4/11/24
Stendhal’s version of love is in line with definitions of limerence. It tends to involve intense mental states. Crystallization seems to me to be little more than turning a human subject into an object. This ideal piece of jewelry must then be protected and cherished.
I believe that genuine love is more a physiological state than a mental one. Hours after being in contact with someone I love romantically, my nerve endings feel on fire. My skin is hot. I’m agitated and can’t sleep. For that reason, I can relate to Stendhal’s description of what it feels like when love passed. That cooling balm is just the right antidote to the fire:
There are moments in violent and unrequited love when you suddenly think you are not in love any more. It is like coming across a spring of fresh water in the middle of the sea.
This is a healing message, and anyone who has lived through a long-term period of unrequited love will remember that there comes a time when it all passes and there’s a tremendous sense of peace. Coming across fresh water in the middle of the sea feels right. But Stendhal was a young man when he wrote this and he did not understand the difference between the mental crush and its crystallization and limerence and the kind of love that your body won’t let you get away from.
So he’s back to state of mind and a kind of depression that is most common to someone who is just giving himself constant dopamine rushes, brought on by mental state limerence:
A thoroughly miserable and depressed blankness follows a state of mind which, despite its agitation, nevertheless saw all Nature fraught with novelty, passion and interest.
Stendhal is talking here about mental states, so it’s a little tricky to figure out just when the connection has passed. The mind has a way of tricking us, especially if this crystallization is elevated. Objectifying a human being requires a certain creativity. People don’t achieve god-like stature on their own.
If the love reaches the physiological level, where you’re shaken by someone even when you can’t feel it in the moment, it’s much easier to tell whether the connection still exists. The body doesn’t lie. The mind will, however, and readily. It wants those dopamine shots. One of its favorite tools is resorting to black and white thinking — such as, I can keep putting her out of my mind and deal with this darkness head on, or I can seek out some renewal of interest. Stendhal describes how that might look:
For instance, after a period of coldness she shows a little more warmth, and you conceive just the same degree of hope, based on precisely the same external symptoms, as on some occasion in the past; she may be quite unaware of all this.
Odds are quite high that, yes, she is completely unaware of this, because this renewal of hope is often based on fairly routine contact and behavior that your brain is interpreting. Her mind is likely to be somewhere else entirely. This leads to an interesting conclusion by Stendhal:
The imagination finds its progress barred by the ominous warnings of memory, and crystallization stops dead.
So what Stendhal is saying here is that, when limerence is moving towards its end point, it takes very little to give it new life, but even this is short lived, because the mind is starting to catch up with reality. Memories of the sadness and disappointment now override the short term bursts of happiness. This may be true. But I want to add that if this love has entered the physiological stage, there’s no trickery that will work. Your body will tell you the truth when you least expect it.
Stendhal includes an editorial footnote here that he’s been advised to stop using the word crystallization, and he uses this as an occasion to repeat his definition, and then add an interesting aside that a man who is depending on vanity to achieve happiness will find himself having to “constantly watch over a thousand details” in his dress. This is even more likely to be true with women, I believe.