Some of it i agree, but some i don't.
Does love make you sick?
Is romantic love a mental illness, as Plato said, a story that ends in death or the highest human achievement?
There are 21 dictionary definitions for the word love. Every woman may come to a point in her middle life when she suspects that she doesn't understand the first thing about any of these. Poets, philosophers, playwrights and pop singers from Socrates to Stevie Wonder have had a great deal to say about love.
It is the sweetest thing; it is a red, red rose; it is a battlefield; it is a drug, a delusion, a lunacy. It is the answer, and the question. It is a balm, and a piercing arrow. H.L.Mencken compared it to perceptual anaesthesia; Keats wrote that it was his religion; Shakespeare called it a familiar, a devil, an ever-fixed mark, a smoke, a fire, a sea, a madness, a fever, a choking gall; it is like sunshine after rain, and does not bend.
Of the various loves, romantic love is the most complicated and inexplicable. It can come on when you least expect it (and with the most unsuitable person), it can cast you from the heights of ecstasy to the abyss of despair, it can roar in you one moment then dissipate as quickly as breath on glass. It is what drives you to offer yourself to another human for the rest of your natural life, but only a few years later you may look back and have no memory at all of that initial ecstasy. Romantic love can be so confusing that sometimes you simply want to give up on the whole thing and concentrate on the nature of dark matter, or macroeconomics, or something else less tiring.
there's too much to read... if u want to read more, heres the source: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_an...icle5719906.ece
You may not be interested to read the whole article, but here's some good points i found (highlighted):
Aside from the chemical cosh, you also have the small-brain problem. MRI scans have shown that falling in love involves only a very tiny part of the brain, a much smaller part than is used when, say, operating heavy machinery. Researchers at University College London have remarked wryly that it was fascinating to reflect that Helen of Troy could have launched a thousand ships through the agency of such a limited expanse of cortex.
It is vital, therefore, to bear in mind that when falling in love and choosing your mate you may be making a decision about the rest of your life based on only a fraction of your cognitive function. This limited section of the brain is also the exact same part that responds to cocaine, which means that you may select a partner for life, move to Anchorage and decide to make many babies, all based on the same area of the cortex that enjoys an illegal substance that makes you talk accelerated gibberish all night long.
Plato said that love is a mental disease. Modern researchers agree enthusiastically, categorising love as a form of madness and echoing what psychologists have been telling tearful patients for years. (There are certain shrinks who refuse to treat people in the early throes of love because they are too insane to do a thing with.) Currently, scientists are having a genteel academic squabble over whether love most closely resembles the manic phase of bipolar disorder or the characteristics seen in obsessive compulsive disorder.
There is also a school of thought that insists love is a cultural phenomenon. As the great French cynic La Rochefoucauld said: “People would not fall in love if they had not heard love talked about.” The culture keeps up a rapid-fire bombardment of the power and the glory of romantic love, and yet it seems curious that so many of the Greatest Love Stories Ever Told - Cathy and Heathcliff, Tristan and Isolde, Heloise and Abelard, Lancelot and Guinevere - end in disaster, if not death and carnage. If we were being really sceptical, we might conclude that it is delusional that “in love” should be regarded as the greatest and most time-consuming aspiration of the modern female.
There is a highly dangerous literary subset to this, most vividly exemplified by Elizabeth Smart's novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, which privileges true love over all other considerations. You can lay waste to families, other people - entire countries - but it's all fine because you are doing it in the name of Love. If you ever find yourself leaning towards this view, we suggest that you have a strong cup of tea and read something enlightening about pig husbandry until the delusion has passed.
It is only when the insane chemical phase of love dies down that you can tell whether it is the real thing. If it is, it will shift into the deep steady love that gets you through rainy days and financial crises and the small quotidian tasks that make up a life. This is why couples who have been together for 50 years always talk about marrying their best friend.
The mysterious thing about this proper love is that it contains no trace of the early lunacy. It does not make you want to rip the beloved's clothes off at inappropriate moments; it is nothing to do with the wild urge to create a universe with only the two of you in it. Instead, it is the kind of profound affection that makes you smile at idiosyncrasies that anyone else would find pointless, or get the joke that nobody else will understand. This kind of love is built of the bricks of a hundred small memories and moments in time. It is the feeling you get when you read a story in the paper, or see a comical character in the street, or overhear a conversation, and know that there is only one person you have to call and tell. It has nothing to do with extravagant hotel suites, or watching the sun rise, or impetuous trips to distant cities. It is not what you see in the shuttered dark of a movie palace; it is finding romance in the unheralded, the mundane: a sudden surge of adoration because a certain person knows how to fix a dripping tap. It may not be the world well lost for love, or “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”, but it is less likely to leave your heart in shards on the floor.
Romantic love, however deranged, is still one of the great delights of life. It has given us sonnets and plays and entire sonatas; it has given us The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice and Doctor Zhivago. It lent us Yeats's pilgrim soul and Herrick's sweet infanta, and Keats's bright star. The wild twist in the stomach at the mere sight of the adored one, the random smiling at strangers in the street, the sudden desire to swing from lampposts, all add vastly to the gaiety of nations. (It should be noted that all these symptoms are not just for the very young: the sensible, 40-year-old female can just as easily become unhinged by the glimpse of a delightful pair of green eyes.)
Love can be crazy, delicious, thrilling; it can make you feel as if every atom in your body is dancing. It can bring back lost youth, make you remember forgotten dreams, revive dashed hopes. It's just that it needs to come with a caveat, a health warning, an unromantic but insistent voice of reason. So, the next time you fall in love, you should bear in mind that in those early days you are a little crazy, and it may be wise not to make any sudden moves.
The article.. then go's on about The danger of romantic love.. which if your interested, have a read.
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