Is romantic love a mental illness, as Plato said, a story that ends in death or the highest human achievement?

Sarah Vine and Tania Kindersley

There are 21 dictionary definitions for the word love. Every woman may come to a point in her middle life when she suspects that she doesn't understand the first thing about any of these. Poets, philosophers, playwrights and pop singers from Socrates to Stevie Wonder have had a great deal to say about love.

It is the sweetest thing; it is a red, red rose; it is a battlefield; it is a drug, a delusion, a lunacy. It is the answer, and the question. It is a balm, and a piercing arrow. H.L.Mencken compared it to perceptual anaesthesia; Keats wrote that it was his religion; Shakespeare called it a familiar, a devil, an ever-fixed mark, a smoke, a fire, a sea, a madness, a fever, a choking gall; it is like sunshine after rain, and does not bend.

Of the various loves, romantic love is the most complicated and inexplicable. It can come on when you least expect it (and with the most unsuitable person), it can cast you from the heights of ecstasy to the abyss of despair, it can roar in you one moment then dissipate as quickly as breath on glass. It is what drives you to offer yourself to another human for the rest of your natural life, but only a few years later you may look back and have no memory at all of that initial ecstasy. Romantic love can be so confusing that sometimes you simply want to give up on the whole thing and concentrate on the nature of dark matter, or macroeconomics, or something else less tiring.

A little biology can be helpful here. In the first throes of romantic love you are under the influence of a powerful chemical cocktail: dopamine (which makes opiates look like aspirin) is rushing through your veins. As if that were not enough, a perfect mixture of vasopressin and oxytocin, the attachment hormones, are raging around your body. Much of this was discovered through extensive study of prairie voles, who mate for life, spend a great deal of time tenderly grooming each other and nesting together, and studiously avoid meeting other potential partners.

If only all men were just like prairie voles, we say, but if wishes were horses we would all be Lady Godiva.

Aside from the chemical cosh, you also have the small-brain problem. MRI scans have shown that falling in love involves only a very tiny part of the brain, a much smaller part than is used when, say, operating heavy machinery. Researchers at University College London have remarked wryly that it was fascinating to reflect that Helen of Troy could have launched a thousand ships through the agency of such a limited expanse of cortex.

It is vital, therefore, to bear in mind that when falling in love and choosing your mate you may be making a decision about the rest of your life based on only a fraction of your cognitive function. This limited section of the brain is also the exact same part that responds to cocaine, which means that you may select a partner for life, move to Anchorage and decide to make many babies, all based on the same area of the cortex that enjoys an illegal substance that makes you talk accelerated gibberish all night long.

Plato said that love is a mental disease. Modern researchers agree enthusiastically, categorising love as a form of madness and echoing what psychologists have been telling tearful patients for years. (There are certain shrinks who refuse to treat people in the early throes of love because they are too insane to do a thing with.) Currently, scientists are having a genteel academic squabble over whether love most closely resembles the manic phase of bipolar disorder or the characteristics seen in obsessive compulsive disorder.

There is also a school of thought that insists love is a cultural phenomenon. As the great French cynic La Rochefoucauld said: “People would not fall in love if they had not heard love talked about.” The culture keeps up a rapid-fire bombardment of the power and the glory of romantic love, and yet it seems curious that so many of the Greatest Love Stories Ever Told - Cathy and Heathcliff, Tristan and Isolde, Heloise and Abelard, Lancelot and Guinevere - end in disaster, if not death and carnage. If we were being really sceptical, we might conclude that it is delusional that “in love” should be regarded as the greatest and most time-consuming aspiration of the modern female.

There is a highly dangerous literary subset to this, most vividly exemplified by Elizabeth Smart's novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, which privileges true love over all other considerations. You can lay waste to families, other people - entire countries - but it's all fine because you are doing it in the name of Love. If you ever find yourself leaning towards this view, we suggest that you have a strong cup of tea and read something enlightening about pig husbandry until the delusion has passed.

It is only when the insane chemical phase of love dies down that you can tell whether it is the real thing. If it is, it will shift into the deep steady love that gets you through rainy days and financial crises and the small quotidian tasks that make up a life. This is why couples who have been together for 50 years always talk about marrying their best friend.

