My name is Sophie Haigney, and my latest article for The New York Times Magazine is about “love addiction” — a condition that’s not a formally accepted psychiatric diagnosis, but has seemed, over the past few years, to be popping up everywhere around me. For some people, it helps explain the unhealthy romantic patterns that have troubled them all their lives. For others, it’s a label to be thrown around more casually, explaining bad dates, melodramatic friends and all sorts of ordinary emotional experiences.
The more I explored love addiction, the more it seemed that everyone was circling the same underlying question: How intense should love be? Is it meant to be glorious, sacred, transcendent and life-changing, as so many songs and poems tell us? Or were people right to start seeing this vision of love as unhealthy, sometimes even pathological?
The Times wants to know: Have you ever felt overwhelmed by your relationship with love? Have you suspected that people around you were approaching it with an unhealthy intensity? Should we, as a culture, be embracing the power of romantic love or guarding against its excesses? For a possible follow-up article, we may reach out to hear more about your submission. We will not publish any part of your response without contacting you first, and we will never publicly share your personal information.
The post How Intense Should Love Really Be? We Want to Hear Your Thoughts. appeared first on New York Times.
