Oh, crazy heart…

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Among the many forms love there is almost certainly nothing more stupid than in love. There is nothing reasonable, useful or practical in that state, and it can be dangerous or even destructive. Plato included infatuation in his list of forms of insanity, and none of his contemporaries was certainly surprised by that, since the ancient gods used some kind of punishment from their "department" for insults, so Aphrodite, the goddess of love, would use painful infatuation, as in the tragic case of Phaedra, who, right after her marriage to Theseus, she "forced" to fall in love with his son.

Only one of the specifics of this form of insanity lies in the fact that many people lack it, and that those who currently have it, those who never had it (or for a long time) and those who recently lost it, all suffer because of it in their own way. Countless counselors explain today, as artists described in the past, what should be done with this madness (or its absence) - how to recognize, find, develop, keep, extend, challenge, redirect love... Not to mention how much it dominates the world of entertainment, from television to popular music to the choice of "Valentine's Day" gifts.

And more than other feelings, infatuation, and what is connected with it, like jealousy or boldness, seems to be beyond our control: where it exists, it can hardly be restrained; where there is none, it cannot be ignited artificially; where it dies, it cannot be resurrected. As one children's song said, the author of which knew a lot about falling in love, suddenly your head becomes full of someone's tuft of blue and he hangs around it for days, you think about that tuft and sometimes it seems to you that this is all you do and that everything you knew for sure before is now playing around. You don't know why right now, why the tuft, why the blonde, maybe you even swore you hated blonde hair, it's just obvious to you that your feelings are now more powerful than you and your mind.

OUTSIDE AND ABOVE THE WORLD

When you grow up surrounded by a lot of people, you eventually learn that no one is objectively special. Then, like a bolt from the blue, you feel that with someone (at the moment when you hardly know him), everything "fits", it seems. The best illustration for this is that Romeo and Juliet meet at the moment when they are both wearing masks (so the visual impression is not decisive) and the first words they exchange form a perfect sonnet. Everyday speech turns into poetry, the two get the feeling that they are outside (or above?) the world and that they don't need it at all. This rapture brings to lovers the belief that they are stronger than social restrictions, which is important material for tragedies in art and real life, and it is not unusual for them to feel that their feelings are more powerful than physical reality, as when in some hugs "time stands still".

Because of this feeling, the illusion is born that everything made sense and that the various coincidences were actually just a preparation for that meeting (as in Šimborska's song, which was the basis for "Three Colors: Red"), and that now the entire future is certain and clear. This also brings the unshakable conviction that out of eight billion people you met the only person with whom this could happen - Rostropovich and Vishnevska got married on the fourth day of their acquaintance, and he, they say, lamented for the rest of his life how they "threw away" the first three - and the rest of humanity, at least for a while, even men, completely faded away.

HOPE AND COURAGE

Such meetings, as well as important shared moments, especially the birth of children, if there are any, bring an extremely intense experience of hope, the conviction that past adversities and limitations have been overcome and that, now that you are "together", you will be able to overcome everything in the future. "Hope" is also the word (actually, "la dolce speranza") in which the greatest excitement occurs in the famous aria in which Rodolfo tries to charm Mimi by showing her the answers to the questions Who am I?? What I do for a living? How I live? He actually expresses the hope of many that falling in love will bring the experience not only that someone will finally see me as I am at the core, but also that they will fully accept me as I am, that I will no longer have to hide, be ashamed, be silent, adapt or deny myself.

It is rare when in adulthood another person is so crucially important and needed as in periods of "acute" love, which can lead to a painful feeling of missing that takes away the dignity of someone who is no longer a child. But Valentine's Day is the day of St. Tryphon, the patron saint of winegrowers, wine and love. It is not difficult to understand that under this is hidden Dionysus, the ancient god of ecstasy ("extraversion"). And indeed, falling in love takes you outside of yourself, shifts the center of your personality to another person or relationship with them. If in those moments you do anything, feel, think, everything is through the other, with the other, for the other.

