"Love is a grave mental disease." Said by Plato, the well known philosopher famous for his theory of the ideal 'Platonic love'. Many of his writings are also considered superb pieces of literature.
Love is an abstract noun. Some say you can feel love, others say you can see it. Love is difficult to define, difficult to measure and difficult to understand. What we understand about love is all the positive but what about the negatives. What about how powerful and dangerous love can be? So powerful and dangerous that it puts its fingers over your eyes and lets you walk off of a cliff.
This is the dark side of love.
The dark side of love includes; loving for the wrong reasons because of the demand for stability, need for money or maybe even due to loneliness. Staying in an unhealthy relationship and remaining in emotionally, verbally, physical abusive relationships.
Did you know that 1 in 4 women have been a victim of severe violence by a partner in their lifetime?
Is there a science behind love? There are scientific reasons as to why love is bad for you and the negative impacts it has.
The obsessive thinking: studies show that people in love have low levels of serotonin which accounts for the intrusive thoughts.
The horrible addiction: as the chemical mix grows stronger our infatuation deepens and turns into outright addiction. In fact scans have indicated that the brain of someone in love looks very similar to the brain of someone who is addicted to cocaine.
The soul destroyed withdrawal: and since romantic love is an addiction the stages of being dumped are similar to withdrawal from cocaine.
The rage: MRI scans indicate that love and rage are intimately connected in the human brain.
Essentially love is not a bed of roses. There are some positive and negative effects of love. In a sense, Love is a drug which should not be misused. Now although everyone has different interpretations of love and may not understand the following points about there being a dark side to love people could possibly see these as hidden signs of depression, complete addiction etc.
"Love is a trap. When it appears we only see its light not its shadows." -Pauli Coelho
"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell." -Joan Crawford
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This was actually an old speech I made and had to recite and the topic i chose was perfect for a grumpy gran like me.
