Remember the first time you fell in love? Maybe you had a crush on a classmate in sixth grade. What about your first true love and being head over heels to the point you felt you couldn’t live without them? Your mind was full of racing thoughts and intense emotions. Your heart sank if they didn’t return your phone call. This was the perfect person, and you felt whole in their presence.
People have created countless songs, books, plays, and movies about this experience, and they view it as the ultimate. Consider popular songs like “I’m Hooked on a Feeling,” “I’m Addicted to Love,” and ”You’ve Got a Hold on Me.” But this all-consuming feeling of romantic love usually lasts for only a few months to a couple of years. But why? Why isn’t this feeling sustainable? Because it is a positive cognitive fusion, a transference reaction, and an illusion. It is based on your story about this person being “the one” who can do no wrong. We know intellectually that this is impossible. Why do we keep pursuing this fiction?
Metacognition
One reason is that this state really is temporary insanity. Your sapiocortex is not fully functioning; critical judgment is compromised, and in the amygdala, threat detection is suppressed when you’re viewing your beloved. Being in love is also highly addictive, causing a massive dopamine surge.[i] This is positive cognitive fusion. As author Fran Lebowitz once observed, “Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one. It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of it.”[ii]
What you have lost is metacognition, which is the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought process. Falling in love fuses our beloved’s identity with our thoughts about them. It is all we can see—for a while. What do we have left when this phase is over? If we’re lucky, it evolves into true love, a long-term, unwavering commitment to another person’s safety and well-being, grounded in genuine awareness. But all too often, it results in disillusionment and painful separation. Falling in love is like a migraine—it distorts your vision and makes you hypersensitive to everything, and the only cure is time.
But what happens when we apply this same fusion to ourselves? Just as romantic infatuation fuses us with fantasies about another person, we spend our lives fused with illusions about ourselves—and this fusion creates what we call ego.
- [i] Kayo Takahashi et al., “Imaging the Passionate Stage of Romantic Love by Dopamine Dynamics,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9 (April 2015), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00191.
- [ii] Fran Lebowitz, “Goodreads,” Quotable Quotes, n.d., https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/147637-romantic-love-is-mental-illness-but-it-s-a-pleasurable-one.