Haltzman

The things we do for love, we are reminded this week, far exceed walking in the rain and the snow when there’s nowhere to go, as the old pop band 10cc put it.

They now include donning a wig and trench coat, packing an air pistol and knife, dressing in a diaper to avoid toilet stops, and driving some 900 miles to pepper-spray a romantic rival in the pre-dawn hours in an airport near Walt Disney World.

As citizens of Planet Earth know, that is what Orlando, Fla., police allege astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak did earlier this week. Police charged Nowak, 43, a Navy captain, with the attempted murder of a woman she apparently believed was in love with the same man she lusted after — a fellow astronaut nicknamed Billy-O.

The incident astounded many who couldn’t imagine that a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, aeronautical engineer, and mother of three who spent almost two weeks on the international space station last summer would behave more like the bunny-in-the-stewpot jilted lover in Fatal Attraction than the heroes in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.

Nowak quickly became the, ah, butt of countless jokes, including this one, heard yesterday on local radio: How long does it take an astronaut to get from Houston to Orlando? Depends. Late-night comedians struck gold. And the tabloids romped, with the New York Post proclaiming the episode “Lust in Space” and The Daily News calling it the “Dark Side of the Loon.” Google News late yesterday afternoon listed 4,560 separate stories from all corners of the globe, some jocular, some not.

The interest renews a timeless question, all the more timely with Valentine’s Day next week:

Is there anything someone, given the right (or wrong) circumstances, won’t do for love?

FIRST, A PRIMER on neurochemistry. What happens in the brain, after all, spells the difference between pepper spray and long-stemmed roses.

“When people are in the early stages of passion, ordinary ‘grounding’ functions in the body — such as sleeping and eating — are disabled by a highly charged chemistry, a cascade of neurochemicals associated with excitement and arousal,” says Terri Orbuch, psychologist, researcher, and host of Detroit’s Love Doctor television and radio programs.

Three naturally occurring substances come into play, says Dr. Scott Haltzman, an assistant professor at Brown University’s Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior: serotonin, the so-called feel-good hormone; dopamine, a central component of the brain’s reward system; and norepinephrine, which plays a role in increasing the heart rate.

“When you’re with your partner, or the object of your affection, the serotonin levels rise,” says Haltzman. “And when you’re not, they plummet. You feel despondent, you feel somewhat agitated. Moreover, you start to obsess on that person.”

According to Haltzman, studies suggest that people in the full blush of love have elevated levels of norepinephrine, which “gives you a sense of a rush.” Likewise, more dopamine is produced. “It’s the ‘reward indicator’ in your brain,” Haltzman says, and it’s associated with addiction.

In the case of unrequited love, craving can move otherwise grounded people to less rational behaviors — though not necessarily with disastrous outcomes like Nowak’s.

“Sometimes you drive cross-country with roses and you do win their heart over,” says Haltzman, who is also medical director of Woonsocket’s NRI Community Services and author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men: Eight Ways to Win Your Wife’s Heart Forever.

ACCORDING TO officials, Nowak, likely under stress from a demanding job and a failed marriage, planned to murder Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman, who stated in a request for a protective order that Nowak had been stalking her for several weeks. In her request, Shipman described Cmdr. William A. Oefelein — Billy-O — as her boyfriend. Nowak apparently wanted Billy-O, too.

While the details differ — history seems to offer no other case of a crazed would-be lover driving almost halfway across a continent in a diaper and a wig — the essentials of the Nowak episode are not unique.

In the early 1990s, the teenage Amy Fisher began an affair with Joey Buttafuoco that led to her shooting Buttafuocco’s wife in the face. Just last month, a British woman was charged with murder for allegedly sabotaging the parachute of a woman she believed was having an affair with the man she loved. The doomed woman plunged 9,000 feet to her death.

Fiction is replete with examples of the radical things we do for love. Consider Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or the more contemporary Fatal Attraction, the 1987 movie in which the Glenn Close character becomes obsessed with the married man with whom she had a fling. Her obsession drives her to boil her ex-lover’s daughter’s pet rabbit on a stove, among other indiscretions.

So what sends someone over the edge?

Crime expert Linda Fairstein says it can be erotomania, “a psychological disorder marked by the delusional belief that one is the object of another person’s love or sexual desire,” as defined by an online medical dictionary sponsored by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.

“It is largely a diagnosis of women — usually very educated, very intelligent women,” says Fairstein, chief of the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit for three decades and now a bestselling author of legal thrillers, including the just-released Bad Blood.

“Often it starts with stalking behaviors that are less ‘out there,’ ” said Fairstein. “Fatal Attraction is erotomania — that’s literally what it can become. The erotomaniac goes after the person or thing in her delusion that she believes is the only person or thing standing in the way of her getting the love attraction.”

WHILE AGREEING that Nowak took love sickness to an extreme, others maintain that her actions sprang from common ground.

“Doctors, politicians, heads of state, and truck drivers all get crazy when it comes to love,” says April Masini, author of several relationship books and founder of the advice site www.AskApril.com. “Jealousy and other derivative behaviors surrounding peaceful, healthy love are centuries old and the source of some of our greatest operas, novels, movies and other forms of artistic expression — and history.”

In a broadcast after the news broke, top-rated talk show host Jay Severin dubbed Nowak the “astro-nut.” Then he explored a weightier theme: Who among us has not done something crazy in the name of love?

On the phone yesterday from his Massachusetts home, Severin, whose show airs weekday afternoons on Boston’s WTKK 96.9-FM, gave his own example.

He was living in New York City a while back, he said, when his girlfriend dumped him. Severin moved in with another woman, but couldn’t put his old flame out of mind. One night, he began secretly and frantically calling her. She finally answered.

“The instant I heard her voice, I knew there was someone with her.”

The old girlfriend denied it.

Discombobulated by the thought of her with another man, Severin slipped toward madness. He told his current acquaintance that he thought he was having a heart attack and had to get to a hospital.

I’ll go with you, the woman said.

No you won’t, Severin said.

Alone, he took a cab to his old girlfriend’s apartment and banged on her door. The woman came into the hall, where a neighbor-rousing argument ensued.

“I was the enraged, jealous, dumped boyfriend,” Severin said.

He didn’t care.

“If there had been a TV camera on me, I wouldn’t have acted the least bit different. I was near — or already at — the stage of the ‘adult diaper.’ ”

Severin has no interest in what he calls the romantic “hijinks of a Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.” Nowak’s case intrigues him, he says, because despite her astronaut status, she is a real person and real mother, a sort of Everywoman … or man.

“I care because it’s me and my best friend and it’s you and it’s everybody else. And I don’t think you outgrow it. If you’re in a relationship, you can ‘get it’ at any time.”

The things we do for love.

gwmiller@projo.com