The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov

Chapter IX Love Potion

uth would have called Lily Moore a lifer. Lily, an unmarried legal secretary, wrote the following in her diary about the discussion of Love Two at Peters trial.

Dear Diary, I think I was eleven when it firs t happened, when I firs t fell in love with a boy. By fourt een, I had had several crushes on schoolma t es, but my thought s and feelings were all hidden from the out side world. Outwardly, I was inhibit ed by shyness, tot ally unable to do the things tha t would bring positive a t t ention from the objec t of my passiona t e a t trac tion. In high school I began a sequence of secre t infa tua tions one af t er another, as if each was the mos t import ant thing in life. For me it was, even in middle age. My thinking would go entirely out of control. My ches t ac tually ached with longing for the man, whoever it was a t the time. I was in his thrall, put ty in his careless, beautiful hands. Tha t was why I went to Dr. Young, but it turned out to be only a replacement, not a cure.
Although all Lilys previous therapists had been psychiatrists, a friend, Sarah Grimwald, had recommended Dr. Peter Young, clinical psychologist. Sarah was taking a college course in abnormal psychology and thought that Lilys condition was due to her having a dysfunctional personality characterized by hysteroid dysphoria. Lily had Sarah write it down so that shed remember. Later, she realized that, like Nancy, her friend had had no experience with Love Two and, therefore, did not believe in its existence, except as an aberration and a fault that she herself was proud to be free of. Sarah had read about Dr. Young in the local paper. She saw references to him frequently in the newspaper because of a talk or a membership on some board of directors, and she thought he had written a book. Like Nancy Mackintosh, Lily assumed that an outstanding citizen must be a good therapist, and she found Dr. Young, only two years younger than Lily, herself, to be everything she had hoped for and even more compassionate than she had expected. Lily wasnt jealous of Nancy. As she sat in the back of the courtroom, hoping Dr. Young would not see her witnessing his hour of shame, she felt pity and indignation. They had not treated him fairly. When he took the stand to speak in his own defense, he looked so sad that she wanted to go over to comfort him. She sent him a card saying that she looked forward to continuing in therapy as soon as he was able to do it, and that he had her trust and sympathy. She had spent an hour at the Hallmark store looking for just the right tone, and ended by making her own. She continued in her diary:

Nancy is a beautiful young woman. I never thought she was a wit ch. A t the trial, it turned out tha t Dr. Young had only done with her wha t I longed for him to do with me, confess his affec tion for her. To me he was without blame, a vic tim caught in a web of misunders t anding. I,

A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It Limerence:

who had had a life time of experience with lovesickness, knew tha t Love Two theory was absolut ely correc t. It is wha t happened to me. It is not wha t I did, except maybe in the beginning, when I found a new man to escape the pain of loss of a previous lover. Maybe I could have s topped it if I had run a t the firs t sign, but I could never do tha t. The firs t sign was also a sign of happiness to come. I am gra t eful to the author, Alan Browne, who wrot e Love Two. It told me tha t I was not alone, and not really abnormal. The insanity of Love Two, or love madness, as many call it, did not mean tha t I was really a dis turbed person; it was only this Love Two tha t was crazy. I have been it s captive during mos t of my life, beginning in childhood. I dont know why it happens to me more than to others, but in all other ways I am a reasonable and responsible person, so I am not ment ally ill, jus t chronically lovesick.
Dr. Young, Lily believed, might not cure her, but he would ease her pain. She fantasized that he would someday see her in a different way so that, even if he could never return her love, he would remain a lifelong source of consolation. Although Peters attorney interviewed Lily, in the end, Lily did not want to testify nor did Ward think she would be of any help to his case. Dr. Young was not Lilys first therapist, and he would not be her last. Lily was a woman who, like the woman Isadora Duncan describes in her autobiography, represented a person unable to shake Love Two, and who, for the past 20 years, had developed the condition for a bank teller, a cab driver, a delivery boy, and, finally, and permanently, for Dr. Young. Although he had not been her first therapist, she had been his first patient, and, as it turned out, she would be the last person he would see as therapist to a patient. When Dr. Peter Young fell in love with Nancy Mackintosh, it was the first time in his life that he had experienced such feelings. Finally smitten, but not recognizing his condition for what it was, he had acted out the Love Two command. Although Love Two author, Alan Browne, tried, through various writings and talks, he was never able to persuade other researchers to conduct research on Love Two during his lifetime. After he died, Brownes papers were donated to the one institution that indicated interest, the Nebraska Historical Association. When it was announced through the Internet and in various professional newsletters that scholars might have access to some of Browns papers, among the first to contact the institution were Vaughn Matini, an anthropology linguist from Italy, whose writings Ruth had occasionally read with interest, and Ruth, herself. The Association allowed on-site access to the 2000 written testimonials and would permit qualified researchers to copy some of the items in the collection, provided the identities of the writers were protected. The message the letters from readers of Love Two conveyed to Browne, the only person who had read all of them, was that the Love Two experience was distinct, involuntary, and unrelated to other aspects of the person. With gloved hands, in a tiny room in the basement of the Nebraska Historical Society, Vaughn Matini inspected each of the 2000 letters from readers of Love Two that had been sent to Alan Browne. Nothing he had yet experienced, nothing in the writings of Browne, had adequately conveyed their message. Simply put, it was that the emotions, desires, thoughts, and feelings of country music, grand opera plots, and folklore from the beginning of human time, and by Matini himself, were the same as those experienced, often secretly, by ordinary people. Thus was he exposed to the eternal mystery of love. The next mystery to be solved, the one Browne himself had puzzled over in the last years of his life, was why something so exact and so openly expressed, had been hidden from cool contemplation and from scientific understanding. Less that two weeks after Matini, Ruth made the trip to Nebraska and sat in the same chair he had occupied, in the same little room. She also read letter after letter from self-selected informants who described their Love Two experience, mostly suffering. That was probably, she assumed, because the happy

