"Love is a powerful emotion. Passionate love is stronger yet, so much so that it generates a congeries of other emotions: euphoric joy, fierce anxiety, episodes of despair alternating with exultant hope. The individual cannot sustain the intensity very long. Passionate love has, historically, been the stuff of poetry and legend. In real life, most cultures thoughout the centuries and, until recently, in the West have placed a terrifying penalty on passion, making it forbidden, sinful, and punishable in quite fearful ways. Religious and secular rulers have unambiguously disconnected passionate love from marriage and family. Despite tendencies to sentimentalize the experience, such love has had little place to go except to disaster and death. Authorities have feared its awesome force and its celebration of individual feeling over communal order.

Add to the combustible power of passionate love the igniting agency of sex, and one produces an explosion which all institutional authorities have conspired to suppress for thousands of years. By and large the authorities succeeded. But no longer: Today passionate love is expected to lead to sexual union, perhaps even to marriage and family. The consequences for individual and society are enor­mous, and we now turn to that "igniting agency"—sex—to examine some of those consequences,"

source: Love, Sex, and Intimacy / Their Psychology, Biology, and History

Elanie Hatfield, Richard L. Rapson

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind:

I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.

I hate my legs, I hate my hands,

I do not yearn for lovelier lands.

I dread the dawn's recurrent light;

I hate to go to bed at night.

I snoot at simple, earnest folk.

I cannot take the gentlest joke.

I find no peace in paint or type.

My world is but a lot of tripe.

I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.

For what I think, I'd be arrested.

I am not sick, I am not well.

My quondam dreams are shot to hell.

My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;

I do not like me any more.

I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.

I ponder on the narrow house.

I shudder at the thought of men . . .

I'm due to fall in love again.

Dorothy Parker