Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-4877635-20130614170253/@comment-22525977-20131017175338

...actually I would think the FTR would have big taboos against poly relationships on account of the whole "One True Love" thing or, at best "One True Love At A Time" in cases where the first OTL dies. Like a kind of "A's True Love is B, therefore she cannot also be in love with C" sort of thing, like A loving C somehow contradicts A also loving B.

I mean, do we ever see any of the (real) pairings fall out of love with each other? the relationships that don't work for reasons other than death or external factors like imprisonment are (a) Graham/Regina, which failed because she was controlling him via heart [ick], (b) Milah/Rumpel, which the writers keep pushin was never True Love at all ("I never loved you!"), and (c) Cora/Rumpel, which ended because Cora took out her own heart and shut herself off emotionally so she couldn't love, and possibly other minor ones that I'm forgetting? Things like David/Kathryn don't count, because they were only together because of the curse.

So there's definitely a theme in the show itself of people only ever having one True Love at a time, with any broken relationships getting put down to "not actually True Love" and death being, from what I gathered in the first two seasons, the only real way of ending a True Love (even with Emma/Neal, they haven't seen each other in ten years and they ended on really awful terms [he got her sent to jail for gods sake], and yet we have them declaring their love for each other all over again). In three, the writers have started exploring multiple True Loves, with Mulan/Aurora and the unrelenting Captain Swan and the Regina/Robin... thing, but in the case of the former it's (apparently, textually) unrequited, and in the latter two the former love interest is dead or presumed dead, so...

Food for thought.