What is Love?

Hello and welcome to the cupid couch, the podcast about love, sex and relationships, both present and past. My name is Genevieve Gaunt, the creator and host, and you can find visual content to go along with the show on the Instagram at the cupid couch. Welcome. This episode is about trying to understand what love is. So I asked my guest the question, what is love, and listen to their stories. I then see what the experts have to say about it, across science, literature, philosophy and psychotherapy. But of course asking this question is nothing new, poets, thinkers and musicians for thousands of years have been obsessed with love, writing about it, poeticizing its dizzying highs, and sometimes suicidal lows. Guide books to love have been written as early as the second century AD. Of its art of love is about how to win a woman and how to keep her. And every romantic comedy is surely saying that if we do not find love, we are somehow incomplete. A great man once said, true love is the soul's recognition of its counterpoint in another. That great man was Owen Wilson in wedding crashes, but it sounds like something Plato wrote in his symposium. Plato said, love is born into every human being. It calls back the halves of our original nature together. It tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. What Plato was suggesting is that the origins of love line a desire to complete ourselves by finding a long lost half, what we would call a soulmate, and the myth of the soulmate originates in Greek mythology, which says that humans were originally created with four arms, four legs, and a head with two faces, fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves. This question of what love is seems so huge that I wanted to ask someone with real life experience, what love meant to them. This is Jeffrey, he's 67, he's been married and divorced, has three children, and is currently single, so I asked him, what is love? It's the highest form of anything pure, it's the highest form of purity, and then it dissipates to friends and family and stuff. The romantic love is, and to be loved, you don't just love, it's no good just loving, to be loved, and the mixture and the secrecy and the privacy that can go into that little box is the holy grail. How does being in love make you feel safe? It's funny that you say that because the way that love is presented often in film and books and plays, is of being passionate and dramatic and. Something untamable. But you're saying the opposite, love actually made you feel. Well, you aim for that, don't you? That's what you aim for, and if you achieve that, and some people do, or some people, for a certain time, it makes you feel it's safe, it's pure. And what do you think love is? Is it chemical, hormonal, is it just a survival instinct that kicks in so that we stay with our partners and our children? I think the brain is involved with it as well. I think it is emotional. I think there's some choice in it too. It's something that everybody would like to have, but we can all do without. But it's the purest form of life. What do you think a life is without love? It's fine without love, because it goes in different directions. You're talking about romantic love basically. It's fine, because it goes in other areas. You don't need romantic love. But if you find it, it's obviously something that everybody searches for all the time. And do you think that maybe love for your children is the enemy to romantic love? No, it's just the continuation. It's a different ingredient of the same whole, the same cake. But it's certainly second to, but then so are friends. Love is essential to everyone in life. But I think the purest form of love is between, probably, between two people, either for a day or a week. Or a lifetime. Jeffrey said love ultimately made him feel safe. But is that enough? Safety? What about sex and lust and passion? Isn't that a key ingredient to love? My next guest, James, 27, defined the paradox of love between safety and sex, and delved into the use of different words for love to think about its meaning. Here's James. I think it's really helpful for me to have different words to distinguish things, because I think often when I think about love really perhaps what I mean more is romance. I don't really know what that word last was most of the thing of the German word, lust, which means fun. So, last always sounds in English sounds so negative, but lust in German sounds so innocent. So, yeah, I just think for me having more words to describe things really helps. Because if I think about actions that are loving, I think of qualities like reliability and nurturingness, or someone being caring or being kind, but none of that is sexy to me. Actually, one of the things that S.T.E.P.R.L says is that we've got these opposing forces within us, one which wants security and safety, and it's that cuddling kind of thing, and then one which is adventurous and aggressive. And that we have fundamentally contradicting needs, and that we all do, and we all agree have needs for both of those, and how do you reconcile those? How do you reconcile those in a relationship, and is it possible for everyone to reconcile those with one person? And yeah, they're just massive questions for everyone. And what do you think if I ask you what is love in its essence? However, that makes you feel, I mean, because you can divide