Ah, love.

That wonderful feeling that the Beatles say is all we need.

But love can make even people who were once rational do irrational things.

All too often, those irrational actions cross the line into criminality.

A news story made the rounds on Facebook last week about a New Mexico woman’s arrest for harassing her ex-boyfriend to the tune of 77,000 phone calls in one week.

The story also reports she sent him almost two thousand emails, over 40,000 texts, 217 audio messages and 647 letters in that week.

That kind of harassment would basically be a full-time job — literally, it would take up all of someone’s time for a week, given that 77,000 phone calls in seven days amounts to one every 7.85 seconds.

This time-defying super-stalker ability is not exactly plausible, and the story is, of course, satire.

If the fact that this story actually could be real because some people fly so far off the handle post-breakup is a bit scary to you, that’s probably a sign you’re still thinking rationally.

But if you remember from your unit in English on literary devices, satire is humorous because it criticizes people for their foolishness. It works because it has verisimilitude — it “rings true.”

Things like this really do happen (albeit to a lesser extent). In March, a Toronto police officer ended up being demoted and forfeiting 24 days of pay after a police tribunal for one count of discreditable conduct and two counts of insubordination for sending Facebook messages under several aliases to her ex-boyfriend’s new wife and that woman’s friends and family.

She also used her access to the city’s police database to find information about the new wife and her ex-partner more than 100 times.

Another case that just wrapped up in Kamloops court saw 38-year-old George Herber sentenced to one year of house arrest for 11 counts of mischief for harassing three ex-girlfriends through two fake Facebook accounts. He sent threatening messages to them, their new partners, their family members and their friends.

His harassment escalated to the point where he slashed their tires and keyed their cars.

Things can get drastically more sinister than threatening text messages and even slashed tires between scorned lovers. Statistics paint a pretty grim picture of the relationships between victims of violence and murder and their killers.

Police reported data from 2011 shows about 26,600 women and 6,600 men experienced violence after splitting up with a dating partner or spouse, according to a Statistics Canada report.

Females are more likely to be victims of family violence regardless of the type — nearly seven in 10 victims of family violence were female in 2011.

That year, 80 per cent of victims of spousal violence were female.

Maybe that’s why the fake story of the “psycho ex-girlfriend” went viral — because it reflects more of a power fantasy than the violent reality of the “jealous ex-boyfriend” story.

Love may be all we need, but basic human decency is love’s ideal companion.