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There is a highly dangerous literary subset to this, most vividly exemplified by Elizabeth Smart's novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, which privileges true love over all other considerations. You can lay waste to families, other people - entire countries - but it's all fine because you are doing it in the name of Love. If you ever find yourself leaning towards this view, we suggest that you have a strong cup of tea and read something enlightening about pig husbandry until the delusion has passed.
It is only when the insane chemical phase of love dies down that you can tell whether it is the real thing. If it is, it will shift into the deep steady love that gets you through rainy days and financial crises and the small quotidian tasks that make up a life. This is why couples who have been together for 50 years always talk about marrying their best friend.
The mysterious thing about this proper love is that it contains no trace of the early lunacy. It does not make you want to rip the beloved's clothes off at inappropriate moments; it is nothing to do with the wild urge to create a universe with only the two of you in it. Instead, it is the kind of profound affection that makes you smile at idiosyncrasies that anyone else would find pointless, or get the joke that nobody else will understand. This kind of love is built of the bricks of a hundred small memories and moments in time. It is the feeling you get when you read a story in the paper, or see a comical character in the street, or overhear a conversation, and know that there is only one person you have to call and tell. It has nothing to do with extravagant hotel suites, or watching the sun rise, or impetuous trips to distant cities. It is not what you see in the shuttered dark of a movie palace; it is finding romance in the unheralded, the mundane: a sudden surge of adoration because a certain person knows how to fix a dripping tap. It may not be the world well lost for love, or “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”, but it is less likely to leave your heart in shards on the floor.
Romantic love, however deranged, is still one of the great delights of life. It has given us sonnets and plays and entire sonatas; it has given us The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice and Doctor Zhivago. It lent us Yeats's pilgrim soul and Herrick's sweet infanta, and Keats's bright star. The wild twist in the stomach at the mere sight of the adored one, the random smiling at strangers in the street, the sudden desire to swing from lampposts, all add vastly to the gaiety of nations. (It should be noted that all these symptoms are not just for the very young: the sensible, 40-year-old female can just as easily become unhinged by the glimpse of a delightful pair of green eyes.)
Love can be crazy, delicious, thrilling; it can make you feel as if every atom in your body is dancing. It can bring back lost youth, make you remember forgotten dreams, revive dashed hopes. It's just that it needs to come with a caveat, a health warning, an unromantic but insistent voice of reason. So, the next time you fall in love, you should bear in mind that in those early days you are a little crazy, and it may be wise not to make any sudden moves.
The danger of romantic love
We don't mean danger in the obvious heartbreak way - the cheap betrayals, the broken promises - we mean the dark danger that lurks when sensible, educated women fall for the dogmatic idea that romantic love is the ultimate goal for the modern female. Every day, thousands of films, books, articles and TV programmes hammer home this message - that without romance, life is somehow barren.
However, there are women who entertain the subversive notion, like an intellectual mouse scratching behind the skirting board, that perhaps this higher love is not necessarily the celestial highway to absolute happiness. Their empirical side kicks in, and they observe that couples who marry in a haze of adoration and sex are, ten years later, throwing china and fighting bitterly over who gets the dog.
But the women who notice these contradictions are often afraid to speak them in case they should be labelled cynics. Surely only the most jaded and damaged would challenge the orthodoxy of romantic love. The received wisdom that there is not something wrong with the modern idea of sexual love as ultimate panacea, but that if you don't get it, there is something wrong with you. You freak, go back and read the label. We say: the privileging of romantic love over all others, the insistence that it is the one essential, incontrovertible element of human happiness, traced all the way back to the caves, is a trap and a snare. The idea that every human heart, since the invention of the wheel, was yearning for its other half is a myth.
Love is a human constant; it is the interpretation of it that changes. The way that love has been expressed, its significance in daily life, have never been immutable or constant. The different kinds of love and what they signify are not fixed, whatever the traditionalists may like to tell you.
So the modern idea that romantic love is a woman's highest calling, that she is somehow only half a person without it, that if she questions it she is going against all human history, does not stand up to scrutiny. It is not an imperative carved in stone; it is a human idea, and human beings are frail and suggestible, and sometimes get the wrong end of the stick.
