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The Psychology and Philosophy of Polyamory

Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée
Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée in Lucerne, 1882.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée had themselves photographed in a studio in Lucerne. Salomé stands behind a small cart, brandishing a whip, while the two philosophers are harnessed in front of her. It is the most famous photograph in all philosophy.

The photograph arose out of an extraordinary love triangle. Nietzsche and Rée had both proposed marriage to the 21-year-old Salomé, who rejected them both. Instead, she suggested that the three form a platonic ‘intellectual trinity’ and wander in search of a place in which to establish a commune of free spirits.

It did not end well. Within months, Salomé and Rée had vanished from Nietzsche’s life, leaving him devastated. But perhaps the most interesting thing about their failed experiment is not that it failed. It is that the arrangement Salomé proposed still strikes us as so strange.

We readily accept that a person can love several friends, several siblings, and several children. Why, when it comes to romantic love, must there be only one?

Why Romantic Love Is Exclusive

The answer has much more to do with paternity than with love. A man who wished to pass his name, status, and property to his own children needed some assurance that those children were indeed his. This created a powerful incentive to control female sexuality, and helps to explain two things: why polygamy is almost always polygyny, and why, historically, adultery and promiscuity have been judged much more severely in women than in men.

Romantic love, when it eventually arrived, became entangled in an older system of marriage and monogamy established to regulate sex and reproduction. This chronology raises the intriguing possibility that we have confused a precondition of marriage, exclusivity, with a precondition of love.

Can Love Be Divided?

To love more than one person is not necessarily to love each person less, just as to love two children is not necessarily to love each child less. ‘True love’, wrote PB Shelley (d. 1822), ‘in this differs from gold and clay / That to divide is not to take away.’ Love is not finite like money or time, or gold and clay, but grows in the giving.

If having a second child is not to betray the first, and taking on a new friendship is not to diminish our old friendships, why should romantic love alone obey a different arithmetic?

Love may not be finite, but time and attention are. Having a second child need not diminish our love for the first child, but it inevitably changes the distribution of our time and attention. And, you know what, maybe it does diminish our love for the first child. Maybe taking on a new friendship does diminish our old friendships. After all, firstborns and old friends often feel this way. Maybe things are more complicated than the binary truths we tell ourselves to simplify our lives.

Polyamory as an Experiment in Love

In 2006, the term polyamory (‘many loves’) made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Polyamory is the philosophy or state of being romantically involved with more than one person at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. The focus of polyamory is more on intimacy than on sex, and polyamorous relationships, while being romantic, need not be sexual.

Polyamory is not the same as polygamy, which, unlike polyamory, is culturally sanctioned and codified. And it is not the same as cheating, swinging, or free loving, since the focus is on intimacy and relationship building, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. While some people see their polyamory as an identity or orientation, others see it more in terms of an ethical alternative to infidelity.

Despite its ethical dimensions, polyamory is more heavily stigmatised than cheating: cheating may threaten the system, but at least operates from within it, whereas polyamory outright does away with it. Like a lie, which is defined in relation to the truth, cheating accepts the principle of romantic exclusivity even as it violates it.

Polyamory in Practice

Polyamory has long been recognised as an alternative lifestyle in gay subculture, and is becoming more and more mainstream, driven, among others, by feminism, gay emancipation, and the fragmentation of families and communities.

Polyamorous relationships can take many forms. They are often triads, or quads—maybe one couple with another. ‘Polyfidelity’ refers to a closed polyamorous relationship in which the parties agree to restrict themselves to one another, rather than take outside lovers. In some cases there may be a primary couple with one or more ‘secondary’ partners who are perhaps more distant or occasional. In other cases, one partner may have, or wish for, outside relationships, while the other may be content with just the primary relationship.

The partners of one partner, who are not also one’s partners, are referred to in the jargon as ‘metamours’, and it is in the spirit of polyamory that one treats them with courtesy and respect, as potential friends rather than rivals.

For some people, polyamory is experienced less as a lifestyle choice than as an orientation, leading to demands for legal recognition and protection for at least some forms of polyamorous relationships.

The Burden of the One

The modern romantic couple, closed as it is on itself, carries an extraordinary burden. One quite unqualified person may be expected to be lover, best friend, confidant, amanuensis, domestic partner, financial partner, co-parent… for decades and into old age. And when it transpires that this person is unable to meet all our needs, we may come to regard this as a failure of love. 

Polyamory acknowledges that some people’s relational needs are best met by more than one person, and, conversely, relieves the pressure of having to meet all of another person’s needs. By creating more space around a tired, claustrophobic relationship, it can breathe new love and new life into the relationship.

Because polyamory is non-exclusive, existing relationships and friendships are less likely to be abandoned or neglected in favour of ‘the one’, leading to a larger and stronger social network with more resources, skills, and perspectives to draw upon.

