Is non-monogamous love shallower?

Article • 305 Words • Non-monogamy, Love/Romance, 2025 • 06/15/2025

I think that this is a question that monogamous and non-monogamous people have all thought about at least once, so I wanted to dedicate some time thinking about it to settle the question.

There are 324 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 2 minutes to read it.

This article was published 2025-06-15 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.

It took an estimated to develop this article from conception to publishing.

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.
    • Can you not have enough time for polyamory?
  • 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