Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two philosophers explain the theoretical dimensions of your pain and suffering.

I'm David Pena Guzman.

And I'm Ellie Anderson.

The French author Stendhal wrote a personal collection of essays about the experience of being in love.

It's very creatively titled On Love, Delamour.

And in these writings, he reflects on the experience of loving somebody

while knowing that they may never love you back.

You know, not a great place to be,

but maybe it's a place where a lot of us have found ourselves

at some point in our lives.

And it turns out that he was inspired by his own life in thinking about this.

So it turns out that he in the 1800s was obsessed with this Italian woman named Matilde Viscontini Dombowski.

And long story short, she was just not into him at all, which caused him to obsess more and more and more about her,

so much so that he ended up writing a whole book about the passions of love and obsession and infatuation.

Actually, on that point, so I was really into this

book in college. Oh, really? Because there's a whole section, Cures for Love. And I think I actually

read an excerpted version of the book that was like a mini book called Cures for Love. It's like,

I need this. And, you know, I don't really remember whether it actually helped me get over things or not. But I didn't know that there was that. I didn't know there was that biographical background. Poor guy. Yeah. I mean, that's why it's like it's like the figure of the tortured author pouring his heart out in writing. And in the book, he talks about how lovers tend to idealize the love object.

And he uses a term for that process of idealization.

He calls it crystallization.

And that is a reference to a natural process.

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