Are You Love Sick!

Obsessive love: don’t think it can happen to you? We joke about it, but clinical psychologist Frank Tallis explains how easy it is to topple in headlong—and how symptoms can match those of a mental illness.

- Frank Tallis

Among the Roman philosopher Lucretius’s writings on the mind and behaviour is a description of what happens when people fall in love. He observes that the besotted frequently become agitated and stirred up by insatiable desires. Sexual union, often passionate and violent, results in only temporary relief, because lovers always want more of each other. Lucretius seems to be describing an addiction. He uses language that suggests falling in love is a little like becoming ill or, even worse, going mad. Love, he says, is like an unconquerable disease and lovers waste away from wounds that can’t be seen. They are loversick: weak and neglectful of responsibilities, they behave foolishly and fritter away fortunes on excessive gifts; they become jealous and insecure.

The earliest poems were composed in Egypt more than three and a half thousand years ago—exquisite love songs that describe the despair of lovers as a malady. Early medical texts also conceptualise love as an ailment. The second-century Greek physician Galen described a married woman who couldn’t sleep and who started acting strangely because she had fallen in love with a dancer. Love sickness was considered a legitimate diagnosis from classical times to the 18th century, but it more or less disappeared in the 19th century. Today, the term “love sickness” is a metaphor rather than a diagnosis.