This is not directly on point, but it might be interesting to see if there are quantitative measures for how rich the various biographies of people with multiple personality disorder are.
Research directly into relationships could be complicated by social factors, the difficulties of studying dynamics, political issues, etc. In contrast, the related subject of how much time one has to spend being someone to be a relatively complete person should be free from that.
If it turns out that a person with MPD can carry, say, three complete personalities at most without them being caricatures or undeveloped characters, that would somewhat indicate a lower limit of three on how many full relationships with others one could have. If each human can be three really distinct people, and each person can have at least one relationship at a time, it seems like an emotionally adept person would be able to handle three relationships without having to fragment their mind.
Or perhaps there are only enough hours in a day to form one normal personality, or perhaps there are enough for ten, I have no idea.
It is an interesting though… of course, there would be other, practical considerations… i.e., if we are assuming three “primary” relationships of the same “importance” (I couldn’t find a better word… maybe “rank”, “status”) we would be dealing with four persons living under the same roof. Add offspring into the mix, and we would have eight, twelve,etc. people lving together...
Even without considering the fact that it would be difficult to give each of the three lovers an equal and significant amount of attention (a day has only 24 hours, it’s won’t stretch to accomodate our needs), adding progeny into the mix… the only option I could see would be limiting the number of children to one per lover (no twins, thanks), and maybe adding a few years between each birth (otherwise the female partner would be in and out of the hospital). Of course, some of the male partners might decide they won’t have kids (I wouldn’t know why, since they would need to deal with the offspring of the other couples anyway), or, if we were talking about bisexual participants, there might be two female and two male partners, so the numbers might change a bit…
Raising the offspring won’t be an easy task, either. I mean, with four adult (autority) figures living under the same roof, some of whom might not be interested/capable/willing to deal with children (what if a part of the quartet wanted to reproduce and the rest did not?), who the child will likely come to see as “parental”, despite what said adults might wish… What if there is disagreement regarding the way the child is raised? It’s true that the “natural” parents would be only two, but the rest would likely have almost as much of a hand in their education, and seeing them on a daily basis, living together as a single family unit, they would feel (and be) entitled to set some ground rules anyway.
In the end, I think there is a point beyond which things would not be manageable anymore. In that respect, Alicorn’s decision seems a sensible one, not only because of the reassuring psychological benefit of “status” she mentioned, but also because the dynamics of such a large family unit living in an enclosed space (need I mention “rebellious teenager”?) would likely be too complex for anyone to manage successfully. I mean, for that to work, one should hope that there would never be a fight/attrition, and even in that case, the sheer number of things to do would be discouraging. Of course, we are talking about the rather “extreme” case of four people having an equal role in the relationship, not of a main couple with different paramours.
This is not directly on point, but it might be interesting to see if there are quantitative measures for how rich the various biographies of people with multiple personality disorder are.
Research directly into relationships could be complicated by social factors, the difficulties of studying dynamics, political issues, etc. In contrast, the related subject of how much time one has to spend being someone to be a relatively complete person should be free from that.
If it turns out that a person with MPD can carry, say, three complete personalities at most without them being caricatures or undeveloped characters, that would somewhat indicate a lower limit of three on how many full relationships with others one could have. If each human can be three really distinct people, and each person can have at least one relationship at a time, it seems like an emotionally adept person would be able to handle three relationships without having to fragment their mind.
Or perhaps there are only enough hours in a day to form one normal personality, or perhaps there are enough for ten, I have no idea.
It is an interesting though… of course, there would be other, practical considerations… i.e., if we are assuming three “primary” relationships of the same “importance” (I couldn’t find a better word… maybe “rank”, “status”) we would be dealing with four persons living under the same roof. Add offspring into the mix, and we would have eight, twelve,etc. people lving together...
Even without considering the fact that it would be difficult to give each of the three lovers an equal and significant amount of attention (a day has only 24 hours, it’s won’t stretch to accomodate our needs), adding progeny into the mix… the only option I could see would be limiting the number of children to one per lover (no twins, thanks), and maybe adding a few years between each birth (otherwise the female partner would be in and out of the hospital). Of course, some of the male partners might decide they won’t have kids (I wouldn’t know why, since they would need to deal with the offspring of the other couples anyway), or, if we were talking about bisexual participants, there might be two female and two male partners, so the numbers might change a bit…
Raising the offspring won’t be an easy task, either. I mean, with four adult (autority) figures living under the same roof, some of whom might not be interested/capable/willing to deal with children (what if a part of the quartet wanted to reproduce and the rest did not?), who the child will likely come to see as “parental”, despite what said adults might wish… What if there is disagreement regarding the way the child is raised? It’s true that the “natural” parents would be only two, but the rest would likely have almost as much of a hand in their education, and seeing them on a daily basis, living together as a single family unit, they would feel (and be) entitled to set some ground rules anyway.
In the end, I think there is a point beyond which things would not be manageable anymore. In that respect, Alicorn’s decision seems a sensible one, not only because of the reassuring psychological benefit of “status” she mentioned, but also because the dynamics of such a large family unit living in an enclosed space (need I mention “rebellious teenager”?) would likely be too complex for anyone to manage successfully. I mean, for that to work, one should hope that there would never be a fight/attrition, and even in that case, the sheer number of things to do would be discouraging. Of course, we are talking about the rather “extreme” case of four people having an equal role in the relationship, not of a main couple with different paramours.