Love Delirium: acute confusional state which resides only in the mind of whoever is swayed by a set of delusional feelings, some of which are perpetuated through self-conditioning in an individual of questionable volition.
Dr. Erick Lagos-Sanchez
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| Don't you LOVE pizza? |
Perhaps one of the most intriguing issues in love is the capacity -somewhat better stated, the lack of it- to control this feeling consciously, judiciously, sanely. Love is such an admixture of emotions that it is worth seeking simpler analogies to ease our understanding of whatever it eventually turns into: a delirium. For instance, I like to consider appetite as an example of humans' rationality. We could at least say that appetite is driven by a set a physiological events that reasonably seek the individual's well being through energy disposal and accumulation. So, try to understand hunger as an irrational feeling in the sense that it is quite unusual that the average-income person can succumb to energy deprivation: rarely (i.e. only under extreme circumstances) does someone starve to death. Instead, seek to understand that energy levels and deposits are a must for human beings, hence the rationality behind hunger is the need to maintain a safe level of energy in terms of caloric intake for consumption along variable amounts of time, put simply, not everything you eat is used up immediately, it is mostly saved for later. Now, if you believe you can set feelings apart from needs, you can successfully control your so-called "animal-behavior". Thus, in our example, if you understand that you need energy to live, you can focus on how much you actually need for survival and then concentrate on other more important aspects of our current life, such as earning a living. In this way, people could focus not on taste, an irrational sense not linked to caloric meaningfulness, but on energy and vitamin content, a rational, fully conscious and smarter surrogate of food and its essentiality. What about the emotions linking food to behavior? Well, this is where things got a step higher in evolutionary thinking. People can choose from a large spectrum of options. On one extreme of this spectrum there is absolute energy deprivation after starvation which leads to death, and on the other there is frank obesity and overindulging. But there are also less extreme conditions such as long-term/short-term/ or overnight fasting, there is nourishing and pampering, there is binging and there is also early satiety, there is abstaining and there are intense and very specific food cravings. There are such complex behaviors towards eating, like bulimia or anorexia, or compulsive munching and gluttony. How can there be such a variety regarding something as simple as nutrition? And how is it related to love?
(Will continue in a second post)
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