Interesting! Now is that only romantic love? What about people who are “crazy” about, say, a hobby, or a sport, or God, or a new child, or even their work? Someone once said that the difference between a crazy person and a genius is only success. Now, I would beg to differ when we’re talking about sociopathic psychos, but this reminds me of an interesting conversation I had with a friend today. He observed (purely anecdotally) that lots of people who become academics appear to have some kind of psychological scarring in their past. I speculated that this might be due to the fact that people who are really “into” a particular subject tend to be isolated or even ostracized from conventional social relationships, the so-called “nerd effect”. The causal relationship between isolation and passion for a given academic subject may be reversed, but they do seem to be somewhat correlated, at least in childhood when most children are out playing and forming social relationships. Certainly, there must be a grain of truth to the stereotype of the eccentric professor. Hmm…so that begs the question: are academics more insane than the general population because they (in theory at least) love their subjects so much? 😉
And now, for a touch of absurdity: in Christianity we are taught that God’s love is infinite and that God’s love for humanity exceeds even that of parents for their children (“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget,I will not forget you!” Isaiah 49:15). So does that make God the most insane being of all? Or maybe our standards of sanity and insanity are arbitrary? 🙂

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