Falling in love with more than one person - Page 2

😭I do not think there is anything wrong in feelings for another person after marriage but invariably that leads to marriage breakdown and suffering for all involved. I have seen this personally happen to many once a time happy marriages that the husband or wife just decide to react or pursue a new love or interest and then before they realise it , everything is blown out of proportion and innocent people are hurt including children. As long as it is just friendship, platonic and both husband and wife are aware of the "new" friendship it is okay or else "BE PREPARED" for heartbreak, pain, divorce, stigma etc.

I don't think it is possible for a either a man or a woman to love two people with the same kind of intensity at the same time. If you already love your spouse to an extreme limit, there is no place for a second person to fit in, even the thoughts of infidelity will not cross. Finding someone attractive or appreciating the qualities and the beauty that person posseses is not a sin. It's a natural response of a human being to beauty in any form. But if you start linking yourself to the other person, giving him/her space in your emotional space which ideally should be reserved only for your spouse, then you are infringing on your spouse's right to sole occupacy of that space, and that definitely is a sin.

The moment you give access to the 'other' person in your emotional space, you are taking away something which belongs to only your spouse. So for me, that qualifies as infidelity. You might not persue it, but sometimes the intention themselves are worse than the actual crime committed.....

So if your truly love your husband/wife, the thoughts for anyother person which is even remotedly romantic in any serious form has no place in your mind and if they do, you are indulging in infidelity.

Originally posted by: greatmaratha

Minnie... great views... but is emotional space compartmentalised. Sometimes, I wonder. And isnt your emotional space yours and not that of your spouse...

If it is your emotional space, isnt it yours to do as you please.

I must add here, that I completely agree with you.... I believe that emotional fidelity is most important and if you observe that, the rest just falls into place.

Yes the emotional place is mine to do as I please to. Hence it's me who consciously pledged that space in the emotional centre in the quintessence of my person to my better half when I said my vows and promised to love him with all my being till the day I die....and got the same in return.....

If I renegade on my promise and share the space I promised him with someone else, I shall be sharing the space accorded solely to him with that someone else, that too without my spouse's knowledge, even while keeping in mind the fact that everything has been same from his side since the day we tied the knot, and this would mean I shall be deceiving him, and that is infidelity in my opinion....

Doing as I please here would definitely mean I have faltered in being the right kind of person somehow.....that my promises don't mean a thing.....

agree with you minnie.

to say it my way....(without bringing in public vows and pledges into the view...)

if i love somebody completely then i do not 'need' another relationship and do not even indulge in the thought of getting into one.

if i do get into a second one its because i have not had a satisfactory relationship or i have not cherished it enough.

The topic of the debate was whether loving more than one person at a time is sin.

First of all, I would like to tell the reason why I started such a topic here. Its because we are seeing break-ups of a number of couples these days. Often in newspaper we see that celebrities are breaking their marriages after long years of happy married life, and the reasons always are some third persons between the couples. Therefore I wanted to discuss this issue among our friends here.

First of all we have to think whether it is a sin to fall in love with more than one person at a time. Let us consider a woman who is happily married and loves her husband very much. How will you define this love? Each human being must have another one with him/her, with whom he/she will spend the whole life. He/she will want to share all the joys and sorrows with his/her spouse. Through thick and thin they will always be together. After a long working day, each of them will feel that in this crowded city there is only one who is waiting for him/her to come back at home and sit with him/her and share their sorrows and joy with each other. This is what we call love between a husband and a wife. Am I right friends? Suppose our woman feels just like that for her husband.

Now, in such a situation this woman starts feeling something for another man.

We will have to consider at first, is it possible? Those who say that if she is satisfied with her husband completely, it is not possible; I don't know what they feel. But according to me, it is possible. What is this new feeling? How will you define it? It is like she likes to talk to this person for a long time. She respects and likes this person. She wants to share her joys and sorrows with this person. This is very much possible. Because, according to me, mind is not a room that once you love someone and then you shut down all the doors and windows so that no one else can enter into it. Mind is not like that. Mind is very soft and sensitive. If she remains within the house and never comes across to anybody else other than her husband then it is possible that she never feels for anybody else like that.. But in today's life where women and men are freely meeting each other everyday everywhere it is possible that she comes across a person whom she starts liking very much. Same thing is applicable for a man also.

