Is It Love or Is It Addiction? Part III

CATEGORIES OF ADDICTIVE LOVE

Love, romance, and sex are delightful aspects of our humanity.

We must be wise in the ways we express them.   

It is easy to mistake addictive love for healthy love because it is so common.  In this post, I distinguish between three types of addictive love:  love, romance and sex addiction.  

Love Addiction

Love addiction refers to an unhealthy dependency on the object of love.  We look to another person to satisfy our hunger for security, sensation, power, identity, belonging and meaning.  It is an unconscious attempt to fix past and present pain, avoid what we fear, fill our loneliness, and gain control of our lives.  Rather than a healthy bonding, the love relationship becomes a bondage.  A person becomes emotionally and biologically dependent on the love object. The gradual enmeshment occurs over time and can have a soothing, satiating effect on the brain not unlike food or alcohol.  Love addicts deny parts of themselves to keep people, even toxic people, around and insure predictability. We take care of others at our own emotional expense, or we try to control others to meet our needs at their expense.  No matter how it plays out, we look to others to fix our discomfort or avoid what we fear, and we tolerate or inflict abusive behaviors in the process. These others can be any important person in our lives—a child, a parent, a romantic partner, a spouse, a boss, a friend.  Based on fear, a love addicted relationship is filled with drama--hurt, disappointment, betrayal, power struggles. A key element of an additive relationship is how we feel and behave when the other person disapproves of us, disagrees with us, moves away from us, or threatens us.

Romance Addiction

Romance addiction refers to when the object of love addiction is also the romantic figure.  This person can be a partner or reside only in the addict’s elaborate fantasy life. A romance addict is ‘in love’ with the sensation of being ‘in love’. Romance is addicting. The rush of intoxicating feelings produced by chemicals during the attraction stage of a romance—a state called limerence by Dorothy Tennov, is a drug that becomes a substitute for real intimacy.  It is an emotional speedball, a wild ecstasy, a bewitchment, a preoccupied madness. The addict is likened to a dazed wanderer, a spellbound lover. The love-stricken brain is similar to a brain high on cocaine and opiates.  A person who goes in and out of romantic relationships quickly is probably chasing the euphoria and other chemicals romance brings. Stalking the love object by the obsessed person is not uncommon.  In romance addiction, the addict seeks total immersion in the romantic relationship whether real or imagined.  Since the romance driven high is dependent on the newness of the relationship or the presence of a person, romance is often filled with melodrama.  Affairs can fall into the romance addiction category as the affair partners can keep the romance chemicals going indefinitely by just thinking of the person.  It is a continuous new romance without the normal relationship routines and disruptions.

Sex Addiction

Sex addiction is any obsessive-compulsive behavior or excessive sexual behavior that if left unattended causes distress or despair for the person and/or partner.  It occurs when a person uses one or more sexual behaviors as a “fix” or a drug.  Negative consequences that result may be relational, emotional, physical, financial, legal, occupational, social, and spiritual in nature.  Despite negative consequences the sex addict will continue the behaviors to get the chemical high sex produces.  In the process, a physical dependency on the hundreds of biochemicals or mood-altering experiences of arousal, fantasy and satiation occurs.  There is usually a marked tolerance and continued involvement to get the cocaine-like or amphetamine high. Like other addictions, sex addiction becomes an unconscious habit, a compulsive ritual that is no longer a choice, and a psychological and biological dependence on the stimulus that provides the pleasure.  Withdrawal symptoms occur when the stimulus is removed, and preoccupation begins to interfere with life. Sex addiction can occur in a committed relationship or outside of it.  If the love object is also the romance object and the sexual stimulus, extreme behaviors can result when the person pulls away or leaves the relationship— stalking, domestic abuse and even murder-suicides.

Dan’s Story

Sometimes, our relationships cannot be salvaged, and we must be willing to say good-bye to them. The following story tells us how all three categories of Addictive Love can be so strong that we deny the obvious—that the relationship cannot work except as a mutual addiction mistaken as love.

To begin, I think I must go back to my childhood and my relationship with my father. I don’t think I ever felt loved by him. I thought I was a disappointment and not a very lovable person. From this, I carried a striving for love into my adult relationships. This became evident in my relationship with Ann.

Both Ann and I had feelings of not being able to live without the other. Our strong sexual and romantic attraction reinforced this. Ann and I were obsessed with each other and allowed the relationship to consume and control us. We expected the other to meet all our needs, never realizing how impossible that was.

The relationship became extremely painful for me when Ann started to see other men, reinforcing my belief that I was not very lovable. Although this caused me great pain and anxiety, I stayed because I was addicted to the relationship in all ways and did not know how to get out ‘without dying’, I would have said then.              

I kept telling myself I could change Ann if I loved her enough. I had to change her because I was not a whole person without my relationship with her. This very addictive relationship became more and more destructive for me, and for Ann, too. My drinking increased, I became verbally abusive, I suffered from high blood pressure and migraine headaches. When I could not control Ann with what I thought was love, I tried to control her with threats and anger.  She responded in like.

Because of my behavior, someone I respected asked me to take a serious look at where I was heading and to try to bring my life under control. At this time, I realized my explosive anger, my bad feelings about myself, and my relationship with Ann were things I was unable to deal with by myself.

So, I sought help from a therapist. Being a counselor myself, this was not easy as I thought I had the answers and felt shame. Yet, I feel therapy is where I realized many things about my life.

I learned that unconsciously, I had sought out a woman who could not love me intimately, supporting my hidden belief that I was unlovable and a disappointment to others. As I began to be good to myself and accepted that my parents had loved me the best they could, my self-confidence grew. I learned I was the one who feared the hurt and pain of rejection, and who had believed it wasn’t safe to be close.  I had chosen Ann to avoid getting truly close. Ya, we had the closeness of drama and sex but that was not true emotional intimacy. It was great to discover I actually had a choice.  Soon I realized that I had to end my unhappy, unhealthy relationship with Ann, and I did.

 Admittedly, this was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made.  Since escaping from that addictive relationship, I’ve become more comfortable with being alone. I feel I have grown a lot, and I hope to continue for the rest of my life. I look forward to loving and feeling close to a woman. Now I believe real love is possible, and that I am capable of giving and receiving it. *

 *Excerpts from Is It Love or Is It Addiction? Third edition