First Knight (1995)

A movie by Sean Connery, Richard Gere, and Julia Ormond demonstrate the malady of love and the wreck it can bring.

Guinevere: Love has many faces. I look on you differently, but not with less love.
King Arthur: When a woman loves two men, she must choose between them.
Guinevere: I choose you.
King Arthur: Your will chooses me. Your heart chooses him.
Guinevere: My will is stronger than my heart.
King Arthur: Do you think I put so high a price on my feelings? They'll pass.
Guinevere: My will holds me to my course through life.
King Arthur: As mine does me, and yet, all I have to do is look at you and everything I ever believed in fades to nothing. All I want is your love.
Guinevere: You have it.
King Arthur: Do I? Then look on me as you looked on him.
Guinevere: I gave one moment to Lancelot.
King Arthur: Yes, you're innocent. But you love him! Any more of this innocence and I'll go mad.
Guinevere: I'll do whatever you tell me to.
King Arthur: I don't know what to think. I no longer see my way ahead. Only fools dream of the one thing they can't have.
Lancelot: Forgive me.
King Arthur: What's to forgive?
Lancelot: I dreamed the dream of you. It was a sweet dream...... while it lasted.

Mysterious and powerful – resistance is futile for love can obliterate any opposition. No one is immune it comes and goes according to its whims. It can make a pauper out of kings or humble the proud to beg on their knees. We are under the mercy of love. One way or the other there is no escape sooner or later it will catch up on us. Better to confront it with the knowledge that somehow we can manage this common affliction of all human rather than wait in the dark and be caught under its clutches.

So what is love but a state of mental incapacity when our brain releases chemicals that overwhelm our thinking neurons and bring us in state of complete bliss. Akin to drug like morphine or cocaine we literally get addicted to it. As much as we want get rid of its effect in our brain – the body crave for it. We need it as much as we need the air we breathe. Love is the only legal drug that cost nothing but is so powerful that it can ravage us for life. We humans are designed by nature to fall in love and reproduce. Understanding that love after all is the presence of chemical imbalances in the brain that put us in the state of ecstasy making us unreasonable and sometimes commit acts we will never do under a regularly functioning brain. Subconsciously our brain seeks out the source that triggers the release of these chemicals. Our body craves the feeling and it wants more of it. Thus, a person in love will go to great lengths and almost exhaust all means in his disposal just to see and or be with his love.

Think of it as drug addict stealing, robbing, and committing crimes just to have another dose of drug. And you get the idea how strong love can be in making us absolutely irrational and focused in being together with the one we seek.

Is there a way out of this? Yes there is as much as addict can be rehabilitated so are love-struck can be tamed. But this is reserve for the next blog. :-)