Loss of Self

Being in love isn't about the other person as much as about oneself, an altered state that allows one to connect rather than the connection itself. The one thing that makes being in love what it is, and doesn't occur in either lust or friendship, is a loss of self, which is meant to prepare us for a time when part of us is contained not within our self but within a family: we can't love someone else as we would ourselves until we've fallen in love at least once in our life. This is why being in love can make us feel more connected to anything aside from the person we're in love with, and separate from anything about our selves. By reducing the ego's repression of the id, being in love reaches deeper into our unconscious than anything other than psychedelics, which simulate not schizophrenia as hallucinogens do, but being in love.