The last time I obsessed over a boy, there was no Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat. There were only telephones and all you could do was stare at them. I thought staring at the phone would make it ring. We all did.

Now, the options for stalking and obsessing are endless. I’m not sure how anyone does their homework or gets a job when it’s so easy to spend your time tracking and following a crush. When you’re in the throes of an obsession, it must seem logical to spend the whole day checking the list of who liked your crush’s Instagram post or to scramble around Facebook looking up his last five exes to see if they look better in a bikini than you do.

When Rachel Bloom and I began working on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, we regaled each other for hours with stories of the unwise things we had done for love, especially the loves that had rejected us. It was the ones who got away (or in the case of my husband, tried to get away and failed) who were particularly compelling. We both had vivid memories of all the ex-boyfriend scheming we had done and the lies we had told ourselves to justify those schemes. Those memories formed much of the basis for our show.

In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca Bunch (played by Rachel) takes this kind of obsessive behavior to an extreme, but the truth is, we have never found her actions to be all that exaggerated. We’ve all done seriously dumb things for love, haven’t we?

When we pitched the show, we were amazed when every meeting turned into a confessional. People were eager to tell us the shocking, silly, outrageous things they had done during various courtships. One executive described in detail a tattoo of a tiger on her back, gotten to commemorate her freedom after a terrible breakup.

In all these stories, people talked about feeling out of control. When you are in love and especially when you are spurned by love, your body is coursing with powerful chemicals, ones that control your behavior in ways you know are not rational. We all know that, on some level, love makes you at least a little crazy.