The mysterious thing about this proper love is that it contains no trace of the early lunacy. It does not make you want to rip the beloved's clothes off at inappropriate moments; it is nothing to do with the wild urge to create a universe with only the two of you in it. Instead, it is the kind of profound affection that makes you smile at idiosyncrasies that anyone else would find pointless, or get the joke that nobody else will understand. This kind of love is built of the bricks of a hundred small memories and moments in time. It is the feeling you get when you read a story in the paper, or see a comical character in the street, or overhear a conversation, and know that there is only one person you have to call and tell. It has nothing to do with extravagant hotel suites, or watching the sun rise, or impetuous trips to distant cities. It is not what you see in the shuttered dark of a movie palace; it is finding romance in the unheralded, the mundane: a sudden surge of adoration because a certain person knows how to fix a dripping tap. It may not be the world well lost for love, or “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”, but it is less likely to leave your heart in shards on the floor.

Romantic love, however deranged, is still one of the great delights of life. It has given us sonnets and plays and entire sonatas; it has given us The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice and Doctor Zhivago. It lent us Yeats's pilgrim soul and Herrick's sweet infanta, and Keats's bright star. The wild twist in the stomach at the mere sight of the adored one, the random smiling at strangers in the street, the sudden desire to swing from lampposts, all add vastly to the gaiety of nations. (It should be noted that all these symptoms are not just for the very young: the sensible, 40-year-old female can just as easily become unhinged by the glimpse of a delightful pair of green eyes.)

Love can be crazy, delicious, thrilling; it can make you feel as if every atom in your body is dancing. It can bring back lost youth, make you remember forgotten dreams, revive dashed hopes. It's just that it needs to come with a caveat, a health warning, an unromantic but insistent voice of reason. So, the next time you fall in love, you should bear in mind that in those early days you are a little crazy, and it may be wise not to make any sudden moves.

The danger of romantic love

We don't mean danger in the obvious heartbreak way - the cheap betrayals, the broken promises - we mean the dark danger that lurks when sensible, educated women fall for the dogmatic idea that romantic love is the ultimate goal for the modern female. Every day, thousands of films, books, articles and TV programmes hammer home this message - that without romance, life is somehow barren.

However, there are women who entertain the subversive notion, like an intellectual mouse scratching behind the skirting board, that perhaps this higher love is not necessarily the celestial highway to absolute happiness. Their empirical side kicks in, and they observe that couples who marry in a haze of adoration and sex are, ten years later, throwing china and fighting bitterly over who gets the dog.

But the women who notice these contradictions are often afraid to speak them in case they should be labelled cynics. Surely only the most jaded and damaged would challenge the orthodoxy of romantic love. The received wisdom that there is not something wrong with the modern idea of sexual love as ultimate panacea, but that if you don't get it, there is something wrong with you. You freak, go back and read the label. We say: the privileging of romantic love over all others, the insistence that it is the one essential, incontrovertible element of human happiness, traced all the way back to the caves, is a trap and a snare. The idea that every human heart, since the invention of the wheel, was yearning for its other half is a myth.

Love is a human constant; it is the interpretation of it that changes. The way that love has been expressed, its significance in daily life, have never been immutable or constant. The different kinds of love and what they signify are not fixed, whatever the traditionalists may like to tell you.

So the modern idea that romantic love is a woman's highest calling, that she is somehow only half a person without it, that if she questions it she is going against all human history, does not stand up to scrutiny. It is not an imperative carved in stone; it is a human idea, and human beings are frail and suggestible, and sometimes get the wrong end of the stick.

浪漫的愛情真像先哲柏拉圖所說的那樣是精神疾病，演繹著一個以死亡亦或人類的最高成就作為結尾的故事嗎？

“愛”這個字在字典里有21條釋義。每位女性在生命的中途，都會面臨一個年齡，那時的她開始猜疑自己連愛這些字面上的詮釋都沒有理解。從古希臘的哲學家蘇格拉底(Socrates)一直到當代美國傳奇盲人歌手史提夫·汪達(Stevie Wonder)，無數的詩人、哲學家、劇作家還有流行歌手都對愛有說不盡的感慨。[1]

愛是甜蜜的事情[2]、是一朵紅紅的玫瑰[3]；愛是戰場[4]、毒品[5]、錯覺[6]、錯亂[7]。愛是問題的答案，又是問題的本身。愛是令你心寧神定的芳香之氣，又是穿透人心的丘比特箭[8]。 美國語言學家門肯把愛比作知覺麻醉；詩人濟慈寫到愛是他的宗教[9]；莎士比亞稱愛為妖精、惡魔、亙古長明的塔燈[10]，煙霧，火災，海洋，瘋狂，發燒，難以入喉的苦味[11]；愛像雨后陽光[12]，直而不曲。