The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov

or uninvolved are less inclined to write to the author of a book that appears to have little relevance to their lives. The letters shocked her. Despite her own experience and despite all that Browne had written, she had not expected the quantity, the quality of much of the writing, or, above all, the sameness of the experience. Ruth rediscovered what she and Xavier had said they believed, that it was in human nature to experience Love Two. Although Browne had described Love Two in the book, and she had had her own experience, reading the letters in the files brought the phenomenon to new life. When hundreds of people said that the experience described by Browne in Love Two was what happened to them, it could no longer be conceived as literary fancy, no longer as a personal idiosyncrasy, no longer as resulting from the biases of a single researchers; it moved to something that had to be arousing to any scientist who knew of it. When she returned home, she emailed a letter to Matini whose address was listed in the Linguistics Academy web page. She wanted to know to what extent his thinking matched hers. The Historical Society director had said that as yet there had been no other researchers, except Matini, to inspect the Browne papers. The reply she received from Matini was polite, but uninformative. He did say, however, that he hoped to visit the United States some day to meet her so that they could discuss the implications of what was revealed in the Browne letters. The events of Peters trial had already underscored for Ruth and Carol that Love Two was definitely too important to be dismissed. When Ruth described her experience in Nebraska, Carols interest deepened further. They considered possible ways of subjecting Love Two to the kind of analysis that could unequivocally test Brownes conception of it as a specific and universal mechanism and, therefore, one that might be brought under control.

Ruth recalled one day that she had sat on the couch in the playroom watching Arthur. At almost two, he had taken his first steps just two weeks ago, under his parents excited attention. Although his crawling skills were masterful, they had begun to worry about his walking. Their neighbors baby had walked at 10 months! Arthur was awkwardly making his way about the room testing out his sea legs. Suddenly, Ruth realized that she had not thought of Xavier for a week. Did that mean, she wondered, that she was entirely out of the Love Two state, that whatever physiological measure might have detected its presence would now read zero? If she and Xavier not understood Love Two, they might have arranged to correspond. They might even have married, swept up as they were in their passion. Thinking about Xavier and wishing for him had lasted longer than she had expected. She wondered whether it was it ever really over, whether the oxytocin and vasopressin in her system had returned to normal levels, and whether the lights had stopped flashing in the Love Two area of her brain when she encountered something that reminded her of him. Ruth had told Carol, and herself, that she would not want to have wanted to have spent the last twenty years in New Guinea, considering all that it would have meant. Surely it was not the way she would have wanted to live her life. They made the right decision, and they did get over it. Ruth did, anyway, and she assumed that Xavier did as well. It may have been an oddity in the universe for two people as madly in love with each other as she and Xavier had been to have parted on the basis of what they considered to be

