Anxiety Expert

I wanted to share this link with you. It's a great site and highly relevant to the issue of obsession love. Here is a quote from the site on coping:

The issue of coping isn’t as straightforward as it might first appear. From my perspective as a psychologist, there are a mind boggling number of potential ways I could choose to assess it. This, to some extent, says something about the fact nobody has really pinned down the concept of coping or how best to examine it. Read the rest of this post >>

The Love Story of Napoleon and Josephine

The story about Napoleon and Josephine illustrates just how obsessive love can be.

In the 19th century one of the directors, Paul Barras, in Paris wanted to marry off his mistress Rose to Napoleon. Napoleon was immediately smitten when he saw the beautiful Rose. He renamed her ‘Josephine’.

Initially Josephine would not marry Napoleon but when Barras threatened to stop providing for her if she didn’t marry Napoleon, she agreed.

Napoleon loved her deeply, but she despised him and immediately took on lovers. When Napoleon heard about her infidelity on a trip away from Paris, he was destroyed.

His love for her was gone but for the rest of his life he would never really love another woman the way he had loved Josephine.

When Napoleon returned to Paris after his trip, Josephine had all of sudden finally fallen in love with Napoleon.

But it was too late. Napoleon no longer trusted her and went onto to have a series of affairs. Napoleon later divorced Josephine and married another woman whom he didn’t love.

Josephine continued to love Napoleon and when she was dying from diphtheria, Napoleon’s name was one of the last words she uttered.

The Love Story of Prince Salim and Anarkali

The most tragic of love stories took place in India in 1615.

Prince Nuruddin Salim, son of Mughal Emperor Akbar, fell in love with the lovely slave girl Anarkali. Anarkali was known for her dancing skills and her remarkable beauty.

Akbar was shamed by his son’s love for a common servant and did everything he could to make Anarkali look bad in the eyes of her prince. A slave girl, he said, could never become the empress of India.

When Prince Salim heard about this, he declared war on his father.

But Akbar defeated his son and demanded that Saleem either surrender Anarkali or be killed.

Prince Salim chose death. But Anarkali intervened and offered her own life in exchange for one last night with Prince Salim. Akbar agreed to this arrangement, and the couple spent one last romantic night together.

In the morning the guards came and took Anarkali away. She was buried alive between brick walls. Her tomb still stands today.

The Love Story of Tristan and Isolde

The tragic love story of Tristan and Isolde took place in the middle ages during the reign of King Arthur.

When King Mark sent his nephew, Tristan, to Ireland to ask for Princess Isolde’s hand and escort her back to Cornwall, Tristan and Isolde fell in love.

Isolde went ahead with the marriage to King Mark but continued to see Tristan.

As soon as King Mark found out, he banned Tristan from Cornwall but forgave Isolde.

Tristan moved to King Author’s court and later to Brittany where he met Iseult of Brittany. He was attracted to her because she reminded him of his true love. He married her but did not consummate the marriage because of his love for the “true” Isolde.

After falling ill Tristan sent for Isolde, hoping she would be able to cure him. The returning ship’s sails would be white if she agreed to come and black if she did not agree. Iseult, seeing the white sails, lied to Tristan and told him that the sails were black.

Tristan died of grief before Isolde could get to him. Isolde died soon after of a broken heart. Iseult immediately regretted her actions once she saw the love that the two had felt for each other.

The Love Story of Cleopatra and Mark Antony

The most tragic episode of Cleopatra’s story of love is revealed in her affair with Mark Antony. Together with her father Pharaoh Ptolomy XII Cleopatra VII was a regent of Egypt. When her father died in March 51 BC, the 18 year old Cleopatra and her 12 year old brother Ptolemy XIII became joint monarchs.

Mark Antony, a friend and adviser of Julius Caesar, thought Cleopatra was responsible for Caesar’s death and wanted to meet her. Cleopatra turned him down several times but finally gave in.

She came to him on a boat dressed as the Goddess Venus. The two fell in love and Mark spent the winter at Alexandria, after which Cleopatra bore him twins.

Four years later, in 37 BC, Mark visited Alexandria again while on route to make war with the Parthians. Mark then renewed his relationship with Cleopatra. At the time he was married to Octavia Minor. But he left his wife and married Cleopatra.

Octavia’s brother Octavian brought the army of Rome to destroy them. When it was clear that the army of Rome was going to claim victory, Mark gave word to Cleopatra.

