Love can be both intoxicating and toxic. One desires to be taken over: enveloped, dissolved, decomposed, and one desires just as strongly to retain an individual shape. For this reason, Anne Carson describes erotic love as fundamentally ambivalent in her 1986 book, Eros the Bittersweet. As she puts it, the “incursion” of Eros invades the self, disturbing its homeostasis, and the self finds this both painful and pleasurable. It is only due to incursion, after all, that the self can even recognize itself as such. When the self recognizes its boundaries, it has to reckon with them. The lover has to ask, “ ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover.” Carson describes this change as both bitter and sweet, borrowing these terms from a fragment of poetry by the ancient Greek writer Sappho:

Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up