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?
Sarah Vine and Tania Kindersley

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.
A little biology can be helpful here. In the first throes of romantic love you are under the influence of a powerful chemical cocktail: dopamine (which makes opiates look like aspirin) is rushing through your veins. As if that were not enough, a perfect mixture of vasopressin and oxytocin, the attachment hormones, are raging around your body. Much of this was discovered through extensive study of prairie voles, who mate for life, spend a great deal of time tenderly grooming each other and nesting together, and studiously avoid meeting other potential partners.
If only all men were just like prairie voles, we say, but if wishes were horses we would all be Lady Godiva.
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 danger of romantic love
We don't mean danger in the obvious heartbreak way - the cheap betrayals, the broken promises - we mean the dark danger that lurks when sensible, educated women fall for the dogmatic idea that romantic love is the ultimate goal for the modern female. Every day, thousands of films, books, articles and TV programmes hammer home this message - that without romance, life is somehow barren.
However, there are women who entertain the subversive notion, like an intellectual mouse scratching behind the skirting board, that perhaps this higher love is not necessarily the celestial highway to absolute happiness. Their empirical side kicks in, and they observe that couples who marry in a haze of adoration and sex are, ten years later, throwing china and fighting bitterly over who gets the dog.
But the women who notice these contradictions are often afraid to speak them in case they should be labelled cynics. Surely only the most jaded and damaged would challenge the orthodoxy of romantic love. The received wisdom that there is not something wrong with the modern idea of sexual love as ultimate panacea, but that if you don't get it, there is something wrong with you. You freak, go back and read the label. We say: the privileging of romantic love over all others, the insistence that it is the one essential, incontrovertible element of human happiness, traced all the way back to the caves, is a trap and a snare. The idea that every human heart, since the invention of the wheel, was yearning for its other half is a myth.
Love is a human constant; it is the interpretation of it that changes. The way that love has been expressed, its significance in daily life, have never been immutable or constant. The different kinds of love and what they signify are not fixed, whatever the traditionalists may like to tell you.
So the modern idea that romantic love is a woman's highest calling, that she is somehow only half a person without it, that if she questions it she is going against all human history, does not stand up to scrutiny. It is not an imperative carved in stone; it is a human idea, and human beings are frail and suggestible, and sometimes get the wrong end of the stick.