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*Sacred Love Versus Profane Love* (1602–03) by Giovanni Baglione.

Love addiction is a human behavior in which people become addicted to the feeling of being in love. Love addicts can take on many different behaviors. Love addiction is common; however, most love addicts do not realize they are addicted to love. Love addiction can be treated with various recovery techniques, most of which are similar to recovery from other addictions such as sex addiction and alcoholism, through group meetings and support groups.^[1]

Process

The normal process of falling into love addiction begins when a person begins to feel sympathy with another person after going through an initially innocent moment of attraction and automatically idealizes the other to the point of divinity. The individual is then blindly attached to the other person, becoming incapable of making a realistic analysis of the situation; they may project all kinds of illusions onto the other person, believing them to be the only one that can bring happiness. This process can be very quick. For some, this can be a brief experience that is only the first step toward a more mature relationship. There are, however, those who never go past this stage of blind love,^[2] and remain 'addicted to people, sucking on them and gobbling them up...parasitism, not love'.^[3]

Obsession can be considered the primary symptom of any addiction. In love addiction, the individual's insecurity gives rise to an obsessive attachment to the object of their affection. It typically manifests as an insatiable hunger that distorts the person's perception of reality and often results in various unhealthy behaviors and suffering.^[4]

The Addictive Love Relationship

Like other addictions (drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, work, and the list goes on), the dependency to a person (their object- drug of choice) allows love addicts to feel alive- a sense of purpose- and to gain a sense of meaning and self worth in the world: they are driven by 'a fantasy hope that the drug of choice - a person - will complete them'.^[5]

'Most love addicts start out attempting to meet some known or unknown emotional need, then become dependent on the intoxicating feelings'^[6] of being in love itself. Unfortunately, 'as in the case of drug addicts, "love addicts", too, may become incapable of getting the desired satisfaction, which in turn increases their addiction'.^[7]

Love addicts commonly and repeatedly form an addictive relationship with emotionally unavailable Avoidant partners^{[citation needed]}. The Avoidant partner is compulsively counter-dependent – they fear being engulphed/drowned/smothered by their love addict partner. They enter relationships with emotionally closed-off individuals who will let nothing and no one in, which makes intimate relationships impossible. Behind their emotional walls, hides low self-esteem and feel if they become truly known (display emotional intimacy) - no one would ever love, accept, and value who they are. Avoidants are attracted to people who have difficulty thinking for themselves, having healthy emotional boundaries, or taking care of themselves in healthy manners- the love addict.

Love addicts and Avoidants form relationships that inevitably lead to unhealthy patterns of dependency, distance, chaos, and often abuse. Nevertheless, however unsatisfactory the relationship, 'love addicts hang on and on, because it is what they know'.^[8] Familiarity is the central engine of their relationship. Each is attracted to the other specifically because of the familiar traits that the other exhibits, and although painful, come from childhood.

This cycle encompasses a push-pull dance full of emotional highs and many lows where the one is on the chase (love addict) while the avoidant is on the run. They both engage in "counterfeit emotional involvement. Healthy emotional intimacy is replaced with melodrama and negative intensity- ironically creating the illusion of true love, intimacy, and connection - usually on an unconscious level. As a result, 'their relationships, although seemingly dramatic in their intensity, are actually extremely shallow'.^[9]

Love withdrawal

With addiction comes inevitable negative consequences. The negative consequences of love addiction can vary. Depending on the level or extreme of ones love addiction, negative consequences can range from violence (to others or self) to increased feelings of shame, depression, impaired emotional growth, chronic emptiness, loneliness, loss of intimacy and enjoyment in life^{[citation needed]}.

The consequences of addictive loving are most revealed as the love addict experiences withdrawal symptoms when a relationship ends, or when a relationship is perceived as falling apart. This is when withdrawal of being with one person is experienced at its most intense level. When a break up occurs, an addictive lover longs for the attachment and apparent loving feelings of the lost relationship, as much as a heroin user craves a their heroin when the drug is no longer available. This longing may result in extreme debilitating pain, obsession, and otherwise avoidable destructive and/or self-destructive behaviors.^[10]

Types

Writers describe different types of individuals who become addicted to love relationships.

Susan Peabody describes several types of love addicts:^[11]

Obsessed love addicts: This type of addiction comes with the inability to live independently from another person, or a feeling of possession.
Codependency addicts
Relationship addicts: This can represent itself as an addiction to the idea of having a relationship instead of a person. There are two types: those who are constantly in and out of relationships and those who will not let go of a bad relationship for the sake of having a relationship.
Narcissistic love addicts
Ambivalent love addicts
Satutory love addicts
Torch bearers
Seductive withholders
Romance addicts: This can represent itself as an obsession over romance itself, including, but not limited to adventure and passion. People suffering with this type of love addiction worry about romantic rituals such as dates, dinner, sex, and everything else that has to do with a passing romance. This can often be a representation of the person's individual fantasies. Love addicts will seek seduction and conquest, but quickly tire of it. A typical example is the legendary Don Juan.

