Monday, 8th June 2009
Is LOVE a grave mental disease?
The voluminous reactions to my last blog (Marriage is the leading cause of divorce!), left me with no other choice but to take a step back and reflect. I felt that by jumping straight into the onslaught of divorce, without giving ‘love’ its fair share of space, was a gross disservice to the human race. So here goes.....
Plato said that ‘love is a grave mental disease’ and, if you’ve ever been in love you would probably agree with him. Isn’t falling in love like going to war without any armour? Isn’t it like throwing a newborn kitten to the wolves? When you fall in love your heart is wide open which means that someone can get inside and mess it all up. The feeling is unsurprisingly very similar to being addicted to heroin, in fact scientists have discovered that the same chemical process that takes place with drug addiction, takes place when we fall in love.
So, you reach adulthood proud of not having fallen for the peer pressure to abuse drugs, you don’t even smoke so you think that you’re finally out of the dangers of addiction. Then, suddenly, someone comes out of nowhere, and for some unexplainable reason you let them wander into your life, you even give them the best part of you and the power to turn it into a hamburger patty.
This is when your heart can be taken hostage by a bunch of love terrorists armed with the latest automatic weapons. This is also when your soul is taken to a secret hideout, gagged up, tied to a chair and made to bleed just for kicks. And because we’re all helpless addicts you hang in there, even though it’s painful, even when you’re being ignored, or when your self esteem has been beaten to a pulp. Sometimes we even hang around when they tell us that they love somebody else, so we stalk them, dream about them, and honestly believe that we could never be happy without them.
The process starts very early in life – as soon as we hit puberty we are injected with a vile concoction of lust. Without this lethal dose of oestrogen and testosterone that messes up our brains we would never ever find that special someone, because in our right minds, we would never be interested enough in a stranger. Lust is what keeps us ‘looking around’, whilst our desire for romance is what leads us to attraction... and the continued inability to think rationally.
The old saying ‘love is blind’ is not entirely accurate, because in the early throws of a relationship love is not only blind but deaf, dumb and sometimes very stupid. At this point we are oblivious to any flaws that our partner might have, we cannot get our minds off them, and we are disgustingly interested in every detail of their life...and to the determent of our friends’ sanity, we also think that everybody else is. If all goes well, once this phase is over, we become attached enough to each other to stay together when the smoke from this chemical bomb has died down.
Contrary to popular belief, psychologists at the University of Texas in Austin have concluded that those who idealize their partner stay in relationships longer that those who can’t or don’t – “Usually, this is a matter of one person putting a good spin on the partner, seeing the partner as more responsive than he or she really is” says Ted Huston, the study’s lead investigator. So, if this study is true, despite all advice to the contrary, it’s actually not a good idea to keep your feet on the ground. Seeing your partner for what they really are, without some of the glitter that your brain drummed in the first phase of your relationship, might in fact be the beginning of the end.
This is also the reason why unrequited love lasts the longest, hurts the deepest and feels the strongest – love that we cannot have does not allow us to go through the normal process of lust-attraction-attachment, so it remains suspended somewhere between one of the stages driving our neurons crazy!
The point of the matter is that the giddiness that we feel when we first fall in love - that racing heart, flushed skin and sweaty palms - are simply a result of a dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine that together release a pleasure cocktail into our bloodstream. But it is important to remember that there is a logical and obvious reason why the symptoms of elation, intense energy, sleeplessness, loss of appetite and focused attention, are restricted to that ‘crazy, can’t-think-of-anything-but-you’ stage.
During this stage of a relationship we can only focus intently on the relationship and on little else, and this is precisely what makes it entirely unsustainable. If this feeling had to last forever we’d have to give up everything else, because the last time I checked people with drug addictions can hardly sustain themselves let alone have successful careers and loving families.
So when the initial gaiety and butterflies subside, don’t panic. Your relationship is not over. No it’s not time to move on to someone else. This is simply life’s way of letting you get on with it.
Unfortunately as much as I would like to claim it as my own, the final point that I would like to make has already been made by Woody Allen. So I leave you with it to ponder on:
"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down."
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Comments
Joe Xuereb understood what you fail to comprehend namely that mine was a rhetorical question and that it did not ask for a reply. My comment drew attention to the conflicting assertion that nature achieves its purpose and gets the job done because coitus leads to procreation and, within the same context, dragging in coitus between gays.
You complement me too much. Off to fetch my 'weeping vase'.
:)
Ingratiating sops never did work with me. Well, maybe they did once upon a time.
