The Triangle Trap

Who Do We Actually Love When We Have Feelings for Two Partners

at the Same Time?

By Miriam Geltman

♦️ Today, I received a question from one of my listeners that often leaves people completely bewildered: “What does it mean if you genuinely love two different people at the same time, wanting to be close and build a family with both?
Is this normal, or is it some kind of hidden addiction?”

♦️ I am incredibly grateful for this profound question. This exact state of confusion is experienced just as frequently by men as it is by women. When faced with this dualism, the mind instantly scrambles for familiar social or religious dogmas, which quickly label the experience as a sin, a vice, or a betrayal.

♦️ However, a therapeutic lens invites us to step outside these rigid dogmas. We come into this world to recognize, integrate, and discover ourselves through the mirror of romantic relationships, using our partners as screens to project our internal deficits.

♦️ When we analyze this phenomenon through the framework of modern deep therapy, the root cause is almost always an incomplete emotional separation from parental figures. At this moment, the subconscious brings forward the figure of a hungry or emotionally stunted inner child. In reality, what the person needs at this stage is not a mature partner for an equal union. They are looking for an object onto whom they can fully project the parent with whom they experienced childhood trauma or emotional deficits.

♦️ This subconscious drive plays out in one of two ways. In some cases, the partner is chosen to trigger a process of "reparenting"—a way to finally claim the love and validation that was missing in childhood. In other cases, the inner child actually received plenty of love, but the crucial step never happened: there was no healthy separation, no natural phase of teenage rebellion. Consequently, the person projects the parental figure onto a partner with a single purpose: to finally break free from them. They need to enter into conflict, claim their boundaries, and play out that delayed rebellion in adulthood.

♦️ It is crucial to emphasize that while this deep process of reparenting or separation is unfolding, the couple is not actually experiencing a mature man-woman relationship. Instead, they are living through a profound mutual integration, a boundary-testing phase, and a form of covert therapy with one another. This dynamic is never one-sided; there is always a mutual subconscious payoff. The other partner is doing the exact same thing—projecting their own baggage in equal measure and attempting to fix their own inner issues through the relationship.

♦️ Because of the glitches in our internal emotional software, we often invent grand illusions about having a "crazy, once-in-a-lifetime love," a wild passion, or some cosmic attraction. On a purely psychological level, however, something else is happening. The subconscious instantly calculates exactly how perfectly its parental projection will fit onto this specific individual, and how deeply it can integrate its inner shadow work through this connection. This isn't love for the person as they are; it is love for the therapeutic potential of one's own self-actualization.

♦️ The psyche splits this massive burden of expectation between two people because a single partner simply cannot handle such conflicting demands—simultaneously acting as the parent who nurtures and the parent against whom one must rebel. Modern psychotherapy and systems analysis bring us to the most vital realization of all: this entire story is always and exclusively about you. Due to those software glitches, it honestly feels like this drama involves three people, two partners, or outside circumstances. In reality, external life merely reflects the inner architecture of our own minds.

♦️ Loving two people is never truly about the partners; it is about different, fragmented pieces of your own Self. By splitting your focus exactly fifty-fifty, you are simply protecting yourself from deep, painful internal changes. It is a subconscious way of keeping a fragile inner balance using external crutches, a process that drains a colossal amount of vital life energy. This phenomenon is nothing more than a temporary therapeutic pitstop where the personality tries to piece itself back together from its fragments. Therefore, the way out of this trap is not to choose between the partners, but to turn your attention completely inward.

6.07.2026