Recently an Instagram post asked me whether I might be addicted to love. I was prompted to consider five “self-reflection questions,” including: Had I ever used the internet to pursue relationships? Was I terrified of confrontation? When in a relationship, did I fear it would end? According to an app called Sobbefy, answering yes to questions like these meant I could be a love addict.
For months, I had been encountering that phrase more and more. I heard it on podcasts and read it in headlines. I saw it on my various feeds and noticed it in casual conversation. People said: “Oh, he’s a love addict, that’s his problem.” “She’s obviously a love addict.” “Am I a love addict?”
It was in an effort to understand this that I wound up speaking with a 44-year-old woman named Marisa, whose story offered a vivid example of the very real problems that can be categorized as love addiction. She had always known that something was different about her, romantically, but did not know how to fix it. She was a prolific serial dater who felt a constant need to focus her affection on somebody. She got deeply involved with unavailable or married men, sometimes supporting them financially. Her own marriage failed. She once got into a car accident while crying over a voice mail message from a boyfriend. She dated an abusive drug addict, on and off, for years, feeling unable to leave even when her life was in danger. Her next boyfriend had anger issues; again, she couldn’t seem to quit.
She started watching YouTube videos about psychology, thinking her boyfriend might have borderline personality disorder. Then she came across a video about the idea that some people are addicted to love, just as others are addicted to drugs. For Marisa, something clicked. That was her: She was a love addict. Now she’s involved in a 12-step program, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. It has brought her a peace that had always eluded her. I spoke with several people like Marisa — people whose love lives were disordered, even dangerous, until they began identifying as love addicts.
The idea is that many people have an unhealthy, compulsive relationship with romance that makes stable relationships difficult and causes constant distress. Lately a burgeoning pocket of attention has focused on love addiction. There are first-person essays and podcasts like “Journals of a Love Addict” and the “Modern Love” episode “How Orville Peck Got Addicted to Love and Came out the Other Side.” There are much-discussed memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert’s “All the Way to the River.” Online forums boom with discussion, with people suspecting that they, too, are problematically obsessive about love — that in a manner similar to alcohol or gambling, romance has come to control their lives and warp their choices.
Love addiction has also spread into the ways ordinary people think and talk about relationships, used casually to diagnose all sorts of drama. After Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez announced their divorce, a host of “The View” said she thought that Lopez suffered from love addiction (a TMZ “investigation” suggested the same), while a source supposedly close to the couple told InTouch Weekly that many people thought Affleck had “switched vices and become a love addict.”
Sometimes this tendency toward diagnosis spins into radical territory. “Has anyone read ‘Love in the Time of Cholera?’” someone asks on Reddit’s r/loveaddiction forum. “Have you read any other books, fiction or nonfiction, that address love addiction?” Answers recommend “Wuthering Heights,” Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, “A Lover’s Discourse” by Roland Barthes and “The Pisces” by Melissa Broder. On another forum, someone asks which movies are about love addiction, and one response suggests “Blue Valentine” and “(500) Days of Summer.” These cultural objects are tied together, loosely, by the subject of romantic love, but they are almost dizzyingly different in their portrayals of it. “(500) Days of Summer” is a goofy rom-com that ends with an affirmation of love’s value; “Blue Valentine” is a dark portrait of a toxic marriage that devolves toward abuse. “Love in the Time of Cholera” is about yearning, infidelity and the ways love changes over time. How would you read it in the context of “love addiction?” I’m not entirely sure.
But as another commenter wrote, on a different thread: “Do you guys see love addiction and codependency everywhere as you read books or watch movies?” This person’s answer was yes: “I can’t stop now lol. I was reading ‘David Copperfield’ and now that I learned about Love Addiction it reads completely different to me.” The resounding response from everyone else was also yes: Even the comedy cartoon “Rick and Morty” was no longer easy to watch.
One forum post stuck with me for a long time after reading it: A man described himself as “badly addicted, and codependent upon,” his wife of 25 years. They were attempting a month of no contact, which he wondered about extending to 90 days, the standard for treating substance addiction. “Once over,” he asked, “is it possible to have a healthy relationship with my former addiction object?”
“Love addiction” is neither a new concept nor a broadly recognized diagnosis. It does not appear in the standard-setting reference on psychological diagnoses, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5. (Of the so-called behavioral addictions, only gambling is included.) The fact that many people now identify as love addicts is not quite a formal clinical development. But neither is it simply a pop-psychology fad. It has come to strike me as a symptom of something much deeper: a sea change in the way that people think about romantic love.
