Now They Call It ‘Co-Dependency’ : Love: Once, passion for another could launch ships, change nations and consume a soul. Now it’s pathological.

They used to call it love. Now, it’s co-dependency.

Love--the living for, in, through, of and with another--was once a godly emotion, worthy of the poet’s labor, the artist’s creation, the philosopher’s brooding. Wars were fought in the name of love, civilizations destroyed and nations founded.

The history lessons that no one slept through were those explaining the mess that Paris and Helen caused to the city of Troy, or how Rome was forever changed by the torrid love of Marc Antony and Cleopatra. Even the little megalomaniac Napoleon looked more attractive through his devotion to Josephine.

But love in the classic sense no longer exists. Compared to the emotions that inspired the Taj Mahal, the Rubaiyat or the Mona Lisa, what we now call love seems sanitized, de-bugged and plastic-coated. We are proud of having demystified love.

Neatly packaged and labeled, we now sell what Dante once called the “power that moves the sun and other stars” as “intimacy,” “commitment” or “communication” in group sessions, private counseling and at the local bookstore. What doesn’t fit this mold is diagnosed as “addictive,” “compulsive,” “dysfunctional” or “pathological.” The only “healthy” form of love we are taught today is self -love.

Best sellers tell us that “Women Who Love Too Much” end up with men who suffer from the “Peter Pan Syndrome” or are “Men Who Can’t Love.” We learn that “Learning to Love Yourself” helps to avoid making “Wrong Choices,” and that “Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love” is the map to finding “The Road Less Travelled.”

The buzzword is co-dependency. Family counselor and PBS television host John Bradshaw believes that the relationship of two “inseparable” people who must be together is “co-dependency,” which--among other scary things--is a “symptom of abandonment” often coupled with “sexual addiction.”

My love is a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.

Modern psychology, I’m sure, would interpret the emotions expressed in this Shakespeare sonnet as a case of high-grade co-dependency.

I have trouble thinking of Mozart’s Constance and Verdi’s Aida as dysfunctional individuals who must learn to “nurture the inner child.” And I can’t imagine anyone telling Orpheus that losing his Eurydice in Hades “may have been a blessing in disguise” that will “allow him to focus on himself.”

In this sensible, self-sufficient and salubrious world of ours, the existence of another as the reason for our own is no longer necessary. We grow babies in test tubes, see and hear ourselves in movies and on tapes and proudly satisfy our needs and wants alone. We no longer see ourselves reflected in the soul of another. A mirror does just fine.

Walking units of emotional health who have successfully rid themselves of addictive-compulsive emotions, severed the dysfunctional ties of co-dependency and no longer are in danger of loving another, we can proudly ask ourselves:

“How do I love me ? Let me count the ways. . . .”