What If You Fall in Love with Someone Else? (Spoiler: It’s Not a Threat)
TikTok video from 2022-09-09
Someone asked me the other day—genuinely, gently, with a little hint of fear in their voice:
“But what if you fall totally in love with someone else? Doesn’t that threaten your marriage?”
And my answer was simple:
I’m not afraid of falling in love.
Not even a little bit.
Because here’s the thing: falling in love with someone else doesn’t mean I love my husband any less. It doesn’t undo the decades we’ve shared, the life we’ve built, or the way we still laugh at the same dumb jokes after 35 years. It just means my heart is expanding. And love—real love—is not a zero-sum game.
It’s like this:
If you’ve had kids (I haven’t, but I’ve heard this from nearly every parent I know), you’ll understand. You fall madly in love with your first baby. It’s this overwhelming, full-body, soul-level kind of love. And then you have a second child… and the love doesn’t divide. It multiplies. You don’t love your first child less. You just love the second one too. Your heart stretches. It makes space.
Love doesn’t run out.
And that’s how I see falling in love with someone new in polyamory. It’s not a replacement. It’s not a betrayal. It’s not “choosing someone else.” It’s simply… expansion.
I have the capacity to love deeply, meaningfully, and uniquely—with more than one person. Each connection brings out different sides of me, invites me into new experiences, challenges me in ways that help me grow. None of that takes away from what I have with my husband. If anything, it enriches it.
But this fear—that love for another person threatens the love we already have—is so baked into the way we’ve been taught to think about relationships. We’ve been told that romantic love should be exclusive, and that if it isn’t, someone must be losing. Someone must be less loved. Less important. Less chosen.
I don’t believe that.
In fact, I think the fear of falling in love with someone else is what causes more harm than the love itself. Because when we’re afraid of what our hearts are capable of, we start to hide. We shrink. We suppress parts of ourselves, or worse—pressure our partners to stay small, too.
But what if we didn’t do that?
What if we stopped seeing love as a fragile, finite resource?
What if we trusted that love could grow, deepen, diversify—and still hold steady where it started?
I’m not afraid of falling in love. I’m grateful for the capacity.
Because that means I get to live a life where I don’t have to choose between loving my husband and loving someone new.
I get to love fully, honestly, openly.
And I get to let love lead the way—not fear.
