Ryan Crossfield

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off topic: can you love more than one person?

It’s very rare to find someone that can be everything to you. So we weigh the pros and cons, sacrificing one thing for the other. Ultimately giving up on certain things to be happy in others. It’s a balance.

Can giving up on things we want every make us truly happy? Can we find a way to have everything? 

I guess that means challenging the very foundation of what we call love, or relationships in general. 

Love is a shared unity. Both beautiful and painful. 

When we think of love, it’s always exclusive, between only one person and another. But why? Can’t we love one person, and another equally? Why are there limits? Where did they come from? It’s most likely from our necessity to acquire rare things, call them possessions, and hold onto them so that no one else can have them. But this sacrifice works both ways — in the classical sense of monogamous relationships — as the possessor is just as limited as the possessee when it comes to true fulfillment. Both are having to give up something on their way to meet somewhere in the middle. The question is, why should we limit our fulfillment to one outlet? Why is that even a good idea? We diversify our bonds to make more money. Why can’t we receive love or things we need from multiple sources? Wouldn’t we be more fulfilled? This works on the presupposition that if we had everything we needed from multiple outlets, we would ultimately be a better person overall. But in general, we don’t. We are all longing for one thing or another. The question is why?

I think it all comes back to tradition, and what we think is “right.” If you repeat a “wrong” enough times it eventually is thought to be right. This isn’t to say that loving one person is wrong if they provide you with everything you could ever need and ask for. FUCK I wish I had that, but I don’t, which leads me down this rabbit hole of how did we get here. Why is the current structure — you only get one person to love — all that we have when we are so very different and continually changing throughout our lives? What if you find someone worth entering into a relationship with, yet down the road they become less and less of the person you fell for in the beginning, but just enough that they aren’t worth moving on from because you’ve built a family and a life you’re not ready to move on from? Now those sacrifices that were bearable in the beginning are starting to get to you, so are we expected to just deal with the decline? Why can’t we, for lack of a better word, “supplement” what we need at that point? It just comes back to finding the love you need in different place. Wouldn’t that be better?

It seems like even asking that question is off limits to most people. And I know personally that it is absolutely shattering to not be someone’s everything, but at the same time it makes sense. We are all so uniquely different, so how can we expect to fulfill someone’s every need (outside of finding soulmates or whatever)? It really comes down to what are people okay with entering into. We can have sacrifice, or we can try to have it all. I don’t have any answer here, I just want things I can’t have.