All or Nothing

There's alwalys someone who asks questions
like What's your favorite dessert or Who 
is your favorite poet or Who was your most
well-behaved child? Once I read a story 
in which two families shared everything—
I mean literally. Not just a household 
but also their children, whose exact
parentage supposedly could not be known
or that they didn't care to know, since it 
was OK with them— Shared beds, shared 
partners, though not toothbrushes. 
The reasoning was love is not like a pie 
you can divide into parts, some larger 
or smaller, goopy with filling or with 
a flakier crust. It's just pie all the way 
through. Can you love what you don't know 
or what's yet to come as much as you 
can love what's been thrust into your hands? 
The implication might have to do with choice 
or some notion of relativity. Or it might be 
that you can't have a forest without trees; 
you can't say I love only this part of you, and 
only under certain conditions on certain days.