Love and Relationship Addiction
Questions to Consider:
Do you choose partners who are emotionally unavailable?
Do you choose partners who are abusive?
You obsess about this person?
You experience unbearable sadness in your love relationship?
Do you find it emotionally difficult to be alone?
Love addiction is compulsively seeking relationships or romance despite negative social, emotional, financial or physical consequences. Terms often used to describe this include “serial monogamists” or “relationship addicts”. Love addicts use the neurobiology of love as a way to distract themselves from uncomfortable feelings or emotions. Neurobiology simply means the way the brain attaches to another person and is wired for love.
Love addicts often have unrealistic expectations for giving and receiving love. Some love addicts get caught in toxic relationships and become “co-dependent” and enmeshed. Many individuals I work with use this word and describe love addiction and co-dependency as going hand-in-hand. Love addicts will do anything to take care of their partners, often putting themselves last on the list. Toxic care-taking can be in the form of enabling immature behaviours or ‘rescuing’ in hopes that they will not be abandoned. This often leads to self-neglect, which eventually usually produces resentment and anger, rather than intimacy and harmony.