As a human being, many people experience different types of love. Love is a feeling or deep affection towards another person. Something that can happen while being in love is the cause of a person to suffer from lovesickness, where a person is unable to act normal, also causing them to feel mentally and psychically ill. Their behavior and view on love changes. It is easy for a person to lose their selves. Being lovesick has a big impact on a relationship because it can either be healthy or unhealthy. Throughout the 19th centaury different settings and characters in literary texts show how a person deals with being lovesick.

The condition of being in love but not having the same feelings reciprocated lead to many people getting into a mental state of lovesickness. There are many symptoms that are related to lovesickness, that many people can say they have experienced. The symptoms include irregular pulse, fever, insomnia, lack of appetite and insanity. These symptoms connect to being put down by love. This affects a person because when you are desperately trying to gain someone’s love, it often causes a person to develop insanity. They do things their selves never imagined doing. The difference between being lovesick and being in love often tend to confuse people on how they show it. Showing signs that they care about their well-being and becoming too attached. Some may not even know they are in the stage of being diagnosed as “lovesick”. Being lovesick is almost the same as being addicted to a drug. You cannot live without love and when you are not given it, you tend to feel out of place and become obsessive with the thought of it. According to Carey, “Yet recent research suggests that romantic attraction is in fact a primitive, biologically based drive, like hunger or sex, some scientists argue. While lust makes our eye wander, they say, it’s the drive for romance that allows us to focus on one particular person, though we often can’t explain why”. Carey explains that lust plays an important role in why someone can develop a deep interest in their partner, but also romance is part of it as well because we fantasize the idea of being with them.

Lovesickness is a real thing, becoming obsessive and attached to a person not giving you the same love can affect you in a way that you never thought. When a person really wants to be with you, they will make the time and effort. A toxic relationship back then and now in modern time is different. Back then it was considered an unhealthy balance because of how you were portrayed to others. During the 19th century, the health system was made up of phlegm which was inflammation, yellow bile was anger, black bile was associated with loss and suffering, and blood was erotic desire. Bile being the worst of out of all of them, which is where lovesickness you can say developed. This belief came from ancient Greek, Hippocratic. Hippocrates is known as the founder of medicine. Part of his medicine research was related to humans and their bodies and believed that illness had an explanation to it. This was the theory of humors, it was how the human body was influenced and how the emotions were made up of it. This connects to Alexander Pushkin’s “The Blizzard” which was a 19th century short story, Maria the main character planned to run away with her beloved, Vladimir. The night before leaving she started remembering her life with her parents and doubted if she can go ahead with the plan. But as she went through it, the day she returned home, she fell quick with an illness. “Could only make out that her daughter was hopelessly in love with Vladimir Nikolayevich and that in all probability her being in love was the cause of her illness.” Being in love causes a person to go through so much and makes them feel vulnerable to the point where they can develop an illness, like Maria did. She suffered through fever and depression, putting her on the edge of dying. She experienced the main symptoms related to being “lovesick”.

Being lovesick is not permanent. There are various ways that a person can overcome their symptoms. Focusing too much on a person can influence you, in which you feel tired and or stressed. You surround yourself to the idea that you can make it work with your partner and you find new ideas to get near them. According to Anisha Jain “Start with things you have been ignoring for a while now. You can even include the things you have been meaning to do in your life because it is a good way to start fresh.” Being positive and thinking about moving forward after a relationship can help you better yourself. As a person it is important to practice self-love. Self-love is being able to consider your well-being and happiness, it is putting yourself first before others. Many people tend to forget this while they are stuck hopelessly in love with a person that does not pay attention to them. By doing this you are allowing yourself to get into a toxic relationship with yourself or with your partner. According to Sobol “The physician’s conclusion explicitly defines lovesickness not as bodily pathology but as a ‘disorder of… the soul”. She speaks about a Russian literature and how the main character is affected by love. This also connects to real life because couples are damaging their soul by allowing their relationship to take over their well-being and emotions. They have no control of limits as to how to come back into reality.

Your mental state can also be affected while being in a complicated love situation. An example of this is in the 19th century literature “Nevsky Prospect”, where the main character experiences being love sick in such a passionate way that it leads to his death. In this story Piskarev the main character falls in love with a beautiful young lady, at first sight. Later, in the book to Piskarev’s surprise he was completely wrong about the unrealistic image he painted her out to be. Instead of his fantasy of her she turns out to be a prostitute. Because of his findings, Piskarev feels hurt and betrayed that she is not the person he had imagined her to be. Throughout the reading, Piskarev attempted many times to convince himself that she is not who he thinks she is. “God, where he had come! At first he refused to believe it and began studying the objects that filled the room more attentively”. The place where she had taken him was a brothel, a place where various woman lives and give themselves up. During another event, the lady he met, calls out to him in the middle of the night and takes him to the place she works, while watching the girl preform the dance, he comes to shock to realize that is the lady he seen walking by at Nevsky Prospect. At this event she explains to him that she is not like the other girls he has met. “I’ll be frank with you: you must have thought the circumstances of our meeting was strange. Could you really think that I belong to that despicable class of creatures among whom you met me?” All of this was during a dream that he was having with her. Piskarev could not find a reason as to why she works that way, which is why he woke up as soon as she was going to tell him her secret. This text also exaggerates the idea of being love sick. Piskarev as coming to the truth, ran away to his room and locked himself for days. As people knocked on his door to see if he was okay, he had already sliced his throat and ended up dying. Piskarev never got the love that he was hoped for or imagined for himself. He could not handle it and took his life. This shows how being love sick can take control of your feelings. Love is seen as something very powerful and when you are deeply in love it can cause you to feel very weak. Giving people the satisfaction to see you at your lowest point or even becoming deadly.

In conclusion, being lovesick is a real effect on people. Even today in modern day, many people experience these symptoms and tend to find a way to not let it get to them. Now a day’s people choose who to fall in love, to be careful to not be put in a situation in where they become obsessive with their relationship. It is unhealthy for a person to cling on to their beloved if they are not getting the same feelings reciprocated. Often a person needs their personal space and figure out how to love their self to love someone else. Many 19th century literacy texts show how different settings and characters deal with being lovesick.

Works Cited  

Jain, Anisha. “5 Signs You Are Lovesick And Ways To Overcome Lovesickness!”. Womennow.In, 2018, https://womennow.in/5-signs-lovesick-ways-overcome-lovesickness/. Accessed 25 Oct 2018.  

Sobol, Valeria. Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination. Seattle: University of Washington Press. (2009). Print. 

 

Carey Benedict. “The Brain in Love.” 

 

Gogol Nikolai. Nevsky Prospekt. 1835 

 

Wikisource contributors. “Translation:The Blizzard.” Wikisource . Wikisource , 21 Dec. 2017. Web. 29 Oct. 2018.