It's an instinctual desire hard-wired into the little reptile part of our brains just as closely as fear of heights and the “fight-or-flight” adrenaline response.

Any man who tells you otherwise is either lying through his teeth, or one of those few individuals that can be considered “asexual” due to some hormonal or mental abnormality.

Let me explain. The capacity for love in the human heart is not a finite quantity. We are all capable of loving as many people that we find lovable.

I don't think when my brother, her number two child, was born, my mother all of the sudden loved me, her number one, half as much.

However much love I could ever grow for you is not affected by how much I like or love someone else. So if I can grow to love you 768 units of love (we'll call 'em “amors”) the 768 units it is.

And if I loved Dale (my ex) 568, or 968 amors, then that's how it was, and you didn't have a thing to do with it. If I love my daughter a googol amors, then you didn't have a thing to do with that either.

OK, Sirena, there are things I find lovable about you. You, I'm sure, would love a detailed list of exactly what they are, but I don't have time to write a book right now, as you are eagerly awaiting this reply.

So I'll just mention a few of the most crass and obvious ones:

You're beautiful. You're artistic. You're intelligent.

Now, you don't a monopoly on those qualities I find adorable in you.

There are prettier girls, smarter girls, more creative girls.

The odds of finding a girl like that with just those three qualities in a greater quantity or quality wouldn't be impossible, albeit difficult.

Then there are the things I don't find attractive about you:

You live far away from me. You have baggage. You can't find your pictures. :-)

Conversely, there girls who live farther away, have more baggage, and lose their pictures longer.

Those are just some of the thousands of different qualities that you have, in greater or lesser degrees, all mixed up like a smoothie, that make you a unique, never to be replicated again in the history of the universe, individual.

The odds of finding a woman just like you, but even more so in the ways I find attractive, and less so in the ways I don't, are vanishingly small, but there might be a half dozen women on the planet that qualify.

Now, suppose I met one of those girls, we'll call them Super-Xelas.

She has just ten percent more of the qualities I love about you, and ten percent less of those I don't. She's you for dog's sake, just a little bit more the you I love than even you are.

If I am truly attracted to, and love, you, how on Earth could I not be attracted to, and love, her also?

Similarly, let's suppose I'm hiding a terrible secret from you.

Did you know I have a twin brother?

He's Super-Marcus.

He's just like me, but a little taller, a bit more handsome, a little bit more witty, intelligent, funny and romantic.

IF you love me for having the characteristics I have, for being the unique person I am, how could you truthfully say that you don't/couldn't love him, too?

Just because you saw me first? Be real.

You couldn't love me without loving him also.

Love is not a dichotomy, a yes/no switch.

It's a spectrum. I find lovable qualities, and some level of attraction, in nearly any woman I meet.

This fiction that we have in our culture that there is One True Love out there for each of us, and only one, is positively ridiculous, and by the way, traceable back to one of my very unfavorite Greeks, Plato, but I'll leave that digression to another time.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of suitable lifemates out there for either of us, partners with whom we could be very happy.

So, we travel through life, meeting these people.

We decide how lovable we find them; how well they fit into that template each of us carries about in our head of our ideal mate.

Anyone much past their teens will realize that this idealized person does not exist (Sorry, Plato) and that we have to compromise.

Furthermore, each person we date or come to love helps us along the voyage of self-discovery to refine our ideas of that perfect mate, and that ideal we seek becomes a moving target as we grow more aware of ourselves, or as the circumstances of our lives change.

At some point in life, most people meet that “special” someone. They decide that this certain person is as close as they are likely to get to their ideal mate, and will propose a life-long companionship.

Where I think we run into problems is when we choose a partner, enter into a relationship, then, sometime later, run into a person we find attractive, on a level ranging from romp in the hay, to good friends, “bed-buddies,” I think you call them, to someone that you would like to love on a long-term basis.

That's where our cruel cultural conditioning kicks in. We drink it in with mothers milk. We grow up immersed in this impossible fantasy of Romantic Love. Hollywood and the other media are as at fault as religion in this area.

We are taught to see the attraction for the other person as an indication that there is something wrong with our present relationship.

We are taught to feel guilty over the attraction.

We come to resent our partner for keeping us from responding to the attraction.

We lie about it, in the very least in the sense of not discussing it with our mate. We don't want to hurt their feelings.

So we suppress it.