it up into lust and a higher form of emotional love, but there's also that, you know, when you think of really being in love with someone, what is that for you? Well, I think since doing the smart program, I think my idea of that is really skewed, but what that means to me, like being in love with someone or falling in love with someone is that, to me, it's that first feeling of dating someone, getting to know someone, thinking about them, you know, smiling in the street, because you get that warm feeling, and it's exciting, and so it's that kind of springtime sort of feeling, that sort of emotional spring. The program you mentioned, Slah, do you want it? Oh yeah, so it's sex and love addicts and all of us, it's a 12 step. And how has your attitude to love changed since doing the program? It's just been really complicated. In a good way, it's been complicated, and it's really made me think about what's sort of breaking down love and what it is for me. And I don't know, I sort of feel like for myself, you know, I'm a 27-year-old gay man, and I don't know necessarily that I want a lot of the things that the Slah program sort of puts as a high priority in a partnership, in terms of like, you know, the person being, you know, well, I don't know it's hard to talk about, but the emphasis is very much on the person being really reliable, and having no red flags, which are things like, you know, having addictions or being chaotic or even you experiencing a really strong, what you might call lust, or chemical attraction to someone. In the Slah program, they say that is a, that's a wrong thing, that's a bad thing. You should actually avoid people that you feel strongly attracted to, which I find really confusing. But I do see it to some extent, because I suppose in the past, when I've gone with that, when I've gone with that really strong feeling of attraction, mutual attraction, I have overlooked so many other things in a person's character, or in our dynamic, which have then cost me very dearly, but I don't know, and then I also go, well, isn't life to be lived and don't want don't I want to experience that passion or that high or whether you call it? I don't know. I suppose I suppose to some extent to me love means on some higher level love means peace and being at peace with somebody and being at peace with myself. But then I don't want to be at peace all the time. I'll have some fireworks. Dividing love up into types as James did is what the ancient Greeks did too. Plato and Aristotle defined seven types of love. The first three I would put together are more general. Phil out here is self-love. Agape is general love for others like charity and pragma is a kind of practical love founded on reason or duty. Then there's philia, friendship love, and storage or familial love. And finally, ludus is playful or uncommitted love and eros passionate sexual love. It's all very well categorizing love this scientifically. But what combination of these things makes a happy romantic relationship? What's the secret? This question has clearly tantalized thinkers since the ancient Greeks. Because in 1985 the psychologist Dr. Sternberg put forward something called a triangular theory of love. The triangular theory of love proposes that love is composed of three distinct but interrelated components, intimacy, passion, and commitment. But the triangular theory also allows for eight other types of love, non-love, liking, infatuation, empty love, romantic love, companion it love, fatuous love, and consummate love. So how has one word come to contain so many meanings in the English language? If we look at the etymology of the word love, we can see that it's a linguistic fossil as is much of the English language. It has been created and shaped by our invaders. The word comes from the old English lufu, lufu, meaning, feeling of love, romantic sexual attraction, affection, friendliness, even the love of God, and even love as an abstraction or personification. So that's quite broad. We can see why if we look at its even earlier roots which are protodromatic. These words include lubo, lof, lob, lib, which in turn mean joy, praise, and dear beloved. The even earlier Latin roots such as libet means it is pleasing and libido which we're more familiar with, which means desire. So this fossil of a word has an interesting linguistic history. There is a paradox between the physical and the emotional, or as James defined it, between peace and fireworks. Speaking of this paradox, James mentioned the psychotherapist Esther Perrell, and she explores the dichotomy between peace and fireworks in romantic relationships brilliantly. In her book Mating in Captivity, she outlines the paradox of intimacy and desire in relationships, how to feel both safe and excited, how love thrives on closeness and security, whereas eroticism thrives on distance and wilderness. In her podcast therapy sessions and in her book, she uses case studies and advises couples of how to keep that balance between safety and excitement. I wondered if what Esther Perrell says sheds light on the ancient Greek myth of the soulmate. That idea of searching for your other half or partner, making yourself whole, perhaps that's a desire for security, and it's more physical, less emotional. In fact, we have something called a bonding hormone. It's called oxytocin, aka the love drug, and it activates when we have a strong attraction