The Neurotic Looks for Love

You feel faint. Your pulse is racing. You are haunted by a feeling of insecurity that does not seem justified. You are unable to concentrate on anything for more than a minute or two, you are unable to make any sense of what people are saying to you. The question is: Are you in love, or are you merely having another anxiety attack?

There are two reasons why this is not an easy question to answer:

1. Neurotics fall in love two or three times a month.
2. Anyone who is in love is neurotic.

Neurotics believe in a flawless, ideal sort of love, at least until they get married. They are prone to crushes. The objects of their ardor often are far away or married to a friend or on the cover of People magazine or otherwise unattainable. This unavailability makes neurotics feel very happy and very sad at the same time, a feeling that is almost exactly the same as the one you get when you are in an airplane flying through heavy turbulence. But instead of calling themselves "sick" and going to see a doctor, neurotics call themselves "romantic" and go to see an astrologer.

Although many neurotics sit around at home expecting love to come knocking at the front door, this very rarely happens. Eventually we have to snap out of our rich and extraordinarily fulfilling fantasy lives; we have to go out and take a look around. This "looking around" can be unpleasant business, and it means that we have to get involved in a lot that has nothing at all to do with true love. It means things such as going roller skating for the first time and laughing whenever we fall down, or cavalierly pretending that it doesn't matter when a scoop of ice cream falls out of the cone and onto the seat of the car. It means dating. And dating almost always means trouble.

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The Neurotic's Dating Game*

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The Single's Scene*

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Those Three Little Words*

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The Big Event*

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