Unlike with serial monogamy, there is less incentive to write off an older relationship—and, by extension, a part of our history and who we are—simply because a more exciting or practical one has come along.

Indeed, there is something particularly brutal, even unnatural, about how someone with whom we have shared the best years of our life can suddenly become not merely a stranger but persona non grata. Surely, we can be better than this.

Love, Jealousy, and Possession

Of course, polyamory, too, has drawbacks. From a young age, we are taught that true love is the love of just one person, and that that person will be able to meet all our needs. The princess awaits her prince, and, when he finds her, they live happily ever after. There is no question of another prince, and still less of a squire or lady-in-waiting. Given this state of affairs, and the stigma of polyamory, it may be hard to find people, or enough people, with whom to conduct polyamorous relationships. But this is more a criticism of society than of polyamory proper.

People are naturally prone to possessiveness and jealousy, even when they insist they aren’t. The princess does not await some prince, but her prince. A new relationship is full of enthusiasm and excitement, or, to give it its proper name, ‘New Relationship Energy’—which can be tough on an existing partner. Jealousy can be even more of an issue if half of a couple is polyamorous, while the other half merely tolerates, rather than embraces, it. Having someone else’s smell on your partner’s skin and in your bedsheets is more than just a little confusing.

Jealousy is often treated as childish possessiveness. But it is more complicated than that. It may express fear of abandonment, helplessness, inadequacy, threatened status, or the perfectly rational recognition that our partner is committing precious time and attention to another and, all the while, comparing us.

Constraints do not always impoverish us. Sometimes, by closing off possibilities, they enable other possibilities to develop more fully. Romantic exclusivity may constrain love, but it may also preserve and concentrate it.

Triangles Needing to Be Squared

Polyamory demands time, energy, security, self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and communication skills. Things can get pretty complicated, which can undermine the quality of the relationships and the very viability of the enterprise. Many people may not have the time, energy, or skills to manage much more than one relationship, and, of course, may not feel a need for more than one partner, if even that. For many people, the ideal number of partners is not one or two, but one-third or half.

This brings us back to Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée. Their difficulty was not simply that three people were involved, but that the three did not want the same thing. Salomé envisaged an intellectual trinity; Nietzsche wanted Salomé; Rée had also proposed to her. While Nietzsche and Rée had been friends, neither had a romantic interest in the other, but merely tolerated the arrangement for the sake of Salomé. Although in a love triangle, their desires were not triangular.

The Measure of Love

Polyamory is neither the solution to love nor the end of monogamy. If anything, thinking seriously about polyamory reveals why monogamy has proved so enduring. Love may not be finite, but we are; jealousy is not simply a social convention to be unlearnt; and constraints, far from merely constraining us, can preserve and concentrate what we value most.

But polyamory also reveals how much unnecessary baggage we have loaded onto monogamy. To love one person need not mean possessing that person, expecting them to meet our every need, neglecting our other relationships, or banishing former lovers from our lives. Nor need we mistake exclusivity, inherited from the institution of marriage, for the essence or measure of love.

There may be a time in our lives for polyamory. But even if we decide to outright reject it, there is much to be gained from adopting a more fluid, flexible, and forbearing approach to relationships—and stealing a bit more life from the closing jaws of death.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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The History and Psychology of Love—and What It Reveals About Love Itself

The Sacrifice of Isaac, by Caravaggio.
The Sacrifice of Isaac, by Caravaggio. Before romantic love, the highest form of love was directed not to another person, but to God.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Many of us expect romantic love to make us whole, tell us who we are, and even give our lives meaning. But these expectations are surprisingly recent—and may help explain why modern love so often disappoints us.

The meaning of love has changed over the centuries. Today, we tend to think about love primarily in terms of romantic love. But, if you consider it, the concept of romantic love barely features among the 66 books of the Bible. The two greatest ‘love’ stories in the Bible are not of husband and wife, nor even of man and woman, but of man and man, and woman and woman: David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi.

When Love Belonged to God

Instead, all love in the Bible is directed at God, and the love for the spouse, and more generally for the other, is subsumed under the love of God, of which it is an expression. Thus, in the Sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham’s love for God trumps his love for his own longed-for son Isaac, whom he is willing to sacrifice for no other reason than that God commanded it.

In ancient times, people did sometimes fall in love, but they did not believe that their love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today.

When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, sparking the Trojan War, neither she nor he (nor anyone else) conceived of their attraction as pure or ennobling or exalting. When, in the Aeneid, Dido fell in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her love as a kind of divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. One might also think of Phaedra and Hippolytus, Medea and Jason, and Antony and Cleopatra.

