaged in the hard work of actively loving one person at a time.

Um, I appreciate that probably sounds like utter bollocks. But it makes sense to me.

I think I agree with this @MadCatLady71. The feeling of love is possible to direct to more than one person. Over time, you need to choose to love your partner.

Right, OP - you've got your eye on someone, perhaps having an EA... yes, we get it. Before you slide into bed with him/her, think about your OH and the hurt you are likely to cause.

Sorry - but what a lot of unadulterated shit @RosesandPumpkins @CrazyToast @MadCatLady71 - you cannot deceive the person you ‘love’ - you cannot make a lie of their love to meet your own needs. Whatever that is- it’s not love.

if you're married and having an affair with someone else you must not love your wife/husband otherwise you wouldn't be having an affair.
I agree that you might love your spouse and still have an affair. You might think to yourself that they'll never find out and it will do them no harm, and you'll be a happier partner to them. You might avoid lying directly or tell yourself that lots of people have secrets from their spouse and it's not such a big deal.

But as long as you're putting your spouse at any risk of pain, however remote, you're not being loving to them. You might think they're great, and wonderful - but you're not seriously worried about hurting them. However deep the love you may feel for them, it's worthless if it doesn't affect how you act towards them.

@ravenmum

Exactly, you may think you love your spouse but you dont.

Love means not hurting someone.

Also, the act of love is meant to be selfless.

This applies to the ow who thinks she loves the affair partner but really it's not love.
If you truly loved someone you wouldn't put them in the position of abandoning their family/children above your need for affection, which may or may not last.

I would also say that this thread highlights the difference between posters who realise what love actually is.

Many of the posters, (if any of you have been in the position of being on the receiving end of the devastation of an affair).... can I say your partners were bloody idiots, never deserved you, your intellegence and your understanding of real love.

You know who you are...

@Dadaist - I'm not sure that you've read @MadCatLady71 post properly...

@MadCatLady71 - have you read bell hooks? It sounds a lot like the way she talks about love, as an action rather than a feeling. my partner is reading one of her books at the moment, and it's really interesting.

Regarding the substantive point that you're making, though, that it's not possible to do that with more than one person, I'm not sure I agree. I think what is often common for people who are monogamous, is that they think about their existing relationship and multiply that by two and can't see how there is enough time. But you have to remember that, generally, the person you are loving also has other partners - so the emotional labour of love that you outline is shared collectively, rather than in just one dyadic unit.

I have two partners, for full disclosure, and they each have (at least one other) partner. One of my partners lives with his partner of many years, they own a house together, my other partner lives alone (as do I). His other partner lives several 100 miles away, and they see each other just once a month. None of our relationships look 'the same', but there is a lot of love and care in them, expressed in different ways, and we definitely work as a wider collective unit sometimes.

I think it's a different 'way' of loving someone, but I don't think that it isn't love. I also don't think that it's for everyone, and that's also completely ok. I do, however, think honesty is really important - if you're going to love more than one person, they need to know about that. And, actually, when you are open about it, it can be really beautiful. I have a really good friendship with my partner's partner. We chat independently of him, and are emotional supports for each other...it's a very different kind of relationship to a normal friendship, but it's a really nice one.

Anyway, enough from me...

if you're going to love more than one person, they need to know about that.
And be honestly happy with it, obviously :) I guess that system can also work better or worse from case to case, the same as monogamy, but when it does succeed, then I'd say yes, you're acting lovingly.

you may think you love your spouse but you dont.
I don't know. Maybe cheaters do love their spouse, but just not as much as they think. Or maybe their feelings of love and their feelings of greed, excitement or selfishness are competing and love momentarily comes second. Then self-deception kicks in so they don't feel quite so bad. You could argue that it's only really love when people don't cheat, but I'm not sure I'd go that far - too pragmatic I guess.

@MadCatLady71 - I think I misread you post and agree with you more on reflection-so apologies. I imagine you are/were talking more about polyamory- where of course you can have love for more than one person - as opposed to infidelity- where you are actively deceiving the person you ‘love’. I think my calling out is on the view that ‘following your heart’ means cheating when necessary.

@ravenmum - definitely you need to be happy with it, for sure. I think that sometimes this can be the hardest part to convince people on the outside, especially as a woman. People often think that I'm being taken advantage of, or trying to play the 'cool girl', when it was actually a relationship model i actively sought out.

With regards to the question posed by the OP in the context of infidelity, I think that does get really complicated. I think while the person who is cheating may think that they still love their spouse, often the spouse themselves feels betrayed and unloved. and certainly, you are not loving them in the way that you promised to love them when you agreed to enter into a monogamous marriage.

Sometimes the process of falling in love with someone else while you're in a monogamous relationship does happen, and can be a really destabilising thing to experience when it does. For people who had thought themselves monogamous, it can be very confusing and if you're in a monogamous relationship, there isn't really the 'space' to discuss how you're feeling, and what it means for your existing relationship. Sometimes, people push the feelings away (go no contact, refocus on their marriage) but often the same issue will pop up over and over again, until perhaps one day they have to take a hard look at themselves and their wiring.

anyway...i know this won't go down well, but it's my musing for the morning.

it will be almost inevitable in every relationship that at some point, one party will be attracted to someone else
Fancying someone isn't loving them, though. Fancying someone is something you can deal with all on your own, with no need for your partner to worry. You surely can't get to the point of actually loving someone without first deliberately going through various barriers of behaviour that are not appropriate in a monogamous relationship?