Last weekend I binge-watched season 4 of Bridgerton and Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Both of with built to monetise unrequited, dangerous love. They make a familiar proposition: We're in love with dysregulation. 

By dysregulation, I refer to relationships that heighten your nervous system in extreme ways, that make you feel intensely happy but also intensely sad. You can be 'on top of the world one day' and then 'walking on eggshells' a few hours later. 

Why does this trope still hold such magnetism? Partly because modern life has made many people hungry for feeling, and hunger is not a careful reader. A small jolt can start to look like a love at first sight. Even when the mind understands the unsoundness of falling for the unavailable (like your boss) or the cruel (like the serial cheater), attraction still leans toward the flames but this time, the contemporary lover has simply traded candlelight for electricity.

Fortunately, this is not a personal moral failure and it can be explained very clearly.

Firstly, dysregulated love sells. Plot is rarely powered by tenderness and reliable care; stories prefer weather, because weather moves scenes forward (Who wants so watch a movie about a stable, happy couple?). Devotion is measured in sleeplessness while faith is proven by endurance. It is much more interesting to listen to stories of love that you must fight tooth and nail for. In fact, critics argue that Wuthering Heights  have been severely stripped of its core, only focusing on the brooding love story between two characters. 

Film and television deliver that lesson somatically. Tension, pacing, visuals, and music are engineered to elicit physiological response. Heightened soundtracks, charged silences and costume symbolism operate pedagogically, teaching audiences what to read as meaningful. Over time, the body learn that this type of love is exciting and the epitome of a relationship. Every girl wants to be swept off her feet and feel butterflies in her tummy no matter how independent she is. 

The problem is that physiology can primitive. Desire can produce these activated state, yet fear, uncertainty, and anticipatory stress can do the same. A study done in 1974 by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron explains that people (specifically men) can confuse any types of arousal (including fear) as  sexual. In relational contexts that amplify ambiguity, non-specific arousal can easily be misread as compatibility.

Anyone who has gone through the initial texting phase with a crush will know; a text after 2 days of silence can be addictive. Those moments feel not merely pleasurable but consequential. Given the mind’s track record for misattribution, it becomes easy to confuse relief with love, or relief with salvation.

Lastly, dysregulation offers identity. It appoints you the role of the one who can bear chaos without flinching. Endurance becomes a virtue and the relationship becomes a test that can be passed through loyalty rather than mutual care. The more it costs, the more it must be worth. The more Heathcliff and Catherine bite at each other, the more certain they become that they have found something total.

Dysregulation can feel seductive is that it offers an alibi. It transfers the responsibility from the realm of choice to the realm of fate. The anxious appetite, the sleepless loops, the compulsion to check and re-check become evidence of profundity rather than red flags. It is easy to blame unaccountability as “mysterious" or even worse, "independent". The moral labour of asking, Is this kind? Is this safe? Is this sustainable? is replaced by the more flattering narrative of being swept away.

So be aware of Love that electrifies, because you might just be feeling something else, confused for love. The most compelling love may not be the love that electrifies, but the love that permits an unmonitored self. When the lights go out and the body no longer needs to brace, that should be your North Star.