Love addiction
Love addiction is a proposed disorder concept involving love relations characterized by severe distress and problematic passion-seeking despite adverse consequences. Academics do not currently agree on a precise definition of love addiction or when it needs to be treated. Love addiction can be contrasted with passionate love which may be intense but still be prosocial and positive when reciprocated. Research on the biology of romantic love indicates that passionate love resembles a behavioral addiction, but it has evolved for the purpose of pair bonding.
A 2010 medical inquiry concluded that medical evidence at the time did not have definitions or criteria to classify love addiction as a disorder. Furthermore, the authors state there is a risk of misunderstanding and "overmedicalizing" people who experience it. The term "love addiction" does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a compendium of mental disorders and diagnostic criteria published by the American Psychiatric Association.
Love addiction is different from codependence, although historically the concepts have been conflated as if synonymous. Love addiction has also been compared to the concepts of obsessive love, lovesickness and limerence.
Definition
Defining an addictive disorder which revolves around love passion is difficult because passionate love normally has features which resemble addiction. People in love experience salience, they yearn for their beloved and the amourous stage resembles "getting high". One of the major differences between love and drug addiction is that the addictive aspects of passionate love tend to fade away in a relationship, whereas the condition of a drug addiction tends to worsen over time.A team of bioethicists including Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu have drawn a distinction between two views on how the relationship between love and addiction can be conceptualized:
- In a narrow view, love might be considered an addiction when it's the result of abnormal brain processes. This is similar to an emerging viewpoint on drug addiction that the brain processes which are responsible for addiction do not exist in the brains of non-addicted people. Drugs of abuse artificially 'co-opt' neurotransmitter systems to produce reward signals which are much higher than could be achieved by natural rewards or with normal functioning. There is also some evidence that certain cases like binge eating and gambling addiction may elicit responses similar to drugs in some susceptible people. In the narrow view of love addiction then, "only extreme, radical brain processes, attachment behaviors, or manifestations of love" could indicate addiction, and it may be a rare condition.
- In a broad view, all love might be considered addiction. In this case, addiction may be "a spectrum of motivation" for any type of reward, like an appetite one can develop via reward conditioning, which is an evolved mechanism. This includes drugs, but also food for example, given that the human appetite for food can sometimes be contrary to real nutritive needs. In this way, perhaps everyone is "addicted" to food, sex, etc., although not to the point of distress or needing treatment. In the broad view of love addiction then, "to love someone is literally to be addicted to them". Helen Fisher, Arthur Aron and colleagues have proposed that romantic love is a "natural" addiction, evolved for pair bonding, which is a "positive addiction" when requited and a "negative addiction" when unrequited or inappropriate.
Another group favoring the six components model of addiction by Mark Griffiths states that "Individuals addicted to love tend to experience negative moods and affects when away from their partners and have the strong urge and craving to see their partner as a way of coping with stressful situations."
Types
A 2025 review has raised the question of identifying subtypes, because of the heterogeneity of clinical descriptions. For example, the diagnosis might apply either to individuals who fall in love quickly with a different partner as soon as the passionate phase of a relationship ends, or to individuals who are unable to break off maladaptive relationships.Authors such as Helen Fisher include those "who have been rejected or broken up with" as love addicts.
Dorothy Tennov's concept of limerence has been likened to love addiction. Tennov's research, however, suggested to her that limerence is normal, and a 2025 survey suggested that as many as 50–60% of the population had experienced it. Stanton Peele has commented on Tennov's work, calling limerence a "clinical condition" and "a severe emotional disability, one that leads people desperately to pursue often inappropriate love objects, frequently to fail at relationships, and to be incapable of learning from such experiences so that their ardor and desperation are often increased by their failures at love". Limerence has also been called "romance addiction", in reference to its relation to the concept of "romantic love".
Susan Peabody, a co-founder of Love Addicts Anonymous, has defined four types of love addicts:
- Obsessed Love Addicts, who are always head over heels for the wrong person—somebody unavailable, distant, noncommittal, abusive, and so on.
- Codependent Love Addicts, who tend to suffer from low self-esteem and desperately hold onto relationships by taking care of a partner with codependent behavior.
- Relationship Addicts, who are no longer in love with their partners, but still cannot let go despite being unhappy, because they're afraid of being alone.
- Ambivalent Love Addicts, who crave love but fear intimacy, so they become addicted to romantic fantasies about unavailable people, or prefer romantic affairs over committed relationships.
History
It was Stanton Peele & Archie Brodsky who brought love addiction into the literature with their 1975 book Love and Addiction, arguably being the most cited work, although precursors to the concept had been described by earlier authors.The term "love addict" is believed to have been first coined in 1928 by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Rado. However, even earlier, Sigmund Freud had observed a similarity between love passion and drug addiction, also having published his case study of Sergei Pankejeff whose "compulsive attacks" of falling in love "came on and passed off by sudden fits". In 1945, the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel defined "love addicts" as "persons in whom the affection or the confirmation they receive from external objects plays the same role as food in the case of food addicts. Although they are unable to return love, they absolutely need an object by whom they feel loved, but only as an instrument to procure the condensed oral gratification."
Most relevant research began after the publication of Peele & Brodsky's Love and Addiction, in 1975. The book sought to show how drugs are not uniquely addictive, and that people can become addicted to any type of sufficiently rewarding activity, an idea which would have been met with skepticism in its time. Through the book's success, that idea is now commonplace. The authors, however, have called that the "less important half" of their argument, which more importantly also criticized the notion that addiction is a "disease". The disease model of addiction was popularized from the 1970s and into the '80s as a facet of Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs, then found its way into other self-help material, and this is how "love addiction" entered popular vocabulary. According to Peele, his main points became sidelined then, as Love and Addiction was actually "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."
The twelve-step program Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous was founded in 1976, by a Boston musician who had been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, but additionally struggled with out of control sexual behaviors of extramarital affairs and masturbation. This led him to seek out others who also believed they were suffering from sex and love addiction, and they began holding meetings to try to stop their obsessive and compulsive behaviors. SLAA has been estimated to hold over 1,200 meetings, with 16,000 members in over 42 countries. However, according to a 2010 review of the topic, most people who attend SLAA meetings may actually be there for sexual dependence or relationship dependence, rather than for love addiction.
Another group is Love Addicts Anonymous, which focuses on love addiction specifically. LAA was founded in 2004 by Susan Peabody and Howard Gold, as a safe place for recovery from "unhealthy dependency on love as it plays out in our fantasies and relationships". LAA believes that love addiction and sex addiction are different.
Cultural references
- In A Spy in the House of Love, the heroine Sabina 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, revulsion, bitterness, depression, and the compulsion once more'. As a result, she has been subsequently described as 'feeling like a "love addict" enslaved to obsessive-compulsive patterns of behaviour'.
- St. Augustine, quoted in Confessions as saying "to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about my ears", has been interpreted as 'fundamentally, what one might call a "love addict"' who 'poured out his soul upon his beloved; in so doing, he tended to "lose" himself in these relationships', setting the stage for 'pain and confusion when his beloved was torn away'.
- Romeo and Juliet, also called mutual limerence, "stand as a summary of individual and environmental forces in love addiction", according to Stanton Peele.