So if she starts liking another person also, what will be the outcome? Here there is a prevalent misconception that whenever anyone starts liking anybody he/she forgets the previous one and does not love the previous one anymore. But this is not true. Mind is not a paper that once you start liking somebody else you will erase the previous person's name from that paper. I think love can never fade. If you once love someone you will always continue to love him/her. You may only try to forget him/her if you want to. But you can never erase that person from your mind. For me there is no conflict between these two persons, which this woman loves. She loves her husband as before, in addition she also loves another person.

Now the problem is how she will manage these two relations? Often we see that marriages are getting broken. Problem lies in the fact that often we cannot define a relation or rather, we cannot recognize a relation. First of all we have to understand what is love actually? For most of the people love is staying together throughout the life, having physical relationship and sharing joy and sorrows all along. Yes, this is surely one definition of love. But according to me, love has different faces. Love is not always as simple as that. Love is friendship also, a friendship which stands beyond the boundaries of life and death. Love is being available for a person throughout the life whenever he/she needs you. Love is like a glow within yourself, a feeling that there is someone in this big world who will always be there for you, who will always cry in your sorrow and smile in your joy. Love is a feeling that there is someone in this earth for whom you will wish to live not to die. Love is a feeling that there is someone staying silently with you for whose existence you will happily do your duties throughout the life. This is also love. So one has to identify which kind of love is it. He/she may live happily with his/her spouse and still he/she can have a real friend like this whom he/she will love forever like this. And for this love he/she will not stop loving his/her spouse.

We have to understand that abandoning someone if we want to have someone else we will never be happy. We have to learn how to distinguish different relations, how to recognize the character of each and every relation. If we can learn this there will be no necessity of break-ups or divorces.

You love your tap water because without it you cannot live in your daily life. But once a year you visit mountains and you love to watch the spring-water falling from the hills. You cannot go near it and you cannot use it in your daily life. But still you are happy to watch it once a year from a distance. Relations of love in your life are just like that. Some are like tap water and some are like spring-water. We have to recognize which relation is tap water and which is spring-water. The day we understand this we have no problems like break-ups or divorces.

(This is only my personal view and I hope I am not hurting anybody with this.😊)

Beautifully said Rumi.

But here, I must say one thing. I completely agree that love has different faces and one can have a relationship with an opposite sex without being hurting the existing romantic relation.

But that is the love of a friend, not a lover. My point is that you cannot give importance to two lovers at the same time without being unfair to one of them.

If your life is taken up by a second person where you share everything with this other person and start having romantic inklings towards this other person, you are definitely being infidle.

For example, say, X is a happily married woman. She has a wonderful husband and a wonderful love life. Now comes another man in her life, who is a great friend. So far so good. She talks with him for hours together, shares her problems with him and even shares her joys and sorrows with him.

Now with her emotional connection with him getting stronger by the day, her wifely duties continue but she does not feel the need to depend for the emotinal fulfillment from her husband that much anyore.She spends time with him, but misses her friend.

This is where the problem arises. Suddenly the spring water is turning into a trickle into her mind where the need for her husband is not strong as before. In fact the husband wants it, but she is too emotionally drained to have anything left for her husband.....inevitably, disasters strike.....

It is very much possible to have a very good friend in the opposite sex without nurturing any kind or romantic illusions. This applies for both sexes. He can be your best friend and yet you will feel the need of her husband as much. Both are different kinds of love and they don't need to cross borders.

But how many people actually can define that fine line of respect in such relationships? Howmany people see their friend as just another person rather than a man or a woman? The reason due to which such friendships often take an ugly turn, step over their boundaries and result in disasters.....

Now if I take this in my own perspective, I know I shall hate it if my husband suddenly developed an interest in another female to the extent of spending hours in talking to her and chatting her up and exchanging tiny details of his life with her......but I shall understand their relationship if I too am included in the relationship, see it for what it is, have a complete knowledge as to what they discuss and when they do it, and have a complete faith in the knowledge that I am still the number one female in his life and if and when the need arises I will be the first one he will turn to and not to his lady friend.......