A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It Limerence:

scientific evidence that they were caught in the grips of an involuntary condition, in which their feelings for each other went beyond rational limits beyond their control. Despite their knowledge and as much as they accepted that the cause went beyond reason, their experiences were no less intense than had they been as innocent as Romeo and Juliet. Love Two was a very powerful state, which, Carol observed, should not be surprising, since mating is the engine that drove human reproduction and therefore human evolution. It made us what we are. Although no truly relevant research had followed Brownes work, Ruth found that a number of labs had started attempting to find physiological correlates of various emotions, including love. They had even isolated brain substances and noted, for example, the part of the brain that showed increased activity when people looked at a pictures of loved ones. Nevertheless, scientifically speaking, Love Two theory was still almost entirely experiential, and still, for that reason, it had been largely ignored, except for self-helpers and the writers of advice columns. Because researchers did not separate various types of being in love, the physiological correlates unique to Love Two remained unknown. Therefore, the state was not subject to analysis based on identification by external observers for which reason it was unacceptable to the academic traditions of human nature study that Love Two was the distinct condition that she and Xavier had assumed to be, and that the letters in Nebraska had confirmed. Anything based on self-report just doesnt fly, Ruth said to Carol. Self-report removes the element of control that is necessary in order for academia to deal with it. In the university library, Carol had found an old magazine article describing an interview with Browne by the journalist Dick Price, the same writer who later covered Peters trial. In response to a question about what he thought might happen in the future, Browne had replied,
I felt that the results of my work portended such changes that it was impossible to predict what might happen, whether it would turn out good or bad or, if both, in what proportions. Maybe those who talk about what has been divinely intended have a point. I wondered whether science, itself, should rightly be considered a compulsion. I dont mean in a psychiatric sense. No, science is humility in the face of truths, and the scientist is a tool. I must push on. It is the best thing I can do.

That interview with Price had taken place three months before Browne died. Carol and Ruth realized that one of Brownes basic messages was that politics and human nature science cannot be separated, that hard science, Carols kind, the kind that disallowed ambiguity, was different from such human nature sciences as anthropology and psychology. Ruth was well aware that sciences that relied on human observation had to be carefully monitored for the errors in which wishful thinking clouded perception. That expectation could influence results was a principle that had been repeatedly demonstrated experimentally a half-century earlier by the brilliant psychologist, Robert Rosenthal. Now that their attention had returned full force to the topic of Love Two, Ruth and Carol began to meet almost daily. They seldom left the building, so intent was their focus on the mysterious subject, as Carol called it. And the biggest mystery was the one Browne had grappled with unsuccessfully. It was the question of how to get around the resistance to the scientific study of love. Ruth said, The main problem lies in the inability of language to convey messages with objective clarity. In Love Two research, Browne found that questionnaires were useless because language was too crude a tool. Words were always subjective, and did not always convey the same feelings and experiences to different users. He was able to discover this because of the similarity that existed in the operation of the pattern across people and situations. But this was possible only when he, as he put it, got beyond the labels to the experience itself.

