How is love an addiction?

I see it as a form of obsession, where the happiness, safety and well-being of another is at least as important to you as your own.

The idea may be to get the sex addict/obsessed to not not call a steady sexual relationship a love relationship?

people addicted to love are “in love” for their own happiness. everyone wants to be happy, and people look for happines in different things. i would say love addicts need to realize that they don’t need others to make them happy, and that as corny as it sounds they need to love themselves before trying to love another. however, that’s just my two cents

I think all addiction is a way of avoiding being alone and forced to learn to be at home in yourself. You can’t have a healthy love relationship with anyone until you have a healthy love for yourself.

I consider love a desire for another person, if your a sex addict then seek help _but I am sure an assigned partner for the physical part would totally help the therapy and then in the end and meaningful relationship could develop.
Meanwhile my priorities are; shelter, food,wife,sex,sleep, repeat… somewhere there is some work!

Love addiction is about getting love and loving someone in a healthy manner is about giving love.

@generalspecific is on the right track there. Love addiction is more a form of narcissism; it’s about making yourself feel good from the euphoria of having someone find you interesting, attractive, engaging. The early, uncommitted stages of a relationship is marked by the newness of it. It can be intense, people go at great lengths to be together. That feeling can be addictive in its excitement.

Real life does not work like that in a committed relationship; you cannot live your life like a character in a bodice-ripper Harlequin romance. Real life is about cooking dinner, car pool for kids, juggling work schedules, the furnace going out, the car breaking down on a dark road on a cold night, people getting sick and having to disrupt your life/own plans to take care of them, people you care deeply about dying.

”After all, what all addicts want is to learn how to experience love in a healthy way.”

Where are you getting this rule? I think it’s very, very flawed. Discuss.

I’m no expert on the addiction bit. Humans (mostly) have an urge to pair up for sex, companionship, security—all kinds of reasons. How looking for love is “healthy” or not gets really confusing, but chew on this for a minute:

Person A falls in love with Person B and Person B reciprocates. The most idealized, pure love of all is that A loves B so beautifully and unconditionally that they would give their life for them (I’m exaggerating here to make a point). But am I the only one who thinks it’s a little design flaw in the human psyche that A usually will only love B as long as B still loves A? In other words, to some degree, A’s happiness is based on the actions of another.

If A continues to love B after B stops loving them and/or moves on to someone else, we then call that unhealthy. Or a stalker, depending on how you look at it. Any way you slice it, love’s a bitch. It can work out really well, but a bitch nonetheless.

Love is Like Oxygen:
You get too much, you get too high,
Not enough and you’re gonna die.
Love gets you high. call me at 867 5309 :)>

@germanmannn Sweet and Tommy Tutone. Can’t go wrong there.

Real love, as long-time married couples know, lasts long past the giddyOMG phase. However, I don’t think that’s the flavor of love that love addicts are addicted to.

Remember the giddy feeling of infatuation, arousal, and plain old obsession that brand new love brings? The kind that releases all kinds of endorphins and makes you feel kind of high? I suspect that’s what they’re really addicted to. It’s as much a drug high as one you get from a pill – the difference is that your body is making the compounds all by itself.

It is a truism that you can’t love anyone else unless you can love yourself. However, my counselor pointed out today, that you can’t love yourself unless you know you’re lovable, and the only way to know you’re lovable is if others love you. For most, the other is supposed to be your parents. But if you don’t get it there, where else can you find it? Maybe from a lover?

If you never know that you are lovable, how can you love yourself? If you’ve never been loved, how can you know what love is?

@laureth In my session today, our therapist said that the “in love” high is actually higher than anything any substance can give you.

Ask Robert Palmer

I cannot be ‘together’ with you unless I have some sense of my own separateness and autonomy. I cannot be my own self with you if I am bound to you in dependency. When our togetherness enhances my life but my life does not depend on it, I can be together with you and still be myself. My sense of being alive comes from within. It is enriched by my connection with people outside myself but does not depend on it.

Intimacy and Solitude by Stephanie Dowrick

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the connection and balance between intimacy and solitude, which is at the heart of all healthy human relationships. All I can say is I found it enormously useful.

I can have sex without love and I have always known love. That idea is wrong, for me.

I think it can be seen as an addiction. Before you experience it, you don’t know what you’re “missing”. After you’ve experienced it but have fallen out of it…its a huge gaping hole begging to be filled.

Love is an addiction because even though you may know that a relationship/person you’re involved is not healthy and/or you don’t want to be involved in it, sometimes you can’t just walk away even when you want to.

I can sort of see how you can be “addicted” (though I would not use that term) to being loved, but I find it much harder to see how you could be addicted to loving others. It is just that telling these two apart is not trivial. My personal experience is that sometimes when people say “I am in love you”, they mean “I love being loved by you”, but they honestly do not know the difference.

It’s not an addiction, but it can become an obsession. Same with sex.

I dont think the question is abt “love addiction” or sex addiction. Its asking if love IS an addiction. In other words, is there such thing as real love or is it an addiction? I think there is real love but its rare and takes a long long time to develop. All other attraction/sexual desire/relationships, are more an addiction, because you want to be with the person all the time, fantasize abt them, need them again and again…

@blueguitargirlkath Interesting post. Welcome to Fluther!