Lovesickness
negative feelings from experiencing unrequited love or loss of love
Lovesickness is the mental state brought on by the personal experience of unfulfilled, unconsummated, or unrequited love.
Lovesickness is a feature of infatuated love or limerence (being irrationally love stricken or smitten), and included under broad labels of romantic love and passionate love. Erotomania has also been included under the heading of lovesickness. A further related term is "obsessive love".
This state of longing for an unavailable beloved is characterized by addictive cravings, depression and intrusive thoughts about a love object. Research on the biology of romantic love indicates that romantic love resembles addiction in the intense early stage (or when unreciprocated), but academics do not currently agree on how love addiction is defined. Lovesickness is not mentioned in modern medical texts, although historically it was considered a medical entity.
Lovesickness is widespread among adolescents: reportedly 33–53% had experienced problems with it, or even as many as 82%, in different studies.
Symptoms
Although lovesickness is no longer recognized as a medical condition, its symptoms nevertheless bear a resemblance to other modern diagnostic entities. According to the clinical psychologist Frank Tallis, lovesickness "still looks like, feels like, and behaves like a mental illness" and "Clearly, a 'clinically significant' amount of distress and general impairment are an almost inevitable consequence of falling in love."
The four "core symptoms" of falling in love according to Tallis are as follows:
preoccupation with the loved one and obsessive thinking, resembling obsessive–compulsive disorder.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lovesickness” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.