…if we look at love in its most passionate phase, we see that love often does several key things to reorient the soul. The first thing it does is humble us. It reminds us that we are not even in control of ourselves. In most cultures and civilizations, love is described in myth and story as an external force— a god or a demon— that comes in and colonizes a person, refashioning everything inside. It is Aphrodite or Cupid. Love is described as a delicious madness, a raging fire, a heavenly frenzy. We don’t build love; we fall in love, out of control. It is both primordial and also something distinctly our own, thrilling and terrifying, this galvanic force that we cannot plan, schedule, or determine.

Love is like an invading army that reminds you that you are not master of your own house. It conquers you little by little, reorganizing your energy levels, reorganizing your sleep patterns, reorganizing your conversational topics, and, toward the end of the process, rearranging the objects of your sexual desire and even the focus of your attention. When you are in love, you can’t stop thinking about your beloved. You walk through a crowd and think you see her in a vaguely familiar form every few yards. You flip from highs to lows and feel pain at slights that you know are probably trivial or illusory. Love is the strongest kind of army because it generates no resistance. When the invasion is only half complete, the person being invaded longs to be defeated, fearfully, but utterly and hopelessly.

“You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the person using it to assert his strength,” the Italian novelist Cesar Pavese wrote. Next, love decenters the self. Love leads you out of your natural state of self-love. Love makes other people more vivid to you than you are to yourself.

The person in love may think she is seeking personal happiness, but that’s an illusion. She is really seeking fusion with another, and when fusion contradicts happiness, she will probably choose fusion.

It doesn’t make sense to say that a lover is generous or altruistic, because a lover in the frenzy of love who gives to her beloved is giving to a piece of herself.

Next, love infuses people with a poetic temperament.

But to be in love is to lose your mind a bit, to be elevated by magical thinking. To be in love is to experience hundreds of small successive feelings that you never quite experienced in that way before, as if another half of life has been opened up to you for the first time: a frenzy of admiration, hope, doubt, possibility, fear, ecstasy, jealousy, hurt, and so on and so on.

The dates on the calendar when the crucial first kisses and words were exchanged assume the aura of holy days. The emotions you feel cannot quite be captured in prose, but only in music and poetry, looks and touches. The words you exchange are so silly and overwrought that they have to be kept private. They would sound insane if they were bandied about with your friends in the daylight world.

You don’t fall in love with the person who might be of most use to you— not the richest, most popular, most well-connected person, not the one with the best career prospects. Adam II falls for the distinct person, for no other reason than some inner harmony, inspiration, joy, and uplift, because he is he and she is she. Moreover, love doesn’t seek the efficient path, the sure thing; for some perverse reason, love feeds on roadblocks and is not usually won by prudence. You might have tried to warn two people in love that they should be wary of marrying because their union will not be a happy one. But lovers caught up in magical thinking don’t see what others see, and they probably wouldn’t change their course even if they could because they would rather be unhappy together than happy apart. They are in love, not buying a stock, and the poetic temperament— part thinking, part brilliant emotion— guides their decisions. Love is a state of poetic need; it exists on both a higher and a lower plane than logic and calculation. In this way, love opens up the facility for spiritual awareness. It is an altered state of consciousness that is intense and
Brooks, David (2015-04-14). The Road to Character (Kindle Locations 3365-3374). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Brooks, David (2015-04-14). The Road to Character (Kindle Locations 3362-3365). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

 
Brooks, David (2015-04-14). The Road to Character (Kindle Locations 3356-3359). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Brooks, David (2015-04-14). The Road to Character (Kindle Locations 3352-3353). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Brooks, David (2015-04-14). The Road to Character (Kindle Locations 3320-3324). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.