Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they passed quickly because he loved her. No one is so happy: if he is fortunate enough to enjoy her company, he is in heaven for a while. If he cannot, he is instantly cast down, solitary and silent; he leaves weeping, lamenting, sighing and complaining.

But lovers’ mental symptoms are almost endless, and so varied that no discipline can encompass them. Though they are sometimes cheerful and carried beyond themselves with joy, love is for the most part a plague, a torture, a hell, a bittersweet passion in the end. “Love abounds in honey and gall; it gives a taste both sweet and bitter.” It is “sweet bitterness, delightful pain, cheerful torment”:

Sweeter than honey, these things delight me; More bitter than gall, they kill me.

Like a summer fly, or a sphinx’s wings, or a rainbow of every colour:

Turned towards the sun’s rays they were golden, Against the clouds blue, like the radiance of a rainbow.

Beautiful, ugly and endlessly changing, though mostly distressing and bad. In a word, the Spanish Inquisition cannot compare with it. It is “torment and execution,” as the character in the poet calls it, an unquenchable fire—and what is it not? From it, says Augustine, arise gnawing cares, disturbances, passions, sorrows, fears, suspicions, discontents, disputes, discord, wars, treachery, enmity, flattery, fraud, excess, lust, shamelessness, cruelty and villainy.

Pain, complaints, Lamentation, ceaseless tears, Languor, anxiety, bitterness, Or anything sadder still, if such can be: These, Neaera, are the companions you give my life.

These are lovers’ companions, their usual symptoms, as the poet lists them.

Love contains these faults: Suspicions, enmities, acts of boldness, War, then peace again.

Sleeplessness, hardship, wandering, terror and flight, Scheming, witless lack of restraint, Wantonness, desire and ill will; Also clinging to it are greed, idleness, injury, Poverty, insult and loss.

These faults are found in love: suspicions, Peace, war, shamelessness and slander, Dreams, cares and errors, terrors and alarms, Indecent pranks, plots, tricks and flights, Resentments, needs, neglect, the wish to injure, Continual loss, expense and harm among them.

Every poet is full of such catalogues of love’s symptoms; but fear and sorrow may rightly claim the foremost place. Although Hercules de Saxonia, in chapter 3 of his Treatise on Melancholy, would exclude fear from love melancholy, I am persuaded otherwise: “Love is a thing full of anxious fear.”

It is full of fear, anxiety, doubt, care, irritability and suspicion. It turns a man into a woman—which presumably made Hesiod call Fear and Paleness daughters of Venus:

To Mars, who cleaves shields and armour, Gracious Venus bore Paleness, and Fear with him.

For fear and love are always joined. Moreover, lovers are prone to misunderstand and exaggerate: sometimes too credulous, too hopeful and confident, then again intensely suspicious and unwilling to believe or welcome any good news.

The comic poet neatly depicts this state, among others, in a dialogue between Micio and Aeschinus, a kindly father and a lovesick son. Micio: “Take heart, my son; you shall marry her.” Aeschinus: “Ah, father, are you mocking me now?” Micio: “Mocking you? Why?” Aeschinus: “The more earnestly I desire it, the more I doubt and fear it.” Micio: “Go home and send for her to be your wife.” Aeschinus: “What, a wife now, father? Now?”

These doubts, anxieties and suspicions are the least of their torments. They often pass from feelings to actions: speaking pleasantly and flattering, now completely compliant and willing, then resistant, arguing, fighting, swearing, quarrelling, laughing and weeping. Lucian holds that anyone who does not act like this by turns has not been thoroughly touched by love’s lodestone. Their actions and emotions are thus mixed together, but sorrow takes the greatest share. To many, love is bitterness itself. Plato calls it “a bitter thing”: a bitter potion, an agony, a plague.

Tear this plague, this ruin, away from me; Creeping like numbness into the depths of my limbs, It has driven every joy from my heart.

Oh, take this plague, this affliction from me, Which, like numbness throughout my body, Drives out my joys and weighs down my soul.

Phaedria felt this keenly when he cried:

O Thais, if only I had An equal share of love with you, and it could come about That this hurt you just as it hurts me.

O Thais, I wish you shared some of these pains of mine, Or that it made you suffer as it makes me suffer now.

So did that young man when he roared with distress:

I am tossed, tortured, driven, goaded, Wretchedly turned upon love’s wheel, Drained of life, swept away, pulled apart and torn down; Where I am, I am not; where I am not, there is my mind.

I am troubled, tossed and tortured on love’s wheel; Where I am not, I am; where I am, I have no feeling.

In Lucian, the Moon lamented to Venus that she was almost dying of love: “I am indeed perishing from love.” After a long tale she broke off abruptly and wept: “O Venus, you know my poor heart.” In Lucian, Charmides was so distraught that he sobbed and sighed, tore his hair and said he would hang himself. “I am undone, O sister Tryphaena; I cannot endure these pangs of love. What shall I do?” “O gods who avert evil, release me from these cares”: out of the anguish of his soul Theocles prays, “O gods, free me from these cares and miseries.”

Shall I say that most of a lover’s life is full of agony, anxiety, fear and grief, complaints, sighs, suspicions and cares—“Heigh-ho, my heart is woe”—full of silence and painful solitude?

Discontented, he frequents the shady bowers And pours his fruitless cries into the air.

Except when he has “lucid intervals,” pleasant breezes or sudden changes: when his mistress smiles on him, gives him a kindly look or a kiss, or some encouraging message arrives saying that his courtship is accepted, and so forth.