If romantic love is mental illness, do many of us want to be cured?

By David McElroy · September 4, 2019

Love is the only form of madness which most of us gladly seek.

I came across an anonymous post on a social media site in which a man was gushing about his happiness at finding the love of his life.

“I found her,” he wrote. “In the most bizarre place, I met the woman who has become the most important person in my life — and my lifelong partner.”

To “find” someone implies that she was lost — or that there was someone he had always needed to find. Is he crazy? Or is this the most clearly he will ever see this world?

“I lost hope for the longest time,” he wrote. “Thinking no one will ever be able to understand me. To really take time to get to know me. I thought I was always going to be alone in this world. I’ve always felt like an outsider from this world. Like everything I do is wrong. Like the person I am is just not how a person is meant to be.”

I know exactly what he felt. Do you?

“And then, just like that, one day you showed up and said the words, ‘You will fall in love with me,’” he wrote. “You understand me. You can relate to me. You care about me. The same way I can understand you. Nine months later and I’m in love.”

When we fall in love, we are all delusional in some ways. The woman I love is the most beautiful in the world. I am sure of that. But millions of other men are also sure they’re in love with the most beautiful woman in the world.

Even when we see the faults of the one we love, we minimize those faults. We make excuses for that person. We are incredibly eager to put that person into the best light. We don’t want to hear about his or her faults. Even if someone who really knows the person tells us something terrible, we don’t want to hear it.

Being in love is also being in denial about some things.

“To me, you are the perfect women,” the gushing anonymous man wrote. “On the outside, you are drop dead gorgeous. … You are just the most attractive person I have ever met. It’s not even an exaggeration. But I won a lottery and it goes beyond just her looks.”

None of us want to believe we have fallen for someone just for his or her beauty or physical appearance. Something about the mental alchemy of love turns a person into something far more than that. And we mean it when we feel it for the first time.

“You are much more than just someone I love,” he wrote. “You are my best friend, too. And you are easily the best thing that has happened or will ever happen to me. Every moment with you is special. And the moments without you are dreadful.”

When you love someone, there is nothing worse than being separated from that loved one. What else would make people leave their homes and move to faraway cities or states or even countries? What else would make us willing to risk everything on the character and honesty and words of another human being — one who we sometimes barely know?

“You are so beautiful on the inside,” he wrote. “A heart that’s too kind for this world. Thoughts and beliefs that are so individual to you it really makes you different. In a very special way. You really take time to take care of me. I can feel you putting me over yourself and it’s so sweet. It made me cry last night.”

When we love, we see the best in the other. And that wellspring of inner emotion bubbles up in such powerful ways that it really can make us cry. How many other things can do that?

“You are the one I will live the rest of my life with,” he wrote. “To live and die by your side is my dream. Because if it’s not you, then right now I am just in a beautiful dream that I hope never ends. I love you.”

Love has caused more grief for me than anything else in my life. As much pain as I experienced because of my father’s narcissism and my mother’s abandonment of us, it hurts worse to be in love and not have the one I love.

In 1931, King Edward VIII of Great Britain was introduced to an American woman named Wallis Simpson. She was married at the time, but Edward fell deeply in love with her — and she fell in love with him.

By 1934, the pair had become clandestine lovers and they wanted to marry, but the Church of England would not allow the king — the nominal head of the church — to marry a divorced woman while her ex-husband was still alive. It was a political and personal crisis for the king.

Faced with a choice between remaining king and being with Wallis, Edward did the only thing which love would allow. He gave up his throne in order to marry the love of his life.

In his radio address following his abdication, Edward explained his decision in this way.

“I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love,” he said.

Most men would do anything to be a king. Many would kill or lie or steal or conquer lands. Many dream of power and position and honor. But Edward VIII chose love.

Wallis divorced her husband in order to marry Edward. They remained together for 35 years, until his death.

Love makes us do things which we wouldn’t otherwise imagine doing. It changes our priorities. It makes us hurt. It can lead us to lose all we have.

But this madness is the amazing gift of the gods, as the Greeks believed. If it is mental illness, it is a madness which can give us a reason to live, a reason to strive, a reason to achieve.

If love is madness — as I think it is — I don’t want a cure. I want love, with all its madness and angst and joy.

More than anything in this world, I need the love and presence of the woman I love. That is madness, but it is a willing choice.

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There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

I’d like to write a modern version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — a more cynical one — with a realistic ending for today’s audience. In this new version, the little boy points out on social media that the emperor is naked but nobody listens to him. Instead, everybody keeps posting grander and grander praise for the emperor’s non-existent clothes. The cognitive dissonance makes the people unable to hear the child who tells them the truth, because they’re getting social media praise — likes and so forth — for their lies. The confused child eventually feels so defeated that he shuts up and walks away. He’s so hurt and disappointed by this that he withdraws from the world and spends years in therapy, trying to figure out whether the rest of the world is crazy or if he’s the crazy one. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be that little boy, but few want to hear the truth today. Either I’m crazy or else our culture has gone insane.

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