From an early age, we are taught — by love songs and movies and poetry and parents — about the power of love. It’s supposed to be irrational, all-consuming and sometimes painful, but also beautiful above all else. Love is supposed to break and remake us. If it interferes with our ability to eat and sleep, so be it. We are supposed to need someone, to feel not quite whole without them. Shakespeare, Sonnet 116: “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to remove./O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark/That looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Love “bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
And yet the more I read and talked to people about love, the more it felt as if huge numbers of them were reaching a new conclusion: What if, actually, it shouldn’t be like that? What if all the high-flown things we’d been told about the transcendent power of love were (at best) mistaken or (at worst) pathological? People weren’t just using the notion of love addiction to talk about destructive, obsessive romantic patterns. They were using it to mount a fascinating rebellion against the narrative that love is the pinnacle of human experience. And some of them, I realized, were replacing it with a new narrative — one that made me worry about the future of love.
The first problem you run into when thinking about “love addiction” is that we do not have a stable consensus about what either “love” or “addiction” even are.
Young people often learn this when they ask someone older and wiser how they’ll know when they’re in love. “You just know,” they’re told — an answer that elides thousands of years of attempts, by poets and philosophers and neuroscientists, to answer this question. There’s widespread agreement that love has, at the least, a dual nature: There’s a chemical and biological element (something happening in our brains and bodies) and also a social, cultural one (something we are conditioned to feel by the people around us, and by all that Shakespeare). The romantics among us, though, still think of love as something that includes those elements but ultimately transcends them, something that approaches the sacred — eternal and mysterious, unbreakable and unknowable, its ineffability part of its value.
As for addictions: Depending on whom you ask, they are brain diseases, or behavioral disorders, or more like an identity, or a combination of all these things. Some are given relatively consistent medical definitions; diagnostic quizzes for alcohol-use disorder, for instance, are partly rooted in quantitative metrics like drinks per day. But even these standards aren’t solid. There is a common genre of online post like this one: “My husband comes home and drinks four to six beers every day. Is he an alcoholic?” Medically, this husband might qualify as having an alcohol-use disorder, but that is not quite what his spouse is asking; she is asking when he officially becomes an addict. The difficulty of this strict binary is part of why clinicians are moving away from the word “addiction” and toward describing spectra of disordered use.
Put “love” and “addiction” together and we enter territory where definitions almost immediately fail. It can be hard to pin down what “love addiction” even refers to. It is distinct from sex addiction, another contested term. (Many love addicts don’t have problems with sex but with fantasy, obsession and attachment.) It could describe someone who cheats, jumps constantly between relationships and is always seeking new romantic thrills; it could also describe someone who clings to one particular person, or is obsessive about keeping a relationship alive.
Theories of love addiction tend to emphasize both love’s chemical properties and our patterns of attachment. Chemically, some researchers note, the brain in love acts much like the brain on cocaine. Helen Fisher, who was a biological anthropologist at the Kinsey Institute, was the lead author of a 2016 paper that noted the way the early stages of intense romantic love feature many of the usual symptoms of addiction: craving, tolerance, withdrawal, relapse. The following year, Brian Earp and other ethicists published a paper noting that, just as with drugs or gambling, “love’s pull is so strong that we might follow it even to the point of hardship or personal ruin” — or, in the extreme, violence. Another view comes from sources like Pia Mellody’s 1992 book “Facing Love Addiction,” the ur-text for many love addicts. It describes the addict as a particular type of person: most often, a woman who responds to some formative wound by latching, disastrously, onto people who cannot love her in return — a narrative rooted in conceptions of childhood trauma that have, in the years since, become culturally ubiquitous.
These visions of love addiction are controversial. In fact, one expert told me, they’re total nonsense. David Ley is a clinical psychologist and sex therapist, and his advice was: “If anyone ever tells you that you are a love addict, run, run, run.” The neurotransmitters, the idea that love is like cocaine — “I call this Valley Girl science, saying things are ‘like’ something else,” he said. “All that is doing is making a blanket analogy involving reward circuits in the brain. Our brains react when we see a puppy in the same way. Does that mean puppies are like crack cocaine?” The whole concept of love addiction, he said, was too hazy to be useful, “so vague and amorphous it could apply to almost anybody.”
