Romantic love is an obsession. It possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can’t stop thinking about another human being.

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist known for studying the biology and evolution of love, has often described romantic love in clinical, neurobiological terms—emphasizing its intrusive focus, craving, and loss of control. This quotation reflects the way she frames early-stage romantic love as a powerful motivational state rather than a mild emotion, drawing on research that links it to reward circuitry and obsessive thinking. Fisher frequently makes this point in public-facing explanations of her work (talks and interviews) to distinguish romantic love from attachment and from sexual desire, and to explain why it can feel overwhelming and destabilizing.

The quote frames romantic love as a state that commandeers attention and identity: it “possesses” the lover, narrows mental life around a single person, and temporarily erodes ordinary self-regulation. Fisher’s point is not merely poetic; it implies that romantic love functions like a biologically rooted drive—intense, persistent, and difficult to will away—rather than a calm preference. Read this way, the loss of “sense of self” signals how attachment and reward mechanisms can reorganize priorities, making the beloved a central goal. The line also carries an implicit caution: because romantic love can resemble obsession in its cognitive symptoms, it can be exhilarating but also destabilizing, especially when unreciprocated or threatened.