The Disease

I am thoroughly convinced that someday a scientist will spoil the fun of poets across the ages by proving that romantic love is an infectious disease. Think about it. You’ve been in love before. You know what it feels like. It feels like an illness. I am certain that it will be found to be a highly contagious virus acting on the nervous system. Its effects seem primarily to be severe impairment of judgement, apparent loss of concentration*, extreme heightening of the senses, and, in many cases, cardiac pain.

It only happens to a patient who happens to be in a state of total emotional nonbeing. The virus enters the body, probably through the nose and the olfactory bulb, and works its way through the entire nervous system. The incubation period is totally unlike the unaffected state in every way: Instead of feeling nothing, the patient actually feels everything all at once. This strange, unsettling time, unlike most pathogenic incubation periods, which last a specific amount of time, lasts until some association is made by the patient’s subconscious mind between some form of incredibly deep psychological security and a person.**

After this happens and the associated synaptic chemicals are released, the antigens produced by the virus begin the Smiting. The antigens actually inhibit the uptake of the very endorphins that initiated the process. Due to the psychological association that ended the incubation period, the levels of the endorphins are increased every time the patient thinks of the beloved. During this first stage of love, the patient is totally carefree and has the capacity to feel happy despite even the most profound motivations for despair. This is just with normal occupation of the patient’s thoughts. When they are occupied with the beloved, the patient is in a state of total euphoria, as if it were something tangible that one could wrap around oneself like a cocoon. Like a narcotic intoxication, it is a wonderful feeling, and the patient wants to feel nothing else. The patient’s psychological “happy place” becomes no specific place other than at the side of the beloved.

Thusly Smitten, the patient feels at all times the driving obsessive compulsion to think of the beloved more and more frequently until the beloved occupies every waking (and probably sleeping) second of the patient’s thoughts. This is the beginning of the second stage, the Addiction. Feeling absolutely euphoric all the time is finally recognized as abnormal by the nervous and immune systems, and the brain-mind complex realizes that the fantasy is insufficient and must be made real. The euphoria is replaced by a thirsty, insatiable, heart-shattering, pull-your-hair-out, cry-yourself-to-sleep longing, an unfathomable longing simply to be with the beloved. The patient only feels complete when the beloved is within sight, though the euphoria is still felt at these times. At all other times, though, the patient wishes against all possibility to feel anything so happy as severe mind-crushing depression. The Addiction is just like any normal addiction, only sufficiently stronger as to merit capitalization.

After the Addiction sets in, the virus’s work is essentially done*, and anything following is largely under the jurisdictions of the mind of the patient and the mind of the beloved. The outcome everyone hopes for is the “happily ever after” [expletive deleted], but this hardly ever happens. The far more common ending is for the Addiction to deteriorate into emotional self-destruction. The patient’s actions become increasingly irrational as the desperation of the Addiction spirals deeper into the Abyss. (You know what Abyss I’m talking about.) At the end of it all, the patient reaches the stage of acting like a complete abject fool and feeling nothing but depression all the time. The depression is forceful enough to render the patient completely apathetic. Part of the patient dies when love fails. The course of the disease is run, and the patient deals in his/her normal way with ordinary depression. There is a period of grieving followed by return to the ground state of emotional nonbeing.

This is the process of the disease. This is the melancholy process that Corporate America exploits every February, making a killing on stupid greeting cards, morbid flowers standing in some strange limbo between normal life and death, overpriced jewelry, and a mixture of paraffin, sucrose, and tile grout that they somehow manage to pass off as chocolate.

The real pestilence afflicting us is not the viral infection of love, but the cultural tumor that exploits it.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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* Apparent because the patient is concentrating, but only upon his/her beloved.
** This could possibly imply that all people inherently start out bisexual, but this is of no import to this essay.