Saturday, May 19, 2007

The One?

A correspondent asks whether it is possible to love two people at once. My response is to wonder whether it is possible to love just one, famously "The One."

Let's set aside the various kinds of love: for family, for friends, erotic or romantic, and altruistic or self-giving -- in Greek: storge, philia, eros, and agape. I wrote about this here.

Defining love, classifying it, moralizing about it, are all distractions.

We all know what love is, most prominently we notice its absence from our lives, our communities, our world. The question about loving two need not be circumscribed to romantic love, although it most often is.

Still, I wonder whether it is possible to love just one person.

Might there not be one person with whom it is a joy to discourse about the economy, politics, literature? Another with whom a shared meal, perhaps cooking for or being cooked for by that person, is a sheer delight? Could not another offer a storybook home, replete with children? Yet another share an interest in tennis or boardgames?

Why must these affinities and shared pleasures lead to the bed, or merely the sofa, or skinny dipping, in only one instance?

All right, we carry the Judaeo-Christian monkey on our backs. Adultery is wrong because ... it muddied up paternity for the purposes of inheritance during the period in which property was almost exclusively held by men. That's not what God allegedly told Moses, nor what the rabbis and priests want you to take home with you after you've helped fill the collection plate.

But it happens to be the best explanation for a moral imperative so widely contravened.

Yes, surely, there's also pregnancy and disease, but there's also birth control, safe sex and medicine. Besides, didn't I just finish pointing to the sofa (or the back seat of a Dodge), the quintessential locale for making out of a non-penetrational nature?

Must every expression of intimacy, desire, pleasure in another necessarily end up with an exchange of genital fluids? Isn't kissing and embracing just as necessary for the sanity of mammals?

Might there not, then, be two or three bed partners, five or six sofa partners and ten or eleven merely hugging and hand-holding partners, each with a different set of emotional, intellectual and activity affinities?

Admittedly, this is a question more often raised by a man. Just as my correspondent's question is most often raised by a woman.

Yet even the most Puritan of women experience a range of physical intimacy -- from sex to kissing, embracing and even just touching -- with a very large set of concentric circles of people. In contrast, the serially monogamous male usually is physically intimate with one adult at a time, perhaps a few children.

Women will often admit that they wished they could be lesbian, as they share so much with other women, even though for sex they desire a man, preferably one man. Why couldn't a community of women sexually share a man? Or why couldn't a community of women share a community of men?

Why couldn't a community of men share a woman? The woman would be too lonely; a community of men is an unsentimental, competitive, relatively Spartan environment.

With the divorce rate what it is, with relationships in general so ephemeral, with the reality that it is unlikely that one person -- The One -- will amply satisfy another emotionally, intellectually, physically and so forth, shouldn't we rethink the couple paradigm?

Yes, Virginia, it is possible to love two people at once, intensely, honorably, lovingly. Indeed, I doubt that it is possible to love just one, happily ever after.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't mere friendship the solution for 98% of the occasions of love?

For The One, I still think it's possible but I think it's more like a maddening affair than a happily everafter, and the chances of having 100% of all the supporting elements in the culture of The One love are minimal.

(Which is why I settled for less.)

Anonymous said...
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Cecilio Morales said...

Anne, why settle for less?

Genevieve, is it possible to have one lover?

Anonymous said...

Yes, I think so. Only one. The whole person. Therefore, the problem is the demanding dimension of duration: from childhood to old age. No way to play a music with an old score and a new score at the same time, or successively. Or it is not love.Ideal love.

thailandchani said...

I will admit that my views on this are very skewed. There's barely a hint of the romantic in me.

To answer your question, I do believe it is possible to love more than one person. Of course it is. However, I believe that for social purposes and general life stability, it is better to build a life with only one.

I like the way Alice Walker put it: "familiar companionability".



Peace,


~Chani

Anonymous said...

Cecilieaux said...
Anne, why settle for less?

Lack of trust, I suppose.

Anne

Snoskred said...

Hi, it's Snoskred here. I'm just dropping by to let you know that I read your blog with google reader whenever you update, and that I enjoy your blog. I'm re-doing my links on my blog, and I have linked to you in the sidebar.

As for the one, I think it is possible, but you are still allowed to window shop as long as you don't touch. ;)

Cecilio Morales said...

I was out of town this weekend and to the new comments, I'd say ...

... I assumed that children are dispensed with (see http://cecilieaux.blogspot.com/2006/02/worst-thing-you-can-do-to-your-lover.html);

... mistrust is what comes from a bad experience, I think, and this makes me sad;

... the idea of window shopping makes me begin to think of a follow-up post.

Stay tuned.

Anonymous said...
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