We Should All Be Crazy When It Comes To Love

I scared myself last night. I was waiting for a guy I liked to text me back and I literally went nuts for a good couple hours. I checked my phone every single second for four hours. This is not an exaggeration. My phone was never not in sight; I treated it like I would an infant child. Every time it went off and read someone else’s name, I got irrationally angry with that person. When he finally did text me back, my mood went from 0 to 100 and yet again, I scared myself. I am 22 so this is all completely embarrassing to admit — but this is a safe space, right, because we ALL do this or have done this at one point or another throughout our dating lives.

We’re all crazy when it comes to love.

My dad once broke some guy’s nose because he told me, my sister, and my grandmother to ‘shut the hell up’ during a play my grandma had taken us to for her birthday. And my good friend Annie tells this hilarious and now infamous story about getting her ex-boyfriend’s neighbors — with whom she’d never spoken before — to hoist her up so she could climb through his window to make sure he wasn’t cheating on her. (Her suspicions were correct; he was.) But regardless, did she really need to climb through his window to find this out? And did my dad really need to break this guy’s nose to get his point across? Absolutely not! But you see, the thing is, love makes us do extremely irrational things that would normally be really out of character.

Love makes us all crazy.

I’ll admit I’ve done some things I’m not particularly proud of in the name of love.

Like this one time I walked around my entire neighborhood in my pajamas in the dead of night looking for my then-boyfriend’s car to make sure he wasn’t lying about being at his friend’s house. He wasn’t. I found his car and I went back to bed feeling both relieved and also panicked by how crazy a thing I had just done.

And this other time my sister refused to join us on our family vacation to Saint Lucia because two weeks spent away from her boyfriend was too unbearable. My mom had already bought the plane ticket for her. The best part was they broke up six weeks later. She’ll forever regret this.

And this phenomenon of love making us crazy isn’t exclusive to just humans. My uncles are extreme hunters and purposely go hunting when the doe are in heat because this leads them to be irrational and less protective and basically easier to hunt. I remember laughing for a long while after hearing this information for the first time because it proves my point exactly.

Love really does make us nuts.

There is no question in my mind as to whether it could actually drive someone crazy. It totally could. There’s been a couple times it’s driven me batshit crazy and I don’t doubt it will drive me crazy again and again and again for the rest of my life.

Love strikes a chord within us that nothing else could ever reach. Because of love, I’ve done some things I swore I’d never do. I’ve jeopardized my morals, I’ve lied and cheated and threw caution to the wind. I’ve done some hilariously bizarre crazy yet completely beautiful and legendary things in the name of love and I’m so okay with that.

Love SHOULD be crazy. It should be so maddening that you forget whether you’re dreaming or awake. It should feel better than any drug when it’s good and worse than any comedown when it’s bad.

There are a lot of things you should play safe in life. Like where you get sushi from, or what part of the city you walk alone in at night.  But my gosh, love is not one of those things.

If you’re playing it safe in love, you have some reevaluating to do.

Love should be uncalculated and disastrous and messy and passionate. Love should be nerve-wracking and risky. Love should make your heart pound 10 times faster than ever before, it should make your pupils dilate, your body tingle, and your heart combust. Love is supposed to be crazy and let me tell you, if it isn’t then you’re missing out, because if it isn’t crazy, passionate and heart-wrenching, it isn’t worth it.