Is love addiction real – and what does it look like?

Elizabeth Gilbert was using people like drugs: a point she emphasizes throughout her memoir All the Way to the River, released in September.

In the book, Gilbert describes falling in love with her friend Rayya Elias. Elias’s terminal cancer diagnosis compelled Gilbert to reveal her feelings, despite being married at the time. She admits to enabling Elias, a self-described “ex-junkie”, to access hard drugs and alcohol during her final months as a warped act of care.

“I needed Rayya at a level that was far beyond healthy,” Gilbert writes of wanting to demonstrate her commitment with extreme acts.

Confronted by her compulsion to seek meaning through the highs of romantic intensity, Gilbert eventually diagnoses herself as a “sex and love addict”, exploring the label via self-reflection and 12-step recovery communities like Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA).

Love and sex addiction can overlap and are often discussed together, but Gilbert focuses less on her sex life than on the extreme ways she pursues love, acceptance, validation and approval, abbreviated in recovery communities as “Lava.” Some of these recovery communities, such as Love Addicts Anonymous (LAA), engage primarily with love addiction as its own unique form of unhealthy obsession.

Love, intimacy and acceptance are universal needs, and western society venerates romance, lionizing extreme behaviors in its pursuit. So one may wonder: at what point does love become dysfunctional?

What does love addiction look like, and what can be done about it?

What is love addiction?

Love addiction has been a research topic for decades. But experts still debate whether “addiction” appropriately describes destructive romantic fixation, or whether it would be better understood as a confluence of attachment disorders, behavioral patterns and relational dysfunction.

While it’s clear people can suffer from relationship patterns, experts worry about over-pathologizing normal human experiences. “I’d be more tempted to say ‘a person struggling with boundaries,’ or ‘a person experiencing enmeshment,’” says sex therapist Erin Davidson; the term “love addict” can be reductive or shaming, or used as an abdication of responsibility for abusive behavior.

“Partly what we call love is just being addicted to another person,” says Dr Brian Earp, associate professor of biomedical ethics, philosophy, and psychology at the National University of Singapore. Some philosophers of addiction are uneasy about conceiving of love as a harmful addiction, arguing that love is an “inherent good”, and as such should not be associated with addiction, which connotes harm, Earp says.

Nonetheless, many researchers use the concept of “love addiction” as a shorthand for exploring maladaptive romances.

According to a 2023 research survey, love addiction can be considered a type of behavioral dependence, a broad category of conditions that includes gaming, shopping and food addictions. Demographic data is scant, but in 2011, psychology researchers estimated that 3% of the US population are love addicts.

Love addiction “presents itself as an incessant need” for romantic relationships in which “dysfunctional behaviors associated with a recurrent fear of abandonment” arise, write the authors of the 2023 survey.

Characteristics of the condition may include high levels of “salience”, or directing most thoughts and feelings toward the object of love; “mood modification”, or coping with negative feelings through thinking about or spending time with the loved one; and “conflict”, an interference with daily activities due to focus on the beloved, according to behavioral addiction research models.

The authors also note there is “real danger in the psychopathological manifestation” of love addiction; it can indicate a serious mental disorder, and is not just a hyperbolic way to describe romantic misadventure.

But due to insufficient expert agreement, neither sex nor love addiction is a formal diagnosis according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Thus, there is no absolute medical consensus on who might qualify as a love and/or sex addict or how they should seek treatment.

Can love be addictive?

Love, approval and validation are associated with feelgood neurotransmitters like oxytocin and dopamine. Because of this, researchers commonly draw parallels between the euphoria of romance to the high of drugs like alcohol, heroin or cocaine.

Love is “phenomenologically identical to being high”, says Earp, “an altered state of consciousness that’s very pleasurable and thrilling, somewhat scary, but very, very enjoyable”. Being in love “feels somehow more true or more real than ordinary life,” compelling people to disregard, to varying degrees, ordinary norms while chasing intensity, he says.

The threshold for addiction is when a behavior, or set of behaviors, becomes uncontrollable, disrupting a person’s ability to live a reasonably balanced, fulfilling life and causing them or those around them to suffer. In love addiction, the euphoria of love can become maladaptive and begin “getting in the way of what a person wants for their life or relationships,” says Davidson.

What are the symptoms of love addiction?

According to addiction experts, no case is exactly like another. However, love addicts may exhibit traits of “immature” love, “feel desperate and alone” when single, continue pursuing a love object long after a relationship has ended or “replace ended relationships immediately,” wrote University of Southern California psychologist Dr Steve Sussman in 2010.

Other patterns could include expecting the right relationship to “fix” one’s life or consistently jeopardizing existing relationships to feel the thrill of a new love’s first bloom.

