WEBVTT

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OK, so today I want to talk about
how we talk about love.

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And specifically,

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I want to talk about what's wrong
with how we talk about love.

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Most of us will probably fall in love
a few times over the course of our lives,

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and in the English language,

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this metaphor,

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falling,

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is really the main way that we
talk about that experience.

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I don't know about you,

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but when I conceptualize this metaphor,

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what I picture is straight
out of a cartoon.

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Like there's a man,

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he's walking down the sidewalk,

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without realizing it he crosses
over an open manhole,

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and he just plummets
into the sewer below.

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And I picture it this way because
falling is not jumping.

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Falling is accidental,

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it's uncontrollable.

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It's something that happens to us
without our consent.

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And this --

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this is the main way we talk
about starting a new relationship.

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I am a writer and I'm also
and English teacher,

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which means I think about
words for a living.

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You could say that I get paid
to argue that the language we use matters,

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and I would like to argue that many
of the metaphors we use

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to talk about love --

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maybe even most of them --

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are a problem.

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So, in love we fall.

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We're struck ...

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we are crushed ...

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we swoon ...

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we burn with passion.

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Love makes us crazy,

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and it makes us sick.

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Our hearts ache,

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and then they break.

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So our metaphors equate
the experience of loving someone

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to extreme violence or illness.

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(Laughter)

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They do.

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And they position us as the victims

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of unforeseen and totally
unavoidable circumstances.

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My favorite one of these is "smitten,"

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which is the past participle
of the word smite.

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And if you look this word up
in the dictionary --

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(Laughter)

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You will see that it can be defined
as both grievous affliction

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and to be very much in love.

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So I tend to associate the word smite
with a very particular context,

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which is the Old Testament.

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In the Book of Exodus alone
there are 16 references to smiting,

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which is the word that the bible uses
for the vengeance of an angry God.

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Here we are using the same
word to talk about love

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that we use to explain
a plague of locusts.

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(Laughter)

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Right?

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So how did this happen?

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How have we come to associate love
with great pain and suffering?

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And why do we talk about this
obsentibly good experience

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as if we are victims?

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These are difficult questions,

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but I have some theories.

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And to think this through,

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I want to focus on one
metaphor in particular,

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which is the idea of love is madness.

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When I first started
researching romantic love,

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I found these madness
metaphors everywhere.

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The history of Western culture

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is full of language that equates
love to mental illness.

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These are just a few examples.

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William Shakespeare:

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"Love is merely a madness,"

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from "As You Like It."

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Friedrich Nietsche,

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"There is always some madness in love."

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"Got me looking, got me looking
so crazy in love -- "

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(Laughter)

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From the great philosopher,
Beyoncé Knowles.

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(Laughter)

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I fell in love for the first
time when I was 20,

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and it was a pretty turbulent
relationship right from the start.

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And it was long distance
for the first couple of years,

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so for me that meant very
high highs and very low lows.

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I can remember one moment in particular,

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I was sitting on a bed
in a hostel in South America

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and I was watching the person
I love walk out the door.

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And it was late,

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it was nearly midnight,

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we'd gotten into an argument over dinner,

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and when we got back to our room,

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he threw his things in his bags
and stormed out.

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While I can no longer remember
what that argument was about,

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I very clearly remember how I felt
watching him leave.

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So I was 22,

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it was my first time
in the developing world,

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and I was totally alone.

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I had another week until my flight home,

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and I knew the name
of the town that I was in,

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and the name of the city 
that I needed to get to to fly out,

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but I had no idea how to get around,

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I had no guidebook and very little money,

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and I spoke no Spanish.

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So someone more adventurous than me

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might have seen this as
a moment of opportunity,

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but I just froze.

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I just sat there.

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And then I burst into tears.

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But despite my panic,

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some small voice in my head thought,

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"Wow, that was dramatic.

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I must really be doing
this love thing right."

