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Why do fools fall in love?Why do birds sing so gay?Lovers awake at the break of day?Why do they fall in love?—Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers
… we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
Over the years, I have been struck by the narratives of various patients, irrespective of age, gender, or diagnosis, in which a “broken heart” has determined the patient's subsequent object choice as well as his or her fear to engage in an intense love relationship again. Each of these patients was afraid, often consciously, of the full force of romantic love and of the state of being in love because of the traumatic pain and disappointment experienced with a loved object in the past. Some of these patients had experienced romantic love during adolescence, the time memorialized in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and about which Kulish (1998) has written, in an article on the developmental significance of adolescent “first love”. But other patients experienced it in young adulthood or further along.
Love of course can travel many roads. I am only talking here about one type of experience, and I do not contend it is a universal one. Yet it seems to me that the broken heart is more prevalent and more significant in the lives of many of our patients than our