在 各式各樣的愛當中，浪漫的愛情是最復雜而又最令人費解的。它可以在你最不經意的時候冒出來(而且帶給你最不合適的對象)，它可以把你從狂喜的巔峰拋向絕望的深淵，它一會兒向你呼嘯而來，轉瞬間卻像鏡面上呼出的氣息消散無蹤。是它驅使你將余生獻給另一個人，卻在幾年之后回想時，絲毫記不得那最初的狂喜。愛情是如此的令人困惑，有時你想索性放棄一切愛情的煩惱，轉而潛心研究宇宙[13]，或宏觀經濟學，或別的輕松事。

有些生物學知識在此是有益的。愛情的第一場陣痛就讓你身陷烈性化學雞尾酒的影響之下：血管內多巴胺(和它相比鴉片就是阿司匹林了)來去匆忙。尚覺不夠熱鬧的附件激素(加壓素和催產素的完全混合物)肆虐盛行于你的全身。這些發現大多是通過對草原田鼠的大量研究發現的。草原田鼠和配偶相伴一生，終日體貼地為對方梳理打扮，雙宿雙棲，極力避免發生外遇，生活作風相當正派。

女人會說，但愿男人都像草原田鼠。但是，要是希望男人都是馬匹的話，女人都愿是戈黛娃夫人了(Lady Godiva)。[14]

除 了愛情的化學棍棒效應，還有個小腦問題。核磁共振(MRI)掃描顯示，墮入愛河所激活的只是很微小部分的大腦區域，比操作重型機械時所激活的大腦區域小得多。英國倫敦大學學院的研究人員用挖苦的口吻評論說：特洛伊的美人海倫能夠僅憑被她激活的這么有限的腦皮層區域，居然使上千艘戰艦發動了起來，想到這真令人神往。

因 此要記住緊要的是，當你戀愛選擇配偶的時候，你僅是在憑借認知功能的小部分做出一項攸關余生的重大決定。被愛情所激活的這小片大腦皮層正是被可卡因所激 活的那片區域，這就意味著你選擇人生伴侶，移居到阿拉斯加的安克雷奇，然后決定生許多孩子，這一系列的決定和你決定享用非法毒品導致徹夜胡言亂語所用到的 大腦皮層區域是完全相同的。

柏拉圖曾說，愛是一種精神疾病。現代研究人員紛紛表示強烈同意，并將愛分類為一種神經錯亂，重復著心理學家多 年以來一直對哭泣的患者的忠告。(有一些精神科醫生拒絕為愛情病痛的早期患者治療，因為患者太過瘋狂不能專注于一件事上。) 目前，科學家們正風度彬彬地展開一場學術爭論：愛是否更類似于躁郁癥的躁狂階段，還是更類似于強迫癥中顯現的特征。

還有一種思想學派堅持認為愛是一種文化現象。正如法國偉大的憤世嫉俗的拉羅什福科說過： “如果人們沒有聽說過有關愛的談論，就不會戀愛。” 文化業持續著它連發轟炸般的勢頭推崇著浪漫愛情的力量和榮耀，但似乎好奇的是迄今為止那么多的偉大愛情故事 - 比如凱西和希斯克利夫，特里斯坦與伊索爾德，愛洛綺斯和阿貝拉，蘭斯洛特和關妮芙之間的愛情都是以災難結束(如果不算死亡和屠殺的話)。如果我們真持懷疑態度，我們可以得出這樣的結論：“‘戀愛’應被視為現代女性最偉大和最費時的愿望”這一觀點只不過是一場妄想。

奉行這一觀點的是一類非常危險的文學作品，最生動的例子就是伊麗莎白·史瑪特的小說《我坐在大中車站哭泣》，這本小說賦予真愛以特權凌駕于其他一切考慮之上。你可以毀掉家庭、毀掉其他人、毀掉整個國家，只要是以愛情的名義，這一切都沒問題了。如果您發現自己認同這種觀點的話，我們建議你喝一杯濃茶醒醒腦，讀一些有啟發性的有關養豬的書，直到你的妄想消散為止。

只有在愛情化學階段的瘋狂漸漸平息之后，你才能夠識別這份愛情是否是真實的。如果是真實的愛，它會轉化為深沉而又穩定的愛，幫你度過困難的日子、金融危機、以及那些編織生活的點點平凡小事。這就是為什么50年的老夫老妻總是說和最好的朋友結婚。