Many years ago, a radio spot included the line "You can't make people do two things: fall in love and be brave." While the first part of that thought is undoubtedly true, the second is much more complex, since some courage has nothing to do with falling in love, but all falling in love is courage. On the one hand, because, when you step so far towards another, that exposure infinitely raises the risk of vulnerability that you dare by trusting to be protected by someone's kindness and tenderness, despite the fact that in moments of such intense feelings, a million per million people are capable of this. And on the other hand, because only those who are convinced that they will be able to and have a place to return to are ready to step outside of themselves, even if they have already experienced in the past that this experience changes us so much that the return must be a thorough reconstruction.

AS IF LIFE IS JUST BEGINNING

When you fall in love, however, every time you think "I have never loved like I do now". And to those who are in their fourth marriage and to those who fall "deadly" in love for the third time since Monday, it's as if all memories have been erased and life is just beginning. It's even worse that you start to believe that "no one has ever loved like I do now" and it's impossible to convince you that the world could possibly, somehow, survive without your portraits, songs, scripts...

Although it is in the nature of this inspiration to instill in us the unshakable belief that we fell in love because we met someone special, the intensity of the feeling actually depends on completely different factors. You will fall in love as intensely as you were previously lonely and/or as successful as you were at containing your feelings (especially if you didn't know that success was necessarily time-limited). We should also not lose sight of the fact that almost everyone falls in love at least partially with the very special feeling of falling in love.

BORDER FOR BEFORE AND AFTER

Our age also brings the strange phenomenon that falling in love is longed for, but at the same time different performances are put on it. Perhaps the most common is that this whole experience is just a seductive illusion. This, of course, makes sense, because of optimism, self-confidence, elation, inspiration... Lovers see almost everything - each other, the future, happiness, challenges - completely differently than anyone around them. But there is also a problem with this remark, and that is the belief that the line between reality and illusion is clear, and that someone infallibly knows how to distinguish between them. This naivety can become arrogance if its advocate has not stopped using money, television or wooden nets, and it is impossible for him to imagine the terrible headaches that the smell of rose oil can cause when the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan is warm and sunny.

Another objection to infatuation is that infatuation necessarily leads to disappointment. This is completely logical and expected. Feelings have their own flow and duration (the Latin word for feelings is based on a word that means movement, setting in motion e-disturbed), so the cessation of painful ones leads to relief, and only the weakening of pleasant ones can bring sadness. When the idealizations of falling in love fall away, reality (ordinariness) can be terribly disappointing. But could it be that raptures are not too short as lives have become too long? At the time when Plato enumerated the forms of madness, age started at 28, at the beginning of the last century the limit was raised to 45. We are now, compared to them, both lukewarm and fragile. And another question could be whether there are relationships in which disappointment is impossible - with parents, teachers, colleagues...

Disappointment can truly hurt just as much as falling in love exhilarated. However, there shouldn't be many surprises there. Verdi's Alfredo, as soon as he sang that love is the pulse of the universe, describes it as "croce e delizia" (cross, that is, torture, and delight in the heart), and it is an aria about happiness ("Un di, felice, eterea"). And when you are happy, maybe just because you are happy, a lot of things change in your personality, something develops, where there is a moral fabric, accumulated lies and self-delusions are burned. All that, among other things, hurts. If, for whatever reason, you are not happy, it knows that it hurts sharper and deeper than almost any other loss. But what about that? The pain passes, and when it comes, there is little that shows you who you are like the moments when you don't back down from it. We must not sacrifice others, but when the possible outcome is love, where there is a heart, no risk or sacrifice is too great. "Broken hearts" need not be dangerous at all in the long run. It is much more important not to fall for someone else's idealized image of you, because a dramatic disappointment in yourself could make impossible the now necessary personality reconstruction.

Falling in love is for most people an experience in relation to which they determine before and after, it has been a great inspiration for art and remains a great puzzle for science. We can only hope that it will not be trivialized and marginalized in the world of dating applications and sociable robots, and that the "anxious generations" will learn how to emerge from its amplitudes. Because, wherever you were a moment before, few experiences bring such, even temporary, fullness of living as falling in love does.

The author is a psychologist