Cleopatra decided to leave the battle site on her ship. When Mark heard about it, he thought Cleopatra had left to die, and decided that his own life was no longer worth living. He committed suicide by falling on his own sword. Cleopatra followed suit a few days later, by purposely getting bitten by a cobra.

The Love Story of Thisbe and Pyramus

Historical cases of broken hearts and obsessions are not hard to come by. The stories of Pyramus and Thisbe, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Tristan and Isolde, Prince Saleem and Anarkali, Napoleon and Josephine, and Queen Victory and Prince Albert stand out as icons of tragic and deeply pathological love.

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe took place in Barbylonia in 331 BC. A young handsome boy Pyramus and a young beautiful girl Thisbe lived with their parents in conjoining houses. As they grew up to become young adults, they fell in love.

When their parents discovered their love, they refused to let them see each other. The two lovers could only talk through a crack in the wall separating the houses.

One night they planned to run away together. Pyramus told Thisbe the location of the place they would meet.

Thisbe was the first to arrive at the first Mulberry bush outside of the city, but as she was waiting, a lion appeared covered in blood from a previous kill that day. Thisbe, frightened at the sight, ran non-stop to the nearest cave. The lion caught her veil just before she escaped.

Shortly thereafter Pyramus arrived at the Mulberry bush. He was horrified when he saw in the sand the footsteps of the lion and Thisbe’s veil covered in blood and torn to pieces. He immediately thought that his only love had been killed by a hungry lion. Heartbroken he stabbed himself in the heart with his sword.

Thisbe soon got the courage to run back. By then Pyramus was only barely breathing on the ground. In a faint voice he told her what happened, and she cried in sorrow. Then she picked up his sword and jerked it through her chest.

Genital Revenges

The love affair between Abélard and Héloïse resulted in a genital revenge. Héloïse's uncle cut off Abélard's penis. Genital revenges didn't just occur in 12th century France. In fact, they seem more popular now than ever.

In 2000 Gail O'Toole invited her ex-lover Ken Slaby over to her Murrysville home to rekindle a friendship but got furious about Ken’s new love.

Gail waited until Ken was asleep. She then glued his penis to his stomach, his testicles to his leg, and the cheeks of his buttocks together. Finally, she poured nail polish over his head.

When Ken woke up Gail threw him out, and he had to walk one mile before he could call 911.

Ken was taken to the hospital where the nurses had to peel the glue off. He had several treatments from a dermatologist afterward. 5 years later Ken filed a lawsuit against Gail, which he won.

This is not the only reported case of the super-glue revenge. After Tracy Hood-Davis from Wisconsin discovered that her husband Donessa Davis was cheating on her, she encouraged three other scorned lovers to take revenge.

Donessa thought he was going to meet up with Therese Ziemann, one of his lovers, at a Stockbridge motel for a night of passion. When he arrived, Therese suggested he let her tie him up and blindfold him for a massage.

Once he was tied up, Therese cut off Donessa’s underwear with scissors and sent text messages to Tracy, 43-year-old Wendy Sewell, one of Donessa’s lovers, and Theresa’s sister 43-year-old Michelle Belliveau.

When the others arrived Therese slapped and punched Donessa in the face and used Krazy Glue to glue his penis to his stomach.

The women were charged with false imprisonment, and Therese was further charged with fourth-degree sexual assault. Since the incident Donessa has been arrested for child abuse, theft, unlawful phone use and harassment with a death threat in a domestic abuse investigation.

Genitals seem to play a lead role in jealousy revenges. In December 2009 Rajini Narayan, 44, from Adelaide in Australia learned that her husband Satish Narayan was having an affair. Sick with jealousy she poured methylated spirit on his genitals while he was asleep and set him on fire.

As the husband jumped out of bed, he knocked over the bottle of spirit, which set their townhouse on fire, causing substantial damages to the property.

Rajini was initially charged with arson and endangering life but the charge was upgraded to murder when her husband died in the hospital from his injuries.

Lesson: All you cheaters out there: watch your private parts!

Don't Think You're the Exception. The Excitement Won't Last

In a survey conducted by AOL Living and Women’s Day in 2009 52% of women surveyed say that their husbands are not their soul mates, 72% of the women surveyed said they had considered leaving their husbands at some point or another, more than 50% said they are either bored in bed or can't remember the last time they had sex, 60% said that they rarely or never have date nights, more than 50% said that they wished their husbands either made more money or made more time for them, and nearly 50% said that their husbands had changed for the worse since they got married.

