The emotional life of the vast majority of people is usually well fed with 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 lesser or greater intensity and that make us wonder if the love bond that unites us with 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 frequently asked questions about that is this: Is it normal to love two people at the same time?

In this article we will try to answer this question, which, I warn you, is complicated.

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 question. What does this mean? Well, it means that an answer to this question, in order to satisfy us, must be of a moral nature , that is, it has to talk about whether it is good or bad to love two or more people at the same time and whether that is compatible with a couple’s relationship.

It is necessary to emphasize 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 found by measuring the number of times 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 answer? Well, in the vast majority of cases, no, because what we really wanted to know is whether it is legitimate to feel that or to relate in some way to these people feeling that. Looking at how often 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 one.

The couple as a social construct

Let us think for a moment about why we are asking the initial question. If we reflect on it, it is because we take for granted that there is a way to relate to the people we love that is more likely to be normal than the other options. If we have doubts about whether loving several people at the same time is normal but we don’t have doubts about whether it is normal to love (romantically) only one person at a time, it is because in our culture there is a lot of social pressure that leads us to establish love relationships with only one person at a time .

Now, regardless of this social influence, is there anything in the design of our body that states that we should only love one person romantically, just as there is something in our body that prevents us from stopping hearing unless we cover our ears? The most obvious answer is no: the proof is that many people realize that they love more than one person. Our biological constitution does not prevent us from doing so; what prevents us from doing so to some degree is social influence.

This idea that there are perverse “affective deviations” coming from culture that make a supposed monogamy naturally programmed in our organism impossible to express 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 appear so). In fact, some studies have shown that the success of some animal forms depends largely on a combination of monogamy and discreet infidelities.

So, to understand whether it is good to love two or more people, we will have to ask ourselves whether or not it is legitimate to disobey these social rules, and whether 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 whether the fact that we love more than one person romantically harms others or not. The default answer is no. Why? Because, on the one hand, our feelings only concern us, and on the other hand, these feelings do not force us to behave in a way that can harm others .

In other words, we can love several individuals without this translating into a series of actions that we cannot control and that, therefore, can harm others. The fact that an intense feeling is 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 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 shock at first, is again no. Of course, it is a fact that can produce pain, but it is not bad in a moral sense. For it to be so, we should have been able to choose between loving another person and not doing so, but this never happens.

That does not mean that this simultaneous infatuation cannot lead us to take a path that is morally wrong. 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 must inform our partner. If not, we will be cheating on her, and the psychological consequences of this can be very hard, since not only does the relationship go into crisis but also the other person will feel denigrated and have low self-esteem, thinking that they are not even worthy of knowing the truth and being able to decide what to do with the relationship.

In short: is it possible to love several people?

In short, if there is one thing we must be clear about when considering whether it is normal to feel something for several people at once, it is that not only is it normal, but when it happens we cannot help it. Whether we behave more or less according to a code of ethics will depend on the commitment we have made to the people involved and whether or not this commitment is fulfilled, for which communication is essential. In some cases, such as those where love and affectionate life is expressed through polyamory, the room for manoeuvre will be much wider and possibly this will not be an issue that concerns us so much.

As for social norms, these will have an effect on our propensity to adopt one or another commitment to people in which our love is reciprocated (monogamy will almost always be chosen, in most cases), but beyond that we do not have to stick to them , because of what was said before: in our feelings, or rather in the way we experience them in a subjective way, we are in charge.