with another human. An oxytocin is fundamental to the love between homo sapiens, but some animals have it too. Dogs, cats, goats and some rodents have all been found to have the love hormone. Penguins mate for life, and some animals such as giraffes, flamingos, snails and vampire bats find long term mates of the same sex. So either animals are just as romantic as we are, or love is a biological phenomenon. So the question is, do animals experience love at first sight? And is love at first sight real? The idea that love could enter through the eyes is ancient. It was expressed by the ancient Greek poet Hesseord around 700 BC, and the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle's around the fifth and fourth century BC. Scientifically, our eyes actually do look beggar during sex, because when we are aroused, we produce noradrenaline, which increases blood pressure, and our eyes dilate. Nowadays, we use mascara and eye makeup to enhance the eyes, but in the Italian Renaissance, they went one step further. This is research from a science paper called Ethno Pharmacology of Love by Marco Leonti and Laura Casu. They write that in the Italian Renaissance, dilated pupils were pharmacologically induced for signaling seductive cues or sexual arousal, and that Venetian women used the sap of Beladonna for dilating their pupils to produce the "look of love" effect. And we know the expression "love at first sight" very well. In the late 14th century, Chaucer wrote in his poem, Joyless and Cressida, she loved, right from the first sight, and around 200 years later, Shakespeare was bolder in his claim, "in the play as you like it," he wrote, "who ever loved that loved not at first sight." We buy into the romance of stories about love at first sight, but are they real? This next story is about love at first sight, and it belongs to a woman called Melin. She's in her mid-30s. Listen to her story and decide whether love at first sight is real or a fantasy. Here's Melin. My favorite story about romantic encounter happened actually in a very different context when I was living in Chicago. A friend of mine came to visit and we were out at a bar, some awful, I think, western themed places, so the antithesis. It's my personality, my aesthetic, but nonetheless, I was there. And this friend of mine was really well-known for getting himself into trouble, and particularly with women. And I saw him sit up, bolt up, right, and go running into a crowd of people, and I thought, "Oh God, we're going to get kicked out." So I went chasing after him to try to mitigate whatever harm he was about to, you know, whatever bomb of trouble he was about to toss to his crowd. And I saw him embracing this other man. And I was absolutely flummoxed. And I sort of stood there, a gap, and particularly, you know, widened that my jaw just dropped when I saw the person he was actually hugging because he was this man that I thought was the most handsome creature that I'd ever seen in my entire life. He really tall, he had dark hair and dark eyes, and this really, really kind smile. And my friend introduced us and said that they had studied together in, so this is James, we studied together in Germany. And I said, "Well, how did you plans to meet up here? Did you tell me we're going to be in town?" Because this friend of mine normally lived in California. And he said, "No, I didn't tell him I was going to be in Chicago. I didn't tell him I was going to be at this bar. This is a complete random sighting." So we went out that night, and James and I were instantly drawn to each other. And we're talking and laughing, and then we went out dancing, and as everyone else pealed off to go home, I just couldn't leave this person who I felt so, you know, drawn to. And so we walked from downtown Chicago to the lakefronts, and you know, it was really quiet. And the lake is so beautiful, and you've got this incredible city escape behind you, and I think the most beautiful city escape in the world. And I don't know why, but out of the blue, well, he was talking about music, and that he made music, he was a musician, and I hadn't mentioned that I was also a musician. And so as we started walking, I started to walk away, and I started to sing a few bars from my favorite Billy Holiday song. And he stopped dead in his tracks, and he said, "Who are you?" Malin's story is undoubtedly romantic, and there's a sense of coincidence involved, fate, and instant attraction, which gives the meeting so much significance. But ultimately, their relationship went on to be on and off and off and down, and then ultimately end. So this magic meeting, was it really love at first sight? Or lost at first sight? And a feeling that fate and coincidence, and the gods of love, was somehow conspiring to bring two people together. When I discussed love at first sight with my friend Paul, he's in his mid-30s. He surprised me with how skeptical he was. He, himself, was no cynic. He found his soulmate and married him last summer. Here's Paul. I think I always expected that it would be like falling, and yet I've never experienced that. And I don't think it's real. I think that it's probably not love, but I think people would define love very differently. I mean, even when we were getting married, looking for readings and things like that about what love is, I had my sister read a reading that was called 'He's Not Perfect'. So, you