Can You Love More Than One Person? Rethinking the Assumption of Monogamy

It is always fascinating to me, in the work that I do, how often people find themselves completely destabilized by the realization that they love more than one person. I have worked with many people who are in monogamous relationships, sometimes long-term relationships or marriages that they deeply value, who find themselves grappling with the reality that they have fallen in love with somebody else. Sometimes it begins as an emotional affair. Sometimes they weren’t looking for another relationship at all, and a friendship or another connection unexpectedly deepened into something much more significant. Other times, I work with people who were openly dating multiple people, perhaps with the intention of eventually finding a life partner, and then discover that the problem is not that none of these relationships feel right. The problem is that more than one of them does.

This can be an incredibly earth-shattering experience, in part because most of us have been surrounded by mononormativity for so long that we don’t even recognize it as a particular worldview. It just feels like reality. We grow up immersed in stories about finding the one. The songs we listen to tell us, over and over again, that there is one person unlike anyone else, one person who completes us, one person we will choose above all others. Our television shows and movies are filled with love triangles in which the central tension is eventually resolved when someone finally figures out who they are really supposed to be with. Even in ordinary conversation, we ask someone whether they have a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a husband, a wife, a partner. Almost always singular.

Interestingly, I think we have become more conscious, at least in some communities, about many of the assumptions we make about other people. Someone may be careful not to automatically assume another person’s sexuality. They may understand that the person sitting across from them could have a completely different religious framework, cultural background, gender identity, or way of organizing their life. And yet when it comes to relationship structure, boy, oh boy, do we still tend to assume monogamy. Monogamy remains so culturally dominant that it is often treated not as one possible way of structuring romantic relationships, but simply as what a relationship is.

And yet, human beings are entirely capable of developing profound attachments to more than one person. Loving more than one person is not some bizarre failure of the human attachment system. For many people, it is simply part of their lived experience.

The more interesting question, then, may not be whether you can love more than one person.

You can.

The harder question is: what are you going to make that mean?

The more interesting question may not be whether you can love more than one person. You can. The harder question is: what are you going to make that mean?

I want to make an important distinction at the outset, because I don’t believe that developing feelings for another person means that someone is secretly polyamorous, nor do I believe that non-monogamy is somehow a more psychologically evolved relationship structure that everyone would eventually choose if they just did enough deconstruction.

People in deeply monogamous relationships can experience attraction to other people. They can develop crushes. They can experience profound erotic chemistry outside of their relationship. They can even fall in love. The capacity to form multiple attachments is not necessarily the same thing as wanting to organize your life around multiple romantic partnerships.

I think it can be useful to separate at least three things that frequently get collapsed together: the capacity to love more than one person, the desire to maintain more than one romantic or sexual relationship, and the decision to actually practice consensual non-monogamy. Those are different things.

You may discover that you can love two people and still deeply desire monogamy. You may recognize that there are parts of you that could imagine multiple partnerships, but the practical reality of maintaining them sounds completely exhausting. You may decide that the relationship you already have is more important to you than exploring other attachments. You may have a partner who wants monogamy and decide that being with that person matters more to you than pursuing a non-monogamous relationship structure.

Or, perhaps, the experience of loving more than one person opens a door that is difficult to close again. Maybe it makes you curious about assumptions you have never actually examined. Maybe you begin to wonder whether the distress you are experiencing comes entirely from loving multiple people, or whether some of it comes from believing that loving multiple people means something has gone terribly wrong. Those are very different therapeutic conversations.

I have worked with clients who come into therapy feeling as though they are standing at an impossible crossroads. They have two relationships that matter enormously to them, and they are trying desperately to determine which person is the right person. Often, there is an assumption embedded in the question that nobody has stopped to examine: I have to choose.

If you are going to live within a monogamous framework, then yes, eventually there may be a choice that needs to be made. But I think it can be incredibly useful to slow down before we get there and ask why that framework is being treated as inevitable in the first place.