The term really did seem to be getting applied to almost anybody. When I spoke with self-identified love addicts, it was often very easy to see the distressing patterns they were struggling to change; they were people like Marisa, for whom the S.L.A.A. program had been freeing and lifesaving. But I also had conversations in which I worried about people overpathologizing themselves. A 19-year-old I spoke with said that one symptom of her addiction was feeling obsessive when she was single and a guy she liked didn’t text her back all day. It was hard not to think: Doesn’t everyone feel like that? Isn’t that normal? Months after we first talked, she no longer identified as a love addict.
One research paper I read, from psychiatrists at UTHealth Houston, acknowledged that the line between love addiction and normal romance “may be conceptually unclear.” It also cited estimates of love addiction’s prevalence among the U.S. population at around 3 percent — and noted one older study, of small populations of college students, in which a full quarter identified as love addicts. Was undergraduate love addiction an undiagnosed epidemic, or were those students just experiencing the ordinary passion and pathos of youth?
I found myself dwelling on the man who felt addicted to his wife. What would it mean to not feel dependent on your wife of 25 years and struggle to imagine life without her? I could, of course, imagine the situation in the most negative terms. The man might be so reliant on his wife that he has lost his sense of self and cannot survive in the world without her; he could be so obsessive about her that she feels harried, miserable or abused. But even his language felt striking. He didn’t talk about a marital separation — he talked about a period of “no contact.” He saw his wife as “a former addiction object” and wondered whether it was possible to return to her at all.
On a website for Love Addicts Anonymous (a separate organization from S.L.A.A.), you can find “40 Statements” with which you might identify. They include: “You fall in love very easily and too quickly.” “More than once, you have gotten involved with someone who is unable to commit — hoping he or she will change.” “You are terrified of never finding someone to love.” Large, nonpathological swaths of us, I imagine, would answer these in the affirmative.
Then there is No. 37: “Love is the most important thing in the world to you.” This one strikes me as a question about values. If I say that love is the most important thing in the world for me — that I value it above all else — have I inched further down a spectrum of addiction? Or have I just decided to value something that countless poets and prophets all said was the noblest human experience?
Love addiction is generally self-diagnosed. This isn’t unusual; most psychiatric diagnoses, including addictions, have their origin in a person acknowledging their own distress. But self-diagnosis has its pitfalls, especially when it comes to love, which is not inherently harmful and can’t be quantified the way cocktails can. There’s an element of contagion: People can read online posts, recognize something of themselves and feel they’ve discovered exactly what is wrong. This is part of Ley’s objection to the category: He feels it can distract people from underlying issues (like mood disorders) with established treatments (like medication). “If I come into my doctor’s office sneezing, he doesn’t tell me I have a sneezing disorder,” he says. “He tries to figure out if I have a cold, a virus, a bacterial infection. And then, if appropriate, he gives me antibiotics.”
And people are not only looking inward, scanning their own romantic histories and drawing conclusions. They are looking outward with this new set of ideas in mind. They are spotting the symptoms of love addiction in friends and relatives and dates and colleagues — and in Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez and the characters in films and novels. “Love addiction” has become a way to describe and explain other people’s behavior: It accounts for why an ex couldn’t stay faithful, why a friend seems to have negative patterns when dating men, why a parent makes reckless choices.
Often, these patterns and experiences seem like the ordinary messiness of romance, the pain and yearning and confusion that have, over the centuries, been seen as part of love’s power. Looking at them through the lens of addiction means pathologizing them, treating them as symptoms of a disorder. As we do so, we redefine love itself. It is no longer something that should remake us or endure “even to the edge of doom”; that would be unhealthy. Much of what we’ve been led to expect from love, this point of view suggests, is in fact toxic or deluded.
Some of those expectations have roots in the stories we’re told from an early age. Marisa, for instance, talked about how popular culture could warp a person’s concept of love; the telenovelas and Disney movies she watched as a child, she said, offered “a misunderstanding of what a normal and healthy relationship should be.” Many women have disowned the Disney-princess script, but critiquing it through the lens of love addiction seemed new to me — much like the people who were reading “David Copperfield” with fresh eyes. All these stories suddenly struck them as artifacts of some deep societal ill — centuries of culture that had normalized obsession, oppression, emotional abuse and delusional expectations by preaching about all-consuming, uncontrollable, happily-ever-after love.
