Divine Madness: Why Falling in Love Looks Like Insanity

It opens the way Alan Watts' talks often open, with a voice that sounds like it is enjoying itself. A host named Mark Watts introduces an old recording called "Divine Madness," and then the lecturer begins by calling romantic love "a particularly virulent and dangerous form of divine madness." Somewhere in the first minute, a listener hears him describe a person who looks perfectly ordinary to everyone else and yet, to the one who is smitten, appears to be "god or goddess incarnate." The room is laughing. The joke, it turns out, is a serious argument: that falling in love is one of the most unreasonable things a human being can do, and that the modern institution of marriage was built, badly, to domesticate it. The episode, Ep. 42 of the Being in the Way podcast from the Be Here Now Network, is a 27-minute walk through that argument, from medieval poetry to the bedroom, ending on the claim that surrender is the only sane response to a love that is out of control.

Why does Alan Watts call falling in love a form of madness?

Watts starts with the practical problem. Falling in love is disruptive, and nobody gets to schedule it. "You never know when it will strike or for what reason," he says, comparing it to a chronic illness: once you have it, you do not simply recover on your own timetable. It is also socially inconvenient. The feeling does not respect the boundaries that families, villages, and governments have spent centuries drawing around who may marry whom.

That unpredictability is the heart of the talk. Falling in love is a state that arrives uninvited and rearranges the lover's sense of what is important. In the description that accompanies the episode, the theme is put plainly: falling in love is "one of the most insane things we can do." Watts is not mocking the feeling. He is treating it with the seriousness of a force that can overturn a life, and he is asking what happens when we try to nail that force to a legal document.

How did marriage become a contract instead of a romance?

This is where the talk turns into a history lesson, and it is the most surprising stretch of the material. Watts argues that the Western idea of marriage and the experience of falling in love were, at their origins, "really rather separate things." In agrarian cultures, he says, nobody chose a marriage partner. A marriage was "an alliance of families," arranged to create a social unit smaller than a village but larger than a household. Grandparents with enormous influence "dicker and use go-betweens," weighing suitability alongside the dowry, and deciding whether the match would benefit both clans.

He reaches back to ancient Greece and to a word that, in his telling, has been badly misread. The Greek parthenos, usually rendered "virgin," meant in his account "a woman who chooses her own husband," and there were very few of them. He points to a line in the book of Isaiah that is often read as a prophecy about a virgin birth, noting that the Greek term there does not strictly mean a virgin at all. Whether or not a reader accepts that linguistic reading, Watts is using it for a larger purpose: to show that choosing your own spouse is the historical exception, not the rule.

Then came the knots. Watts describes the courtly love tradition that flowered in Provence in the Middle Ages, in which a knight-poet would fix his devotion on a lady, often a married one, and sing beneath her window without ever going to bed with her. He credits Denis de Rougemont's account of this, while noting a rival explanation he finds more plausible: that noble ladies, with husbands away hunting and making war, were simply bored and took lovers, and the poetry grew up around that reality. Both stories, for Watts, point to the same tension. Desire wanted to be free, and the social order wanted it to be contained.

"So then as a result of the gradual fusion of these two approaches to the relationship of the sexes we have arrived at the idea of the romantic marriage. In which the two trends are misallied to say the very least." — Alan Watts, "Divine Madness," as presented on the Being in the Way podcast, Ep. 42 (Be Here Now Network, 2026)

The result, in his words, is a strange hybrid. You are expected to fall in love of your own free choice, and then to seal that choice with a legal contract "in which you get up before a magistrate or priest and do solemnly curse and swear that you will be faithful to each other until death do you part." Watts jokes that this vow "often leads to murder," and the room laughs, but his underlying point is sober. Two people desperate to be together will promise almost anything to get there, and the contract is then asked to hold a feeling that was never designed to stay put.

What is the "secret intent" behind the repression of sex?

One of the more provocative threads in the talk concerns sexual repression. Watts says he has developed a theory, laid out in his book Beyond Theology, about what he calls the Christian repression of sex. His claim is that its "secret intent" was to make people more interested in sex. If sexual life were completely liberal and every door open, he argues, it would become so easy that it might become a bore, and people would drift toward other, less healthy diversions. Strict disapproval, in this reading, keeps the fire lit.

Watts also quotes a friend who insists that laws about sexual relationships should never be liberalized, because if disapproval fades and the forbidden becomes easy, "it's less fun." He does not present this as a prescription so much as a diagnosis of how desire behaves. The provocation is worth sitting with, whatever one thinks of the theory, because it reframes the old moral struggle as a kind of erotic engineering.

Why does Watts argue that surrender is the only sane response?

The talk's resolution is where the madness gets its name. The episode's description pulls out the central sentence: "Love is an act of surrender to another person, total abandonment. I give myself to you. Take me. Do anything you like with me." Watts acknowledges how mad that sounds, because it means letting things get out of control. But he flips the usual meaning of sense. The course of wisdom, he argues, is to let go, to commit oneself, to give oneself up. The conclusion he reaches is: "in madness lies sanity."

"Love is an act of surrender to another person, total abandonment. I give myself to you. Take me. Do anything you like with me. So, that's quite mad. It's letting things get out of control. Actually, the course of wisdom (what is really sensible) is to let go, to commit oneself, to give oneself up, and that's quite mad." — Alan Watts, quoted on the Being in the Way podcast, Ep. 42 (Be Here Now Network, 2026)

The episode's description lists the adjacent ideas that follow from this. Watts considers the notion of a partner as a "mutual guru and student," in which each person teaches and is taught. He discusses being truthful with one another and "setting each other free" inside a relationship, rather than holding each other to a fixed picture. And he raises the idea that we might each be incarnate divinity in the eyes of someone else, and that falling in love is the moment that vision becomes possible. Those threads are sketched in the material rather than fully developed, which makes them a useful starting point for a listener's own reflection rather than a finished doctrine.

What does this talk mean for relationships now?

Watts' argument is old, delivered in a warm and jocular voice, and it lands against a modern background in which many people have tried to make love predictable through agreements, expectations, and scripts. His warning is that expectations can become a kind of hypnosis. The more tightly we insist that a relationship must look a certain way, the more we risk being untrue to our own experience and to the other person's. A contract can protect children, property, and stability, which Watts acknowledges society needs. What it cannot do is guarantee that the feeling will last, and the attempt to make it do so is where much of the damage occurs.

There is also something freeing in his refusal to treat breakups as simple failure. He points out that the phrase "breaking up" is a put-down, suggesting that something precious has been smashed, when the truth may be far more complicated. Read this way, the talk is less a case against marriage than a case for honesty about what marriage is, and for leaving room in the bond for the strangeness of love itself.

Watts' final move is to suggest that we can see one another as we truly are only when we are in that mad state, and that the sane response to it is to yield rather than control. Whether one finds that persuasive or merely charming, it is a provocation that is hard to dismiss. It asks the listener to consider which of their own certainties are really protecting them, and which are just keeping the fire from burning.

Where to go from here

To hear the full argument in Watts' own cadence, watch the Being in the Way episode and listen for the moments when the room breaks into laughter, because those are often where the sharpest points are hiding. For the complete talks, the episode description points listeners to Alanwatts.org, which is supported alongside Ram Dass' Love Serve Remember Foundation. If the history of courtly love caught your attention, look into the sources Watts names, including Denis de Rougemont's study of love in the Western world. And if the idea of surrender in love unsettles you, that is probably the most useful place to begin: sit with the question of what you would have to give up in order to be truly known by another person.