Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness

Darwin was correct then – and he remains correct today. Even if we take into account the fact that historically women have always been disadvantaged because of social inequality, the disparity of artistic and scientific achievement that divides the sexes is quite extraordinary. From an evolutionary perspective, this strongly suggests that male talent has been shaped by sexual selection. Men might appear to be more gifted than women, but this is only because women have ‘made’ them that way! If women in the ancestral environment hadn’t expressed a distinct preference for gifted mates, such a disparity would never have arisen in the first place. With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female . . . But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during the same period of life. Consequently . . . we might expect that they would at least tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring at the corresponding period of manhood.

Firstly, falling in love is greatly influenced by prior learning and experience. For example, in the formative years of childhood, a classroom crush for a girl or boy with black hair might establish a hair-colour preference that becomes apparent in later life. However, memories of such events are not always accessible. They might be hidden away in the mind’s basement – the unconscious. Therefore, we often have very little insight into our own behaviour. Like the Wolf Man, our most significant memories may have been repressed. It is only by entering psychoanalysis that such memories can be recovered. Without being able to identify the real causes of love, we will attempt to generate a series of post-hoc justifications – which may have no bearing on reality whatsoever. They will be nothing more than a set of convenient (and probably romantic) fictions: ‘It was our destiny to be together’, or ‘It was love at first sight.’ Secondly, ideas about romance and romantic love allow us to disguise the true and troubling nature of our attachments. Just below the thin lacquer of civilisation, primitive sexual desires are a potent and unwelcome reminder of our animal ancestry. Thus, love is a cosmetic, clumsily applied to protect us from discomfiting self-knowledge. It operates within the psychic economy like a defence mechanism, warping reality along contours that cause the least offence – thus reducing anxiety.

The experience of ‘falling in love’, although complex, has been described through the ages and across cultures with remarkable consistency. Moreover, the repeated, indeed relentless, poetic linkage of love and madness merits more than just a knowing smile and a moment of embarrassed self-reflection. It is surely of some significance that the same metaphor has been employed so enthusiastically from the time of the earliest love songs to those of the present day. In addition, it must also be significant that doctors took love sickness very seriously for over a thousand years. Perhaps all this means something? Perhaps – if we suspend disbelief and provisionally define love as a mental illness – this definition will edge us towards some unexpected insights. Indeed, it may even be the key to a true understanding of what love is, and how it works.