What if loving multiple people at the same time is the key to contentment?

We’re conditioned to believe love equals one. Society drills in the idea of monogamy very early on. It is a mantra passed down like scripture – finding “the One,” your one, your “only”.

But what if that is a lie? If not a lie, an idea born out of a thought leader’s personal preference, institutionalised over time? What if that was not, rather is not, the best way to live? What if that idea – that we are meant to devote ourselves to just one person romantically, sexually – was a glitch introduced in the matrix?

Anthropologists remind us that over 80 per cent of traditional human cultures permitted polygamy. Evolutionary psychologists argue that humans carry traits from both monogamous and non-monogamous species. Pair bonding may have emerged as a survival mechanism, a way to ensure child-rearing; not from virtue, but necessity. Monogamy, then, is not soul-truth. It’s a social strategy.

That said, I approach my perspective from a psychological lens.

Psychologist and biological anthropologist Helen Fisher describes how the human brain contains three distinct but overlapping neural systems – one for lust, one for romantic love, and one for deep attachment. These systems can be activated by different people at the same time. According to Fisher, it is entirely possible to be sexually attracted to one person, romantically in love with another, and deeply attached to a third, all at the same time. Feeling this is not a flaw, we are neurologically built for it.

What if that idea – that we are meant to devote ourselves to just one person romantically, sexually – was a glitch introduced in the matrix? (Source: Freepik)

I am taking this a step further. I am arguing that it is possible to be romantically involved with multiple people, be sexually attracted to all of them, and also have a deep sense of attachment to each of them.

Yet, the world calls it cheating, a betrayal of the “sacred one”. Cheating, too, is a construct. A defence mechanism that shields the deep-rooted conditioning of sacred monogamy. Society builds entire systems – marriage contracts, fidelity oaths, moral panic around what is considered infidelity – to guard the myth that love must be “exclusive”.

What if that myth was just a fear of freedom? Strip all that away for a second. Picture five people, each loving four others, openly, without deceit. That’s not betrayal – it’s clarity, it’s honesty, it’s transparency, it’s being unconditional. Here, what you get is not confusion, but a network of twenty happy souls. What if we’ve misunderstood love’s mathematics all along? Happiness multiplies. It doesn’t divide.

This is where morality walks in like a schoolteacher with a stick. Philosophers have tried, for centuries, to domesticate love –– to cage it within rules, duties, and equations. Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German philosopher, argued that morality must be universal. According to his framework, love is a matter of obligation – fidelity, honesty, and loyalty. There is no room for desire or spontaneity. For him, if something can’t be willed universally – like loving multiple people at once – it falls outside “moral law”.

John Stuart Mill, the British utilitarian, believed in maximising happiness. His idea was that actions are right if they succeed in maximising overall happiness. He might tolerate polyamory, but only if it could be proven to increase the collective well-being of everyone involved. Love, then, becomes a math problem – who gains, who suffers, what is the net result?

To me, love is not to obey any moral arithmetic. It spills, it sways, it resists law. Kant wants it to serve duty. Mill wants it to serve the outcome. But maybe love serves nothing – maybe it just is.

Ethics help in traffic systems, not in matters of the heart. Traditions, East and West, say loving many at once is wrong. But wrong by whose measure? If there’s no coercion, no lies, no harm – only consent, happiness, abundance – where is the sin? Whose fear are we carrying?

Love, at its most beautiful, at its most truthful, resists ownership. But we’ve reduced it to property – my partner, my person, my right to be their only one. But the second you own love, you imprison it. What if love is not possession but permission? About liberation? What if it’s not about keeping someone, but witnessing them, even as they bloom beyond you? What if it is about freeing them of all the shackles? What if it is about being truly happy for all that makes them happy, even if that means other people?

Even the Stoics spoke of detachment. The ancient Stoics, like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, taught that love should not disturb one’s inner peace, that true affection must come without dependency or control. Buddhism, too, urges non-attachment. Love without clinging. A love that doesn’t shackle. One that says, “I see you as you are, even as you blossom beyond me,” and not, “You are mine.”

I explain it this way. There’s a person X, who decided to live and love the way I am proposing. X has 100 per cent love for person A. When X meets person B, and falls in love, that love is, again, 100 per cent. Love for B doesn’t mean X loves A any less. Love for persons C and D, that X has, doesn’t mean A, B, C and D now get 25 per cent of X’s love. Each person X loves gets his whole, in its own way – pure, unadulterated, independent of what he offers others.

The fear, I believe, isn’t love. It’s jealousy. But jealousy isn’t proof of love’s boundaries. It’s proof of our own. We equate exclusivity with value. “If they love only me, I must be special.” But maybe love doesn’t prove anything. Maybe it just flows, abundant and overflowing.

Many indigenous and ancient cultures celebrated multiple romantic and sexual bonds. Over time, history was edited to fit a nuclear-family-shaped box. Now, we cling to it like gospel, even as people cheat, lie, and break under the pressure of monogamy. What does that tell us? That the system is sacred, or that the system is failing?

What if we didn’t need polyamory with all its rulebooks and diagrams? What if people are just built for more? Built to more than one – deeply, sexually, soulfully – without breaking anyone. What if the mind stumbles only because it was never shown as an option?

We’re taught, “Ek hi milega” (You can only have one). I am saying that need not be true. What if five, ten, twenty could come, if only we stopped running from them? Society taught us to fear abundance. But I believe love isn’t rare, love isn’t limited. It’s just been rationed.

I ask again: should romantic love’s reach be chained by rules, or should it shatter them? I choose the shattering. Let the heart remain unowned. Let love be many. Let morality step aside, and let joy speak instead. Perhaps society will quake. Perhaps the rules will crumble. Maybe beyond those crumbling walls lies the kind of love and contentment we never experienced, the kind we always deserved, but were too afraid to imagine.

Mind the Heart attempts to uncover the unspoken in our relationships – or the over-discussed, without nuance – spanning solo paths, family bonds, and romantic hopes. Join us to discover the whys of our ties.