Love Sick
Obsessive love: don’t think it can happen to you? We joke about it, but clinical psychologist Frank Tallis explains how easy it is to topple in headlong—and how symptoms can match those of a mental illness.
Among the Roman philosopher Lucretius’s writings on the mind and behaviour is a description of what happens when people fall in love. He observes that the besotted frequently become agitated and stirred up by insatiable desires. Sexual union, often passionate and violent, results in only temporary relief, because lovers always want more of each other. Lucretius seems to be describing an addiction. He uses language that suggests falling in love is a little like becoming ill or, even worse, going mad. Love, he says, is like an unconquerable disease and lovers waste away from wounds that can’t be seen. They are loversick: weak and neglectful of responsibilities, they behave foolishly and fritter away fortunes on excessive gifts; they become jealous and insecure.
The earliest poems were composed in Egypt more than three and a half thousand years ago—exquisite love songs that describe the despair of lovers as a malady. Early medical texts also conceptualise love as an ailment. The second-century Greek physician Galen described a married woman who couldn’t sleep and who started acting strangely because she had fallen in love with a dancer. Love sickness was considered a legitimate diagnosis from classical times to the 18th century, but it more or less disappeared in the 19th century. Today, the term “lovesickness” is a metaphor rather than a diagnosis.
When love-struck individuals voice their complaints, the best they can usually hope for is a little sympathy and a wry, knowing smile. Teasing and ridicule are common responses.
But lovesickness is not a trivial matter. Unrequited love is a frequent cause of suicide, and approximately 10 percent of all murders are connected with sexual jealousy. Moreover, there is a view that intermittently gains currency within psychiatry and psychology that troubled close relationships are not merely associated with mental illness but are a primary cause.
I have often found myself sitting in front of lovesick patients whose psychological pain and behavioural disturbances were equal in severity to cardinal symptoms of a major psychiatric illness. Such patients are usually embarrassed to disclose their thoughts and feelings, having internalised the prevailing view that lovesickness is transitory, adolescent, inconsequential, or ridiculous. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The emotional and behavioural consequences of falling in love can be enduring and profound. I have seen lives unravel on account of wild passions; I have watched people suffer prolonged agonies because of rejection; I have accompanied individuals to the verge of psychological precipices—dark, fearful places—where I sensed that an infelicitous word or maladroit turn of phrase might be enough to propel them over the edge. I have watched people hollowed out by desire and yearning diminish them to a fading iteration of their former selves.
The term “incurable romantic” is more than just an amusing designation—it acknowledges an uncomfortable clinical reality. One of the ardent poets of ancient Egypt tellingly wrote that doctors with their remedies could not heal his heart. He may have been right.
Love is a great leveller. Everyone wants love, everyone falls in love, everyone loses love, and everyone knows something of love’s madness; and when love goes wrong, our relative wealth, education, and status count for nothing. Virtually all the major theoreticians of psychotherapy, from Freud onwards, agree that love is essential to human happiness.
The problems arising from love—infatuation, jealousy, heartbreak, trauma, inappropriate attachment, and addiction, to name but a few—merit serious consideration, and the line that separates normal from abnormal love is frequently blurred. The merest spark of sexual attraction can potentially consume us. We all share this dormant propensity, which explains why examples of its full expression in my clinic are so arresting and alarming. They give us good reason to reflect on our own intimate histories and forewarn us of dangers that may lie ahead. Take one of my recent patients. He was 19, a philosophy student with unwashed hair and an unconvincing beard. The dark crescents under his eyes suggested sleepless nights and his clothes exuded the smell of cigarettes. He had been rejected by his girlfriend and he was exhibiting symptoms of lovesickness described by poets. His distress and anger seemed to come off his body in rising waves.
“I don’t understand how it happened. I just don’t understand.” I noticed his foot tapping impatiently. “Can you give me my answers? What’s it all about? I mean ... life, love. What’s it all about?”
Love and life are often linked because it is almost impossible to think about life without love. In a very real sense, when we ask questions about the nature of love we are also asking very deep questions about what it is to be human and how to live. J This is an edited excerpt from The Incurable Romantic by Frank Tallis (Hachette). Crisis support is available at www.befrienders.org.my