Literally, it means that love is death, death for yourself, death at your own hands. Falling in love with someone is akin to killing yourself.

Love being suicide doesn't literally happen very much, but it can often feel like it, especially when that love ends. It can end in many different ways, but one constant is that it hurts and sometimes that hurting never stops.

Linked to this is the Hedgehog's Dilemma, if love is suicide, if it hurts so much, why do we desire it so? Why is it that the pain we feel the most is of a broken heart?

Pardon me for taking this seriously, but speaking as someone who has lost people in this manner I can tell you that is not a fair comparison, analogy or anything.

Suicide is, by definition, an act of SELF love and SELF hatred. It is all about self. Love is, by definition, all about someone, or something else.

While love is often painful, life is also often painful. Love is life at it's most extreme, the best and the worst. Love is often difficult for people who feel things strongly because it is the most intense of all of those feelings. But it is about life to the nth degree. It is not about null.

Suicide is a selfish act of self hatred and/or hatred of others turned inward. It is always harder on those left behind.

If there is an antithesis of infatuation (maybe there isn't one) it is suicide.

If you lose yourself in someone or something it may be love, it may be grace, it may just be sexual intoxication. But it is NOT suicide.

Maybe love is suicide in the same way it's suicide for a caterpillar to transform into a butterfly. When we fall in love we become something more then we were before. We gain a new perspective, the world stays the same, but we see it with new eyes. This cannot happen unless we let go of our previous selves.

It's like the stories about Zen. We cannot grow unless we empty our respective cups.