know, it's my idea of love. it's very different from someone's idea of this sort of fairytale live happily ever after. I don't think that that's practical. I think that people can see that from social media, from Instagram, from stories, from films, whatever, but you're not seeing that every day, the mundane, the having to cope with your partner in the toilet with the runs or all of that sort of stuff that you just have to kind of deal with that is not making your heart burst or making you so happy that you could jump for joy. I think there are moments of that, but there's also moments of that with people that you don't love. There's moments of that with friends. Well, I mean, you love in different ways, but friends and acquaintances. You know, I would say the perhaps been previous relationships where sex was the only good thing in the relationship. And you confuse that for being love because you feel wanted, you feel desired, and that's always been part of the package that sold to you, but it's not sustainable because on a relationship that's so sex-driven, if one of you then doesn't feel like having sex, that other person will go somewhere else for it. Oh, that's how it seemed to me in my experiences. So that would put me in a position where I was having sex when I didn't want to be having sex. And you know, I've been in relationships where I've pretended to be asleep when they got home, so I didn't have to have sex with them. And you know, pretty bad stuff. But that's when you think that's when you started relationship thinking, I'm in love with this person because physically it's all working. And this is making me feel so happy. And then you realize that there may be not a nice person or they're not. They don't have the same values as you or they don't treat particularly nicely or whatever it might be. And then you realize that none of that is actually love. So I think you can fall in lust very easily. But I think there's a huge difference between that and love. Paul raised the unromantic but undoubtedly true point that you really can't fall in love with a whole person in one look. It's not possible. You have to get to know someone and that takes at least six months. So if you felt love at first sight, what is that? Maybe it's more about the idea of falling in love with the idea of falling in love. On that note, I asked another guest about love at first sight and they were also skeptical. Here's Paddy. He's in his early 30s. Have you ever experienced love at first sight? I think like infatuation. I think it's infatuation that might. I mean, I had this talking about not mentioning a therapist. I was at my therapist. I said, I've had like, I've had like 20 X Y's already. There's that thing of love at first sight. It's like it's more infatuation. Do you kind of project on to that person? Whether there's something that is the person, right? And I think I'm not alone in saying this. I've projected onto people I've dated and I'm going to marry them. I don't even fucking know this person. But then also the point about the X-Wife is that the then loss of that person is inherently, it's not related to the real context of that person's position in your life. It's actually the perceived position, which is that you've already fucking walked down the aisle. Then we've already got three kids. We've already named all in a split second of seeing that person or whatever, right? So the perceived loss is far greater than the actual real loss. It's funny because that is something that women think that only women do. Yeah. I think it's the same for men and women. I think men just would beat themselves out for having those thoughts. When Paddy said he had had 20 X-Wives already, what he meant was he had thought, is this woman the one? She is the one at least 20 times. And every time it went wrong, that idea was discarded. And the idea that we project the future onto a person means that perhaps it's only love at first sight in hindsight when it works out. He also said that men are just as prone to having leaping romantic thoughts as women. So if men and women both do that, why? That's not about sex. That's about nesting, snuggling, building a home together. That primal kick to nest and snuggle is undoubtedly an animal reaction. And solitary confinement is considered by neuroscientists to be close to a form of torture than punishment. So when the world went into lockdown in 2020, I wasn't surprised when I heard a lot of people selecting a short-term romantic partner and jumping into a lockdown bunker together, Netflix, Breadflower, quizzes and vodka in hand. This primal kick to cohabit links to the idea that love is just nature's way of getting a couple to spend a lot of time together, a) to get a pregnancy going, and b) to keep us monogamous so our babies don't die. In the animal kingdom, monogamy is nature's way of protecting the children, to protect against something called targeted in fantaside, where the father kills the baby because he can't get sexual access to the mother. This goes on in many species, including gorillas, monkeys and even dolphins. Yep, dolphins, cute, rapey murderous dolphins. And, statistically, cohabitation actually keeps us alive for longer. A 2010 Harvard study said the unmarried adult men have twice the mortality rate of married men of the same age and even unmarried women die younger than their married counterparts. But then, this is