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Referring to the title of the song by IOWA, what does it mean? I understood it literally as "I got sick with you" or "I made you sick", but I think I'm missing something.

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    Love is a sickness
    – V.V.
    Oct 25, 2020 at 10:58

3 Answers 3

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This might be not the best translation but it was my first association with the song you quoted: "I'm mad about you". Besides, it's just a nice song.

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"Я заболела тобой" is a Russian idiom which literally means: "I fell in love with you". Moreover the meaning is about female love: you can see the last "а" letter in word "заболела". If a man sang such words in any song it would be "заболел" (without last one "a").

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    Thank you. Can you show some other examples or sources to prove this is a common idiom?
    – Isa
    Oct 31, 2020 at 9:53
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    Here is an amateur poem about love in Russian, where this speech turnover is used zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d48241723371c00afdcbe1a/…
    – Aleksei V.
    Oct 31, 2020 at 17:40
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    As you can see its title is "Я болен" ("I'm sick"). And you can think of it is equal to "Я заболел" - I have some kind of illness. But then in the poem he speaks about love at all, so love is the very disease, roughly speaking - "Заболел тобой давно..." - I love you for a long time.
    – Aleksei V.
    Oct 31, 2020 at 17:52
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    @I. Hasanov ru.m.wikisource.org/wiki/…
    – Elena
    Nov 2, 2020 at 21:22
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It's idiom meaning fell in love (especially woman's love)

I think the roots of this idiom is in verses of Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva

Here's the text (in Russian) written in 1915.

Verses become famous after a well-known movie The Irony of Fate - here's song from that movie

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