Topics Love

Question Given the complexity of human relations, given the death of "till death do us part" and given the near-acceptance of a normal human acquiring more than one partner during his/her lifetime, we have entered an age where the phrase "I love you" has been devalued from the "I love you, for ever and ever" of our forefathers to the "I love you at the moment" of today. My question therefore is: Is it possible to love two people at once?

Accepted:
January 15, 2006

Comments

I guess I want to begin by saying that I deny your premise. I think we actually have very little reason for thinking that our forefathers were more loving, or meant more when they said "I love you" than we do. It may be true that marriages did not as often end in divorce as they do now, but I strongly suspect that the explanations of this fact have very little to do with our ancestors being more loving, or more stable in their loves. In many ways, actually, I am inclined to think that the relevant sorts of relationships in most cultures of earlier times were more exploitative, more limiting, more unequal, and less about "love" (in any form I would be willing to recognize) than relationships are now, at least where women's rights are recognized (if not, alas, always respected).

As for your second question, the answer will depend upon what you mean by "love." Certainly most people who love their spouses also love their children, parents, and close friends. But you would no doubt object that these are different kinds of love. I have a suspicion that absolutely every attachment that goes by the name of "love" is in some ways different in kind from every other such attachment, and so in some sense it will be true that one won't have the very same feelings for any two people at once or even in an entire lifetime. But perhaps you would still find this an evasion of your question. Perhaps you mean by "love" a kind of attachment that is absolutely exclusive of any others of the same kind. But then the answer to your question obviously follows from the definition of "love" so defined. It may be (though I tend to doubt it) that there is a kind (or are kinds) of love that is (are) completely exclusive, but most kinds of love, obviously, are not exclusive in that way. Romantic love seems to tend to exclusivity--but I think many people have found themselves in a situation where they would honestly claim to love more than one person romantically. One thing is for sure in such cases, given the way society is configured: Such a person's life is likely to become very complicated!