to what psychologists call “intrusive thinking”-that famously distracted state in which you cannot concentrate on anything other than the object of your obsession. Once infatuation strikes, all else-jobs, relationships, responsibilities, food, sleep, work-falls by the wayside as you nurse fantasies about your dearest one that quickly become repetitive, invasive, and all-?consuming. Infatuation alters your brain chemistry, as though you were dousing yourself with opiates and stimulants. The brain scans and mood swings of an infatuated lover, scientists have recently discovered, look remarkably similar to the brain scans and mood swings of a cocaine addict-and not surprisingly, as it turns out, because infatuation is an addiction, with measurable chemical effects on the brain. As the anthropologist and infatuation expert Dr. Helen Fisher has explained, infatuated lovers, just like any junkie, “will go to unhealthy, humiliating, and even physically dangerous lengths to procure their narcotic.”
Nowhere is that drug stronger than at the very beginning of a passionate relationship. Fisher has noted that an awful lot of babies are conceived during the first six months of a love story, a fact that I find really noteworthy. Hypnotic obsession can lead to a sense of euphoric abandon, and euphoric abandon is the very best way to find yourself accidentally pregnant. Some anthropologists argue, in fact, that the human species needs infatuation as a reproductive tool in order to keep us reckless enough to risk the hazards of pregnancy so that we can constantly replenish our ranks.
Fisher’s research has also shown that people are far more susceptible to infatuation when they are going through delicate or vulnerable times in their lives. The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely fall in love. This makes infatuation start to sound like a dormant virus, lying in wait, ever ready to attack our weakened emotional immune systems. College students, for instance-away from home for the first time, uncertain, lacking familiar support networks-are notoriously susceptible to infatuation. And we all know that travelers in foreign lands often fall wildly in love, overnight it seems, with total strangers. In the flux and thrill of travel, our protective mechanisms break down quickly. This is marvelous in one way (for the rest of my life I will always feel a shiver of pleasure whenever I remember kissing that guy outside the bus terminal in Madrid), but it is wise in such circumstances to heed the advice of the venerable North American philosopher Pamela Anderson: “Never get married on vacation.”
Anybody going through a difficult time emotionally-due to the death of a family member, perhaps, or the loss of a job-is also susceptible to unstable love. The sick and the wounded and the frightened are famously vulnerable to sudden love, too-which helps explain why so many battle-?torn soldiers marry their nurses. Spouses with relationships in crisis are also prime candidates for infatuation with a new lover, as I can personally attest from the mad commotion that surrounded the end of my own first marriage-when I had the good, solid judgment to go out in the world and fall quite insanely in love with another man at the very same moment as I was leaving my husband. My great unhappiness and my shredded sense of self made me ripe for the plucking of infatuation, and boy, did I get plucked. In my situation (and from what I know now, it is a tediously common textbook example), my new love interest seemed to have a giant EXIT sign hanging over his head-and I dived right through that exit, using the love affair as an excuse to escape my collapsing marriage, then claiming with an almost hysterical certainty that this person was everything I truly needed in life.
Shocking how that didn’t work out.
The problem with infatuation, of course, is that it’s a mirage, a trick of the eye-indeed, a trick of the endocrine system. Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it’s more like love’s shady second cousin who’s always borrowing money and can’t hold down a job. When you become infatuated with somebody, you’re not really looking at that person; you’re just captivated by your own reflection, intoxicated by a dream of completion that you have projected on a virtual stranger. We tend, in such a state, to decide all sorts of spectacular things about our lovers that may or may not be true. We perceive something almost divine in our beloved, even if our friends and family might not get it. One man’s Venus is another man’s bimbo, after all, and somebody else might easily consider your personal Adonis to be a flat-?out boring little loser.
