Can You Be Addicted to Love?

Many people are familiar with the widely-debated concept of "sex addiction." Many people imagine a "sex addict" to be someone who watches pornography all day long and can’t get their work done or who is married but compulsively goes to massage parlors twice a week for "happy endings," building up credit card debt.

The similarly theorized (and similarly debated) concept of "love addiction," sometimes referred to as "pathological love," conjures a different image. If you are a so-called "love addict," your sex life might be pretty vanilla, or you might not be having much sex at all. You are simply in love with someone, madly and passionately. You think you have found your soulmate forever and ever. You know the honeymoon phase of a lasting love relationship doesn’t last forever, so you may as well enjoy it while you can. What’s wrong with that?

Love by its very nature has an obsessive quality. When you are in love with someone, you may think about them all of the time to the exclusion of everything else. When you are in love with someone, you don’t always see them realistically. You may put them up on a pedestal and make excuses for their character flaws. When you are in love with someone, you often can’t bear to be apart. And when your love is unrequited, you are forlorn in a way that isn’t easy to get over. All this is normal and should not be pathologized.

Pathological love, however, is thought to be a need to always be in love regardless of whether or not the situation or the person warrants it. Once you fall out of love with one person, you are immediately in love with another person as a replacement.

That might not seem like such a problem. We all engage in escapist romantic daydreams. That seems pretty harmless. But what if those romantic daydreams make it difficult to focus on other things like getting our work done or raising our children? What if we constantly fall in love with the wrong person, someone emotionally unavailable or abusive, who will never love us back the way we want? What if we are never fully committed to our current real-life partner because we are always in love with someone else from afar with whom we have a strong fantasy relationship? And what if we see the downside of being consumed by being in love all of the time and discover it’s not so easy to wean ourselves from that bad habit? Then we just might have to face the fact that we struggle with pathological or obsessive love.

Why Love Is Not Meant to Last Forever

Some evolutionary psychologists now believe that romantic love is a near-universal human emotion that evolved for a very specific reason. Romantic love is theorized to have evolved to facilitate adult pair-bonding for biparental care. Romantic love brings two people together to form an intense sexually exclusive relationship usually accompanied by frequent sex. The couple usually forms an intense attachment to each other and an emotional dependency on each other. Your life partner becomes your "other half" and you are incomplete without that person. Romantic love is usually accompanied by fantasies of having a family and growing old together.

The honeymoon phase is ecstatic. It’s like walking on air. The world is a wonderful place and you feel blissfully happy. What’s not to like?

But it doesn’t last forever. Research has suggested that the honeymoon phase usually doesn’t last beyond 18 months tops, but it can often be a few weeks or a few months before a couple has their first major fight and the honeymoon phase ends.

Evolutionary psychologists theorize that this is how it should be. This is nature’s way of ensuring that the romantic couple can stop focusing exclusively on each other and instead focus on the hard work of raising a family. It’s not adaptive to be madly and passionately in love forever. Romantic love turns into mature love or companionate love. The romantic couple becomes a well-functioning team that cooperates, often to raise a family, while affirming their commitment to each other by treating each other supportively, affectionately, playfully, and erotically despite whatever conflicts arise. It’s a nice arrangement if it works—but it’s no longer a state of complete bliss.

Why Pathological Love Develops

The theory is that so-called "love addiction" develops because being in love is among the best anti-depressants that exist on the planet. Life is tough. There is a lot to get depressed about or anxious about or angry about that puts us in a bad mood. Love seems to magically banish that bad mood and makes us feel like everything is just great. So when we are feeling bad about something or other, we can comfort ourselves with an escapist romantic fantasy that makes us feel better.

Of course, if we appreciate that it’s just a fantasy, what good does it do us? We have to feel that our romantic fantasies are, in fact, realistic possibilities that will actually happen at some future point if we play our cards right. We don’t have to feel hopeless and helpless about the future if we have some confidence that someday our romantic aspirations will be realized. Someday your emotionally unavailable partner will become available, someday your abusive partner will appreciate you, and someday that person you love from afar will discover that deep down inside they have always loved you as much as you have loved them. These expectations give you hope for the future—something to look forward to in life so you are no longer depressed.

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Being in love, then, can become an emotional crutch for some. You may use being in love similarly to the way alcoholics use alcohol. You become mentally dependent on "being in love" to regulate your bad moods.

But it’s not a healthy dependency because it gets you into trouble. It sets you up for disappointment because the emotionally unavailable or abusive people you love are never going to love you back the way you want. Pathological love, like any compulsive behavior or addiction, is closely tied to denial. You deny the reality that these are fantasy relationships that will never turn out the way you wish because that reality is just too depressing. So to deny that depressing reality, you just double down on the escapist romantic fantasy in the hope it will somehow become true if you are only stubbornly persevering in the face of an unpleasant reality.

How You Overcome Pathological Love

Some argue that "love addiction" should be overcome just like any other addiction. You have to wean yourself from the toxic behavior and learn to abstain. You have to find a way to cope with the withdrawal symptoms and practice relapse prevention. You have to find healthy alternatives to cope with your bad moods—be it social support, exercise, healthy eating, meditation, creative pursuits, and prioritizing your responsibilities like work or childcare.

You also have to appreciate what is and isn’t a healthy love relationship. It’s only healthy if it’s based on reciprocity and mutuality. If someone doesn’t love you back the way you love them, it’s not healthy. You shouldn’t settle for less just because you can’t tolerate being alone. You need to find healthy ways to enjoy your solitude.