The Rise of Romantic Love

But over the centuries, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love, which came to take the place of the retreating religion in lending purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives. People had once loved God, but now they loved love: more than with their beloved, they fell in love with love itself.

Abraham had surrendered himself and Isaac out of love for God. But in the Romantic era, around the time of the French Revolution, love grew into quite the opposite: a means of finding and validating oneself, of lending texture, substance, and solidity to one’s life—as encapsulated by Sylvester’s 1978 hit, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), the final kissing scene in Cinema Paradiso, the ‘You complete me’ scene in Jerry Maguire, and countless other popular songs and films.

In the time of God, ‘finding oneself’—or, more accurately, losing oneself in God—had demanded years of patient spiritual practice. But after the French Revolution, romantic love could come to the rescue of anyone, with very little effort or sacrifice on their part. Being saved became a simple matter of luck.

If love is a word with a meaning that has changed over time, it is also a word with multiple meanings, one that points at a diversity of distinct concepts with only a family resemblance between them.

What Is Love?

Unlike us, the Greeks had several words for love, enabling them to distinguish more clearly between the different types. For example, eros referred to sexual or passionate love; philia to friendship; storge to familial love; and agape to universal love, such as the love for strangers, nature, or God.

Having many more words for ‘love’ enables us to think and talk about love in new and different ways. For example, we might say that people in the early stages of a romantic relationship often expect unconditional storge, but find only the hunger and dependency of eros, and, if they are lucky, the maturity and fertility of philia. Or, like Plato, we might say that the best kind of philia is one that is born of eros, and that in turn feeds back into eros to strengthen and develop it, transforming it from a lust for possession into an impulse for philosophy.

But if we are to understand the deep meaning of the word ‘love’, then we need to uncover what all these different types of love have in common. In other words, what is it that unites eros, philia, storge, and agape? What is the common element that makes them all types of love?

What all these instances of love have in common, I think, is a reaching out beyond our own being to things that are able to lend purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives, even to the point of ingesting or incorporating those things into our inner being—whence the hug, the love bite, and the sacramental bread and wine of the Eucharist.

Love is the force of nature that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world, like the lobster, to shed our shell and grow beyond it—which is why people with little love are so small.

Romantic love can do this. But it can also do the opposite. If we ask it merely to complete us, validate us, or save us, it closes us in upon ourselves instead of opening us to the world. In that case, romantic love works against the very meaning of love.

The question each of us must ask is this: Am I loving another person—or am I asking them to save me?

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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Is Desire a Form of Madness—or the First Step on the Ladder of Love?

Saint Sebastian in Ecstasy, by Guido Reni, c. 1615.
Saint Sebastian in Ecstasy, by Guido Reni, c. 1615.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 8 September 2026.

For the Apostle Paul, marriage has, it seems, no higher purpose than the containment of lust:

For I would that all men were even as I myself… But if they cannot contain let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

Lust is the strong, passionate desire for something: not only sex, but also food, drink, money, fame, power, or knowledge, among others. Even so, owing to the historical resonance of Matthew 5:27-28, lust has come to be associated almost exclusively with sexual desire:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: 

But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

There are many reasons for which we might desire sex, for example, to be close to someone, to hold on to or manipulate that person, to dominate that person, to injure a third party, to injure ourself, to define ourself, to feel alive, to pass the time, to make a child, or to gain some advantage such as money or preferment. But with lust, sex is contemplated primarily for itself, or, more precisely, for the pleasure that it may procure.

It is possible to seek out sex for itself without this desire being lustful. For the desire to be lustful, it has to be disordered, that is, inappropriately strong or inappropriately directed—although what counts as inappropriate is, ultimately, a value judgement that varies according to person, time, and place. People who experience lust without acting upon it are lustful without being lecherous; but if they act upon it, especially repeatedly or habitually, they are both lustful and lecherous.

King David was undone by his lust for the bathing Bathsheba, and Bill Clinton, while still the most powerful man in the world, was impeached following his affair with a young White House intern. In the Divine Comedy, souls that have committed the sin of lust are blown around in a whirlwind that symbolises their lack of self-control. More recently, MRI studies have found that patterns of brain activity in people experiencing lust are similar to those in addicts receiving their fix.

No surprise, then, that reason and philosophy are a poor defence against lust. In Greco-Roman art, Eros/Cupid is depicted as a child, and the ithyphallic (erect) satyrs are only half-human. According to mediaeval lore, when Alexander the Great found Phyllis (by some accounts, Alexander’s wife) riding Aristotle like a horse around the garden, he exclaimed, “Master, can this be!” Quick on his feet, Aristotle replied, “If lust can so overcome wisdom, just think what it could do to a young man like you.”