Sometimes therapy becomes an endless exercise in comparing two people. Who are you more sexually compatible with? Who makes you feel safer? Who shares more of your interests? Who would make the better co-parent? Who understands you more deeply? Who can you imagine growing old with?

And sometimes the maddening answer is: both of them.

This is where I become less interested in helping somebody perform a romantic version of a pros-and-cons list and more interested in understanding their internal world. What happens inside of you in each of these relationships? What parts of yourself come alive? What are you longing for? What do you believe love is supposed to look like? What do commitment and exclusivity mean to you? And perhaps most importantly, if there were no cultural rule requiring one of these people to eventually win, what would you actually want?

That doesn’t mean you will necessarily get to have it. Wanting something and being able to ethically construct a life around it are two completely different things. But I think there is tremendous value in knowing what is actually true before deciding what to do about it.

One of the things I appreciate about non-monogamy is something that we already seem to understand intuitively about friendship: different people bring out different parts of who we are. We don’t ordinarily expect one friend to satisfy every relational need we have. We generally don’t experience those relationships as being in competition with one another. The existence of one friendship doesn’t automatically invalidate the significance of another.

Romantic relationships are often treated differently. There can be an extraordinary expectation placed on one person to become our lover, best friend, primary attachment figure, intellectual companion, co-parent, financial partner, roommate, travel companion, erotic counterpart, emotional confidant, and witness to nearly every dimension of our adult lives.

For some people, that works beautifully. For other people, multiple romantic or sexual attachments allow them to experience different aspects of themselves in relationship with different humans. Someone may make you playful. Someone else may bring out an intellectual part of you that has been dormant for years. A particular relationship might awaken your eroticism. Another person might share a history with you that nobody else ever could.

There are parts of ourselves that become visible through the eyes of particular people, and sometimes when we lose a relationship, we aren’t only grieving the person. We are grieving the version of ourselves that we got to experience while being witnessed by them. This is one reason why “just choose” can be so much more emotionally complicated than it sounds.

There is another way that I see people attempt to resolve this conflict, and it is important to talk about it honestly. Sometimes people decide, consciously or unconsciously, that they are going to remain publicly and relationally identified as monogamous while privately engaging in non-monogamy. In other words, they maintain more than one relationship without the knowledge or consent of the people involved.

I can understand why this can become psychologically appealing. In some ways, it appears to offer the best of both worlds. You get to remain legible within the dominant culture. You don’t have to come out as non-monogamous. You don’t have to sit across from a beloved partner and tell them something that may activate tremendous attachment fear. And, at least for a while, you don’t have to relinquish either relationship.

Except there is a cost here too. In my experience, living this way often creates enormous chronic stress. It requires compartmentalization, vigilance, concealment, and the constant management of multiple realities. And for people who identify strongly with values like honesty, authenticity, transparency, or congruence, it can create an increasingly painful internal split. You may understand yourself as somebody who values honesty while simultaneously building important parts of your relational life around dishonesty. That incongruence tends to add up over time.

There is also, of course, the very real possibility of discovery. What may have begun as a complicated but understandable human experience of loving more than one person can eventually become entangled with betrayal, shattered trust, grief, and the devastation of realizing that another person was making consequential decisions about your relationship without giving you access to the information necessary to make your own.

Discovering that you may be capable of non-monogamy doesn’t retroactively make non-consensual non-monogamy consensual. Our desires can be real. Our attachments can be real. And we still have responsibilities to the people with whom we have made agreements.

Our desires can be real. Our attachments can be real. And we still have responsibilities to the people with whom we have made agreements.

There can be something incredibly vulnerable about telling the truth about what you want, particularly when you know that your truth may hurt someone you love. Imagine that you have fallen in love with two people and, after doing a tremendous amount of internal work, you realize that you don’t actually want to choose between them. If you want to explore that desire ethically, you are going to have to tell the truth. And the other person gets to have a response to that truth.

