Labrynth of desire - Rosemary Sullivan - Why do women fall in love?

Why do women fall in love? More to the point: why do so many intelligent, accomplished women fall into obsessive infatuation with men who turn out to be shallow cads? Biographer Rosemary Sullivan has taken a break from probing the life stories of Canadian literary legends such as Margaret Atwood and Gwendolyn MacEwen to try to understand what drives us to hurl ourselves, like lemmings or stampeding buffalo, over the edge of that steep cliff called dangerous love.
"I have spent a good deal of time sitting in cafes with other women talking late into the night about romantic obsession," writes Sullivan (a romantic, obsessive activity in itself). Something in her personality and life experience has drawn her to this scorchy subject, which she explains is not husbandly affection but "the hot thing we fall into," the love of "torch songs and the tango."
Until now the only books available on this topic have been simplistic self-help tomes treating romantic passion like the disorder of the week. Sullivan refuses to pathologize the experience, insisting that it can be quite enlightening once the dust has settled and the players have gone home: "I have come to believe that falling obsessively in love is one of life's necessary assignments. It cracks us open. We put everything at risk ... And life, to be lived fully, demands desire."
That is, if it doesn't kill us first. "It is not a place to get stuck and is never a life solution," she warns, but something we must live through to gain insight -- and, perhaps, to help us eventually find the real thing.

By Rosemary Sullivan
http://januarymagazine.com/nonfiction/labofdesire.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2002/02/14/sullivan/index.html
http://books.google.ca/books

http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinbess/3030646994/