The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov

I can see that, said Carol. When he used interviews what he called searching interviews with individuals, he found the basic similarity of experience that he identified as Love Two. But his finding that Love Two did not happen to everyone was the lucky break that really put it into distinct focus, Ruth added. He realized that questionnaires didnt work because every culture had beclouded the phenomenon with undecipherable language. Being in love was not the same for everyone who claimed they were in it. Its a wonder that he ever found it out, said Carol. It was sheer accident that he spent six hours on a plane with a person to whom the experience was entirely foreign at a time when his own involvement with the subject was at a fever pitch. One wonders whether it could have happened any other way! Carol added, It was a lucky break, too, that he didnt have the funds to conduct traditional research. Thats right. He did not study the people. He had no interest in correlations, the stock in trade of social science research. He had found no variability in Love Two on which to base a correlation. The experience varied with conditions, but the laws of operation were constant. A conclusion borne out by your reading of his mail in Nebraska. He had found no Completely. I was too intent on reading to take statistical data, but the word exactly came up in many letters. What Browne described was variability in Love Two. what they experienced. The experience varied Response to Love Two by human nature scientists was mainly with conditions, but the praise of the reality of the descriptions. However, what Browne had seen, and what Ruth, Xavier, and Carol saw as its significance, had not been laws of operation were acknowledged. The mindset of love researchers was locked in the traditions constant. of the academy. Ruth thought of the nonexistent Love Two Scale that the several psychology students requested of Browne because they wanted to pursue correlational tabulations. Their requests only demonstrated their inability to understand the main point of Brownes work, Carol said. Instead, Ruth added, researchers insisted on asking how many people in each category of sex, personality type, race, etc. were given one designation rather than another. Or they would ask for a scale, when Brownes conclusion was that Love Two is all of a piece. It either is or isnt. Variations in intensity of feeling depend on degree of hopefulness for reciprocation or variations in perception of rejection. Studying Love Two is more like studying the double-arrow Muller-Lyer Illusion. Everyone experiences it in the same way. However people may vary in other ways, the Love Two state, like the Muller-Lyer Illusions, runs true. But surely, Carol objected, you dont mean theres no difference in the experience from one person to another, even in how they perceive a visual illusion. No, Ruth admitted, of course there must be differences, but the underlying sameness of the experience is the important finding. That journalist, Dick Price, got it right, Carol remembered. He pointed out in his article that the term Love Two refers to the invariant features of an experience described by individuals who provided testimony regarding their experiences with and opinions about being in love and that Love Two is different from Love One or from a pure sex urge by its exclusive focus on a single individual, and by its unique ability to disrupt thought. He said that sex urge might be described that way, except Love Two feels more like love, brings general ecstasy that does not diminish after the act of sex, and endures for years. Ruth was pensive. Its interesting that a journalist can understand Browne better than the psychologists.

A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It Limerence:

Its because Price was not hindered in his thinking by the constraints of the academic frame of mind, Carol offered. Thats it, Ruth agreed. Incidentally, Browne wasnt clear about the duration of Love Two in his book, but none of the letters I saw in Nebraska mentioned a duration of less than three years! How long did yours last? Carol inquired. How long was it before you really stopped thinking about Xavier? It was just about three years, as a matter of fact, and that was in the absence of any contact with or knowledge of him at all. Some of the letter writers described endurances of decades when occasional contact led to re-stimulation. And, most important, as far as Peters trial was concerned, Browne was clear about his view that Love Two controlled wishes, thoughts, and feelings, but not a persons acts. Love Two can be announced to the world, or it can remain hidden from others. Thereby, said Carol, making it difficult to capture by ordinary psychological means of investigations. While the phrase being in love, in contradistinction to loving, largely captures a valid description, Browne found that ordinary language does not permit unambiguous differentiating. With definitional clarity, Love Two emerges in clear form. Yes, Ruth said, but we mustnt forget one very important point: The intensity of the pleasure experienced when hopes are high is so great that it has been referred to as the greatest happiness, the highest high, walking on air, something the writer could not imagine living without, worth all the pain, and so forth. I know; I was there in New Guinea. One thing is clear to me, Carol said. Anything so distinct has to have observable physiological markers, if they can only be found. Also, because of the family disruption and other damaging effects of Love Two, finding a cure would be very important. Soon after this discussion, Carol spent several days at a professional conference at which she gave a paper on an unrelated biochemical topic, but she couldnt stop thinking about Love Two. From her hotel room after the days sessions were over, she wrote the following letter to her friend.

Dear Ruth, Our focus on Love Two has reminded me of the student who left that anonymous note in your mailbox. A scientific approach to human nature flies in the face of the religious necessity of free will. Fundamentalist Muslims, and Christians, too, feel that a psychological law, something that is fixed and involuntary, denies free will. Without free will people are automatons who cannot therefore be blamed for their transgressions. The impulse to punish runs high and the justice system is tied in knots over intentions and deliberateness and knowing right from wrong. They are obliged to decide whether the defendant was aware at the time of committing the act that it was wrong. We identify sinners and impose punishment on wrongdoers. We say we do it so that others will be deterred, but that we want to do it is a built-in reaction, what is called the result of hard-wiring.

The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov

Correlation, that is, the fact that two events occur together, as we have said, does not, in itself, tell which was the one that caused the other. Furthermore, knowing the chemistry doesnt produce an explanation at the level of experience. The difference between my work and yours is that, as a biochemist, I work below the level of ordinary observation, while you try to operate at the muddy level of human motivation, action, and experience. If Love Two is really either on or off, there must be a way of identifying the state physiologically. And if it can be identified, perhaps it can be induced, and, if it can be induced, then perhaps it can be extinguished. In other words, it might be possible to control it. If so, it would be fulfilling the wish of people across the ages. It would be producing the magic love potion. For these reasons, I look forward to getting back to the lab where I can continue with the chemical analysis of the ingredients of those love potion vials that Xavier gave you. I realize I am not saying anything here that you dont know, or that we have not already talked about, but I have become so obsessed with the subject that I felt I must write it out.

