Free All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion by Lisa Appignanesi

kindled by Puck’s potion, so magical is its suddenness and force–queens fall in love with asses, see regal beauty in brutes and cede their once dearest wards. We are literally enchanted. Long-held attractions give way in the blink of an eye to others. Couples realign. Suffering is heedlessly engendered. Others wonder whether our ‘sanity’ is utterly gone.
    In its choice of object, love seems to know little rhyme or reason: Cupid, son of Venus and Mars, wears a blindfold, after all, as he shoots his troublesome arrows. In the words of Carson McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café :
    The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else–but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll.
     
    From the outside, the choice of beloved may appear utterly crazy and indeed be so–like that snail in the New Yorker cartoon, who while gazing at a curvaceous snail-shaped tape dispenser declares to another snail, ‘I don’t care if she is a tape dispenser. I love her.’ For the lover, the beloved speaks to some intimate part of himself, has perhaps awakened some long-held need. The reel of that inner story is then projected on to the screen the beloved becomes. She may fill a deep unconscious lack in the lover. She may in the way she moves her head or in the wave of a hand evoke a preverbal childhood memory of a long-buried, excessive love. He may envy something she has or represents, or alternatively need to be rescued. She may feed some hungry part of himself. The scenarios are infinite and to others, even to himself, invisible.
    Imagination nurtures the process. In love, we are all poets, for good or ill. We are also akin to psychotics. Psychosis is, after all, that aberrant condition of the mind or psyche in which contact with reality is lost and a delusional state prevails. Taken literally rather than metaphorically, John Donne’s poem ‘The Sun Rising’ aptly describes the lover’s delusional state:
    Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time…
     
    She’s all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is.
     
    Torn or separated from her beloved, the lover may, like a person in the grip of psychosis, hallucinate his presence, his words, his actions, for good or ill. Or the lover, in the grip of jealousy, love’s nether twin, may persecute the beloved, imagine betrayals, punish the real or hallucinated slight to his power with violence. Driven jealously mad, his reason unseated, Othello murders his beloved Desdemona, attempting to extinguish his jealousy and her being in one fell act. Or the lover may grow addicted to her jealousy and pain, and over and over seek others who will feed a core masochism, inflict humiliation and loss.
    In The Act of Love , Howard Jacobson’s unflinching account of a character who becomes pain’s slave, the narrator, at the age of fifteen, suffers his first self-shattering betrayal. He reflects:
    If you wanted to be in love–and I wanted nothing else–then you had to welcome into your soul love’s symptoms and concomitants: fear of betrayal which was no less potent than the fear of death, jealousy which ate into the very marrow of your bones, a feverish anticipation of loss which no amount of trust would ever assuage. Loss–loss waited upon gain as sure as day followed night… You loved to lose and the more you loved the more you