Love is a many spendoured thing, or love is a many splintered thing?
The greatest thing about love is its unpredictability, its non-compartmentability, its incomprehensiveness. Despite the multi-billion people who have experienced love no-one has been able to get into its psyche, to tame it.
From the three previous articles my personal observations lead me to believe:
- there are many different kinds of love.
- we are capable of falling in love with thousands of different people.
- we can love more than one person at any given time.
- some people have life partners and some do not.
- love is on a gradient; we can love one person more than another.
- it depends on the individual as to how much in love one needs to be in order to be satisfied one has found their life partner.
So can anything useful be garnered from these observations? The main conclusion that I keep on returning to is that it appears to be quite natural to have more than one partner.
I’m certainly not advocating having simultaneous partners, this is easy to refute; just imagine how you would feel if your partner had an alternate. But it is pretty clear that over the course of a lifetime the possibility arises for an individual to be in love several times.
This is rather at odds with a conventional Western view of marriage and family, where one life partner, and a stable home for any children is widely considered the ideal. Perhaps it isn’t.
Perhaps if more fluidity were considered the norm, then the fears and stigmas of broken homes might be avoided, and might be viewed with much less embarrassment and contempt.
For ‘broken homes’ maybe we should substitute ‘multi-homes’. After all some so-called stable homes are not exactly dens of pleasure, and plenty of children from so-called broken homes grow up to be decent, rounded people.
Maybe we should worry less about love, and more about its effects.
thiNK TWice 