Turns out “crazy in love” isn’t just a Beyoncé lyric—it’s a peer-reviewed lifestyle choice, now statistically confirmed across three continents.
Science, in its endless quest to explain the obvious, has just announced that people with psychiatric disorders are more likely to marry people with…wait for it…psychiatric disorders. Thank you, Nature Human Behaviour*, for confirming what every Thanksgiving dinner with your extended family has already proven.
The study spanned 14.8 million people across Taiwan, Denmark, and Sweden, which suggests not only that insanity loves company but also that researchers are willing to count every last Nordic divorce to prove it. The conclusion? Schizophrenics marry schizophrenics, depressives shack up with depressives, and OCD couples spend their honeymoons alphabetizing the minibar.
Apparently, the only real surprises were national quirks. In Taiwan, OCD couples thrive—presumably because at least one spouse knows exactly how to fold the dumpling napkins. In Scandinavia, though, they’re less keen, maybe because spending six months in the dark with someone who insists you re-stack the firewood in Fibonacci sequence is a dealbreaker.
There are three explanations, all equally bleak.
One: like attracts like. Nobody understands a bipolar episode quite like someone currently riding the manic rocket to Mars.
Two: convergence. Spend enough time together, and suddenly you both develop the same charming paranoia about the toaster spying on you.
Three: stigma shrinks your dating pool. Who else is going to marry you when you’ve spent half the decade on SSRIs and the other half explaining them to TSA agents?
To put it in plainer terms: if you’ve been committed, your soulmate may be waiting in the next padded room.
History offers endless supporting data. Think of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—she wrote novels in the sanatorium while he drank gin in the Ritz, and somehow it worked until it didn’t. Or Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: poetry, passion, and the world’s bleakest domestic arrangements. Even Sid and Nancy prove the theory. He stabbed her, but nobody ever accused them of being incompatible.
The study also warns that two loons don’t cancel each other out. Instead, they double the odds of producing offspring who think conspiracy forums are peer-reviewed science. So the cycle continues—another generation of anxious, compulsive, chemically-enhanced romantics looking for someone with matching pill bottles.
The real laugh here is that people ever thought otherwise. Did we imagine depressives go hunting for motivational speakers? Or that alcoholics fall madly in love with teetotaling yoga instructors who own juice bars? No, they go for people who understand the deep spiritual bond of six empty vodka bottles and a shared Uber receipt.
And let’s not forget the researchers’ phrasing: “shared suffering.” Ah yes, nothing says “’til death do us part” like synchronized panic attacks at IKEA.
Beyond the chuckles, there’s a grim little moral. Life gets faster, messier, and harder, and rather than running from our crazy, we run into someone else’s. The study suggests it’s practically human nature. So if you wake up one morning and realize you’re both hoarding tuna cans for the apocalypse and labeling the spice rack in Esperanto—don’t worry. Science says you’re just in love.
