Monday, July 20, 2009

Yes, Amy, You Can Be In Love With More Than Two People At The Same Time | Slog | The Stranger:

Amy can't set aside her feelings about adultery long enough to answer the dude's question: "Is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time?" You can be in love with more than one person at the same time. It's more complicated, of course, and running around behind the wife's back isn't the path toward a healthy, functional poly relationship. Successful poly relationships are built on honesty and trust, not lies and betrayals. But they can and do exist.

And maybe Amy knows it: she writes that you don't love two women at the same time, not that you can't. Poor word choice? Or tacit acknowledgement that it is possible to be in love with more than one person at at time? The latter, I think. But open relationships—particularly successful ones—make traditional types like Amy uncomfortable. And as an advice columnist, ahem, Amy gets to declare things in or out of bounds; it's her column, the dude sought her advice. So she says it just isn't "done" because she doesn't think people should, and not because people don't.