Ask Dr Sivri – Can you love more than one woman?

Dear Dr Sivri,  I hope you are well? I feel kind of embarrassed with my problem, but you are the only person that can help me. I am a man in his late thirties, and I feel really stuck at the moment and in this stage of my life. I have never been married, and I have always loved going out and having fun. At the moment, I am seeing three different women (they don’t know about each other), and I honestly don’t know which one to choose.   My family would love to see me settle down, and deep down that is what I want, but my inability to stick to one woman is causing me a big headache in my life. I just can’t choose between them. I know I am being selfish and greedy, but I can’t help myself. Please help! Kind regards, M (Name & address supplied)   Dear M, Thanks for reaching out. Well, in many ways you already know you are being selfish and greedy, but you seem stuck in your lifestyle. Your problem appears to be two-fold:

1. Problems with decision-making.
2. A deep rooted desire to be loved.

So let’s look at these in greater detail. The first point relates to your struggles making decisions. It could be that you have always struggled making a decision and sticking to it. In fact, most people are bad at making decisions. Decisions can be made in two ways. The first one relies on our Intuition. We make fast decisions based on our previous life experiences, which result in us not using our Conscious Thinking Patterns as this could prevent us make a decision quickly. Here we say something is Instinctive or it could be a ‘Gut Feeling’, but in reality, our minds like to store information and look for patterns, so we decide something very quickly, even though we don’t always know why and how we do it. The second way of making a decision is a more Conscious-based approach, as we go through a Seven Step Process in thinking about what we want. Here’s how it works:

1. Identify the problem or decision that needs to be made.
2. Look for all the relevant information that can help you.
3. Look for all the alternatives open to you.
4. Look to weigh up all the evidence available to you.
5. Make the relevant choice from all your options.
6. Take action to implement your decision.
7. Review your decision at some point to see how it is going.

This process should help you understand how to make decisions and how to implement them in your life. Now the second point relating to your situation is much more psychological and in-depth and requires a bit more analysis. Maybe you have deep-rooted negative feelings about yourself and when people show an interest in you, you become addicted to the positive attention you receive, so you struggle to let go of people? You will then tend to ‘collect’ people in your life because you’re afraid to let go of them. At the same time, you will look to get love and attention from one person when one of the others can’t give it to you.

Fingers art: Man kisses woman on cheek, other girl is unhappy. Photo © iStock/Mukhina1

  This necessity for love and attention will ultimately make you more indecisive. Also, you are probably too insecure deep down to have a committed long-term relationship. So you avoid true commitment by juggling three women in your life. In that way you will always feel satisfied on a superficial level – without getting too deep or too vulnerable. In Freudian terms, you are stuck at the ‘Latent Period’, which means you can be immature and struggle to form meaningful relationships as an adult. Of course, it could be said that morally and ethically your behaviour is wrong because ultimately it is destructive. You will definitely end up hurting two women, if not all three, and worse still, if they all wise up to your game-playing, then it will be YOU who gets dumped. And maybe that’s what needs to happen, so it forces you to take responsibility for your actions. Because if you don’t learn to control these self-destructive behaviour patterns, you will end up repeating them again and again. It seems like you haven’t truly grown up and you are not really ready to have a relationship. Maybe your real problem isn’t about choosing the right woman, it is about choosing yourself, so that you can understand who you are and why you struggle to make commitments to people, especially women? Maybe you are scared of getting hurt, or you have been hurt in the past, so you are fearful of letting go of women or committing to only one woman? You need to get to the bottom of your deep-rooted issues before trying to have a serious relationship, because if you don’t, you will end up hurting both yourself and the woman you ultimately choose. I suggest seeing someone who is a professional and who can help you deal with your innermost fears and worries. Take care and keep me updated. Kind regards, Dr. D. U. Sivri   Dr Sivri is T-VINE’s new agony uncle. If you have a problem or question, you can contact him by emailing [email protected]