when the studies contradict one another. Another scientific report, according to Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, says that unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population and, as a result, they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-wearing peers. I have to say this is kind of backed up by the fact that Europe's oldest woman is a lady called sister Andre, who turned 117 in 2021. And the reason I'm mentioning sister Andre is you might have guessed because she is a nun, which means no toxic relationships, no unhappy marriages, and no heart disease of the romantic kind. That idea of love and death being connected, we know well from the expression "dying from a broken heart." And it's not just a metaphor. The broken heart emoji is nothing new. In Emily Bronte's 1847 novel "Wuthering Heights," Heathcliff says to Kathy, "I have not broken your heart. You have broken it, and in breaking it, you have broken mine." The British Heart Foundation explains a medical condition called Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, also known as broken heart syndrome. It's a heart condition that can be brought on by emotional or physical distress. When someone is highly emotionally or physically distressed, one of the heart's chambers, the left ventricle, suddenly expands and then weakens. The shape of the ventricle with this condition looks like an octopus's trapping net, which in Japanese is Takotsubo hence the name. When this happens, the heart can't pump blood around the body properly, and this extra stress can lead to heart failure. So a broken heart really does kill. And neurologically, to quote the clinical psychologist, Dr. Kristen Bianchi, "regions of the brain that light up when you experience physical pain also light up when you go through heartbreak. So when someone goes through a breakup, they experience a drop in the production of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin that are associated with feelings of pleasure and happiness." So the line "Love as a Drug" which sounds like a cliched lyric from a pop song is true. Our bodies actually produce drugs, serotonin and dopamine, especially during the first flush of a romance, you feel high, so when it's taken away, there is a come down like going cold turkey. My next guest also spoke about love in these terms. She is the Australian author, Kathy Lett, author of 20 books, 14 of which are comic fiction. Her latest book, HRT, Husband Replacement Therapy, is soon to be published in the UK. I interviewed Kathy remotely, and for someone who writes so well about love and sex and marriage, I knew I had to ask her the question, "What is love?" And she said, "Well, besides the best thing ever, I think love should be classified as a class A addiction, and if love is a drug, then I'm like the all-night chemist." And there have been times in my life, I've needed a nicaret for love, a boyfriend ed or something. But the thing you've got to remember is that you can go to romance rehab and you will get over a bad, bad bloke. But there's only one thing worse than being in love and that's being out of it. I mean, it's a joy. It's the icing on the you know, on life's pie, it's wonderful, but you mustn't mistake lust for love. I've done that a few times. Your gasms are so good. I'm like, oh, oh, oh, this must be love. No, no, it's just really, really superb bedroom gymnastics. You've got to learn to tell the difference between that. But of course, I think the men I fall for normally are good at wordplay because wordplay is for play for females and how it's woody and still getting laid. So, a bloke who can thrust away with his rapier, his rapier wit is always big my top fella. And earlier, my friend James talked about going to Slar, sex and love addicts anonymous, addicts anonymous. People go to Slar as they go to AA or NA. Love and sex clearly produces drugs in the brain that become addictive. The highs and lows of love are captured by Shakespeare and the play Romeo and Juliet. Romeo says to Benvolio, love is a smoke raised with the fume of size, being purged, a fire sparkling in love as eyes, being vexed, a sea nourished with love as tears, what is it else? A madness most discreet, a choking gall, and a preserving suite. But interestingly, Romeo is not talking about Juliet. He's talking about a woman he is infatuated with before Juliet comes on the scene. Her name is Rosaline. I think Shakespeare does this to show that Romeo's love for Juliet is something far deeper, far greater. It shows the difference between immature love and true, deep love. Even the way those lines are written with the saccharine rhyme and the hyperbole, Shakespeare's showing that Romeo's immature language is immature. His love is shallow, whereas as Romeo's love deepens, so does his poetry. Shakespeare describes love sickness symptoms, a fume of size, a sea of tears, a choking gall, and nothing has really changed. When you hear my next guest, Corinne, you'll hear that he similarly had those symptoms of love sickness. He's a rapper, he's known as the last skeptic and his latest album, See You In The Next Life, was inspired by a shattering breakup. I asked him about love sickness, and if he could explain to me what it felt like. Here's Corinne. It was that heartbreak was so so painful that I felt it physically. So the point that three months later, I had some shows in Vietnam