Love and romance addiction experts have been speaking about this issue for many years. Below some key info and resources have been capsulized.
A Quiz: Do You Have Love and Romance Addiction?
Is It Love Or Is It Addiction? (1997) by Brenda Schaeffer now has a more recent and expanded third edition. Get 12 or more affirmatives on her 32-point “Romance Addiction Questionnaire” and there’s a possibility you have an addiction.
A brief sampling:
2. Do you like melodrama: being a rescued victim or the hero?
3. Are longing and melancholy familiar to you?
5. Is being wanted extremely important to you?
6. Is the attraction phase of a relationship what matters most?
10. Is there a familiar pattern in your selection of partners?
MORE RESOURCES
Susan Peabody is the author of Addiction to Love: Overcoming Obsession and Dependency in Relationships and the recent Recovery Workbook for Love Addicts and Love Avoidants.
Stanton Peele recognized (Love and Addiction, 1975) that addiction wasn’t just about substance abuse. He continues to address this topic in his “Addiction and Society” blog on Psychology Today and elsewhere.
Pia Mellody‘s Facing Love Addiction “has been used as a sort of mini-Bible in addressing the issue for more than 20 years,” notes Barcella. One of Mellody’s contributions is her description of the “addiction/avoidance relationship cycle” in which a love addict has a pattern of becoming entwined with a “love avoidant.”
Although not a professional clinician like the above-listed, the writer of the popular Love Addict: Sex, Romance, and Other Dangerous Drugs (2011), Ethlie Ann Vare, is a recovering addict herself. Her alternate name for love addiction? Affection Deficit Disorder.
About a year ago on her blog (called Affection Deficit Disorder, of course) Vare listed “The Five Most Popular Paragraphs in LOVE ADDICT”:
1. Addiction is a disease of loneliness. Recovery is a process of community. Don’t try this alone. Your brain, an otherwise admirable tool of subtle complexity and divine reason, is a wee bit broken in this one particular area. Use someone else’s brain for a change.
2. When I stop doing the things that hurt me, I stop hurting. When I stop doing things that hurt other people, my self-esteem increases. When I have self-esteem, I am less inclined to do the things that hurt me. Simple.
3. The love addict is either chasing or being chased. As long as the person they’re chasing is unavailable, they’re madly obsessed and in love. But as soon as the person they desire is in their face saying, “I love you back and I want to be with you,” that’s when the love addict becomes the avoidant. They run for the hills, because they can’t handle the intimacy.
4. “We assign magical qualities to others. We idealize and pursue them, then blame them for not fulfilling our fantasies and expectations.”
5. Love addicts and sex addicts tend to go together. Love addicts are often people who were severely abandoned. And they tend to idealize people. It’s sort of romantic love gone pathological. The kind of person [they’ll] idealize will necessarily be the kind of person who will abandon them. If that person suddenly comes around and forms a closeness, the love addict will sabotage the relationship.
RECOVERY FROM LOVE AND ROMANCE ADDICTION: WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?
Although some kind of “sobriety” is important, as indicated by therapist Robert Weiss (SexualRecovery.com), this will differ for each person. One proposal for early recovery: “Sobriety can be delineated as abstinence from any romantic or sexual activity that causes the person to feel shameful or hold secrets, or which is illegal or abusive to others.”