Is it possible to love two people at the same time?
The affective life of the vast majority of people is usually well nourished by doubts about what it means to have a partner and about how a "normal" relationship should develop.
These are small questions that assail us with a greater or lesser intensity and that make us ask ourselves if the loving bond that unites us to the other person is authentic, or if our needs and feelings fit with what is supposed to be a traditional romantic relationship. And, one of the most frequent questions about that is the following: is it normal to love two people at the same time?
In this article we will try to answer this question, which, notice, is complicated.
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A moral dilemma about love
The first thing we have to understand when addressing this issue is that the question of whether it is normal to love more than one person at the same time is a moral doubt. What does this mean? Well, it means that an answer to this question, so that it satisfies us, must be of a moral nature , that is, we have to talk about whether it is good or bad to love two or more people at a time and if that is compatible with a relationship.
It is necessary to highlight this fact, because the initial question masks the nature of the doubt when talking about what is "normal" and what is not: technically, normality is ascertained by measuring the number of times in which this phenomenon occurs in people. Let's say that 80% of human beings have loved more than one person at the same time (invented percentage). Will we be satisfied with this response? Well, in the vast majority of cases, no, because what we really wanted to know is if the legitimate feel that or relate in a certain way with these people feeling that. To notice the frequency with which this fact occurs in other people will not tell us anything about whether that is good or bad.
But this is not the only idea we have to consider before answering the question; there is another.
The couple as a social construct
Let's think for a moment about the reason why we ask ourselves the initial question. If we reflect on that, it is because we take it for granted that there is a way to relate to the people we love that is more likely to be normal than the rest of the options. If we have doubts about whether wanting several people at the same time is normal but we do not have them about whether it is normal to want (in a romantic way) only one person, it is because in our culture there is a lot of social pressure that leads us to establish loving relationships with only one person at a time .
Now, independently of this social influence, does there exist in the design of our body something that establishes that we should only love a person romantically, in the same way that our body is something that prevents us from hearing unless we Let's plug our ears? The most obvious answer is no: the proof is that many people realize that they want more than one person. Our biological constitution does not prevent us, what prevents us to a certain degree is the social influence.
This idea that there are perverse "emotional deviations" coming from the culture that make a so-called monogamy naturally programmed in our organism can not be expressed correctly is erroneous, as well as essentialist. For example, cases of infidelity are frequent in many animal species that, in theory, are monogamous (or at least try to pretend). In fact, some studies have shown that the success of some animal forms depends largely on combining monogamy with discrete infidelities.
So, to understand if it is good to love two or more people, we will have to ask ourselves whether the legitimate one or not to disobey those social rules, and if it is useful to let these rules dictate how we should manage our emotions.
Differentiating between feeling and acting
To answer the question of moral character we should ask ourselves the question whether the fact that we romantically love more than one person harms others or not. The default answer is no. Why? Well, because, on the one hand, our feelings only concern us, and on the other, these feelings do not force us to behave in a way that could harm others .
That is to say, we can love several individuals without this being translated into a series of actions that we can not control and that, therefore, can harm others. That an intense feeling be born in us does not mean that this will transform us into an uncontrollable and harmful being, because we have the capacity to manage the way in which we express our emotions.
The importance of the communication
And what happens when you are in a monogamous relationship and you start to feel love for another person? Is this bad? The answer, although it may collide at first, is again no. Of course, it is a fact that can cause pain, but it is not a bad thing in a moral sense. For it to be, we should have had the possibility to choose between the option of loving another person and not doing it, but this never happens.
That does not mean that this simultaneous infatuation can not lead us to take a morally wrong path. For example, if we know that our relationship is based on a commitment and on the idea of exclusive love, that means that if we start to feel something for someone else we should inform our partner. Otherwise, we will be cheating, and the psychological consequences of this can be very hard, because not only the relationship is in crisis but also the other person will feel denigrated and low self-esteem, thinking that it is not even worthy to know the truth and be able to decide what to do with the relationship.
In short: is it possible to love several people?
Ultimately, if there is something that we should be clear about when considering whether it is normal to feel something for several people at the same time, it is that not only is it normal, but when it happens we can not avoid it. Behaving in a manner more or less consistent with an ethical code will depend on the commitment we have made to the people involved and on whether it is met or not, for which communication is essential. In some cases, as for example in those in which the love and affective life is expressed through polyamory, the room for maneuver will be much broader and possibly this will be an issue that will not worry us so much.
As for social norms, these will have an effect on our propensity to adopt one or the other commitment with the people in which our love is reciprocated (almost always we will choose monogamy, in the majority), but beyond that we do not have to stick to them , for what has been said above: in our feelings, or rather in the way in which we experience them in a subjective way, we send ourselves.
