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Are You in Love with “Being in Love?”
A Cautionary Tale for Hopeless Romantics
Before you read this, you should know where I am coming from. I am forensic psychologist, private investigator and crime writer. A lot of the relationships I hear about do not end well. The people who were in them wind up traumatized, missing or dead.
Sometimes, when I’m listening to the course of these relationships, I get the same feeling as when I’m watching a scary movie. I know bad things are about to happen.
But I’m still sitting there, glued to the edge of my seat, hoping against hope the innocent victim is not going to head down into the dark basement alone, or open the door to the man with an axe. Know what I mean?
In real life, there are often early clues that foretell a bad ending to a love relationship just as surely as there is foreshadowing on the silver screen. Can we see them? It depends. Trust me when I say we can all be fooled in the short-run; that has nothing to do with how smart or mentally healthy you are.
But there’s some interesting psychological research that suggests some people have an ongoing relationship vulnerability that tempts them to glue-gun those rose-colored glasses on so tightly that they don’t see a predator’s true colors. Psychologists even have a name for it; emophilia. In…