From Her Perspective

I was having dinner with a girlfriend last week and I noticed she was flushed.  Her eyes were sparkling.  She kept looking off into herself in the middle of our conversation.  She kept tossing her hair around, as though she was flirting with me because she couldn’t help it.  She was under some sort of influence, it was clear.  I asked her if she was okay, and, slyly, almost coquettishly, she said yes.  I asked her what she had done the night before, and she said she had gone out with someone she had been really excited to spend time with.  Then, it hit me.  I knew exactly what it was: classic love hangover. 

When I said this to her, she had no idea what I was talking about, and it occurred to me that she, along with other people, may not have the benefit of self-diagnosis in these situations.  So I thought I’d get into detail here…

Love Hangover : A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person, generally with whom one has spent a night of heavy drinking.  Love hangovers usually set in the following morning (as one tends to not really remember the night before) and symptoms last approximately 24 to 36 hours after said encounter, usually about as long as it takes for a regular hangover to go away.  However, unlike a real hangover, which results in nausea, headache, and a general sense of poor health, a love hangover’s symptoms are characterized by uncontrollable smiling, the inability to focus on anything other than the night before, overtiredness, and a general sense of giddiness. 

In layman’s terms, a love hangover is the intense emotion one feels after a good drunk hook-up, usually of the semi-random variety.  By this I mean a non-girlfriend/boyfriend.  The newness of the situation is a major contributor to the onset of a love hangover.  Sex may be a factor, but a good make-out session can warrant a love hangover under the right circumstances.  They often occur in females around second base, but males rarely suffer until they have safely slid into home. 

Love hangovers tend to manifest themselves differently in males and females.  While the female will moon about her apartment or office, smiling like an idiot and showing off to all of her friends, the male love hangover is more internal.  He is far less likely to verbalize said emotions, as males in our society have been conditioned to keep their feelings to themselves.  They will probably not want to talk about what happened the night before.  They may make reference to it, because even the strongest of men can’t always hold everything in, but you rarely see an overt male love hangover.  We can compare it to the consumption of alcohol in males and females.  One generally sees the female affected sooner, and after she’s had less.  The same thing happens with love hangovers.

Symptoms may include the constant checking of a phone to see if the other person has called.  Or an exaggerated casualness about the situation (i.e. “Yeah, whatever, that chick last night was cool.”) but the subject of said person keeps coming up (i.e. he has said the same thing about her 50 times in the last 15 minutes).  As I mentioned before, the sparkly eyes, the secretive smile, and the incapability to stop flirting also typify love hangovers.  The sexual energy one has garnered the night before may not have fully dissolved and has to spill out onto everyone else.

Although what I have presented thus far may seem alarming, please do not panic.  Case studies have shown that love hangovers tend to intensify and dissipate rapidly.  And they only usually emerge the first few times one sees this object of desire.  After the novelty has worn off, love hangovers stop, too.  One can eventually lead a normal life.  You may even revel a bit in the fact that you met someone you think is really cool.  I hope this brief summary was helpful, and that the next time you find yourself with these symptoms, you can relax and ride it out.  There is nothing worse than a wasted love hangover.