Is non-monogamous love shallower?
Article • 305 Words • Non-monogamy, Love/Romance, 2025 • 06/15/2025
Love is not a finite resource, so loving multiple people does not take away from the amount of love you have for them.
- In this way, I do not think that being non-monogamous adds a limit to the amount of love/depth in a relationship.
- It certainly can limit the time that you can give someone, but that is a different (but related) thing to love.
- I think that love and depth in a relationship is more related to intimacy than time, and time-intimacy is not a linear relationship. The more appropriate variable is probably effort/work, and has varying degrees of pay-off between different people.
I think that non-monogamous love can feel shallower, and this is not a bad thing! You shouldn’t moralize it and there’s actually a pretty good reason for this to happen.
- You may wonder to yourself: “Why am I not all-consumed? Shouldn’t I be spending all my waking moments thinking about this person?”
- Well, should you be all-consumed? Is that something you want? In what ways would you benefit from it compared to a “less consuming” form of love?
If you only had pretty enmeshed relationships beforehand, you would understandably and almost certainly associate love with enmeshment.
- Most media portrayals of love are of this whirlwind nature where there’s a lot of big feelings
- It just takes some updates to your assumptions and associations (un-learning via re-training)
- Obsession, total access, etc. are all things that we have associated with love that may not be entirely sustainable
It takes a bit of re-imagining romance and love for it all to make sense, but this is good!
- I think we can take note of the unique character that romantic love has for you while still appreciating other forms of love as well
- Re-imagining vs De-centering Romance