Love is the Best Kind of Crazy
5 tips for staying centered while falling in love
Do you believe in love at first sight?
I have no idea whether or not I believe in love at first sight. What I know is that biochemically, in my very nature, deep in my core, I am a woman to whom “love at first sight” just happens.
I know this because of 20/20 hindsight. I know this because I am a person who chose the man I’d marry after two weeks of love, and tied the knot at 23.
I know this because I would have done it again with someone I’d know for a similarly short amount of time, twenty years later, even though I should be so much older and wiser now.
How could it be, having lived all that I’ve lived, shed the tears that I’ve shed, that I could still swoon in minutes and forget myself in days?
It’s because love is a form of insanity. It’s the very best kind of insanity, but insanity nonetheless.
Emergencies are the wrong time for rainy day planning, hospital beds are a bad time to figure out faith, and the moment you fall in love is the single worst time to consider the nature of love.
The time to look deeply at the nature of love is long before you’ve met “the one.” It’s important to learn about what it is and how it affects your body when you are levelheaded, not when you’re under the influence of the powerful chemical cocktail that is love.
What is Love?
After scanning thousands of brains and developing countless studies on the nature of love in human beings, neuroscientist and seminal researcher, Dr. Helen Fischer describes love as follows:
“Romantic love is an obsession. It possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can’t stop thinking about another human being…Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly.”
— Dr. Helen Fischer, Why We Love
To date, scientists have performed thousands of fMRI scans on the brains of those who self-identify as “in love.” Do you know what those brains look like? They look like the brain of a drug user. A hit of love and a hit of cocaine are virtually identical for the human brain, because both directly stimulate our most basic pleasure/reward system.
Here’s a detailed look at the chemical processes of a body in love.
The Brain on Cocaine (Yellow= activation, red= intense activation)
The Brain on Love (Blue = Sexual arousal, Pink = Romantic love)
All of this is not to say that love is bad. Love is not bad. Its bliss. If there is a God, that God is Love. But, it’s also a form of insanity, and the better you understand that biochemical fact, the more likely you are to make good decisions.
Love is not bad. Its bliss. If there is a God, that God is Love.
The History of Love and Marriage
For the last 500 years, modern western societies have made the curious choice to make romantic love between two adults the cornerstone of society. It is on the foundation of romantic love that adults build family units, in order to birth and raise children.
It’s so important to understand how new and wild this idea is.
For example, for 1,000 years of history in Europe, it was money and politics that determined family units. Love was something that happened while rolling around in the hay by the barn. It was a transient thing, the stuff of poetry and passion, a passing fancy not the building block of a family unit or a society.
With the Enlightenment, the role of romantic love in society shifted. The individual, now centered, had the right to want, to love, and to make life-choices based on her desires, no matter how fleeting they might be.
With divorce rates in urban centers above 50%, the jury is still out on the wisdom behind this 500 year old experiment.
Why?
Because, as researcher Helen Fischer has shown, the human brain has the capacity to maintain the activation levels of romantic love for 3–18 months. Love, as the poets have long known, is a transient thing. As the foundation stone of society, it’s pretty darn wobbly.
What does that mean for you?
Love is insanity. It will turn your life upside down. It’s a force of chaos, not order, and as we all know, the best way to combat chaos is with a plan.
Here are the 5 Steps for combatting the craziness that is romantic love:
- Know yourself. Before you welcome another person into your life and your heart, you must know yourself. Know your priorities. Know your passions.
- Know what you want. What role do you want love to play in your life? How important to you is passion? How about stability? Lovers and life-partners are two different things, characterize by different qualities. If you’re considering a long-term commitment to another person, you’ll be happiest if you can know which you want and which you’ve got. Knowledge is power, baby!
- Know how to say no. Romantic love makes us forget ourselves, whether we like it or not. But, here’s the thing…each of us is born with a purpose that we’re not allowed to forget. The key to finding balance in the face of romantic love is the ability to stick up for yourself, and that means sometimes saying “no” to your love.
- Know that you are already loved. When romantic love sweeps in, it is easy to feel that our beloved is our whole world, but that’s just plain not true. I love you. Your friends love you. The more you can remember that you are loved by many, the better you’ll do at maintaining your balance with your beloved.
- Know that love takes work, but its worth it. Doom and gloom notwithstanding, love is worth the pain and suffering it can sometimes cause. It is very simply, what makes life worth living.
Romantic love isn’t just a drug. It’s the very best drug there is. It’s free and it’s magic. It activates the senses. It makes living so much sweeter and it put’s life’s many challenges in perspective. It is worth the blood, sweat and tears that it can sometimes wring out of us.
It is what I most want for you. But, I want it for you in way that is wise and lasting. To have that, you have to see it for what it is.
It’s the best form of insanity around.
Most Important Lessons
Most Important Lessons is a series of 10 letters I’m writing my teenage daughter. When she was 1, I helped her learn to walk and talk. Now, these lessons, on healthy sex and pleasure, are the most important I can teach her.