Sorry to disappoint you. You like to think you agree with me. The bad news is that you have no idea what I am talking about. And this is neither the time nor the place. You could ask your friend Sharon Abela. She is quite an expert at deciphering fishy conundrums at ground level.
Surely you must have heard of the "naturalistic fallacy".
When Joe Xuereb wrote that "nature" devised coitus to propagate, he was simply stating an evolutionary fact, which you, as a Doctor, should find no difficulty in accepting (unless you are a creationist who is opposed to evolution).
However, as an intelligent adult human being, you should also know that humans are wise not to do only that which is "natural", otherwise you would lose your job (illness is "natural", medicine is "unnatural").
Nature's job is not done when gay couples have sex, just as much as nature's job is not done when priests choose celibacy, or to go even further, nature's job is not done when one freely choose to have sex with only one partner. No big deal.
I don't think Joe Xuereb needs to explain anything.
Nature intended coital union to multiply. Job done. But humans, being humans, hijacked the amplesso. Homosexual men and women not immune to this. Damn one . And damn the other. It's only fair.
Mark Smith, given the above, and the fact (as proof) that men obsess about marmmae intended to nourish the young.
But all is not lost Mark. Having secured a 'love nest''you can guarantee it durability beyond the beyond, and holding hands exchange benign glances. And do only what's prescribed by erudite fishermen 2000 years ago. Reiterated by modern erudite doctors. Trust me Mark. Trust my numerically incredible experience over decades and continents. With men. But that is irrelevant to the argument. Ah-men!!
I agree with you.
Maybe I can also add that this is the stage where 'real' love comes into play.
It's the moment when the couple are really put to task: if their love is based on strong foundations it evolves into commitment, dedication, etc.
Of course it's nicer if the 'in love' feeling remains too.
Ultimately I really feel that real love is a verb and not a noun - it requires action.
@ Mark Smith
I sympathise, truly. May I recommend you carry on loving her anyway....... and let her know you do :)
Nature is God's creation...so like God....it works in mysterious ways!!
They are very much two divisible individuals. Once one of the two starts to 'cool' off, the other following is hardly automatic. They are separate individuals, different baggage, different needs. When still madly in love, the needs unite and are shared. Once a cooling starts, the differences become glaringly obvious. Popularly, we talk of, in a relationship, one of the two always gets hurt. Known fact.
The problem is we are sold a 'commercialised notion' of togetherness. You know, the song lyrics, the advertised holidays together, the sharing of a beautiful sunset, etc. Of course they are together, hands locked, eyes dazzled. But the nitty-gritty of the experience is different for both. Has to be. They are individuals.
Quoting precisely from your comments that “Everything around a couple, gay or straight, is overlapping social construct” and that “Nature devised coitus to propagate” could you please elucidate further on how “Its (i.e. nature’s) job is done” when coitus occurs between gay couples?
I met my wife 25 years ago and been married for the past 19. As Geraldine said, my heart skips a beat too every time i see her, hear her laugh, see the twinkle in her eyes, but even when she is angry at me :). Does this make me blind/dumb/unique in this world? (NOT).
@Joe Xuereb
although i agree with you on some arguments, in others you generalise too much. Yes it is important to love with the head to establish acceptable and non acceptable paramaters and make sure that you honour these at all times (question of DECIDING to). But it is NOT invariably that people fall out of love. My wife and i have fortunately approached our marriage with deep commitment, but keeping it alive and bubbly continuously.
I don't agree with "it is absolutely not recommended to pray together". For some it has worked and still works (i prob don't do enough of it myself), so we cannot say "not recommended". "Divorce is an option", well, for me it is not, but i respect others and do not want to impose my beliefs on anyone. agreeably, sometimes it is the most plausible solution.
that's because your attraction was not 'to encourage the continuity of the species'. clearly you're in a same sex relationship and you have fooled evolution...good for you.
sweeping, all-pervasive simplicity and complexity. Resulting in repeated coital unions some of which are bound to bear fruit. Natural monogamy would be counter-productive > end of species. Nothing to do with religion. Marriage came later to protect children needy of long weaning periods, ownership, inheritance, security, social order, etc. This was a social construct, veritably a contract that can be untied. Nothing to do with religion. The whole setup is dressed up in all kinds of romantic notions, lyrics and so on. And people fall for it all the time. They are condtioned to believe that falling in love (falling, interesting word) is having found the right one and thence perennial bliss - they marry - but wake up. The fallout (as in falling out of love) is inevitable, natural. The words falling (in love), head over heels, madly, are not incidental.
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