Extremely interesting psychological perspective on the tale! KUDOS!

My romantic side, however, thinks your overall take is a bit too cynical. I think Shakespeare can be thinking both at the same time, yes they were young and did not cope as best they could with the troubles they faced, but society was to blame too! And perhaps mostly!

The tragic flaw of Romeo and Juliet as people that I hear about most often is that they had a failure to communicate. A communication issue is also a problem that could also be addressed with some therapy sessions. :)

I don't think we should have to see Romeo and Juliet as mature and well-adjusted in order to make the point that the whole Capulet v. Montague feud was stupid and wrong and tragic. It's like that ride at Disneyland "It's a small world"... there really isn't as much distance between people as it seems, it's a world of joys and a world of tears it's a world of hopes and a world of fears... Can't we all just get along???

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail--and to someone who has been studying addiction for over 30 years, romantic love looks like addiction.
Would R & J have been able to sustain their passion? Of course not. It would have morphed into a more mature affection, or withered. It never got a chance to do either, not b/c of the young lovers, but b/c of the feud which separated their families.
Juliet is more mature than Romeo--she proposes to him, not the other way around, and her love for him is her first--but they don't fall in love to defy their families. They don't know the beloved is a member of the rival family when they fall.
Your article trivializes a great piece of poetry, and fails to appreciate Shakespeare's real knowledge of human nature.

1. Why does Shakespeare take so much time at the beginning of the play to establish Romeo's suicidal lovesickness following the demise of his prior love affair?

2. Why does Shakespeare make Juliet a virginal teenager who is fighting a stifling home life, rather than a mature, self-confident woman, like many of his leading female characters are?

3. Why does Shakespeare create the character of Father Lawrence to upbraid Romeo for falling in and out of love so rapidly, for his self-destructive impetuosity, and for his failure to appreciate his life advantages and opportunities?

4. Why is each lover's immediate reaction whenever confronted with any impediment to their relationship, repeated throughout the play, to threaten suicide?

5. If Shakespeare's point was to show how cruelly oppressed the lovers were, why do Romeo and Juliet commit suicide when alone in one another's presence, rather than, say, Romeo being executed for violating his banishment?

These are just two kids who have no idea and aren’t mature to know what love really is. How can one person (Romeo) go from one love to another in such a short period of time? Maybe Romeo was just simply horny, he is a teenager, impulsive, hormones pumping like crazy, and not mature enough for cognitive decision making. His parents were too busy feuding that maybe they didn’t have the time to raise Romeo appropriately. This is your typical kid that thinks he’s going to die if he doesn’t get what he wants. Then we have Juliet, a young immature virgin girl that doesn’t want to get married to an older man that she doesn’t like, she’s also hormonal. Maybe Romeo was her way out of that marriage, maybe just the idea that Romeo was a forbidden boy she couldn’t be with because of their family feud, drove her to wanting him more. All in all these are two kids that have no idea what going on with them; it’s simply an infatuation. It’s not being cynical, it’s being realistic, and apparently nobody wants to be realistic anymore.

Love tends to be blind. People falling in love tend to be irrational and illogical. The love emotion takes over, thereafter nothing else matters.
Love can be destructive. Love, blind love, can ruin your life. Yes, some kind of love is blind love. This kind of love is infatuation.