What I don't understand is how you can think of someone you love being in an amorous relationship with someone other than yourself and not get peeved?
That's what I was talking about in that post a year ago, Aztec, and especially in the excerpt by Anne Morrow Lindbergh that I linked. Here's the crux of what she says:
We all wish to be loved alone. "Don't sit under the Apple tree with anyone else but me," runs the old popular song. Perhaps, as Auden says in his poem, this is a fundamental error in mankind:
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
Is it such a sin? In discussing this verse with an Indian philosopher, I had an illuminating answer. "It is all right to wish to be loved alone," he said, "mutuality is the essence of love. There cannot be others in mutuality. It is only in the time-sense that it is wrong. It is when we desire continuity of being loved alone that we go wrong." For not only do we insist on believing romantically in the "one-and-only" -- the one-and-only love, the one-and-only mate, the one-and-only mother, the one-and-only security -- we wish the "one-and-only" to be permanent, ever-present and continuous. The desire for continuity of being-loved-alone seems to me "the error bred in the bone" of man. For "there is no one-and-only," as a friend of mine once said in a similar discussion, "there are just one-and-only moments."
...One comes in the end to realize that there is no permanent pure-relationship and there should not be. It is not even something to be desired. The pure relationship is limited, in space and in time. In its essence it implies exclusion. It excludes the rest of life, other relationships, other sides of personality, other responsibilities, other possibilities in the future. It excludes growth.
I think our longing for exclusive devotion stems not from love, but from insecurity. We've found something that makes us feel accepted and secure, and we want to keep it to ourselves because if someone else gets some too, we may lose what we're getting. But suppose it was possible to be completely assured of your lover's continuing devotion to you? If you knew for an absolute fact that this person was going to keep on feeling the same way toward you throughout life, no matter what else happened, then there would be no threat of loss in her association with others.
That's the meat of the idea... you trust that your lover will continue to love you as he/she does now, and allow that it is possible for her to love others as well; loving you uniquely and them uniquely as well, and feeling no fear of loss in this.
Take away the fear of loss, and you take away the need for exclusivity; you can be open to and accepting of your loved one's wish to know others and to experience a full and varied life by feeling, sharing in, the love of more than just one person. If you saw the movie Sweet November, perhaps you can relate the November guy's action at the end of the movie, to what I'm saying.
Farkel: "fiction"? You'll burn in Hell for that!