Despite all this, 71% of the women surveyed expected to be married to their spouse for the rest of their life!

Are the women who are not fully happy in their marriages masochists? Probably not. It is more likely that they simply have realized that if you decide to enter a long-term monogamous relationship, you are in some sense settling. Things are not always going to be a dance on roses. The extreme excitement, obsession and ecstatic madness won't last. And why would you want it to anyway?

Well, apparently people do want it to last. The Pew Research Center and the National Survey of Families and Households report that couples become bored and unhappy sooner than was expected: more like three years into their relationship than seven, just after the end of the "honeymoon" phase of the relationship.

This is not to say that in a long-term monogamous relationship love couldn't continue to grow but only that people confuse madness with love. Or they write off calm and rational love as love-gone-away. Even when the madness is gone, love could continues to ripen (until it falls off the tree and rots in the ground).

When love ripens, it doesn’t feel the same, most of the time it doesn’t feel like anything at all, because love in its ripening phases is an in-between state of love. It has its ups and downs.

Over half of monogamous relationships suffer from one partner or the other becoming involved in an outside relationship. They miss the madness and excitement of the beginning phrases of the relationship. The secrecy and excitement of having sex on the side resembles the maddening phases of obsessive love. Cheating temporarily brings back the madness which so many people are addicted to.

The truth is, love starts out strong and intense only to fade or ripen a few years later. Later on it's never going to be the same again, unless the lovers actually separate for an extended period of time and re-kindle at a later point.

This is what happened for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Richard and Elizabeth fell in love when they played Mark Antony and Cleopatra in the movie Cleopatra. They got married after divorcing their spouses.

But their marriage didn’t last. Ten years and many tempestuous arguments later, they divorced, only to remarry in Africa less than a year later and divorce once again after just 11 months.

Love doesn’t always fade but when the ecstasy and extreme longing lasts a lifetime it is usually because the lovers were barred from being together.

One of history's most famous everlasting love affairs is that between Abélard and Héloïse, who were prevented from being together by Héloïse’s uncle.

In 12th century France, Peter Abélard, a French Aristotelian philosopher and one of the greatest thinkers of the 12th century, persuaded Canon Fulbert, a priest of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, to hire him as the mentor of his beautiful and highly gifted niece, Héloïse.

After Abélard had moved into Fulbert's home, Abélard and Héloïse became lovers. Though they tried to keep their relationship a secret, Fulbert eventually found out and was furious. He demanded that the lovers physically separated.

But their separation did not make them love each other any less, on the contrary: "the very sundering of our bodies served but to link our souls closer together; the plentitude of the love which was denied to us inflamed us more than ever," Héloïse later wrote.

And sure enough: shortly after their separation Héloïse told Abelard that she was pregnant. Héloïse stayed with Abélard's sister until her son Astrolabe was born.

Longing for his lover Abélard proposed a secret marriage to Fulbert, who agreed. But Héloïse turned down the proposal. She was well aware of the opportunities Abélard would be passing up if he tied himself to a family.

However, Abélard insisted and shortly after their son Astrolabe was born, he returned to Paris to get married to his lover in secrecy. The couple separated immediately after the wedding, seeing each other only in rare private moments, in order to give the impression that they were no longer involved.

But Fulbert was determined to ruin Abélard’s career and refused to keep the marriage a secret. When his niece denied the marriage, he beat her.

To keep Héloïse safe, Abélard took her to the convent at Argenteuil. Héloïse’s uncle thought that Abélard had forced her to become a nun and arranged for his relatives to take revenge in the most gruesome fashion.

One night while Abélard was asleep in a secret room in his lodgings, the relatives ambushed him and cut off his penis.

After Abélard’s tragic injury Abélard could not stay in Paris without being subject to extreme ridicule. He decided to become a monk, and he convinced Héloïse to join the cloister. She agreed out of love for her husband. She wanted no other man.

But Abélard’s and Héloïse’s love affair continued in the form of letters, which were later collected in book form. In a letter to Abélard, Héloïse wrote:

You know, beloved, as the whole world knows, how much I have lost in you, how at one wretched stroke of fortune that supreme act of flagrant treachery robbed me of my very self in robbing me of you; and how my sorrow for my loss is nothing compared with what I feel for the manner in which I lost you.

