If you’ve ever fallen in love, you know the feelings and behaviors that accompany it. Butterflies in your stomach, constant daydreaming, or struggling to eat or sleep are all hallmark signs Cupid’s arrow has hit you. Those feelings of love are exciting, but when it advances to an obsession, it creates challenges in your relationships and can cause significant emotional distress.
Love addiction is a type of attachment disorder, which is a problem that develops in childhood when you’re unable to connect with a person in your life you rely on, like your parents. At Begin Again Institute, we offer a unique trauma-informed approach to treating love addiction and other intimacy-related issues.
Defining Love Addiction
Love addiction is an unhealthy fixation on another person that results in obsessive compulsions. It can look like focusing all your time and energy on your partner, sacrificing your health and well-being for your relationship, or feeling unable to be alone.
The root of love addiction is the hope that your romantic interest can solve problems and provide love no one else can. Because of this, you may find yourself in toxic, unsustainable relationships because of a constant need to be in a partnership.
Love addiction is characterized by a pattern of unhealthy behavior. If you’re experiencing love addiction, you may cater all your choices specifically to a romantic partner or to searching for a partner.
You may feel more attracted to the feeling of falling in love than actually experiencing a healthy relationship. Once that initial rush fades, you can find yourself bored in the relationship and seeking out the “high” of falling in love again. If you’re not in a relationship, you can experience withdrawal symptoms, like feeling irritable, restless, and unhappy with your circumstances.
While love addiction can look different for different people, there are a few misconceptions of love addiction.
Misconceptions about love addiction include:
- “It’s normal to be love-crazy!” There’s a difference between the typical enjoyment of falling in love and being in a relationship as opposed to experiencing compulsive behavior. Dismissing love addiction as being “love crazy” invalidates the genuine mental health challenges the person experiencing the addiction is facing.
- “Love addicts just read too much romance.” There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a romance novel (or several). Love addiction goes deeper than passionate escapism. When you consistently disassociate from past trauma, it prevents you from processing and coping with that trauma.
- “If I make myself better, they’ll love me enough.” People experiencing love addiction are often attracted to emotionally unavailable people. They feel like if they change things about themselves, they will be enough for their partner, and the relationship will be perfect. Additionally, they may expect that a relationship can fill any holes in their own life. Not only can the partner not provide what they need, but it places unhealthy standards on the relationship that the partner likely won’t be able to fulfill.
Symptoms of Love Addiction
Love addiction may be challenging to distinguish from typical feelings of falling in love. Partners may even unwittingly enable the behavior, believing it will improve the relationship. Look for these symptoms to know if you or a loved one may be experiencing love addiction.
Symptoms of love addiction include:
- Constantly craving or searching for a new relationship
- Feeling obsessed with a romantic interest
- Putting your partner on a pedestal
- Having anxiety over the constant need to please your partner
- Feeling unable to be alone
- Having withdrawal symptoms when not with your partner
- Being drawn to someone who is love-avoidant
- Feeling emotionally dependent on your partner
- Changing your beliefs, values, or interests solely for a relationship
- Struggling to leave abusive relationships despite promising to do so
- Returning to abusive relationships despite vowing against it
Causes of Love Addiction
As with many addictions, love addiction often stems from unresolved trauma. Obsession with love may be a need to compensate for a lack of love in childhood, fear of abandonment, dopamine dysregulation, or low self-esteem.
When you lack appropriate nurturing at a young age, it creates an emotional void. You may struggle to find excitement, joy, or value in life and seek out relationships to fill that gap. If appropriate, healthy relationship behavior hasn’t been modeled, it could lead to poor emotional boundaries. You may feel dependent on your partner and have a constant need to seek approval.
Lack of stability in your personal life can lead to a desperate and compulsive need to find stability in a relationship. You may expect your partner to give you purpose, even if the love is unrequited. This can lead to shame as you struggle to find fulfillment in your life.
The euphoria of being in love parallels the dopamine high of using drugs or alcohol. When you consume a substance, you experience an intense level of pleasure. In the beginning stages of love, you’ll experience similar high levels of excitement and satisfaction. These feelings become addicting, particularly if you are lacking them in other areas of your life.
Love addiction can overlap with other intimacy disorders like sex or pornography addictions. The need to please your partner and maintain intimacy can manifest in sex addiction. Alternatively, you may use sex or porn as a means of avoiding attaching emotionally to someone, essentially avoiding all meaningful romantic relationships.
Impact of Love Addiction
Because people experiencing love addiction tend to unconsciously choose emotionally unavailable partners, it can build resentment in the relationship. The emotional dependency can exhaust and wear down the other partner. They may feel expected to constantly provide attention and bear the emotional burden of the relationship.
It can also worsen your self-esteem if you find your partner does not offer the fulfillment you crave. It will likely take the work of unpacking the root cause of love addiction to achieve true peace. Your partner cannot provide that for you. It may be necessary to seek professional mental health support.
Coping With and Treating Love Addiction
The first step in healing from love addiction is acknowledging the issue. You may feel confused or shameful about experiences you thought were positive but actually have negative consequences. Obsessive, compulsive behaviors can be addressed through various therapies, including talk therapy..
By approaching love addiction through trauma-informed therapy, you can tackle the heart of the addiction. Begin Again Institute provides a team of expert mental health professionals who can safely guide you through unpacking previous traumas. Through our intensive programs, we offer a safe space to work through negative or problematic feelings related to intimacy. Through our treatment, you can track unhealthy patterns and adjust harmful behaviors.
For at-home practices, try meditation or journaling to help with anxieties surrounding the addiction and reflect on past experiences. Invest time in hobbies you enjoy and be intentional about spending healthy alone time. Confide in a trusted friend or loved one, or consider joining a support group. It’s easy to believe you are the only one feeling this way, but many others experience love addiction.
Renew Your Relationship With Yourself
Love addiction can cause distress, confusion, and harm in your personal life and your relationships. If you’ve experienced unhealthy fixations or obsessions in your relationship, you may have a love addiction. While it can be frightening to make that discovery, it doesn’t have to be permanent. With treatment, you can learn to form healthy relationships with yourself and others.
Begin Again Institute recognizes that love addiction is an intimacy disorder that likely stems from past negative experiences. That’s why we approach love addiction with compassion and understanding. We believe in helping you rebuild your relationship with yourself so you can have healthy relationships with others. That’s how we’ve helped hundreds of men find healing through intimacy disorder treatment.
Don’t wait to get the help you need. Give us a call today to learn more about the support and treatment that starts your life anew.
Like many people, Ryan walked many paths before becoming a therapist. He wrote for a music magazine, worked as head-roaster for a coffee company, made live and recorded music, and worked in libraries. But it wasn’t until he discovered his own mental health struggles that he found his true calling. Through trauma work and psychotherapy he came to understand that many dysfunctions are deeply embedded in our culture, and that long term healing requires courage, resilience, and a supportive community.