They may be hurt. They may panic. Their attachment system may become completely activated. They may wonder whether they are enough, whether they are being replaced, whether the relationship was ever what they thought it was. They may need time. They may have boundaries. They may tell you that non-monogamy is absolutely not something they are willing to participate in. And then you have another decision to make.

This is part of why I don’t think authenticity should be confused with doing whatever feels most authentic to you regardless of its impact on other people. In many cases, living authentically actually requires more relational responsibility, not less. It asks us to tolerate difficult conversations, disappointment, misunderstanding, attachment distress, and the possibility that somebody we love may make a choice we desperately wish they wouldn’t make.

You are allowed to tell somebody the truth about who you are. They are allowed to tell you that they cannot build a life around that truth. Sometimes there is no villain in that story. There is simply incompatibility, and incompatibility can be profoundly painful.

When clients become stuck in these kinds of dilemmas, I often find it helpful to move away from the question of which relationship is “better” and begin talking about values.

What are the most important values in your life? For myself, as someone who has engaged in a lot of deconstruction and tends to see many aspects of human relationships outside of the dominant social constructs surrounding them, I know that authenticity matters enormously to me. I value congruence, the experience of what you see is what you get. I value honoring the actual human experience I am having rather than continually trying to force myself to become the version of myself I think I am supposed to be.

I value love. I value attachment and connection. I see enormous value in having many different kinds of meaningful attachments throughout our lives, and I don’t experience the existence of multiple attachments as inherently threatening or negative. I value freedom, choice, individuation, and having a strong sense of who I am as a person. And because these are some of my values, I know that I am personally more willing to tolerate a certain amount of social misunderstanding than I am willing to tolerate feeling fundamentally incongruent within myself.

Those are my answers. They do not have to be yours.

Maybe family is one of the most important values in your life. Maybe you belong to a cultural or religious community that gives you tremendous meaning, identity, continuity, and connection, and you know that openly practicing non-monogamy could jeopardize your belonging within it. Maybe you are willing to sacrifice some amount of internal freedom in order to protect something else that you value more. I am not interested in telling someone that this is the wrong choice. I am interested in helping them understand that it is a choice, and that choices have costs.

One question I sometimes find useful is this: If nobody was watching you answer, if nobody would ever know what you said, and this answer existed only between you and you, what would you actually want? Not what are you going to do. Not yet. What do you actually want? Sometimes simply answering that question honestly can be an incredibly significant piece of therapeutic work.

I also want to be thoughtful whenever I talk about deconstruction because the ability to openly question dominant cultural narratives is not equally safe or accessible to everyone. I live in California. I am surrounded, on average, by fairly progressive communities and by people from many different cultural backgrounds, religious traditions, sexualities, gender identities, and ways of organizing their lives. When I came out to people in my own life as polyamorous, I had real fears about how some people would respond, including whether I might be shunned by members of my family. I have been extraordinarily fortunate that, for the most part, very little about my life changed.

That is a privilege.

Not everyone lives in a community where openly practicing non-monogamy is socially safe. Depending on someone’s family, culture, religious framework, financial circumstances, employment, parenting situation, or broader community, telling the truth about a nontraditional relationship structure may carry consequences that an article on the internet cannot possibly understand.

You know your context better than I do. Deconstruction does not mean that you have to blow up your life in order to prove that you are psychologically liberated. Sometimes the work is simply creating enough internal room to know what is true for you, even if you ultimately make pragmatic choices about what parts of that truth you enact. What you know about yourself and what you decide to do with that knowledge are not always the same thing.

I think there can be something incredibly powerful about questioning a belief system and eventually landing right back where you started. Deconstruction doesn’t require rejection.

