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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What if your daughter were about to start kindergarten and you went to the affluent school where she was about to go and discovered that the school was teaching nonsense? That’s exactly what happened to an education consultant in Colorado who recently visited his daughter’s new school. Everybody was nice, but when the kindergarten teacher talked about their methods of teaching reading, he cringed. She was using “progressive” methods that were debunked decades ago. He’s learning that most schools use similar techniques that don’t work, simply because schools of education are committed to ideas and techniques based on ideology instead of cognitive science. So why do so many people entrust their children’s future to these well-meaning but incompetent people? It’s one of the most underreported scandals of modern learning. Read his summary of what he’s found here and then check out the radio documentary to which he refers where you can find out more.

I really enjoy political satire. You might remember that my first short film was political satire. But there’s a trend in political satire today which I find disturbing — and this graphic is a great example. This fake promotional ad for Fox News was placed on New York City subways recently. When I found it on social media, people who lean to the political left were smirking and enjoying this attack on their “stupid” opponents. But this isn’t satire. It’s just a mean-spirited attempt to say, “Those who agree with me are smarter than you idiots who watch Fox News.” It’s a smirking, nasty attack which makes no point other than to claim superiority over people for the sin of disagreeing. I absolutely loathe Fox News, but I also loathe CNN and MSNBC and all the other media outfits who pander to partisans and intentionally try to divide people. If you want to show that you’re a small-minded bigot who doesn’t understand his opponents, just pretend your enemies are all stupid and evil. They’re not. The truth is a lot more complicated. Ideas are ripe for satire, but that involves creative thinking, not just nasty personal attacks.

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Democracy is going to die — and it’s all because the human brain prefers easy answers to complex problems. You and I were born during the golden age of democracy. It was a period during which it was assumed that democracy was the natural evolution of civic governance. But Dr. Shawn W. Rosenberg is challenging that idea. He’s a leader in the study of political psychology and he says research convinces him that the human brain isn’t wired for self-rule and that democracy is heading toward collapse. In a paper presented this year to the International Society of Political Psychologists, Rosenberg argues that the human brain naturally favors simple answers to complex problems, which tends to favor the rise of authoritarian strongmen who offer confident and simplistic solutions. Anyone who’s paying attention sees this happening around the world already. Donald Trump isn’t the cause of the problem, but he is an early example of this outcome in action. All authoritarian rulers come to power offering simplistic solutions — just as Adolph Hitler did in Germany and Benito Mussolini did in Italy. I’ve argued for 20 years that this country is heading toward social and economic collapse and I’ve made the case that things are going to get ugly when that happens, at least for those who are not prepared. Many people will ignore this evidence, of course, because they have too much emotionally invested in the idea that democracy will prevail — but that is just another example of clinging to a simple answer to a very complex problem. Don’t be surprised when things get ugly.

Political candidates are liars. They can’t help it, because lying to voters is the only thing that gets them elected. They have to promise things which are not possible. I used to write political promises for my clients, so I know this very well. None of my successful clients ever did anything which I promised for them. Every day lately, I see new promises from presidential candidates. I know they’re lying about what they will do if elected — and I assume they know they’re lying, too. When a society changes, the change starts from culture — and that starts with the values which individuals hold. I hate many things about this society. I want a lot of changes. When I was young, I believed the way to change those things was by becoming a political leader. I know better today. We live like hamsters on a wheel or rats in a maze. Government can’t change that. Only we can make those changes for ourselves. The next time you hear a politician promising to change your life — your work life or your home life or your children’s future — remember that the person is lying. Don’t wait for politicians. Take the initiative and change your own life. Nobody else can do it for you.

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