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(Laughter)

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Because some part of me
wanted to feel miserable in love,

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and it sounds so strange to me now,

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but at 22,

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I longed to have dramatic experiences,

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and in that moment I was irrational
and furious and devastated,

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and weirdly enough,

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I thought that this somehow
legitimized the feelings I had

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for the guy who had just left me.

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I think on some level I wanted
to feel a little bit crazy,

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because I thought that
that was how loved worked.

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This really should not be surpsising

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considering that according to Wikipedia,

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there are eight films,

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14 songs,

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two albums and one novel
with the title "Crazy Love."

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About half-an-hour later,

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he came back to our room.

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We made up,

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we spent another mostly
happy week travelling together,

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and then when I got home,

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I thought, "That was so
terrible and so great,

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this must be a real romance."

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I expected my first love
to feel like madness,

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and of course it met
that expectation very well,

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but loving someone like that --

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as if my entire well-being depended
on him loving me back --

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was not very good for me --

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or for him.

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But I suspect this experience of love
is not that unusual.

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Most of us do feel a bit mad
in the early stages of romantic love.

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In fact there is research to confirm
that this is somewhat normal,

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because neurochemically speaking,

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romantic love and mental illness
are not that easily distinguished.

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This is true.

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So this study from 1999
used blood tests to confirm

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that the serotonin levels
of the newly in love

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very closely resemembeled
the serotonin levels

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of people who had been diagnosed
with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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(Laugther)

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Yes,

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and low levels of serotonin

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are also associated
with Seasonal Affective Disorder

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and Depression.

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So there is some evidence

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that love is associated with changes
to our moods and our behaviors,

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and there are other studies

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to confirm that most
relationships begin this way.

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Researchers believe 
that the low levels of serotonin

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is correlated with obsessive thinking
about the object of love,

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which is like this feeling that someone
has set up camp in your brain,

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and most of us feel this way
when we first fall in love.

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But the good news is that it
doesn't always last that long --

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usually from a few months
to a couple of years.

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So when I got back from
my trip to South America,

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I spent a lot of time alone in my room,

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checking my email,

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desperate to hear from the guy I loved.

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I decided that if my friends could not
understand my grievous affliction,

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then I did not need their friendship.

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So I stopped hanging out
with most of them.

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And it was probably the most
unhappy year of my life,

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but I think I felt like it was
my job to be miserable,

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because if I could be miserable,

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then I would prove how much I loved him,

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and if I could prove it,

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then we would have to
end up together eventually.

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This is the real madness,

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because there is not cosmic rule

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that says that great suffering
equals great reward,

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but we talk about love as if this is true.

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Our experiences of love are both
biological and cultural.

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Our biology tells us that love is good

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by activating these reward
circuits in our brain,

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and it tells us that love is painful
when after a fight or a breakup

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that neurochemical reward is withdrawn.

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And in fact --

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and maybe you've heard this --

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neurochemically speaking,

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going through a breakup is a lot
like going through cocaine withdrawl,

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which I find reassuring --

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(Laughter)

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And then our culture uses language

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to shape and reinforce
these ideas about love.

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In this case,

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we're talking about metaphors
about pain, addiction and madness.

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It's kind of an interesting feedback loop.

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Love is powerful and at times painful,

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and we express this
in our words and stories,

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but then our words and stories prime us
to expect love to be powerful and painful.

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What's interesting to me

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is that all of this happens in a culture
that values lifelong monogamy.

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It seems like we want it both ways:

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we want love to feel like madness,

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and we want it to last an entire lifetime.

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That sounds terrible.

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(Laughter)

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To reconcile this,

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we need to either change our culture
or change our expectations.

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So imagine if we were all
less passive in love.

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We were more assertive, more
open-mined, more generous,

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and instead of falling in love,

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we stepped into love.

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I know that this is asking a lot,

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but I'm not actually the first
person to suggest this.

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In their book "Metaphors We Live By,"

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linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff
suggest a really interesting solution

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to this dilemna,

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which is to change our metaphors.

