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Being lovestruck is a non-medical term used to describe mental and physical symptoms associated with falling in love: 'love-struck. It means to be hit by love...you are hit in your heart by the emotion of love'.[1]
Historically, being lovestruck has been viewed as a short-lived mental illness brought on by the intense changes associated with love. Avicenna, a Persian polymath, viewed obsession as the principal symptom and cause of love sickness. This diagnosis has been out of favor since the humoral model was abandoned, and since the advent of modern scientific psychiatry.
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The term is associated with a set of metaphors attempting to convey the speed and intensity of the (mainly visual) process of 'falling in love instantly; placing great importance on the moment of being love-struck'.[2] Thus for example it has been described as 'like struck with a lightning bolt. The second that you see and meet the person, you are instantly in love'.[3]
Alternately, there is Cupid's arrow; whilst Uncle Toby uses an image from musketry: 'I am in love with Mrs Wadman, quoth my uncle Toby - She has left a ball here - added my uncle Toby - pointing to his breast'.[4]
The twentieth-century saw the concept of love-sickness reconceptualised by psychoanalysis. As early as 1915, Freud asked rhetorically, 'Isn't what we mean by "falling in love" a kind of sickness and craziness, an illusion, a blindness to what the loved person is really like'?[5] Half a century later, in 1971, Hans Loewald took up the theme, comparing being in analysis 'to the passions and conflicts stirred up anew in the state of being in love which, from the point of view of the ordinary order and emotional tenor and discipline of life, feels like an illness, with all its deliciousness and pain'.[6]
A 2005 article by Frank Tallis suggested that being lovestruck be taken more seriously by professionals.[7]
Being lovestruck only occurs when a person has fallen in love, not when a crush emerges. However it may develop into love. 'For love-struck victims, the world appears altered. Replacing the flatness of ordinary experience is a fullness'.[8]
According to Tallis, some of the symptom clusters shared with being lovestruck include:
More substantively, the estimated serotonin levels of people falling in love were observed to drop to levels found in patients with OCD.[9] Brain scan investigations of individuals who professed to be "truly, madly, deeply" in love showed activity in several structures in common with in the neuroanatomy of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), for example the anterior cingulate cortex and caudate nucleus.[10]
Some who would 'disagree with Frank Tallis's fundamental thesis that love should be seen as a mental illness...concur that at the extreme and under certain circumstances love sickness can drive a person to despair'.[11]
They would suggest however that '"disordered love"...can be understood more clearly in terms of attachment theory'.[12]