Of course all lovers do-and should-see their partners through generous eyes. It’s natural, even appropriate, to exaggerate somewhat our partners’ virtues. Carl Jung suggested that the first six months of most love stories is a period of pure projection for just about anyone. But infatuation is projection run off the rails. An infatuation-?based affair is a sanity-?free zone, where misconception has no limits and where perspective finds no foothold. Freud defined infatuation pithily as “the overvaluation of the object,” and Goethe put it even better: “When two people are really happy about one another, one can generally assume they are mistaken.” (By the way, poor Goethe! Not even he was immune to infatuation, not for all his wisdom or experience. That staunch old German, at the age of seventy-?one, fell passionately in love with the utterly inappropriate Ulrike, a nineteen-?year-?old beauty who turned down his heated marriage proposals, leaving the aging genius so bereft that he wrote a requiem to his own life, concluding with the lines “I have lost the whole world, I have lost myself.”)
Any actual relating is impossible during such a state of pitched fever. Real, sane, mature love-the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school-is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect. And the word “respect,” from the Latin respicere (”to gaze at”), suggests that you can actually see the person who is standing next to you, something you absolutely cannot do from within the swirling mists of romantic delusion. Reality exits the stage the moment that infatuation enters, and we might soon find ourselves doing all sorts of crazy things that we would never have considered doing in a sane state. For instance, we might find ourselves sitting down one day to write a passionate e-?mail to a sixteen-?year-?old monk in Laos-or whatever. When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves, “What was I thinking?” and the answer is usually: You weren’t.
Psychologists call that state of deluded madness “narcissistic love.”
I call it “my twenties.”
Listen, I want to make it clear here that I am not intrinsically against passion. Mercy, no! The single most exhilarating sensations I have ever experienced in my life happened when I was consumed by romantic obsession. That kind of love makes you feel superheroic, mythical, beyond human, immortal. You radiate life; you need no sleep; your beloved fills your lungs like oxygen. As painfully as those experiences may have turned out in the end (and they always did end in pain for me), I would hate to see someone go through an entire lifetime never knowing what it feels like to morph euphorically into another person’s being. So when I say that I’m sort of excited for the monk and Carla, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m glad they have the opportunity to taste that narcotic bliss. But I’m also really, really glad that it’s not me this time.
Because here is something I know for certain about myself, as I near the age of forty. I can no longer do infatuation. It kills me. In the end, it always puts me through the wood chipper. While I know there must be some couples out there whose love stories began with a bonfire of obsession and then mellowed safely over the years into the embers of a long, healthy relationship, I myself never learned that trick. For me, infatuation has only ever done one thing: It destroys, and generally pretty fast.
But I loved the high of infatuation in my youth, and so I made a habit of it. By “habit,” I mean exactly the same thing that any heroin addict means when he speaks of his habit: a mild word for an unmanageable compulsion. I sought passion everywhere. I freebased it. I became the kind of girl about whom Grace Paley was surely thinking when she described a character who always needed a man in her life, even when it might have appeared that she already had one. Falling in love at first sight became a particular specialty of mine in my late teens and early twenties; I could do it upwards of four times a year. There were occasions when I made myself so sick over romance that I lost whole chunks of my life to it. I would vanish into abandon at the beginning of the encounter but soon enough find myself sobbing and barfing at the end of it. Along the way I would lose so much sleep and so much sanity that parts of the whole process start to look, in retrospect, like an alcoholic blackout. Except without the alcohol.
Should such a young lady have gotten married at the age of twenty-?five? Wisdom and Prudence might have suggested not. But I did not invite Wisdom or Prudence to my wedding. (In my defense, nor were they guests of the groom.) I was a careless girl back then, in every possible way. I once read a newspaper article about a man who caused thousands of acres of forest to burn down because he drove all day through a national park with his muffler dragging, causing explosive sparks to leap into the dry underbrush and set a new small fire every few hundred feet. Other motorists along the way kept honking and waving and trying to alert the driver’s attention to the damage he was causing, but the guy was happily listening to his radio and didn’t notice the catastrophe he had set in motion behind him.
That was me in my youth.
Only when I reached my early thirties, only once my ex-?husband and I had wrecked our marriage for good,
