 Love has been called divine madness, for good reason. From the outside, it can be hard to distinguish true love from true insanity. We've all met couples with love stories that blur the line between romantic and completely nuts. But as crazy as these stories might sound, we can actually explain them perfectly with the lens of Austrian economics. We can turn the insane into the rational, without losing too much romance in the process. Take a wonderful story of romantic insanity. My father, my dad proposed seriously to my mother one week after they met. He was 19 years old. She wisely declined, but after a few months he proposed again. He said he, quote, felt their spirits merge. She, again being sensible, declined. A few months later, he proposed a third time. This is all within the first year of meeting, and she said no. But then for some reason, my mother reconsidered and called up my dad to accept his proposal. He quickly bought a ring and then sent it to her in the mail because he was in the Navy at the time. They got married after one year of knowing each other and after having spent less than three months together physically. They're poor parents. History is filled with even more dramatic displays of romance. Mark Antony committed suicide after being told Cleopatra was dead. That Taj Mahal was built by an emperor who was grieving his wife. Peter Abelar wound up getting castrated for his forbidden relationship with Elwa. Clearly, love is powerful whether it's due to insanity or not. Now, before talking about economics, I must clarify. I'm not referring to love as it's popularly defined, where I love you means I really, really like you. I'm talking about the deepest kind of love, which you can only understand by experiencing it. The kind where you'd be willing to jump off a bridge if necessary to show your love. In the deepest of moments, if my wife asked me to dismember myself, I would. Does that make me crazy? Not at all. We can understand this behavior using simple economic concepts starting at the foundation. Humans act in accordance with their preferences. We have various goals and therefore we value the different means that we use to achieve those goals. And when we act, we demonstrate which goals we value the most. To illustrate, imagine you have a bottle of water. You have options. You could drink it, give it to your dog, wash your hands, you could throw it at somebody or do something else. If you choose to drink it, for example, you've demonstrated that quenching your thirst is your highest valued goal at the time. After all, if you valued washing your hands more than quenching your thirst, you would have acted differently. Your action has revealed your preference. The same holds true when you're in love. If your highest valued goal is the expression of love, you act accordingly. If you can achieve this goal by cutting off your ear, then you go get a knife. If your love requires that you hike across the country barefoot, singing the theme song to Power Rangers, then you start tonight. The consequences don't matter. Of course, from the outside, people will think you're crazy, but from the inside, you're just acting rationally in accordance with your goals. So you can think of falling in love as simply a reordering of your preferences, as romantic as that sounds. And this reordering can be radical. You end up valuing another person more than yourself, which fully explains why lovers would jump in front of trains for each other. And in Mark Antony's case, his valuation of life itself was tied to love. Without love, for him, there was no more reason to live. So ultimately, though I'm sure he was depressed and grieving, his suicide was a rational decision. He didn't value life at all without love. So when you hear some Romeo writing about how he'd go to the ends of the earth or walk a million miles for his Juliet, it's not a rhetorical flourish. It's true. In fact, it's so true, it's scary. When love is your highest valued end, you're willing to do anything for it. It might sound nice to say, Darling, I would jump off a bridge for you. It sounds a bit less romantic to say, Darling, I would push people off a bridge for you. Just how far, in a bad way, would somebody go for true love? It's disturbing to think about. And to be honest, those moments of extreme love that I've experienced are coupled with terror for two reasons. I really feel like I would do anything. And it puts me at the mercy of my wife. She could crush me or make me a criminal at the snap of her fingers. I suppose you could say extreme love comes with extreme fragility. And in the case of my parents, their reordered preferences and fragility with each other worked. They were married for about 35 years. So by using the lens of Austrian economics, we can turn apparent madness into sanity. So next time you see shameless infatuated lovers, rest assured, they aren't insane. Suck out all the romance and realize, ah, they're simply acting in accordance with their preferences. If you like these ideas, make sure to subscribe. And if you want to help create a more rational worldview, then please head over to my Patreon page and you can support content like this for $1. To read this article or to learn about my books, check out steve-patterson.com.