Why love is an Addiction

Love is not an emotion. It is an addiction. It is an addiction that plays with your emotions. Throwing you from the highest of highs to the depths of sorrow, sometimes in an instant. It makes people behave in strange ways, and do things they’d never otherwise do. People risk everything for love, they give their life for love, they kill for love.

 

Love is the most addictive substance in the world.

Being in love shows all the classic symptoms of an addiction: dependence, tolerance, withdrawal, and relapse. When you’re in love with someone, they become special to you. The object of your desire becomes the focus of your attention, the motivator of your intentions – the center of your universe. They’re constantly in your minds, they’re the first person you think of in the morning, the one you dream of at night.

Eventually, you fill your whole lives with them, you spend every moment you can with them and you take them into account for every decision that you make. Sometimes you even let them make all the decisions for you. In the end, you can’t even imagine a life without them. You say things like “how could I ever live without you”, and “where have you been all of my life?” You become so used to and attached to this person that you become dysfunctional without them.  You become dependent, and whenever you can’t get to see them, you’re a mess. You spend all your time anticipating the next time you get to see them. You’re no longer in control of your emotions, everything you feel dictated by them and how much you get to see them.

So eventually, you take every opportunity you get to spend time with them. You plan sushi dates on Facebook and bring them breakfast in bed. Just like drug addiction, you develop tolerance and you end up wanting more and more. You want to see them more often, you want to do more things together. You quit your job and your career just to be with them. You devote all your time to them because you just can’t get enough of them. Just like the alcoholic who just drinks more and more, you’re drunk on love, but your tolerance just keeps building.

And when you don’t get to see them enough or spend enough time with them, you start to experience withdrawal symptoms and cravings. At first it might start off subtly and mild, like hunger, but it quickly escalates into a burning itch. You miss them all day and you think about them all the time. Worse still if you’ve just broken up, or been rejected. You become depressed, depressive, demotivated and utterly useless. You can’t seem to function without them. Still, you try to move on and forget, but everything reminds you of them. You have to cope to living a life without them. The life which, before you had met them, was going relatively smoothly.

After an inordinate amount of time recovering from the whole thing, you finally begin to readjust to life without love. Yet, months after the experience, you catch yourself thinking about that special person once in a while, and each time, it’s like all the feelings come rushing back. Months after you thought it’s all over, the cravings are still there, ready to bring you into relapse.

And that is why love is an addiction.