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They argue that metaphors really do
shape the way we experience the world,

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and that they can even act
as a guide for future actions,

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like self-fulfilling prophecies.

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Johnson and Lakoff suggest
a new metaphor for love:

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love is a collaborative work of art.

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I really like this way
of thinking about love.

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Linguists talk about metaphors
as having entailments,

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which is essentially a way of considering
all the implications of,

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or ideas contained
within a given metaphor,

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and Johnson and Lakoff
talk about everything

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that collaborating
on a work of art entails:

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effort, compromise,
patience, shared goals.

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And these ideas align nicely
with our cultural investment

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in long-term romantic commitment,

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but they also work well
for other kinds of relationships --

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short-term, casual, polyamorous,
non-monogomous, asexual --

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because this metaphor brings
much more complex ideas

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to the experience of loving someone.

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So if love is a collaborative work of art,

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then love is an aesthetic experience.

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Love is unpredictable,

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love is creative,

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love requires communication
and discipline,

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it is frustrating and
emotionally demanding,

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and love involves both joy and pain.

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Ultimately, each experience
of love is different.

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When I was younger,

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it never occurred to me

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that I was allowed to demand
more from love,

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that I didn't have to just accept
whatever love offered.

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When 14-year-old Juliet first meets --

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when 14-year-old Juliet
cannot be with Romeo,

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whom she has met four days ago,

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she does not feel
disappointed or angsty --

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where is she?

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She wants to die.

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Right?

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And just as a refesher,

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at this point in the play,

00:12:56.098 --> 00:12:57.101
act three of five,

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Romeo is not dead.

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He's alive,

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he's healthy,

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he's just been banished from the city.

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I understand that sixteenth-century Verona
is unlike contemporary North America,

00:13:12.115 --> 00:13:15.010
and yet when I first read this play,

00:13:15.181 --> 00:13:17.485
also at age 14,

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Juliet's suffering made sense to me.

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Reframing love as something
I get to create with someone I admire,

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rather than something that just happens
to me without my conrol or consent,

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is empowering.

00:13:33.986 --> 00:13:35.627
It's still hard.

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Love still feels totally maddening
and crushing some days,

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and when I feel really frustrated,

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I have to remind myself,

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my job in this relationship
is to talk to my partner

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about what I want to make together.

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This isn't easy either,

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but its just so much better
than the alternative,

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which is that thing
that feels like madness.

00:14:02.828 --> 00:14:08.185
This version of love is not about winning
of losing someone's affection.

00:14:08.992 --> 00:14:12.513
Instead, it requires that you
trust your partner,

00:14:12.673 --> 00:14:15.686
and talk about things
when trusting feels difficult,

00:14:15.857 --> 00:14:18.236
which sound so simple,

00:14:18.405 --> 00:14:22.901
but is actually a kind
of revolutionary, radical act.

00:14:23.253 --> 00:14:27.397
This is because you get to stop
thinking about yourself,

00:14:27.543 --> 00:14:30.622
and what you're gaining
or losing in your relationship,

00:14:30.799 --> 00:14:34.490
and you get to start thinking
about what you have to offer.

00:14:35.010 --> 00:14:38.438
This version of love
allows us to say things like,

00:14:38.591 --> 00:14:41.761
"Hey, we're not very good collaborators,

00:14:41.925 --> 00:14:43.609
maybe this isn't for us."

00:14:43.999 --> 00:14:47.823
Or, "That relationship
was shorter than I had planned,

00:14:47.962 --> 00:14:50.178
but it was still kind of beautiful."

00:14:51.075 --> 00:14:53.738
The beautiful thing about
the collaborative work of art

00:14:53.962 --> 00:14:56.755
is that it will not paint
or draw or sculpt itself.

00:14:57.274 --> 00:15:00.813
This version of love allows us
to decide what it looks like.

00:15:01.215 --> 00:15:02.091
Thank you.

00:15:02.410 --> 00:15:03.388
(Applause)