Carol found Love Two theory to be personally inconceivable, and yet it matched what she found described in autobiography, legend, and folklore. There was the intense longing, the euphoria, and the terrible pain when a love was lost. Without direct experience, Carol had, from her discussions with Ruth, and from Brownes book, come to see Love Two as distinct, with intensity predictable as a reliable function of circumstance. The amount of uncontrolled thought and the pangs of lovesickness should the lover be rejected followed a definite pattern. Because it gradually diminished in salience when the loved one reciprocated and a committed mating actually occurred, its more unsettling features were not always experienced. It amazed Carol that, although it had been repeatedly described in precise detail in story and song, few among anthropologists or psychologists seem to have seen it, as distinct as evidenced by their failure to award it a specific verbal designation. Love Two theory was the product of a single researcher, not taken up by other researchers for many years after Brownes book was published. The most remarkable thing about it for Carol was the finding that some people, like herself, lived their lives without having the experience, and others experienced it for the first time late in life. She wondered whether she ever would fall into Love Two. Carol and Ruth both knew that many people would find Love Two theory repulsive, that a large portion of the unmarried adult population walks around longing to find someone. Well, Carol thought, not me, and I assume the reasons would be found in my DNA. At that time, the science of love had not progressed beyond Brownes conjecture about a felicitous combination of inside and outside circumstances, that is, of physiology, plus the presence of a person who attracts. Whatever sets it off, once the state is in force, reactions are predictable. It was impossible to imagine because it is so unlike any other experience. As Ruth said, no words can produce the full image. Carols letter to Ruth continued:

A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It Limerence:

The difference between science and art is that people create art, while science is the search for what is beyond our ability to create. I know it can be said that we create theories, and of course that is true, and the scientific leap to the insight that shines a pathway not yet paved is exactly the same, I am sure, as the spark that tells the artist what is the next right thing to do. I admired the artist, but it was not my role. I knew about those who see science as constructed, but in the most important sense, they were wrong. They mistook the bureaucracies, the competitiveness, and the errors of scientists, for science. Science is the discovery of things out there in nature that are not immediately visible to the untutored naked eye. The artist might be said to look for things that are in there, in the human mind, in the human potential for reaction, things that evoke some form of pleasure. Less than four centuries ago, we sharpened our tools and overcame the prejudices that had banned biology. The result was a transformation of ever-escalating proportions in the human condition, until the fortunate one-sixth of the worlds population lived with comforts unavailable to the monarchs of previous times, and unimaginable to all in previous ages. Only we left our minds and motives in a primitive state. We are still out of control, still killing, still obeying the ancient jungle law of hit and hit back, of the wild vengeance that has brought humanity to the brink of extinction and we have not learned to share resources fairly.
By the scientific principles to which Ruth and Carol subscribed, consideration of possible social or political consequences warps the scientific process. The search for truth must be pure. Otherwise, it risks being misdirected. That didnt mean abrogating ethical considerations or that anything goes as long as it is labeled scientific. There were many kinds of ethical considerations that could and should be applied, but the constraints were on action. There must not be constraints on thinking, or science isnt science anymore, and not likely to get very far in the pursuit of new knowledge. Its a sticky problem that many in the academic and scientific community do not themselves fully understand, Ruth said. Scientific progress depends on ideas that are free. Constraint cannot be placed on the expression of ideas without running the risk of inhibiting scientific progress.

hen Ruth returned from the convention, she and Carol continued to ponder Love Two. Ruths interviews had only underscored Brownes original message; they had revealed nothing new. They had many discussions on how unintended factors screwed things up. Biases of various sorts, conscious and unconscious, could determine what is studied, how it is studied, and what conclusions could be drawn from the findings in view of which what would be done next. All kinds of accidents and predilections might have