You might deeply examine monogamy. You might interrogate the messages you received about romantic exclusivity, jealousy, commitment, sex, family, marriage, and what makes a relationship legitimate. You might realize that you are absolutely capable of loving more than one person. You may even recognize that there are parts of non-monogamy that appeal to you. And after all of that, you may choose monogamy.

There is a meaningful difference, at least internally, between saying, “I am monogamous because that’s just what relationships are,” and saying, “I have thought deeply about how I want to organize my relational life. I understand that other possibilities exist. I have questioned what I was taught. And this is the structure I choose.” The external life may look exactly the same. Internally, though, there can be much more anchoring because you have developed a sense of authorship around your decision.

Sometimes the reasons are deeply emotional. Sometimes they are surprisingly pragmatic. You may have the emotional capacity to love several people but absolutely no desire to manage multiple romantic relationships. You may be raising children and feel stretched thin already. You may not want the scheduling, processing, communication, jealousy, negotiation, and emotional labor that can accompany non-monogamy.

You may love a monogamous partner enough that maintaining your relationship with them matters more to you than exploring other possibilities. Those are legitimate reasons to choose monogamy. You do not need to prove that monogamy represents the deepest truth of your soul before you are allowed to choose it.

Ultimately, I think one of the hardest things to accept in this work is that there may not be a decision available to you that doesn’t involve loss. The word decide comes from a Latin root carrying the sense of cutting off. I find that image incredibly poignant because that is so often what decision-making actually asks of us. When we choose one path, we relinquish others. When we choose one possible life, we grieve the lives we will not live.

If you decide that monogamy is the structure you want, you may have to sever an attachment to somebody you genuinely love. You may grieve that person, the future you imagined with them, the erotic or emotional experiences you shared, and the parts of yourself that came alive in their presence.

If you decide to pursue consensual non-monogamy, you may grieve simplicity. You may lose social approval. You may discover that somebody you deeply love does not want the relationship structure that you want, and you may lose that relationship.

If you decide to maintain multiple relationships secretly, you may temporarily postpone some of those losses, but you are choosing another set of costs: secrecy, incongruence, chronic anxiety, the violation of relational agreements, and the possibility of tremendous fallout when the truth eventually emerges.

Non-monogamy doesn’t eliminate grief. Monogamy doesn’t eliminate grief.

There isn’t necessarily a door marked NO LOSS that you simply haven’t been clever enough to find.

Sometimes therapy is less about figuring out how to make a decision without hurting and more about developing enough internal clarity to ask: what am I willing to grieve in service of the life I actually want to live? What matters enough to me that I am willing to tolerate the cost of choosing it? And which costs would require me to live too far outside of my own values?

So, can you love more than one person? Absolutely. But I am not sure that is ultimately the most interesting question.

Maybe the questions worth asking are: what does loving more than one person mean to you? What do you believe about commitment? What do you value about exclusivity, if anything? What do you value about freedom? What kinds of attachment and connection make your life feel richer? What agreements have you made with the people you love, and what responsibilities do those agreements create? What are you afraid you would lose if you stopped organizing your life around other people’s expectations? And what might you lose if you didn’t?

You may ask all of these questions and discover that you are deeply monogamous. You may discover that you aren’t. You may end up somewhere much messier in the middle.

I don’t believe that therapy should decide that answer for you. I think good therapy can help you become curious about the narratives you inherited, distinguish them from the values that actually feel like yours, and create enough room to encounter your lived experience with honesty and self-compassion. From there, you get to decide what kind of relational life you want to build, while also acknowledging the responsibilities, limitations, privileges, consequences, and grief that accompany that choice.

Because perhaps the goal isn’t to find the relationship structure that allows us to avoid every loss. Perhaps it is to know why we are choosing the life we are choosing, to understand what that choice asks us to relinquish, and to feel that, as much as possible, the person living that life is actually us.

If you’re navigating questions about relationship structure, loving more than one person, or the space between the life you were taught to want and the one you actually have, I offer therapy in Pasadena and via telehealth across California.