Obsessive Love
Our focus article is but a basic primer to a phenomenon one may have experienced directly or witnessed on the periphery as collateral damage (click: I Hate That I Love You).
Obsessive love was the subject of an expanded book club discussion we had years ago featuring an extraordinary article (National Geographic, February 2006 cover story, Love – The Chemical Reaction), describing more fully the biochemical foundation of this powerful yet mysterious force, together with two animating novels, The Great Gatsby and Lolita (no need to (again) read those three cited works for purposes of this discussion).
Referencing the National geographic article, "love is a chemical reaction" primarily driven by brain chemicals like dopamine, norepinephrine (noradrenaline), and oxytocin, which create feelings of pleasure, excitement, and bonding when we are attracted to someone, similar to that of one suffering an obsessive-compulsive disorder, giving special meaning to "madly in love." As a relationship develops, the oxytocin plays a greater role in fostering long-term commitment and security.
It all sounds so clinical. Not so with those two cited novels, inviting our attention to that elusive, intense, idealized, often controlling, longing for another, that sometimes in its milder forms goes by the term romantic love. Or obsession.
How bad can it get? Let’s put it this way. Gatsby bought that mega-mansion on the West Egg (the nouveau riche) island for the sole reason that it provided an unobstructed view of the green light marking the end of Daisy’s dock over there on the East Egg (old money) island. The Green Light. He’d stare. Longingly. Fantasize. Stare. The Green Light.
We’d taken a run at the obsession topic once before with our Lolita discussion about this phenomenon of “love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.” That sex-laced road trip may be closer to what we might label today as pathology given it involved a middle-age man and twelve-year-old Lolita but both stories seemed to share the same tune.
What jumped out for me was the bleakness outside of Humbert’s described world – take Lolita out of that lengthy, passion-laced road trip and the rest of the world sounded like a description of the surface of the moon. But maybe that’s the point – this one flower colored the universe. But, seen another way, even an oil slick is iridescent when the light strikes it right.
One common question: the distinction between the power of the illusion versus the worthiness of the underlying object. Neither Daisy nor Lolita would seem to the “objective” reader to be worthy of the bestowed adoration. No matter. The illusion transcends the subject. The light then shifts and yet another country western song is born.
We’re thereby invited to the whole province of neuroscience which, in fact, seems to be the key to many of our other past subjects: religion; evil; (attitude toward) death. Much in life may be little more than a neural construct. Perhaps all reality is, in a sense, virtual.
Virtual or not, many of us have seen how the Shakespearean power of love, passion, and the sexual imperative can go well beyond the cute and the cuddly, transcend rationality, and suck all the oxygen out of the room.
Behold the green light.