Love & Passion Quote by Albert Ellis

Ellis is doing what he always did best: yanking romance off its velvet pedestal and putting it under harsh clinic lighting. The line is blunt, almost tabloid in its phrasing ("sex and love cases"), but the bluntness is the point. He’s not interested in dignifying obsession with poetic language because dignification is part of the trap; it helps people treat craving as destiny. By calling it "compulsively in love", he smuggles in a clinical diagnosis where our culture prefers a love story. Compulsion isn’t devotion. It’s a loop.

The intent is both therapeutic and polemical. Ellis is talking from the vantage of mid-century psychotherapy, when he was pushing Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy: stop treating feelings as unquestionable truths; interrogate the beliefs feeding them. The subtext is that devastation doesn’t come from rejection alone. It comes from the private rulebook people build around it: I must be loved by this person, or I am unlovable; if they don’t choose me, my life collapses. He uses extreme language ("killing themselves") to puncture the romantic myth that suffering proves sincerity. In his telling, suffering proves something else: catastrophic thinking left unchecked.

The cultural context matters. Modern Western romance markets exclusivity as proof of value, then acts shocked when exclusivity becomes dependency. Ellis’ clinical anecdote doubles as social critique: we train people to equate being chosen with being whole, then send them into relationships like high-stakes auditions. His sentence refuses to sentimentalize that damage. It insists that what feels like love can be an anxiety disorder wearing a valentine.