Hold the Prozac

We all have baggage about all kinds of things. My sister describes the state of something being psychological or personal baggage for someone--a trauma, compulsion, phobia, fear or obsession, for example--as having "brain spaghetti." For example, apparently she has spaghetti about me pinning her down as a child and tickling her until she screamed for mercy. She knows this because when her spouse tried to do the same, the experience she had as a child came flooding back as a complex tangle of fears, feelings, and mental images. Notwithstanding the trauma inflicted on my poor sister, the spaghetti metaphor is a simple but useful tool for explaining how complex our experiences are, and I bring it up here because I believe a lot of people have spaghetti, most particularly about love. So many hopeful love relationships turn sour and yet we continue to idealise love. Romantic love is so deeply ingrained into our psyches, because we are faced with it at every point in our lives—flic