Warning: the following post contains an attempt to define love, and may prove to be dangerously corny.  Moreover, it is being written by a guy on the rebound which increases the chances of maudlin sentimentality drastically.  Enter at your own risk.



I agree with Devin here that no one person is ever going to be everything you need all the time.  It's just not going to happen.  So how do you deal with this problem?  One way is to resign yourself to being unhappy sometimes, but I think we can safely disregard that one.  It's the non-solution solution.

Then there's the polyamorous solution which Devin and callei are discussing (please forgive me if I misrepresent your ideas, this is what I interpret you to be saying).  Picture everything you want out of a relationship as a giant puzzle, and people as pieces or collections of pieces.  The chances of you finding one person with all of the pieces to your puzzle is statistically zero, but if you put several people together, you have a good chance of making a pretty picture.  Of course, one of the reasons it's hard to find a "perfect" person is that people don't always want the same thing all of the time.  Sometimes you want a partner who will listen to your problems patiently and give you their best advice, and sometimes you want a partner who is going to laugh off your problems and take you out to get drunk.  The puzzle analogy breaks down a little here (well... you see... sometimes you need a purple piece in the left corner, but sometimes you need an orange piece, and if you have a purple piece AND an orange piece to choose from... aww fuck it) but I think everyone understands the basic concept being discussed.  This is what I took Devin to mean when he referred to your Loves as an entity and your Lovers as components of that entity

Anyway, I think the one flaw in this thinking is that it underestimates the transformative power of love.

Yes, I just said "the transformative power of love" without even a trace of irony.  What is this world coming to?

Let me start by saying that for the rest of this comment, when I say love, I'm talking about good old Eros... romantic love.  All other types of love may work into this somehow, but I'm not worried about that right now.

So, what is love?  I think most people would agree that there's something more to it than just being best friends who have sex.  What that something more is is a little harder to pin down.  It's certainly not the degree of intimacy.  I have friends that I can tell anything but I wouldn't say I'm in love with them. I've even had friends with that level of intimacy who were also cohabitating and having sex with me, and again, I wouldn't say I was in love with them.

My personal feeling is that love is defined by your willingness to change, and be changed by, your partner.  In this respect, my mentioning "the transformative power of love" is not technically correct; love is transformative power.

Now I don't mean transformation like, "honey I love you, so I'll learn to put the toilet seat down," or at least, I don't only mean that.  Anyone who has been in a long term relationship can tell you, there's a bit of a mind-meld that happens after a while.  You start to adopt pieces of each other.  You share perspectives and personality traits.  Some of the things that bugged you most about your partner turn into the things you can't live without.  To continue the already strained puzzle analogy, instead of finding the pieces that fit your puzzle, you realize that your puzzle has changed and, lo and behold, the pieces you needed were sitting right here in front of you the whole time.

You both become different people, and in that sense, your love creates something entirely new.

This is another solution to the one-person-not-being-everything-you-need problem.  You fall in love with someone and your mutual growth changes your partner into someone who gives more of what you need, while at the same time changing your needs to fit what they have to give (and vice-versa). 

I'd like to make it clear that I'm not talking about co-dependency, and I'm not talking about subsuming your personality under someone else's.  I'm talking about the natural growing together that happens in an romantic relationship.  Does this kind of transformation happen in other kinds of relationships?  Sure.  But I don't think it happens as easily or as intensely as in romantic relationships, and as such,  I think it's the main difference between being intimate friends who have sex and being a romantic couple.

What does all of this do to polyamory?  I would say that it invalidates the idea of looking for partners based on how well they fill your specific needs, or in general, needing different partners to fulfil different parts of yourself.  However, there are a ton of other reasons to be in a poly relationship (so many that I'm not going to go into them here).  Suffice to say that, even when thinking about love in these terms, polyamory still seems to be a viable relationship structure.  Can three (or more) people transform each other in a romantic relationship?  I don't see why not.  Can one person have this kind of intimacy with multiple partners?  Sure, as long as growing closer to one partner doesn't mean growing away from the other(s).

So, in direct response to Devin's post, I would say that rather than thinking of my Loves as an entity and Lovers as components, I prefer to think of myself as included in the entity with my Loves, and each of us is a component, but a component that also contains the whole.

Of course, the real point of all of this is that these polyamory posts inspired a mostly tangential train of thought in me, and I felt the need to blurt it out here and see what other people thought.  So if you survived my ramble, and you have a thought or comment, send it.  I'm sure all of these ideas could use some refining.