When You Love More Than One

There are people in this world who never loved any human being in their entire life. I have met many nuns and priests and monks who devoted their lives and energies serving God. For them God was their beloved and their dedication and commitment to Him were so deep, intimate and pervasive that there was no room in their heart for any human being. They could serve many human beings, considering them children of God, but did not develop any personal, emotional, romantic or sexual attachment with them. They considered such attachment sinful deterring them from their spiritual journey. They remained celibate, even chaste, all their lives. Their spirituality excluded any sexuality in their lives.

I have also met some men and women in my clinical practice as a psychotherapist who were so shy and introverted that they could not develop any strong emotional connection with other human beings. They lived alone all their adult lives and never had any close relationship with a friend or a lover. All their relationships were superficial. There were times they felt extremely lonely and sad even suicidal. Some of them wished to love someone but did not know how and wanted professional help to overcome their inhibitions and cope with their schizoid and introverted personality.

Then there are people who can only love one person at a time. They put all their eggs in one basket. Sometimes that love is platonic and affectionate, other times sexual. Sometimes they are friends as well as lovers. And then there are times when that relationship is sensual, more than platonic and less than sexual. Sometimes it is hard to classify such relationships as the words platonic, sensual and sexual do not truly reflect the nature of feelings or the dynamics of the relationships. Even in the same relationship two participants might feel differently. Two people who love each other might have different expectations. One might like to keep it platonic, the other wishing to make it sexual. One might like to get married and the other to live common-law. One might like to have an extra-marital affair while the other reluctant to get involved considering it immoral. One might associate sex with sin and guilt, the other with love and affection. One might be controlled by the cultural morality while the other might easily ignore it and follow his / her heart more than the social norms. Each person who loves gives a unique meaning to the experience.

And then there are people who are able to love more than one at the same time. Such people have poly-philous personality. Such people stir up a lot of intense emotions in themselves and others, and can cause serious emotional and social conflicts. Their lives are complex and complicated. Loving more than one person at the same time is hard for many people to handle as it creates situations that most people do not know how to cope. If those relationships are platonic and affectionate, they are relatively easy to deal with. Even such relationships can generate intense feelings of jealousy. I have met many close friends who are jealous of each other as they want the attention of the same person at the same time. In my opinion those people who have low self-esteem and feel insecure and have not resolved sibling rivalry issues in their childhood have more tendency to feel jealous.

When the loving relationships also become sexual, the conflicts become more intense. Since human sexuality is intimately connected with social morality, such relationships are judged on moral grounds rather than understood on psychological basis. Those men and women who love more than one are perceived as unfaithful and are asked to limit their love to only one person. It is hard for some people to understand that one person cannot fulfill all the emotional, intellectual, social and creative needs of the other person.

Most communities and countries that consider monogamy as normal and healthy have laws to defend monogamous marriages and judge people with poly-philous personality harshly. In these communities those people who love more than one, are always in conflict. Poly-philous people living in monogamous communities are not different than homosexual and bi-sexual men and women living in heterosexual societies. Many of them are judged, penalized and persecuted, even executed.

The more we understand human psychology and sociology, the more we realize that human sexuality is mysterious and love does not follow social norms, legal institutions and religious traditions. Laws of the state and traditions of the religion are made to regulate and control people’s behavior by declaring certain behaviors illegal, immoral and sinful, even unnatural and those people who do not follow those laws and traditions are declared delinquent and sinners. But those people who want to follow their hearts and love many people intensely find those traditions restrictive. For them to follow their love they have to take risks and offer sacrifices. It is also sad that many families, communities and cultures judge women more harshly than men as they have double standards.

With recent advances in science, psychology and technology humanity is passing through a transitional phase and human beings have to make certain choices individually and collectively. We can ask human beings to sacrifice their love on the altar of state laws and religious traditions or we can raise social consciousness and change state laws, social norms and religious traditions so that more and more human beings can enjoy different forms of love without feeling guilty or afraid of punitive social repercussions. In the Western world social acceptance of common-law relationships and legal acceptance of gay and lesbian marriages is a progressive step welcomed by many loving couples.

Those people who have a poly-philous personality believe that if you love more than one, love multiplies, it does not divide. Many such people have a creative and non-traditional lifestyle. When I studied the biographies of creative personalities, whether scientists or artists, poets or philosophers, reformers or revolutionaries, I discovered that many of them had a poly-philous personality. Whether it was Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung, Pablo Picasso or Ernest Hemingway, Mohammad Iqbal or Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Josh Maleehabadi or Mustafa Zaidi, Saadat Hasan Minto or Ahmad Faraz, Sara Shagufta or Ismat Chughtai, Karl Marx or Viladmir Lenin, Anais Nin or Henry Miller, Jean Paul Sartre or Simon de Bouvoir, they all loved more than one person at the same time. Sometimes those relationships were platonic, sometimes sensual and sometimes sexual. Many of them faced a number of emotional, family and social dilemmas to fulfill their dreams. There were times they were judged harshly as they challenged the traditions of monogamous communities, the same way homosexual and bisexual artists and intellectuals challenge the norms of a heterosexual society.

I think time has come for all of us to have a new look at the mysteries of love and try to understand the minority of homo-sexual, bi-sexual and poly-philous people rather than judging them as they experience and express their love differently than the majority of traditional people. Let us celebrate the magic of love as it has different forms and colors like the colors and forms of a rainbow.