Aren’t we all just crazy in love?

“Love conquers all” is what Virgil wrote in his Eclogues. Of course, love needs a little… “Love conquers all” is what Virgil wrote in his Eclogues. Of course, love needs a little help sometimes. Like rubber tubing, say, or maybe a bb gun. And who can forget the wig, the knife with the four-inch blade, maybe some diapers? Now that you’ve got that, love is going to be just fine.

Lisa Nowak is the astronaut who is being charged with attempted murder because of her bizarre actions on Feb. 6. She is alleged to have driven from her home in Texas to a Florida airport, where she attempted to abduct her romantic rival, a fellow astronaut who made the third side of a romantic triangle with – yes, of course – another astronaut.

Astronauts. These people are all astronauts. They have gone through some of the craziest training and screening in the entire world to become what they are. They’ve woken up every morning with the knowledge that they – unlike Lance Bass – have a pretty good chance of going into space.

I wake up every morning pretty sure I’ll miss my bus.

These people aren’t like normal everyday citizens who worry about job security and office politics. They worry about burning up during re-entry or the computer on their spaceship going crazy and attempting to kill them. Oh, wait, that was “2001” where the computer goes crazy. This is real life, where the astronaut goes crazy.

I don’t mean to sound harsh. I hold no grudge against Ms. Nowak and her alleged actions that have yet to be proven in a court of law. We’ve all been frustrated before in matters of love. We’ve all been upset when the one we want doesn’t share that feeling. We’ve all driven 900 miles straight wearing diapers so we wouldn’t have to use the restroom in order to kill somebody, right? That has happened to everybody else, right? Not just to Lisa and me?

Because it isn’t as if Lisa is operating in a vacuum. There are plenty of examples one can draw from pop culture of someone doing something absolutely crazy when he or she is in love. Eighties movies gave us, notoriously, the idea of stalking as a romantic one, with films like “Say Anything” showing the audience that the way you can prove your love is to stand outside someone’s window blaring music when he or she refuses to talk to you. Because stalking means you care.

“Love bites, love bleeds,” sang Def Leppard, and we all know how insightful hair metal ’80s bands with one-armed drummers are. Love can make people do really weird, out of control, not normal and, fine, yes, absolutely insane stuff. Maybe we’ve never sprayed someone in the face with pepper spray in a parking lot while wearing a wig, but we’ve certainly all found ourselves doing something absurd because love has a tendency to tear away from us our rationality and replace it with utter madness.

Which is how the Greeks viewed it. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was produced through the castration of another god, so right from the start we have always linked the sexual to the violent. For the Greeks, love wasn’t this lovey-dovey business with cardboard cut-out hearts and flowers. It wasn’t a holiday. It was a ticket into a realm of utter insanity.

Love, of course, still isn’t believed to be the work of random deities who wear flowing robes and appear in films like “Clash of the Titans,” which is probably why we’re being so hard on the astronaut. Everybody likes to think that we’re so rational nowadays. We make relentless jokes about this and engage in helpless punning – “astro-nut” and “off the deep end” are two that I’ve caught – while flashing her mug shot on the evening news. And I can’t argue with that. I mean, that’s what I’ve been doing this whole column. But is there something else going on with all of this, too?

I think a lot of time we tend to forget that romantic love is a construct of the world and that there used to be different ideas of what love was. Now the only version of love we have is the love that the movies give us, and that’s the love we want: a staggering, beautiful, epic kind of love all of the time.

Sometimes, it seems, love reverts to an older unstable way of being, and that always strikes us as unbelievable. We can’t imagine what would drive someone over the edge like that. The truth is that the edge is always there, and it’s the horizon that we could just as easily fall off of instead of riding off into.

There’s a reason Beyonce called that song “Crazy in Love” instead of “Normal in Love,” right? I like to think of Lisa driving through Texas, across Louisiana and into Florida, her eyes wide open and bright, her powerful astronaut hands gripping the steering wheel so that her knuckles turn white; and the whole time that song blaring through her speakers, the horn section blasting as her eyes focus and refocus, singing along as she crosses state lines, crazy in love.

Upset about the convention center collapse? E-mail kjs34@pitt.edu about it.