Welcome to the Happiness Podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff.

Loving others, it should be so simple. We should love others. They should love us back. And that's it.

But that's not how life works. Take a moment and think about

the first love you ever had for another person that wasn't a family member. Do you remember the

intensity of those feelings? They can be amazing. We're stunned. We're shocked by how powerful this first love can be.

Most of us have read or seen the play by William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.

It truly does epitomize the enchanting and mesmerizing power of first love.

Romeo says,

My bounty is as boundless as a sea. My love as deep. The more I give thee, the more I have,

for both are infinite. If you want to read a more recent rendition of Romantic Love, a deep yet disturbing example of romantic love

is a book I recently read called Kairos by Jenny Erbenbeck, which won the Booker International

Award in 2004. In this novel set in Germany, two people, Catherine and Hans,

fall in love, yet one partner's need for control suffocates the other, creating a cycle of dependency

and resentment. In one part of the book, from Katerina's perspective, the author says,

how can he ever refuse her anything if she doesn't demand anything? But the truth of it is,

they both demand things from each other. The intensity of the relationship in Cairo's

raises questions about the nature of love and the fine line

between passion and obsession. When we love another, we can so easily fall in the quagmire

of dysfunction and attachment and sorrow. Not because the relationships aren't beautiful, but because of how our minds

shape our expectations of how the relationship should be. In the book, The Gods of Small

Things by Arundati Roy, he writes about love in this way. It was a time of tall tales and tall dreams

of pure, uncomplicated enchantment, the way things ought to be, not the way things are.

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