For Cyn Posner, 50, a self-identified love addict working on, and writing about, recovery, addictive patterns looked like becoming involved with unavailable people despite wanting a stable monogamous partnership, and “not being able to walk away” from relationships where she was “being emotionally mishandled”, and cheated on. “I wasn’t able to be OK just by myself,” Posner says.

Love addicts may feel “so viscerally drawn” to a person that they cannot bring themselves to leave, even in the face of harm, says Earp.

Love addicts may not be aware of their patterns – perhaps because of cultural normalization of romantic dysfunction or because irrationality is a characteristic of addiction. Coming to accept that one has a problem beyond their control is, in recovery communities, a crucial first step toward healing.

Dominick McClintock, a 43-year-old military IT professional, is now in recovery and working with a therapist. But previously, he might have met a woman – a client or colleague, or strangers he sought out on Reddit – and begin fantasizing, oversharing and flirting with her, hiding it from his wife.

“It wasn’t sexual,” says McClintock, who also uses the label “fantasy addict”. This made it feel innocent, he says. But the strength of his need eventually gave him pause: “I couldn’t stop.”

What causes love addiction?

Like any other addiction, love addiction has no single cause and likely arises from a complex interplay of genetic, psychological, social and developmental factors, says Earp.

Sheila Lashley, a Houston-based counsellor who has specialized in the issue for over a decade, traces clients’ compulsive emotional patterns back to childhood trauma, such as abuse, abandonment, displacement, and emotional neglect.

“How many of us can say we got everything we emotionally, physically needed as a child? Probably close to none,” says Courtney D, 27, a queer California-based stylist who identifies as a love addict. “There’s so much self love that we’re not taught in western society.”

Lashley and Davidson say clients often find learning about attachment theory and “codependency” illuminating. The latter – unboundaried enmeshment in which a person takes so much responsibility for a partner that they lose their sense of self, sacrifice their own wellbeing, and experience low self-esteem and a declining quality of life – is particularly characteristic of love addicts.

“Not all codependents are love addicts, but all love addicts are codependent,” says Lashley.

Love addiction can co-occur with other disorders, particularly conditions associated with impulsivity and control, says Davidson. For instance, attention deficit disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, some manifestations of autism, anxiety and depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder can all intersect with all kinds of addiction, due to underlying psychological and neurobiological traits.

For an estimated 40% of love addicts, the condition overlaps with substance use disorders. Posner used to relapse with alcohol and pills after a breakup, she says. Trying to self-soothe by switching to a new addiction is not uncommon among attendees of 12-step programs, she says; many of the people she has met in recovery for love addiction have also attended Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, “because we tend to need an escape from our reality,” she says.

How can love addicts develop a healthier relationship with romance?

There are no evidence-based treatments for love addiction recovery, but therapy from a qualified provider can help a patient understand their relationship to trust, love and partnership, and build self-esteem, says Lashley. A therapist can help cut through “fantasy, rumination and falsehood”, so individuals can clarify and pursue what they really want, she says.

Recovery groups are an accessible way for people to find support, community and information. There have been no controlled studies on the outcomes of self help groups, but in 2023, researchers studying treatment options for love addiction wrote that group interventions can be “fundamental to breaking out of isolation and experiencing new, healthier, and more functional forms of relationality”.

“It’s very reliable and very consistent,” says Courtney of recovery meetings. “It’s on every day.”

Yet, with their emphasis on spirituality and rigid structure, 12-step recovery groups aren’t for everyone. And because such groups bring unhealed love addicts into contact, attendees say they can present opportunities for new, ill-advised romantic entanglements. Gender-specific meetings can help reduce those complications for heterosexual attendees.

The 12-step program’s sponsor model, in which a more experienced member of the community guides a new member through their recovery, was useful for Posner. The sponsor helped her to write a list of goals, or “top line” behaviors, including communicating openly about seeking stable, monogamous, long-term partnership at the start of new relationships. She also created a “bottom-line” list of behaviors to avoid, including “ex-stalking on social media”.

Unlike in substance-use recovery, full abstinence isn’t the goal in love-addiction programs; the aim is for individuals to cultivate healthy, fulfilling relationships. Frameworks vary, but in Posner’s experience participants are encouraged to go a year without engaging in bottom-line behaviors before pursuing new romance, and to reset their sobriety date if they slip.

In All the Way to the River, Gilbert writes of the lonely boredom of withdrawal from love addiction, describing how it took months to reorient away from high-adrenaline love affairs toward more steady satisfactions, and a belief in self-love and internal strength.

Perhaps there is some comfort in knowing that debilitating, destructive love has been around for millennia. In the first century BC, the Roman poet Ovid wrote Remedia Amoris, or “The cure for love.” His recommendations are timeless: space and distraction from the object of one’s yearning, and seeking deeper fulfilment from within. “Let your swift mind encompass what it is that you love,” he writes, “and withdraw your neck from the collar that hurts you.”