and I went away and I thought, you know what, let me go out there a week before my gigs and just have a nice week to myself in Ho Chi Minh City. I'll go eat some good food, I'll do some writing. I got there and I had the first mental breakdown I've ever had in my life. I've never had a mental breakdown before and I was stuck for five days in a shitty Airbnb in Ho Chi Minh City. Anyone who's been there, it's a very loud humid place. The worst place you can have a mental breakdown, and I couldn't eat, sleep, drink water. I thought I was dying, I was crying all the time, like non-stop, and it was probably the worst experience of my life. Like everything hit me at once. I couldn't even get out of bed. I couldn't watch anything on my laptop. I literally was experiencing what my friends told me afterwards was my version of like an Iowaska trip. I was I was like seeing things, hearing things. I was calling my mum back in England like maybe I should change my flight and then any advice that her or my friend Ron would tell me I would ignore because in my head I had this guilt of like, "Coron, you must do the shows. Do the first show." If you get through the first show, you're, you know, you're a fucking winner. So I do the first show and I'm like, "Okay, okay. Maybe I'll put my flight home." No. I'm going to fly to Hanoi and do my second show, and it's like literally was just dragging myself along like this hidden person inside me going, "You need to get past this." And it was at that point, I got this thing that's still on my phone that says, "If you can't beat fear, then just do it scared." And there was a point where I really realized that through all of this anxiety and heartbreak and mental anguish and and OCD spiralized like thinking and the health anxiety that I thought if you any time like, I mean, what's the worst that can happen? I'll die. We're all going to die. So I literally that voice in the back of my head said, "If you cannot, if you feel like the fear is so strong that it's beating you down and you cannot get through this, then just do what you're going to do but just do it while being scared." Corrin's breakup come down was so bad, he described it as his own ayahuasca trip, and 400 years ago that poet John Dryden wrote, "Love is a melody without a cure." But how can you cure that melody? How can you get over heartbreak? How do you realign your brain chemistry after that cold turkey feeling? The first treatise on fighting love sickness and unrequited attraction known in history is the Remedia Amoris by the Roman poet Ovid. Ovid actually advised against the use of herbal remedies and magic to quote him, "If anyone thinks he can be helped by harmful herbs and magic arts, that's his affair." Ovid's remedies and magic we might now call anti-depressants. I interviewed my mother about breakups and love sickness and she told me how she dealt with one. Here's my mom. Well, everyone's been lovesick and it is so painful and I'm like flu which you get over with in a week or so. Love sickness can go on for months. Good thing about love sickness is you tend to lose weight. Some people of course get the other way and start eating out of comfort. I always lost weight so I always felt physically better but I remember one time being so heartbroken that I went to the doctor and I said I can't bear it and I felt just dreadful. I was also doing a quite a difficult player musical in a theatre in London and I thought I haven't got the energy. I'm just I can't sleep, I can't eat, I'm just in a mess. So he give the doctor prescribed for me in those days it was quite novel anti-depressants and I took these anti-depressants but I don't know whether he got the dosage wrong or whatever but they had the reverse effect. I started grinning like a loon. I started laughing at things that went particularly funny and I was as happy as anything, as long as I was sort of manic but the other thing was that I had to perform at nights in the theatre and I had to sing. It was quite a small company, it was a French show, it wasn't very memorable but there was one memorable night. When I got up to do my RA the whole of the company on the stage singing the chorus along with me and I started giggling and I couldn't stop and I was singing and choking and giggling and laughing. The whole company turned up stage because they gone, they were absolutely doubled up. The audience were looking bemused. First of all they couldn't hear what I was singing because I was so whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I was golf, I was gone and I got an absolute balloting from the director when it was over because he was in watching but I couldn't help it. So I came off the anti-depressants. I thought natural way is probably the best way to it too but I'll never forget that because it was euphoric but it was also madness. Love and even love sickness can make fools of the best of us. In a diary entry for the 9th of June 1956 the playwright Noel Coward reported a lunch with Churchill and a woman, not his wife, Wendy Russell. He writes, "There was this great man. Historically one of the greatest our country has produced and domestically one of the silliest, absolutely obsessed with the senile passion for Wendy Russell. He followed her about the room with his brimming eyes and wobbled after her across the terrace, staggering like a vast baby of two who was just learning to walk. A proud