‘When was love first described as a sickness? When did the body in love begin to be likened to one battling an infection?
The parallels are self-evident: love moves in and colonises all available space, reorienting everything to itself. It weaves a gauze beneath the skin of its subjects, a mesh through which all experience is filtered for the duration of the infection: healthy cells become love cells, resources are corralled and redirected, the body’s tangible and intangible energies are reconstructed as a living shrine to the beloved. In most European languages the word for love is said to derive from the ancient Nostratic word luba, meaning thirst.
Love’s appetite ends either with privation for the love-starved, or else a gorging, a devouring of its objects. A consumption.’
- Daisy Lafarge, Lovebug