崇 高愛情的神秘之處在于，它沒有早期精神錯亂的痕跡。它不會令你在不適宜之時想剝去心愛人衣物；它不是那種想獨創二人世界的野性沖動。相反，它是一種深切的情愛，令你賞識外人無謂的獨特氣質而含情脈脈，領會無人能懂的幽默笑話而前仰后伏。這種愛是由千百塊細微的記憶瞬間磚砌而成的。它是這么撩起的一種感覺：每當你讀到報上一則趣聞，在街上遇見一個滑稽怪人，或者無意中聽到只言片語，你下意識中世上只有唯一的那個人是你必須傾訴分享的，這就是那種感覺。它不是奢侈的酒店套房，不是觀賞日出，也不是遙遠都市的沖動一游。它不是電影院里一屋漆黑中看到的經典片段；崇高愛情是在默默無聞的平凡之中找尋浪漫：只是因為那個人會修水龍頭，你的內心就會油然而增的一股愛慕。它也許不像那一切為了愛而丟失世界的愛情那么經典[15]，或像是“我想將你比作迷人的夏日[16]”這些詩句世代傳頌 ，但它絕不會令你的心碎掉落一地。

愛情雖然有些瘋狂，但仍不失為人生中一條亮麗的風景線。它帶給了我們十四行詩、歌劇還有各種奏鳴曲；它孕育了我們《了不起的蓋茨比》，《傲慢與偏見》以及《日瓦戈醫生》這些名著。它借與了我們葉芝那朝圣者的靈魂[17]和赫里克那甜蜜公主[18]，還有濟慈那顆耀眼的明星[19]。瞥見愛慕對像時那扭起肚子翩翩起舞的姿勢，大街上對著偶遇的陌生人的相視一笑，凝視著路燈突然想憑著燈柱蕩一秋千的欲望，所有這些都給民族增添了無盡的歡樂。(應該指出的是，所有這些瘋狂的癥狀并不只局限于年輕人身上：40歲明智的女性同樣容易被令人心醉而又年輕的明眸一瞥搞得心神不定。)

愛可以是瘋狂的、美味的、驚心動魄的；它可以讓你覺得好像身體的每一個原子都跳著舞。它可以帶回你淡忘的青春，讓你回想起遺忘了的夢想，重新燃起破滅了的希望。只是它需要附上一個忠告，一個健康的警告，一個不浪漫但執著理智的聲音。所以，下次你一旦戀愛，你應該記住，在那些愛情初期的日子里你是有點瘋狂的，明智的話就避免任 何沖動的決定。

愛情的危險

我們指的不是那種明顯令人心碎的危險-廉價的背叛，破碎的承諾- 我們指的危險是：當明智受過教育的女性陷入教條的束縛，固守著現代女性終極目標就是浪漫愛情的信條時，潛伏著的黑暗無知的危險。每天，成千上萬的電影、書 籍、文章以及電視節目反復輸灌著這個信念-如果沒有戀愛，生活如同荒漠。

然而，就像一只充滿智慧的老鼠在壁腳板之后發出吱吱的聲響，也有婦女接受這種顛覆正統的想法：也許這高高在上的愛情不見得就是通往絕對幸福這一天堂之路。她們的閱歷經驗開始發揮作用，他們觀察到在愛慕和性的迷霧之中結婚的夫婦，十年后，卻在互相摔碗，為些微的財產而激烈爭吵。

但是，那些注意到這些反 差的女士們往往害怕談論此事，以免被別人認為自己是憤世嫉俗的女人。當然，只有那些最厭倦和最受傷害的女士們才會挑戰浪漫愛情的正統。公認的智慧認為現代的性愛無疑是最終的靈丹妙藥，但是如果你對此不解的話，那肯定是你有問題。你這怪物，回去找瓶藥吃，別忘了吃藥前讀一下藥瓶外的標簽。我們認為：給予浪漫愛情特權使其凌駕于所有其他之上，堅持認為它是人類的幸福必不可缺少、不容置疑的一個組成部分，追溯到人類老祖宗的洞穴時代，這是一個陷阱圈套。自車輪發明以來每個人的心靈深處都渴望另一半與之合二為一，這個想法是一個沒有憑證的神話。

愛是人類不變的追求，變的是對愛的解釋。愛的表達方式、愛在日常生活中的意義，這些從來都不是不可改變或一成不變的。不同種類的愛及它們所標志的都不是固定不變的，無論傳統派人士怎么費心給你灌輸。

因此，“愛情是女人的最高要求，沒有愛情的女人在某種程度上講只能算是半個人，如果她對此有質疑，那她就是在反對人類所有的歷史”，所有這 些所謂的現代觀念都是經不住檢驗的。這不是一個刻在石頭上的命令，而是一種人類的想法，而人是容易受到引誘、耳根發軟的，有時甚至還會完全搞錯。