The Painful Love Stories You Keep Coming Back To: A Deep Dive into the Psychology of Romantic Love
- Luna Feyth
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
When you think of romantic love, what thoughts, feelings, and images come to mind?
Maybe your mind goes to a particular romantic film where two people find themselves feeling those feelings but are restricted from moving forward on account of various dramas and obstacles. Finally, after much restless back and forth, the restriction is lifted and they are able to embrace one another in full, uninterrupted surrender.
Intensity and passion are combined with stress and anxiety. On a chemical level, increased endorphins, dopamine, and oxytocin are interspersed with cortisol and adrenaline that can be traced to the longing, the chase, and the lingering possibility of losing the love of their life.
One may wonder: is this real love, or is this an attachment to a feeling that we've been sold as love?
The obvious risk here is that we might start to believe that if love doesn't produce stress and anxiety, it might not be real love.
When we feel love, we are experiencing certain chemicals in our body that we associate with love.
But how do we know that what we call love is actually love?
Before we ever fall in love with a person, it may be that we first fall in love with a story.
The Stories That Teach Us How to Love
Chances are that the template you call love was absorbed long before your first relationship. It was inherited through fairy tales, films, songs, and the countless stories that surrounded you while growing up.
Do you remember which love story felt the most impactful and real for you? For me, I remember watching Aladdin and Cinderella countless times. The mythology of these tales spoke to me and no doubt shaped my expectations when it came to love.
Stories do more than entertain. They teach us what is worth longing for. They teach us what love is supposed to feel like, how quickly life can change, what kind of person we should become, and what sort of ending we should expect.
With Aladdin, I was led to believe that whatever I wished for would come true. I also learned to fear overnight success and how being seen as a rich person can grant certain privileges, but also come at a cost to one's integrity and moral sensibilities.
In Cinderella, I learned that if I stayed insulated, minded my own business, and essentially allowed myself to be enslaved by family members who backed me into a corner, then by some miracle an unthinkable circumstance would swing open a door of opportunity, allowing my beloved to find me.
In both mythologies, I learned that my dreams would come true—not in a slow, incremental way, but suddenly. My wretched life would do a complete 180-degree turn, shifting me from peasant to queen in the blink of an eye.
Looking back, I can see that these stories weren't merely shaping my ideas about romance. They were shaping my expectations about life itself.
The Myth of Sudden Transformation
From my experience, the more I expected life to unfold through dramatic turning points and sudden transformations, the more I suffered when my life plodded along uneventfully.
Because we compare our ordinary lives with those rare cases where someone's life seemingly changes overnight, we can easily begin to believe that something has gone wrong.
Even in these exceptional cases, however, we are being fed a highly edited version of the story. What would take months or even years to happen in real life, a movie is able to take us through in the span of minutes. As each frame leaps through time, we are transported to our destination at lightning speed.
The result is that we are left with the illusion that things should happen quickly.
So when it comes to our own lived experience, how do you think people might react when things take longer than expected?
Frustration and impatience are obvious possibilities, but where do these feelings actually come from?
They do not arise in isolation. Every emotional response rests upon a set of assumptions about how reality is supposed to unfold.
Hidden beneath impatience is an expectation.
Hidden beneath disappointment is a love story that didn’t take shape as we were told it would.
The stronger our attachment to a particular outcome, timeline, or narrative, the more distress we experience when life refuses to cooperate.
And when things don't happen the way we think they should, this can become the source of tremendous distress.
Perhaps there is something more to the term "love sick" than we realize.
Love Sick: When Mythology Collides with Reality
When someone becomes heartbroken, what exactly has been lost?
Certainly a person may have left, but often something much larger collapses alongside them.
A future disappears.
An identity disappears.
The story is interrupted and the imagined life we were moving toward suddenly evaporates.
In many cases, what the body is reacting to is not merely the absence of a person, but the collapse of an entire mythology.
The prince never arrived.
The reunion never happened.
The sacrifice was not rewarded.
The story no longer makes sense.
Viewed from this angle, love sickness can be seen as the nervous system struggling to reconcile with a reality that no longer conforms to the narrative it had invested in.
Sustainability vs Intensity: The Stigma of Going Slow
When every facet of our experience can be fast-forwarded—next-day delivery, fast food, and endless AI optimizations—it's no wonder that love which unfolds slowly is not considered love; it's considered boring.
And yet to think such intensity of feelings for another is sustainable, or even desirable, is a gross misunderstanding.
Could you imagine if you were perpetually stuck replaying a romantic drama? At a biological and energetic level, this would wreak havoc on your nervous system.
And for those people who do find themselves replaying a romantic scenario, no doubt their nervous system is taking a hit.
Personally speaking, when I was finally able to give up my romantic obsession, I noticed I was able to breathe deeper, sleep easier, and feel more peaceful and relaxed.
The task of being romantically obsessed—not with a person, but with what they represented as an archetype within my own personal mythology—was exhausting to uphold because it wasn't grounded in reality.
The effort that goes into making something real that isn’t real should not be understated.
Through renewed understanding, the obsession finally began to wear off. In actuality, it wasn't love that was fading, but my attachment to the initial surge of chemicals I experienced when we first met—an experience that, if I am honest with myself, was often unpleasant and destabilizing.
And yet modern romanticism promotes these heightened emotional states as the be-all and end-all—a feeling you should spend your whole life searching for.
It's no wonder our obsessions have become socially normalized.
But what is the real cost of chasing the feelings that romantic love so willingly provides?
Anyone who has travelled through adolescence will know the devastation of that first heartbreak.
How could we ever recover?
For some of us, the first breaking of our heart comes as a sobering wake-up call.
For others, it only turns up the heat beneath the cauldron of desire.
Our broken heart gets inserted into the script of our favourite love story.
Will the event be reduced to a temporary fracture, signalling a reunion at a later time?
Or perhaps it signals a necessary sacrifice we must make in order to welcome the arrival of our true love who will come as a soothing balm to heal the wounds of the past…?
Unconsciously, we begin writing the script of our apparent destiny.
The imagined archetype of our lover keeps our passions burning for that moment in time when our destiny will finally arrive.
And when that day does not arrive, or when the person arrives but the story does not follow, we are left feeling disappointed and betrayed.
Perhaps the question is not whether we have fallen in love with the wrong person.
Perhaps the question is whether we have fallen in love with a story that is not ours to fulfil.
Reflection Questions
• Which stories, films, books, songs, or cultural narratives most influenced your understanding of romantic love?
• What did these stories teach you about how love should feel, how quickly it should arrive, and what a successful relationship should look like?
• When you reflect on past romantic experiences, were you relating to the person in front of you, or to what they represented within your imagination?
• Which aspects of your romantic life have brought the greatest disappointment?
• Have you ever mistaken emotional intensity, uncertainty, longing, or obsession for evidence of love?
• Are there stories from your past that continue to shape your expectations of romance, even if you no longer consciously believe them?
• What would love look like if it were freed from the need for drama, urgency, rescue, destiny, or emotional extremes?
• Is there a romantic story you continue to revisit internally? What need, hope, fear, or unfinished longing keeps that story alive?
• What might become possible if you stopped waiting for life to follow a particular script?
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