Romantic love is part obsession, part reality — and part madness

By David McElroy · July 21, 2018

I never understood obsession until I experienced romantic love.

They tell us obsession is unhealthy when it comes to love, but I’ve never experienced love without a large dose of obsession along the way. Maybe it’s different for some people. I can’t say. But I know my patterns and I know what I see from everyone I know.

Some form of obsession — at least in the beginning or the end of a love — seems close to universal, but it’s strongly heightened for those of us who feel emotions very deeply.

I’m thinking about this tonight because of a conversation I had with a friend who went through a painful breakup six months or so ago. My friend knows she did the right thing to end the relationship, but she can’t quit wanting the guy and obsessing over him. She even tried to date someone else for a couple of months, but she was just going through the motions.

When she allows herself to talk with this dysfunctional and manipulative man, she is angry and hurt. But when she cuts him off completely, she’s so depressed she wants to die. She knows her obsession is unhealthy for her — but she can’t seem to get past it.

For many years, I’ve grappled with the light and dark sides of love. I’ve tried to understand it and I’ve tried to figure out how to love in emotionally healthy ways. Every time I think I have it figured out, I’m confronted by the reality that romantic love is a far more powerful force than I can understand or control.

Love is like a fierce and powerful storm that pulls me toward it with its power and potential for good and beauty — but it’s something that can destroy me, too.

I’ve seen love do terrible damage to me when I can’t have it. Some people would play semantic games by saying it shouldn’t be called love when it can cause that kind of damage, but I think romantic love truly brings out both the best and the worst in human beings.

Love can make us giving and loyal and self-sacrificing. Love can make us willing to give anything we have — even our lives — to make someone else happy and safe. Love can make us capable of feats we didn’t know we could achieve in order to take care of someone we love.

But love can also make us obsessive and scared and jealous. Love can make us willing to throw away our values — sacrifice everything we are — in order to have what we believe we need. Love can make us capable of turning into monsters who are capable of destroying — even capable of destroying ourselves.

It’s easy to concentrate only on the good side of love. I like to do that. It’s far more pleasant. But love brings with it something dark and dangerous. We can pretend that has nothing to do with love, but we’re lying to ourselves. That dark side is always lurking underneath the beauty.

To be in love — to need a specific human being with a powerful and irrational lust for possession — is a form of madness. At least part of the time. Even if we like to ignore this dark side.

My friend who’s struggling with this issue deserves better than the awful man she’s obsessed with right now. Part of her sickness is not realizing she deserves better. We all have a toxic brew inside our heads and hearts that can pull us toward people who are wrong for us at times. It can even be hard to understand while we’re in the middle of it that this person is part of a bad pattern.

This woman is beautiful. She’s bright. She has a great personality. She could have pretty much any man she wanted, but she doesn’t know that. She’s obsessed with someone who would destroy her if she let him. She’s locked in the dark side of love.

Psychologists would probably tell me that emotionally healthy people can have the positive parts of love without the negative parts tagging along, but I don’t think that’s realistic. For most of us — maybe for all of us — love is a struggle of figuring out how to have the object of our obsession before we destroy ourselves and everything we believe in.

For me, the madness of love is knowing I absolutely must have one particular person or else nothing will be right. It’s knowing that the attraction isn’t for a particular set of characteristics of one person. It’s knowing that it’s this one woman — to the exclusion of everyone in the world.

Love is an all or nothing thing for me.

Even when I feel that “all or nothing” intensity, I know love can die eventually. When it does — seemingly through no control of my own — I can move on in life, maybe fall in love with someone else.

But until that obsession is gone, nothing is right. The dark side of love is dangerous to me — and it’s done serious damage to me over the last few years — but I see no way to have the beautiful love I need without risking the obsession and hurt which I fear.

Is love worth it? It has to be worth it, because I need love — specific love — just as much as I need water or food or air. I need love to make life worth living.

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Something small just made me happy. The specifics don’t matter, but I found myself smiling and I felt a kind of warm joy filling my heart and mind. In that brief moment of ecstasy, I felt the irrational desire to talk with a particular person. It wasn’t a calculated thought or a rational want. It wasn’t even that I wanted to tell the person about this particular thing. I simply felt ecstatic joy — and I somehow connected that feeling to this person. I can’t explain it. If we’re wise, we’ll pay attention to such moments, because the instincts of our hearts and minds often know more truth than our conscious and rational brains do. The same thing can be true in moments of great pain and suffering. If we pay attention to who our hearts are drawn to in such moments — of extreme joy or extreme hurt — we learn something about ourselves. I don’t know why. I only know that our gut instincts sometimes understand deep truths about ourselves that our rational brains haven’t yet figured out.

It started out as a satirical joke, but some friends liked the idea, so now it’s a real Facebook profile picture frame. If you’ve never heard of Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, let me explain. One of the dumber elements of social media is that it allows people to publicly signal their goodness and virtue to others — without actually doing anything of substance. So you see photo frames around profile photos saying things such as, “Moms Against Racism,” as though they’re standing up against those evil moms who are in favor of racism. It’s meaningless virtue-signaling and it deserves to be mocked, so I made a frame and published it on Facebook’s frame system today. If you go to your own Facebook profile picture and add a frame, then search for Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, you can select it. About a dozen of my friends are using it so far. It’s just fun satire — at least until Facebook decides it “goes against our community standards.” Or something. It’s just a fun way of mocking something that deserves to be mocked.

When I first told you about the project that would become DavidMcElroy.TV, I thought it would launch by mid-May. Since today is the last day of May — and I’m still not close to launching a finished product — here’s a brief update. The graphic above is the latest rough mockup of the format, but it’s still subject to change. Even the logo isn’t yet set in stone. Motion graphics are really difficult when you’re starting from scratch. Sunday night, my camera stopped recording, so it has to be sent off for repair. I have an older camera that I’ll keep using for testing, but I can’t launch without the better one. The audio system developed a low buzz this weekend that has me puzzled. I’ll be taking all the equipment over to the home of a local audio engineer who’s volunteered to help me figure out what I’ve done wrong. On top of all that, my on-camera performance seems to get worse with each test I do. There are days when I think I’m crazy to be attempting this. And in truth, I probably am insane to do it, but being crazy has never stopped me before. I’m at least a month away from launch and it could be a few months. Thanks for being patient — and thanks for all the support and enthusiasm for the project that you’ve sent my way.

I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

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