The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov

brought scientists to any given point. The important thing for Ruth and Carol was the ability to square theory with experience whatever may have been the route that brought them to that point. But, Ruth asked, is there really hope when the subject is the conjunction of the actions, thoughts, sensations, and visions that make up the human experience? They both remembered that science began with the study of the heavens, and that it had taken many centuries to progress to biology. Ruth saw the history of human nature sciences as the history of bypassing the essence. Human science investigators avoided scientific study of the human mind; instead, they fooled around at the periphery. Carol pointed out, These are not the old days, when we believed that we wed been created in Gods image, rather than by the accidental intersection of chance and necessity. As neurologist and authors Oliver Sacks and Antonio Damasio (among many others) have taught us, we now see and I mean literally see through the microscope, if not directly with bare eyes part of the physiology associated with particular behavioral manifestations. The point is that we are biological, even our ideas are biological. Learning the mechanisms can only help. People in the grip of Love Two behave very much the way they do because of their individual situations, but underneath its all the same, Ruth added. Yes, Carol agreed. What we want to study cannot be seen by traditional scientific means. And, therefore, Ruth continued, as Browne wrote in his autobiography, there is stigma attached to scientific research on romantic love. He said that two passionate contingencies raise objections. In addition to those who were suspicious of self-report, there were those who maintained that scientific study of romantic love was immoral. Flat out. Love was sacred, even mystical, and should not be tampered with. In the famous words of Senator William Proxmire, in awarding his Golden Fleece Award meaning fleecing the government by spending money foolishly to Ellen Berscheid, who had requested government funding for her proposed a study of romantic love I know, Carol interjected, Proxmire said that there are things we do not wish to know about, and why people fall in love is one of them. Yes, Ruth said, But the real resistance, Browne maintained, came from something else; it came from the fact that some cannot conceive of it and others cannot admit it. He said he found out that his book had been held up because the subject was controversial within the publishing house that had accepted it. Some hinted that the husband and wife owners were having their own Love Two related troubles, and that the editor was a factor. It was really only after publication that Browne obtained the data that confirmed both the reality of the phenomenon and the resistance to accepting it for what it was. The same resistance was probably responsible for the minimal publicity given to it. Browne, himself, was carrying a heavy academic load, and so did virtually nothing to publicize it. Nothing? Carol asked. Actually, she continued, from his papers in Nebraska, I learned that he tried to reach the scientific community prior to publication. He wrote individual letters to about thirty of his scientific colleagues that were intended to accompany galleys. It was over a year later that he learned that the galleys had never been sent out, due to what the publisher told him was a mail room error. Could it have been sabotage? Carol wondered. It might have been, Ruth said, considering the in-house controversies that were raging. He didnt know about those, either. The book was not reviewed, although it was discussed sarcastically in Time magazine and in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And Love Two won second prize in a book contest of the National Women Journalists Organization. But it wasnt until Browne received the hundreds of letter with their common message that he really felt he had received confirmation of the theory. I saw them. They thanked him for telling them that they were not alone with their crazy feelings.

A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It Limerence:

said. Thats right. For reasons weve already talked about, those around him university colleagues and administrators, for example were not likely to admit to their personal Love Two experiences, if they had had them. Which is no different from how our friends here at Westport U would react if we talked about it, Carol observed. There was an incident, Ruth said, that really revealed the reception the book would get in some quarters. From his journal, I learned that, on one occasion, Browne spoke at a community gathering organized by a local clergyman. Browne did not consider it a particularly good meeting, although it was hard for him to put his finger on just why. A few days after he returned home, he received a telephone call from the woman who, having read Love Two, had recommended him as a speaker. At first, Browne didnt understand why she was apologizing. She said that the behavior of the host had been rude and hostile. It was something Browne had not recognized because he had not witnessed the same mans usual behavior with other guest speakers. The woman said the difference was striking. It seemed that the Reverend was a ladys man who had had affairs with several women in the community. The way Browne and the woman reconstructed it, when the invitation was issued, the Reverend had not read the book. He assumed a book about love would be harmless enough. But between the time he issued the invitation and the day of the lecture, he did read it, and was infuriated. There was the theological problem, but there was also the resistance of the gigolo to seeing the consequences of his actions on his victims. He had enjoyed their attention; he had not felt responsible for the effects of his seductions. He, himself, had not experienced Love Two, and, like Peter Young, he assumed that the state of Love Two was a psychopathology, which made him blameless. How terrible for those poor women! Carol said. One thing that has really fascinated me, Ruth said, was that as far as the uniqueness of the state is concerned, Browne found almost no other human experience that were also distinct, cross-cultural, although not universal in expressiona state that a person either was or was not in, where being in it meant playing by its rules of response to external conditions, and where its existence in others could only be determined by verbal report. There was one phenomenon that might fit, Ruth continued after a pause. He noted that the so-called near death experience reported in a similar manner by diverse persons had at least one of the same characteristics as Love Two. It, too, could only be assessed by what the person said about it. Only the amazing consistencies in the reports led credence to the idea that there was a constant physiological process involved. But the similarity between Love Two and NDE ended there. Ruth and Carol concluded that the problem was that when Love Two is described, it sounds both irrational and foolish, clearly a psychological disorder. That made it very difficult, say, at a publishers conference, when someone objected that Love Two was a foolish book describing a lot of silly people, for anyone to stand up, naked before the group, to say that that craziness was exactly what they went through. Who would put themselves through that? Browne imagined that this is probably what actually happened. As one reader of his book wrote, one of the half-dozen or fewer who wrote anonymously, Its too embarrassing. In his journal, Ruth recalled, Browne said that his really important finding was not the constant attributes of the state of romantic love important as it was to set them down. Everyone knew about them; they permeated the music, dramatic, and literary arts; it was just that they had not been given status within

