Stupid Cupid

If love were logical, psychologistswould be out of business

VALENTINE'S DAY--Sigmund Freud said love and work are the
cornerstones of happiness. But like many of us, he discovered that love
can take a lot more work than work. I grew up knowing this firsthand,
since my father married seven times--including my mother on three
separate occasions.

How did I handle this? Denial and escape into fantasy. ! learned
about love from Frank Sinatra and An Affair to Remember, treating MGM
musicals as if they were documentaries. I learned that love struck like a
bolt of lighting--instantly, inevitably and infinitely.

My lightning bolt hit when a beautiful woman sat next to me on a
bus in Buenos Aires. "Buenos dias," I said, blowing half my Spanish. Over
dinner, she told me her name was Maria. "Maria," I sang to myself, "I
just met a girl named Maria." I was scoring our romance. Sure, we gazed
deeply into my English-Spanish dictionary, but hadn't movies taught us
that the language of love needed no words?

The day I left she said I could pack her in my suitcase. Charmed, I
found myself engaged. Everyone thought it was so romantic. Oh, there were
occasional warnings about cultural differences and not knowing each other
from Adam, but I suspected that the doubters, especially my mother, were
just jealous.

After Maria arrived, things got a little rough: Apparently the
language of love actually mandates that there be no words, because the
more we could communicate, the less we had to say to one another. As that
great philosopher Matt Groening once said, "Love is a snowmobile racing
across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you
underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."

Divorced, I contemplated suing MGM for alienation of affection.
Instead, I went to a psychiatrist, who concluded that I had chosen a
woman as far from my mother as I could get without actually marrying an
ice weasel. Then another marriage failed. I began to wonder if the
problem were genetic.

I looked for answers about love in self-help books, but just found
writers from Mars. I combed the research. The freshest approach appeared
in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, which
described a woman who conquered sexual anxiety by eating macadamia nuts
during intercourse.

I was beginning to consider researching divorce rates among
macadamia nut workers when I met a wonderful woman. And now, despite a
painful history and against all reason, I am once more reaching for the
brass ring of a relationship that works. Deep inside me, there's still a
romantic who believes Freud was right about love being a requirement for
psychological well-being. Besides, now I have a little jar that says,
"Break in case of emergency," and inside are macadamia nuts.

ILLUSTRATION (COLOR)

Adapted by Ph.D.

Steven R. Pritzker, Ph.D., PT's humor editor, is co-editor of the
new Encyclopedia of Creativity (Academic Press, 1999).