After many years Héloïse and Abélard briefly reunited at a ceremony in Paris but never saw each other again afterwards.

They love affair nonetheless went on for 20 years. Six hundred years after their death Josephine Bonaparte ordered that the remains of Abélard and Héloïse be entombed together at Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Irrational Love as a Psychological Disorder

In my first post I introduced the idea of irrational love. Like other emotions, love can be rational or irrational. Love is assessable for rationality. One of my views of love is that irrational love is unhealthy. It is a mental disorder.

Though unhealthy irrational love is not included in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it satisfies the criterion for being a disorder.

The obsessive phases of roller coaster relationships and intense love affairs tend to be irrational. In fact, their chemical profile resembles the chemical profiles of generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Science tells us that the excitement of sexual and romantic love are due in part to increased levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine and low levels of serotonin.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that motivates us to continue to perform certain activities by causing a feeling of profound enjoyment in response to those activities. For example, dopamine helps to motivate us to continue to have sex by causing feelings of extreme pleasure in response to the activity.

It is commonly thought that people who are severely addicted to nicotine, amphetamines and cocaine have altered dopamine pathways that make the pleasure from the drug significantly stronger for them compared to non-addictive personality types.

Serotonin in the stomach regulates intestinal movements. In the brain it regulates mood, appetite, sleep, muscle contraction, memory and learning. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors inhibit serotonin from being absorbed by the body.

Inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin increases the serotonin levels in the brain. This has been found to enhance mood and decrease anxiety. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors have been used successfully for many years in the treatment of depression, generalized anxiety disorder and social phobia.

Love can be as addictive as cocaine and speed. A particularly severe form of love obsession is obsessive love disorder. When parents are unable to satisfy a child's emotional needs, he will continue to long for the parent's emotional attention. Consequently he will tend to become attracted to and fixated on unavailable and emotionally inaccessible partners because they are implicitly seen as the parent whose love the sufferer is longing for.

Sick Love?

Welcome readers! This is my new blog devoted to the unconscious and irrational elements of love. If you are more technically inclined and love philosophy and psychology, you might want to visit my blog Lemmings. If love is your passion, stay put.

My view on love? You can love another person for just about any reason. Sounds strange? It’s not. You can kill for just about any reason, though very few are good reasons. Coral Eugene Watts strangled several women because he saw evil in their eyes. Belle Sorenson Gunness slaughtered her husbands because she believed men were evil. Ed Gein mutilated, skinned and gutted his graveyard goodies and his only live victim because he wanted to be a woman and believed he needed body parts for a sex change (or maybe to make a replica of his mother). None of these reasons are good reasons to kill, and not all reasons are good reasons to love. Still true love can, in principle, be love for any reason.

This idea that true love can occur for any reason is at odds with the view that true love is love for a good reason. In his acclaimed article "Love as a Moral Emotion” NYU professor J. David Velleman writes: "Being loved does not entail being valued on the basis of our distinctive qualities, such as our yellow hair; on the contrary, it entails being valued on the basis of our personhood, in which we are no different from other persons" (1999: 366).

In my humble opinion, our loved ones must possess particular physical attributes or personality traits in order for our love to be rational but they need not possess any particular physical attributes or personality traits in order for love to be true love. Or to put the point differently: Not all love is rational but rationality is no more of a constraint on love than rationality is a constraint on action.

Love is an emotion. Emotions can be rational. Your fear of Ted Bundy whispering in your ear that he is going to continue to have intercourse with your corpse until it putrefies is rational. So is your anger at the two 10-year old British boys who kidnapped 2-year old James Bulger and took him on a 5 kilometer walk, only to throw blue paint in his eyes, kick him and hit him with bricks, stones and a 10 kg iron bar, molest his tiny penis, place batteries in his mouth and anus and leave him on train tracks where he died before his corpse was cut in pieces by a goods train.

Like actions and beliefs emotions can be irrational. Ethan’s fear of flying is irrational because he knows that flying is safer than walking from the pool table to the restroom at the local pub in Detroit. Your anger when you first met John and he said, “Awright me old fruit, what gender are ye?”, is irrational because you know that half the people you meet are below average, that John is too stupid to be a smart-ass, and that his remark was meant as good-spirited humor. Anger in this circumstance is like borrowing cash from a pessimist because you believe that they won’t expect it back.