Without Mania, Relationships Fail
Of the eight types of love, which I summarized a few days ago, mania is the most misunderstood.
People often put mania into an “evil” bucket, because when mania exists in excess, it can lead to bad things like stalking.
Mania is not necessarily bad. Our modern usage of the term overemphasizes the extreme case, but mania is actually necessary for relationship formation.
When you meet someone, and you become curious to learn more about that person, you are experiencing mania.
If you don’t experience mania, you don’t care about them enough to bother asking them questions about who they are, what their preferences are, etc. You may work with them, if you have to, but you don’t bother to learn the little things upon which we build friendship (and potentially romance).
Not only is mania necessary for friendships, it is the first step in empathizing with someone.
In order to empathize with someone, you have to be curious enough to learn about them. Learning about them allows you to find analogous experiences within your own history or to imagine what they experienced, which in turn allows you to bond through your similarities.
You can almost always tell when someone doesn’t feel mania towards you when you meet because they ask rote…
