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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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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