imposing former leader of the UK quote, staggering like a vast baby after a younger woman. It's embarrassing. My friend Martha told me about how embarrassed and helpless she felt, how physically shattered after a breakup. Here's Martha, she's in her late 20s. Yeah, I had a really bad one at uni which was the first guy that I really liked. Maybe for an incredibly special, you know, introduced me to his family. And then it turned out that he had been sleeping with his ex and with one of my other friends and with potentially with a couple of other people and he took me to a pub one day and we were a couple of drinks in having a nice chat and he was like, "I've got something to tell you." He was like, "I've met someone else." I was like, "Oh!" And immediately felt sick, like I just threw up my whole body just this awful, awful wrenching stomach churning, just deep, deep betrayal and felt incredibly stupid as well. And I said, "Who are they?" And he was like, "I've only met them once but I'm just besotted with them." Two weeks later they were calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend and I just felt like a complete fool was still feeling sick, had to go to therapy in the end because I ended up only feeling, I basically completely lost the plot, felt like I was only able to eat tin tomatoes and drink coke so I spent a whole month just eating warmed up tin tomatoes. Sometimes I put some herbs on them for a bit for obviously and drinking cans of coke for energy. Lost a lot of weight. He I think three weeks after breaking up with me then came crawling back, turns out the girl was very Christian and he wasn't going to be able to have sex with her so he came back to me apologising profusely and you know saying "oh I miss you so much, it's so important to me blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah" we sat together again and then the next morning which was stupid on my part but at that point I was feeling so unwell and just I mean I don't even been eating tomatoes for three weeks so I wasn't quite in the right frame of mind and just grateful that he was back but the next morning I woke up and I was like "I'm no I just are better than this like this isn't yeah this isn't right I know this is this is not correct yeah and so I just felt really dreadful and the fallout of it was kind of having to have counselling going on antitipressants kind of problems with eating for a little while getting back to like normal healthy eating patterns and it was just a bit grim a nice thing was that all my friends rallied around me and our mutual friends all sided with me which was great I think they could see he'd been a bit of a knob and well a big of a knob which is ironic because he had a tiny knob Martha only eating tin tomatoes and drinking coke wanting to be sick it's actually comfortingly nothing new medical and philosophical texts from the late 16th and early 17th century frequently described romantic love as both a physical disease and a mental illness and one of my favorite writers is Dr Frank Talis he's a practicing clinical psychologist and an authority on obsessive disorders his books love sick and the incurable romantic or must reads in a 2005 article Talis wrote called truly madly deeply he lists the symptoms of love sickness which he categorizes as a mental disorder or OCD have a listen to the symptoms and you can decide if you've ever experienced any of these depression hopelessness or helplessness nausea tearfulness insomnia lack of concentration high blood pressure pain in the chest and heart upset stomach changing appetite dizziness confusion chronic neck pain body tremors intrusive thoughts frequent flashbacks rapid mood swings so in conclusion love is clearly physical and chemical but also evolutionary and the paradox of security and sexuality it seems love won't be tied down thinking about all of it it seems quite tough to me the search for love the search to bond with another person whether it's love at first sight or a love that grows and then to satisfy the ever shifting paradox of security and excitement of friendship and lust and being fed the idea that we have to do it forever I guess the forever happily ever after thing we can thank Disney for that and when I think of sleeping beauty she looks pretty medieval to me so she probably only lived until she was 35 if she survived childbirth in which case of course they lived happily ever after and she also probably had narcolepsy so presumably slept through most of the marriage maybe that was the key to their success and just to throw a spanner into the works I worry about the human condition if we're too happy we seem to get bored perhaps human beings are meant to be in emotional limbo caught somewhere between peace and fireworks here's James again to end this episode I suppose I suppose to some extent to me love means to on some higher level love means peace and being at peace with somebody and being at peace with myself but then I don't want a bit peace all the time I'll have some fireworks love is peace and fireworks and that's the end of this episode the next episode of the Cupid Couch is sex fetish and fantasy from a guest who lives out a fantasy of sleeping with a porn star to ancient sex manuals and filthy letters this episode is an exploration into the shadowy side of our sexual desire my name is Jenna Veeve gaunt and you've been listening to The Cupid Couch