Can fully sane people fully fall in love?
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There’s so much happening in the realms I care about. But I’m going to take a detour to talk about love and mental illness.
It seems like you can draw a clear biological link between mental illness and passionate love.
I saw this post on Instagram recently:
It basically says it’s normal to misattribute the sources of your feelings of arousal.
It reminded me of an Invisibilia podcast episode I listened to years ago. If I remember correctly, they spoke to a researcher who said there’s evidence that there’s really just one universal human emotion: Arousal. Every other emotion is just a variation or flavor of your level of arousal. Anger, anxiety, excitement, etc. are high-arousal states. Sadness, depression, disappointment, etc. are low-arousal states.
This theory holds that excitement/anticipation and anxiety are the same emotion: Arousal. They cause the same physical response, racing heartbeat, sweating, etc. How we experience them depends on how we interpret them.
Which reminded me of research showing that falling in love is associated with a dip in serotonin.
Low serotonin is associated with several mood disorders, including depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Some scientists speculate that low serotonin may cause the “overpowering infatuation that characterizes the beginning stages of love,” Katherine Wu wrote for Harvard.
SSRI antidepressants increase the amount of serotonin available to our brains. They’re famously implicated in lowering libidos and even decreasing our feelings of love for our partners.
There seems to be a pretty clear link between your serotonin levels and the intensity of your arousal both in general and relating to sex and love in particular.
Which leads me to wonder whether only crazy people can really fall in love.
You are probably deliberately oversimplifying things but as some with Bipolar disorder it is easy to fall in love while in a hypomanic or manic state and much harder in a depressed state. For me at least. I can't speak to schizophrenia or other types of mental illness.