Obsessive love
Obsessive love is characterized by obsessive or compulsive attempts to possess or control an individual, especially triggered by rejection. Obsessive love can also be distinguished from other forms of romantic love by its one-sidedness and repulsed approaches. Rejection is the "ultimate nightmare" to an obsessive lover, who can not let go when confronted with disinterest or the loss of a partner. Usually obsessive love leads to feelings of worthlessness, self-destructive behavior and social withdrawal, but in some cases an obsessive lover may monitor or stalk the object of their passion, or commit acts of violence.
Most obsessional stalkers who are not delusional had some type of a relationship with their victim, and have personality disorders.
Comparison
The term "obsessive love" may also be compared to other concepts:- The love style called mania : possessive, dependent love. A manic lover is insecure, jealous, and needs reassurances of being loved. A manic lover is unsure of who attracts them, so they may fall in love with somebody they don't even like and project unrealistic qualities onto them. Among the other love styles, mania is most closely compared to eros, which is erotic love or love of beauty. An eros lover is also intensely preoccupied with their beloved, but they are self-assured. The eros lover is in search of an ideal, and they tend to fall in love with somebody more appropriate.
- Passionate love : the kind of love felt in the early stage of a relationship, or for a potential partner before a relationship has occurred. Passionate love is a state of intense longing for another, which has an obsessional element characterized by intrusive thinking, uncertainty, and mood swings. Passionate love is commonly contrasted with companionate love, the gentler feelings of affection or bonding which take more time to develop. Passionate love is a relatively broad concept which encapsulates and combines aspects of other more precise taxonomies, but while ignoring their finer distinctions.
- Limerence: love madness or all-absorbing infatuated love, commonly for an unreachable person. Limerence is said to be "a condition of cognitive obsession" where the person experiencing it spends much of their time fantasizing about their love object, the kind of love Romeo and Juliet felt for each other. Limerence can impact day-to-day functioning and mental health. According to the inventor of the term, Dorothy Tennov, limerence is supposed to be viewed as a normal state, and tragedies only seem to happen when limerence is "augmented and distorted" by other conditions. Limerence is usually unrequited, but it can be reciprocated. In cases of mutual limerence, according to Tennov's original theory, there must be obstacles to the relationship for the mutual preoccupation to intensify.
- Love addiction: a proposed disorder involving love relations characterized by severe distress and problematic passion-seeking despite adverse consequences. Academics do not currently agree on when love is an addiction, or when it needs to be treated.
- Erotomania: a delusional disorder where the sufferer has a delusional belief that their love is reciprocated when it isn't. A subject with erotomania will invent reasons to explain or excuse rejections, however extreme, so they continue believing their love is reciprocated. A related condition has been termed "morbid infatuation", where the sufferer does not believe their love is reciprocated, but still believes with a delusional intensity in the legitimacy and eventual success of their attempts to pursue a relationship. Both kinds of delusions are common among stalkers who did not have any relationship with their target. A classification problem exists where morbid infatuations do not fall under a DSM erotomania diagnosis, because the DSM diagnosis was designed with features of de Clérambault's syndrome in mind. Historically, the term "erotomania" also did not have a precise definition.
- Obsessive love disorder: an unofficial diagnosis commonly found online, but not in the DSM.
Psychology
John Moore describes the process of those who "confuse love with obsession" as a cycle of four phases he calls the "Obsessive Relational Progression":
- Attraction, characterized by an initial overwhelming attraction to a new person, unrealistic fantasies, an immediate urge to rush into a relationship, and the start of controlling behaviors.
- Anxiety, a turning point which usually occurs after a commitment has been made, where unfounded thoughts of infidelity, betrayal and fear of abandonment occur, resulting in mistrust, depression, anxiety, and the escalation of controlling behaviors.
- Obsession, when extreme behaviors begin to overwhelm, resulting in obsessive surveillance, stalking, and possibly violence.
- Destruction, where the partner flees the relationship.
In the dualistic model of passion, a distinction is made between two types of passion: harmonious passion and obsessive passion. This is reminiscent of the distinction between the love styles eros and mania. One study found that harmonious romantic passion was strongly correlated with secure attachment, and obsessive romantic passion was moderately correlated with anxious attachment. Obsessive passion has also been associated with maladaptive conflict resolution strategies in relationships.
The anthropologist Helen Fisher believed that "abandonment rage" can be explained in terms of the frustration–aggression hypothesis, where rage is triggered when an expected reward is in jeopardy. Romantic love and rage are connected in the brain by similar circuitry; both involve arousal and energy production, and both drive obsessive focus and goal-directed behaviors. Fisher believed that ordinarily the evolutionary purpose of abandonment rage is to facilitate separation and the search for a new partner, although sometimes abandonment rage erupts into violence instead.
Another feature of obsessive love is jealousy, which seems to be related to OCD for its obsessional qualities and compulsive checking. This can also take the form of pathological jealousy where the sufferer has a delusional or paranoid belief in their partner's infidelity despite actual evidence. Jealousy is strongly associated with irritability, which can erupt into violence: spousal murder is often related to infidelity. It has been suggested that this seemingly self-defeating behavior of murdering one's own partner results from a kind of "brinkmanship", where a looming threat of violence is used to control women as sexual partners—a threat which sometimes escalates into actual violence to be "credible".
It is argued that non-pathological jealousy evolved as protection against reproductive competition, which is adaptive as long as it serves to maintain a relationship.
Stalking
Love obsessionality can in some cases lead to stalking, although stalkers also often have other conditions. Like falling in love, stalking is also described as a form of addiction. A 1999 study by Paul Mullen and colleagues classified 145 stalkers according to several kinds of groups:- Rejected ex-partners, who mostly had personality disorders, although 9 were delusional, 5 of whom had morbid jealousy. Rejected stalkers often had mixed desire for reconciliation and revenge, as well as frustration, anger, jealousy, vindictiveness, and sadness.
- Intimacy seekers, who were attempting to establish an intimate relationship with their "true love", most of whom were delusional, and further classified as follows:
- Those with erotomania, with a delusional belief their love was reciprocated.
- Those with morbid infatuations, who did not believe their love was reciprocated but still believed a delusion of their eventual success.
- Those who had personality disorders, but were not delusional.
- Incompetent stalkers, who regarded their victims as attractive potential partners, but who were intellectually limited and socially incompetent instead of being infatuated.
- The other 33 stalkers identified by the study had motives other than a relationship.
Neuroscience
Cultural references
The ancient Greeks called obsessive love "theia mania", and Greek mythology depicted it in stories such as Apollo and Daphne.Obsessive love has been depicted in the movies Fatal Attraction and Play Misty for Me, and the novel Wuthering Heights.