COULD YOU BE A “MEDICAL SLEUTH?”

You are in a classroom with other wan-a-be-docs. Your assignment is to diagnose a young patient who presents with the following symptoms:

1. Sexual preoccupatiom
2. Alternating depression and euphoria
3. Loss of appetite
4. Insomnia
5. Loss of interest in school/work/hobbies
6. Irrational jealousy
7. Anxiety
8. Social withdrawal from friends and family
9. Inability to concentrate

• Obsessive fantasizing
• Occasional giddiness.
• Excessive dependency.

 You are to sift through a manual of psychological diagnoses, learning to be a “medical detective,” in search of a clue or two for the cause of all this “unpleasantness.”

Everyone has a different idea about what is wrong with the patient. Not one… not one… got it right!

 ****THE DIAGNOSIS: THE PATIENT HAD “FALLEN” IN LOVE

 So, is being “IN LOVE” a disease? Really?

                                                     THINK ABOUT THIS

A fantasizing brain (associated with FALLING IN LOVE) releases the feel-good hormone, DOPAMINE along with OXYTOXIN which almost everyone understands to be the “LOVE HORMONE.”

And who doesn’t want more of that? Love inspires you… and me… to be more than we ever were. And when it is reciprocated, the feeling is like being over the moon… and then some.

So much has been written and said about the impossible quest of keeping that IN-LOVE limerence- feeling of new love alive forever. If you are reading this, you’ve already discovered that it is mostly impossible.

 Just as well, it turns out.

 No one would be capable of getting much else done…  like going to work, if we remained perpetually handicapped by “FALLING/BEING IN LOVE.”

                                              NOW, THINK ABOUT THIS

 To “FALL” implies losing one’s perspective and/or balance… which sort of sounds like a disease, don’t you think?

TO TRULY LOVE SOMEONE IN AN ADULT RELATIONSHIP IS DIFFERENT and much more comfortable to sustain.

LOVING SOMEONE is a growing together process, learning to live with compromise, sharing and having an appreciation for her/him, above all others. To love is to trust, to understand, to desire and to know deep inside that SHE/ HE loves you back.

My horoscope today said “Glue needs hours to dry, cement needs a day to set up”. “It reminded me that people do not become “tight” over-night either.

Which is one idea this LOVE DOCTOR likes to think about.

How about you? If you are single, for example, but would rather not be, there may be are some hidden benefits, during this lonely pamdemic.

Taking extra time to get to know someone without actually being together/together can safely release some of those same feel-good, love hormones.

Not quite as much fun in the short run but I can’t wait to see the movies made about new versions of the “CUTE MEET”.

Maybe I’ll even write one.