Love Addiction: They Love Me, They Love Me Not
Love is often on the brain in February, with Valentine’s Day front and center almost anywhere you look. In almost every store, every commercial, and every radio station, we are bombarded with messages about love, and why not? Everyone wants to be in love, and everyone wants to feel loved, because love feels good…until it doesn’t. While not often talked about, the feelings that we describe as love can also end up hurting us when we become reckless in our pursuit of them, and like many other addictions, this will often manifest as hurting ourselves and others when we feel as though we’d do anything to catch that feeling.
But can you really be addicted to love? Love is, after all, something that all of us truly need, somewhat unlike other forms of addiction. Though perhaps not in the same way that someone might be addicted to alcohol, sex, or another substance, the destructive cycles often very much mirror what might come to mind when we think of a stereotypical image of addiction. In her book Facing Love Addiction, Pia Mellody describes love addiction as a toxic pattern of “someone who is dependent on, enmeshed with, and compulsively focused on taking care of another person,” often another person who is either unwilling or incapable of responding in an emotionally reciprocal way.
Pia Mellody describes love addiction as a toxic pattern of “someone who is dependent on, enmeshed with, and compulsively focused on taking care of another person,” often another person who is either unwilling or incapable of responding in an emotionally reciprocal way.
If that description sounds a little concerningly familiar, it may be because you have likely encountered this push-pull or playing-hard-to-get paradigm scattered throughout pop culture. Countless songs, movies, and shows have been written that portray this dance almost as an ideal. There’s still stereotypical relationship advice out there admonishing people to wait at least a few days to text someone back or not to appear too eager at the start of a relationship. Adages like this can inadvertently play into the development of an unhealthy pattern of love addiction because we get conditioned into rooting for the love addict who is doing everything in their power to get the other person to notice them, give attention to them, and hopefully fall in love with them in the end, no matter the toll it takes on the love addict themselves. Because the story that we’re told is often that it’s worth it in the end, because the couple ends up together, and even though it was difficult or painful for a while that everything turned out alright. That may be how the Hallmark movies end when the screen fades to black, but we all know that in real life the relationship continues past that seemingly happy ending, that the cinematic happy ending doesn’t necessarily reflect the realities of daily life with a partner.
The thrilling, intoxicating highs and lows that we see in rom coms are actually the two halves of the cycle of love addiction that Pia Mellody writes about in Facing Love Addiction. There’s a sense of positive intensity, the rush and the excitement of relentlessly pursuing a partner who doesn’t seem to be all that interested in you that gets rewarded when they do end up giving you the attention and affection you were trying to get. This is usually the climax of the movie, when the person the protagonist has been chasing for the last hour and a half finally seems to acknowledge them and return their feelings in kind. But is this really worth it?
The gradual pulling away in the opposing negative intensity half of the cycle then prompts the love addict to engage in pursuit in order to reach the positive intensity stage, which then continues to perpetuate the cycle.
Like any other addiction, the cyclical positive-negative intensity of a love addiction pattern can be incredibly difficult to break, especially because there can be so many different reasons why a love addict is continually chasing the positive intensity that they get from being able to wrangle just a fraction of their partner’s attention, affection, or reciprocity at their own expense. That reason why is what the love addict needs to get to the bottom of in order to help themselves out of this spiral, in the same way that addicts of food, alcohol, sex, etc. need to be able to understand what exactly the function of their addiction is. Do they need their partner’s love in order to feel okay and good about themselves? Does focusing their energy and devotion into their partner’s needs and worries help them take their mind off their own? Perhaps there is a fear of abandonment, a belief that if their current partner won’t love them, then nobody will.
The specific reason that a love addict finds themselves in the throes of a love addiction cycle may be different for each person, but the pain that they bring both to themselves and their partners is often similarly destructive and requires the love addict to examine themselves and their relationships in order to find their way out of the cycle.
Ultimately, the love addict needs to get to the bottom of the reason why they find themselves continually drawn into the cycle of love addiction in order to find their way out of it.
Working with a mental health provider can help someone potentially experiencing love addiction to work through why they find themselves stuck in this pattern and develop healthier boundaries for themselves and their relationships. Pia Mellody, an internationally renowned lecturer and clinician whose work informed and inspired this post, also has additional resources on her website for love addiction and codependency.