“I spoke with several 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,” xx starts in New York Times magazine.
Excerpts from the New York Times article…
“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… 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…
But if we did away with old visions of romantic love, what would replace them? 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.”
