...and what better day to talk about love.

There are all sorts of forms of love. Unconditional love should be the most prevalent - loving someone without any conditions or reasons. Love for the sake of love. Unfortunately, it's not. Too many out there love with conditions - they fall out of love with someone because they found someone better looking, or they're only with someone because they give them gifts and spend money, or other unfathomable reasons.

There's the love a person has for their pets until they mess on the floor. There's the love a teenage girl has for a crush - either on a person in their real life, or a character they see on television (well, I know some grown women who have those crushes too). Love from a parent to a child. And then there's obsessive love.

Let's take a look at obsessive love today. We'll start with a story:

Once upon a time there was a very smart lady named Lisa. Lisa had it all - a great career, a beautiful family, a husband who loved her very much. Then Lisa did a bad thing and has put everything at risk, and it was all in the name of obsessive love.

The end? Not quite. Lisa now faces an attempted murder charge.

You see, Lisa wasn't obsessed with her husband and family. You see, she fell in love with a co-worker. And that co-worker, an unmarried man, was having a relationship with someone else. Lisa got jealous of the "other woman" and decided to put an end to it.

Shall I go on, or have you heard all about this already? Yes, I'm talking about the astronaut who donned an adult diaper and drove 900 miles (from Texas to Florida) to confront the woman that was having an affair with the man Lisa herself was having an affair with. She was so consumed with jealousy and so obsessed with dealing with this woman that she was compelled to do something.

So, she got in her car, and brought with her a steel mallet, a knife, garbage bags, pepper spray and rubber tubing. I suspect, as the police do and have charged, that she was going to kill her competition and dispose of the body parts. This is a woman who has flown into space (with the man she was having an affair with) and endured some of the greatest stresses a body can go through, physically and psychologically, in order to become an astronaut.

And she's snapped.

NASA has pulled her from the flight ready list, no surprise there. They're also going to re-evaluate their psychological testing of astronaut candidates, no surprise there either. This woman claims to love the man she was having the affair with. What kind of love compels someone to attempt to take someone else's life? Clearly not unconditional love.

Now this woman is going to get even more attention from the media because a New York Times story on her has been optioned for a movie. That's right, the astro-nut gets a movie about her life not because she did something extraordinary as a female astronaut, but because she was cracked enough to try and kill someone. Where have all the heroes gone? Certainly not to NASA these days.

Love can compel people to do many things. It can make you soar, make you feel like a better person, make you do things you wouldn't normally do. Obviously it compelled Lisa Nowak to do something she probably wouldn't normally do... what *most* people wouldn't normally do.

So, there's my treatise on love for this year. Not what you expected, huh?