But if we did away with old visions of romantic love, what would replace them? This is in some sense the question the man on the forum was asking about his wife: If what he experienced in marriage was toxic, then what came next?
The answer, it appears, is a kind of love that neither saves us nor breaks us. This new vision of love is cleaner, healthier. We should be with our partners because they enhance our lives in sensible ways. People should be compatible; relationships should be stable; we should be, above all else, emotionally safe. This is a tamer love, one that does not involve ardent self-sacrifice or world-shattering passions. It is the kind of love that might let you and your partner proudly tell a therapist about the progress you’ve made in “meeting each other’s needs.”
This sort of therapeutic language has lately taken over interpersonal relationships as a whole, from the bedroom to the dinner table to the office. The casual diagnosis of psychiatric disorders has become more common: We toss around descriptions of people’s personalities using DSM diagnostics like “narcissism” or “O.C.D.” People are hyperaware of “trauma” and “trauma responses” and even “generational” trauma; we talk constantly about “boundaries,” “wounds,” “attachment styles”; workers and bosses alike have learned to talk about “self-care.” The psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams has written eloquently about the consequences of this turn. It used to be, she wrote, that a woman would arrive for therapy saying she was “painfully shy,” and wanted help dealing with social situations. Today, “a person with that concern is likely to tell me that she ‘has’ social phobia — as if an alien affliction has invaded her otherwise problem-free subjective life. People talk about themselves in acronyms oddly dissociated from their lived experience: ‘my O.C.D.,’ ‘my eating disorder,’ ‘my bipolar.’” McWilliams describes this as an “odd estrangement from one’s sense of an agentic self.”
In the context of romantic love, this estrangement from the self can also lead to an estrangement from others. “Sobriety” from love addiction is a fraught concept — unlike with alcohol, few people are aiming for permanent abstinence from romance — but it often involves periods of celibacy and aloneness, of “working on yourself” before returning to dating. This idea, too, has seeped into the culture well beyond those who participate in 12-step programs. You see it in online trends like #boysober, a sort of Dry January for women tired of dating, or the male-coded “monk mode,” in which distractions like romance are set aside in favor of self-perfection at the gym and grinding at work. This focus on healing and self-optimization tends to view romance as, if not an outright enemy, at least not a friend.
Given that Americans are, famously, quite lonely, I cannot help but see any script that replaces romantic love with relentless self-improvement as an even lonelier turn, and a tragic one — a climb into the straitjacket of the self.
I remembered, recently, what the writer Shirley Hazzard said, in an interview with The Paris Review in 2005, about writing her 2003 novel, “The Great Fire.”
I wanted to write, perhaps, a story of falling in love. I wanted to be as true as possible to a phenomenon now passing away from our society: the accidental meeting of man and woman and a sense of destined engagement that would possibly last out their lives. This, to serve as counterweight to the huge disillusion of a ravaged world. I will let myself in for derision, whatever I say on this theme, I suppose. Yet I think that such a story is not necessarily idealized, and that the dream, at least, of such love still supplies the poetry of all manner of unpoetic lives.
A destined engagement that would possibly last out their lives! Yes, this does seem to be falling out of fashion.
“The Great Fire” follows, among other things, a veteran of World War II’s Pacific theater who falls in love with an Australian teenager. It was based on Hazzard’s own experience as a teenager, and it is the type of novel that could be read, through the lens of love addiction, as a cautionary tale. (Not to mention the lens of age-gap discourse.) But it could be read in other ways too. Hazzard’s core idea — that love really can supply the poetry in otherwise unpoetic lives, and do so without delusion or idealization — seems to me to be one of the things we should value most.
The cultural focus on love addiction, the sense that we must tame romantic love, the desire to make it less risky, less confusing, less disruptive — these are like furrows that keep deepening and spreading across the landscape. My hope is that we won’t abandon all our notions of romantic love and what it might do for us, even and especially when it is painful. My hope is that we can find a new vision of love, and of the associated pain, that is neither oppressive nor idealized. After all, how many other things can supply poetry to unpoetic lives?
Sophie Haigney is currently working on a book about our obsession with collecting objects, from priceless fossils to plastic Power Rangers. Her last essay for the magazine was about the remarkable power of group chats.
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