So receiving the letters was pretty important to how Browne himself felt about the topic, Carol

The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov

science. The most surprising, and maybe the most important finding, for Browne, was the discovery that many maybe most, maybe a minority, who knows? perfectly normal people never underwent the experience, and, because they had not undergone the experience a experience with absolutely unique features, features that do not occur in other experiences they could not imagine it. Unfortunately, Browne died the year before Peters trial and so was unable to testify himself. But the significance of his ideas was that they fit everywhere I looked, once I knew what to look for. They fit different cultures, different historical events, and, most of all, they fit with precision descriptions in the literature from the Hebrew Bible to Shakespeare. It had been a long afternoon so they left it there, but the next day, after thinking about it, Carol said, I can think of another experience that no one can imagine unless they had actually experienced it. Words cant describe it. I had heard the words, but it was only when it happened to me that I knew what the words really meant. What was that? Ruth wanted to know. Depression. Depression? You mean that we dont understand what that means unless weve experienced it? Thats right, Carol replied. At least I didnt understand what it was until it happened. What happened? It was after my mothers last husband had succumbed to his cancer. I was in college and because of my allergies, which were especially bad that semester, I was cut off from many social activities at a time I really didnt want to be, and I was feeling sad about my mothers grief. She had had too many losses in her life. Anyway, I was sharing an apartment with three other women. They suddenly stopped speaking to me. I later learned that it was a misunderstanding. They thought I had done something that I hadnt done. They thought I had secretly read one of the other womens diaries. It was a mistake. I was innocent. In any case, it was during that period that I suddenly dropped into a state of total lack of caring. I was immobilized. Any action, even the simple act of getting out of bed to get something to eat was more than I could manage. I just lay in bed. I wanted to call mother to try to ease her pain, but I couldnt lift the telephone receiver. I couldnt summon up that much effort. Were you suicidal? In a way. When I heard about someone who had killed herself by jumping off a bridge, I thought, Good for her, I wish it were me. I think if Id had a gun, I might have used it, except that the slightest activity was more than I could get the energy for. I just lay in bed. My goodness, Carol, thats not like you at all. Thats right. It wasnt like me because I wasnt really being myself. How long did you go on like that? Three days. Only three days? I thought depression lasted longer than that, Ruth said. Well, my friends discovered the truth and apologized and that got me out of it. It had never happened before, and it has never happened again, but now when I read descriptions like William Styrons book about his depression, I know what he is talking about as I never could have had I not had that experience. Thats one reason why I know I cant imagine Love Two. I can accept the reality of it from the descriptions of others, but I know that I cant really understand the feelings. According to one recent author, its when the depression lessens, but is not completely gone, that suicide occurs. I was lucky. I got out of it quickly. But, Ruth demanded, was your reaction really commensurate with the situation? Of course it wasnt. But somehow, my friends rejection triggered something that just took off. Probably there were other physiological things going on in me at the time that normally would not have thrown me into such an extreme reaction.

A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It Limerence:

Its probably the same with Love Two, Ruth said.