Cultural examples

In A Spy in the House of Love, the heroine Sabrina is said to have seen her 'love anxieties as resembling those of a drug addict, of alcoholics, of gamblers. The same irresistible impulse, tension, compulsion and then depression following the yielding to the impulse'.^[12] As a result, she has subsequently been described as 'feeling like a "love addict" enslaved to obsessive-compulsive patterns of behaviour'.^[13]

P. G. Wodehouse features in The Inimitable Jeeves 'a character called Bingo who on about every third page meets a wonderful new woman who is going to save his life and is better than any woman he has ever met before, and then of course it flops...a new burst of life, but it does not last'.^[14]

Saint Augustine - 'to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about my ears'^[15] - has been interpreted as being, 'fundamentally, what one might call a "love addict"', with a disturbing tendency 'to invest all of himself in relationships and to "forget himself" in the intensity of his affection'.^[16]

References

^ *Bireda, Martha R., Mike Link, and Peter Roberts, Love Addiction: A Guide to Emotional Independence (Minneapolis: New Harbinger Publications) p. 5
^ Timmreck, Thomas C, "Overcoming the loss of a love: preventing love addiction and promoting positive emotional health" Psychological Reports 66 (1990) 12-14)
^ M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled (1990) p. 111 and p. 104
^ Timmreck, p. 15
^ Schaeffer, p. 61
^ Schaeffer, p. p. 110
^ Fenichel, p. 388
^ Schaeffer, p. 69
^ M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled (1990) p. 106
^ Jim Hall, "Surviving Withdrawal"
^ Susan Peabody, "Typical Kinds of Love Addicts"
^ Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love (Penguin 1986) p. 36
^ Anne T. Salvatore, Anaïs Nin's Narratives (2001) p. 67
^ Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (2004) p. 56
^ Quoted in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Plays and Poems (London 1985) p. 79
^ Judith C. Stark, Feminist Interpretations of Augustine (2007) p. 246

@@ Line 4: / Line 4: @@
 '''Love addiction''' is a [[human behavior]] in which people become [[Behavioral addiction|addicted]] to the feeling of being [[in love]].  Love addicts can take on many different behaviors. Love addiction is common; however, most love addicts do not realize they are addicted to love.  Love addiction can be treated with various recovery techniques, most of which are similar to recovery from other addictions such as [[Sexual addiction|sex addiction]] and [[alcoholism]], through group meetings and [[support group]]s.<ref>*Bireda, Martha R., Mike Link, and Peter Roberts, ''Love Addiction: A Guide to Emotional Independence'' (Minneapolis: New Harbinger Publications) p. 5</ref>
+== Process ==
-' ''Addictive love'' is an inclusive term in that it includes..."addicts" and "co-addicts", ""[[co-dependent]]s", and "love avoidant"'.<ref>Brenda Schaeffer, ''Is It Love Or Is It Addiction?'' (2009) p. 1</ref>
-==History==
-The modern history of the concept of the love addict - ignoring such precursors as [[Robert Burton (scholar)|Robert Burton]]'s dictum that 'love extended is mere madness'<ref>Robert Burton, ''The Anatomy of Melancholy'' (New York 1951) p. 769</ref> or [[Tristram Shandy|Mr Shandy]]'s recommendation of 'losing a few ounces of blood below the ears, according to the practice of the ancient Scythians, who cured the most intemperate fits of the appetite by that means'<ref>Lawrence Sterne, ''Tristram Shandy'' (Penguin 1976) p. 565</ref> - go back to the early decades of the twentieth century. [[Freud]]'s study of the [[Sergei Pankejeff|Wolf Man]] highlighted 'his liability to compulsive attacks of falling physically in love...a compulsive [[falling in love]] that came on and passed off by sudden fits';<ref>Sigmund Freud, ''Case Studies II'' (PFL 9) p. 273 and p. 361</ref> but it was [[Sandor Rado]] who in 1928 first delineated the characteristics of '"love addicts"...in their continuous need of supplies that give sexual satisfaction and heighten self-esteem simultaneously'.<ref>Otto Fenichel, ''The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis'' (London 1946) p. 387</ref>
-However it was not until the [[Seventies]] and [[Eighties]] that the concept came to the popular fore. 'At least two of the three major hall-marks of the 1960s - sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll - have in the 1970s become problems that require care and cure'.<ref>Lennard J. Davis, ''Obsessions: A History'' (London 2008) p. 174</ref> [[Stanton Peele]] opened the door, almost unwittingly, with his 1975 book ''Love and Addiction''; but (as he later explained), while that work had been intended as 'a social commentary on how our society defines and patterns intimate relationships...all of this social dimension has been removed, and the attention to love addiction has been channeled in the direction of regarding it as an individual, treatable psychopathology'.<ref>Quoted in Bruce E. Levine, ''Commonsense Rebellion'' (2003) p. 242</ref> Thereafter in the Eighties, 'thanks to Robin Norwood's ''[[Women Who Love Too Much]]'', "love addiction" for women became popular', <ref>Levine, p. 242</ref> and has scarcely looked back since.
-==Process==
 The normal process of falling into love addiction begins when a person begins to feel sympathy with another person after going through an initially innocent moment of [[Interpersonal attraction|attraction]] and automatically idealizes the other to the point of divinity. The individual is then blindly attached to the other person, becoming incapable of making a realistic analysis of the situation; they may project all kinds of illusions onto the other person, believing them to be the only one that can bring happiness. This process can be very quick. For some, this can be a brief experience that is only the first step toward a more mature relationship. There are, however, those who never go past this stage of blind love,<ref>Timmreck, Thomas C, "Overcoming the loss of a love: preventing love addiction and promoting positive emotional health" ''Psychological Reports'' 66 (1990) 12-14)</ref> and remain 'addicted to people, sucking on them and gobbling them up...parasitism, not love'.<ref>M. Scott Peck, ''The Road Less Travelled'' (1990) p. 111 and p. 104</ref>