Shakespeare went so far as to compare lust to a form of madness, for instance, in Sonnet 129:

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action… 

… 

Past reason hunted, and no sooner had

Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit and in possession so…

But it is not just that lust can, at times, overcome reason. For Schopenhauer, the sexual impulse is the most powerful manifestation of the Will, the blind striving that directs all human behaviour. This idea is certainly borne out by modern advertising, which seems mostly about suggesting that buying a particular product will help us to obtain the objects of our lust. In contrast, no one ever made a fortune by peddling restraint or wisdom. It is sometimes said that everything is about sex, except for sex itself, which is about power—or would that be the other way round? 

Even the Holy Church, when seeking to express ecstatic communion with God, could do no better than Bernini’s orgasmic Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

Schopenhauer, who had read Indian philosophy, held that, so long as we are enthralled to lust, we can know no peace or happiness.

In the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, Krishna declares that, along with anger and greed, lust is one of the three gates to Naraka, or Hell. When the warrior Arjuna asks him by what one is impelled to sinful acts ‘even unwillingly, as if engaged by force’, he replies:

It is lust only, Arjuna, which is born from contact with the material mode of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring sinful enemy of this world… Therefore, O Arjuna, best of the Bharatas, curb in the very beginning this great symbol of sin—by regulating the senses, and slay this destroyer of knowledge and self-realisation…

Lust, in the broader sense of coveting or craving, is also at the heart of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism:

1. Suffering (dukkha) is inherent in all life. 

2. The cause of all suffering is lust. 

3. There is a natural way to eliminate all suffering.

4. The Noble Eightfold Path is that way. 

Lust, taught the Buddha, can be eliminated through attaining a higher level of consciousness. This idea can also be found sporadically in the Western canon. For instance, the poet Charles Baudelaire (d. 1867) went so far as to suggest that artists should never have sex: ‘Only the brute is good at coupling, and copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another—and the artist never emerges from himself.’

As well as being harmful to the subject, lust is harmful also to the object. Lust is the only appetite that is for a person rather than an object, but a person qua object rather than qua person, shorn of human qualities such as dignity and agency. The lustful person is unconcerned about the blossoming of the object of his lust. More than that, he will act against her best interests to feed his appetite, and, with his appetite sated, discard her as ‘one casts aside a lemon which has been sucked dry’. These acerbic words belong to the philosopher Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), who held that a person should never be treated as a means-to-an-end but only ever as an end-in-herself.

It is in the nature of lust that it seeks to possess or ‘have’ the other, to incorporate and degrade the other by undermining her integrity and autonomy. In One Fat Englishman (1963), a novel by Kingsley Amis, the protagonist says that, when it comes to sex, his aim is ‘to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature who is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.’

Lust, in the words of Shakespeare, is ‘a waste of shame’. To hide that shame, many cultures magic up a male demon who lies upon sleepers to have sex with them. This incubus (and the less prevalent female equivalent, or succubus) is made to carry the blame for embarrassing nocturnal emissions, accusations of abuse or adultery, and even unexplained children. Another response to the shame of lust, much more prevalent in our culture, is to pass off lust as… romantic love. Unlike lust, love is respectable, even commendable. We look on approvingly at a pair holding hands or hugging, but turn around for the police as soon as they start acting out their lust.

Love is the acceptable face of lust, but the love that is lust in disguise is arguably even more perverse and destructive, and, in that sense, even more shameful, than the lust that knows its game. How to tell lust and love apart? While lust is hasty, furtive, and deceitful, love is patient, measured, and constant. While lust is all about taking, love is all about sharing. And while lust is all about degrading and destroying, love is all about building. Lust can lead to love, but is a poor start and a poor basis, akin to choosing one’s favourite book by the picture on the cover.

There is nothing wrong with sexual desire per se, and none of us would be here without it. Sexual desire is a life force, to be enjoyed and even celebrated. But, as with alcohol, the problems start when it turns from servant into master. Unfettered lust is especially unbecoming in the elderly, because, as the saying goes, there is no fool like an old fool.

Lust is hard to extinguish, but can more readily be redirected. If Kat is having a bad day, she can take out her frustration on anyone or everyone who crosses her path—the receptionist, her colleagues, her partner—or she can instead discharge all her nervous energy into the novel that she is writing. This second instance of anger displacement, working at her novel, is also an instance of sublimation, the channelling of unproductive or destructive forces into socially condoned and often constructive activities. As Baudelaire put it, ‘the more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes.’

For Plato, lust is the first step on the ladder of love and not to be shunned or shunted. In the Symposium, the lover begins with one beautiful body, before recognising that its beauty is shared by other bodies. From beautiful bodies, he rises to beautiful souls, practices, forms of knowledge, and finally Beauty itself. Desire is not suppressed but educated, redirected from the particular and perishable to the universal and eternal.

Lust contains its own cure, so long as one is able and willing to learn.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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