Why Being in Love Feels So Addictive

We become emotionally addicted as well as physically dependent on romantic love, and fear that losing it could be unimaginably catastrophic.

(Photo by Vidar Nordi-Mathison on Unsplash)

By Dr T J Jordan

Love can be the sweetest of poisons. Some people seem built for love. Others have difficulty letting love in.

What is common to all of us is the sense that we don’t quite understand romantic love. Yet, we long to have this mystery (and, sometimes, this misery) in our lives.

At least since the Ancient Greek philosophers, humans have been engaged in a battle with love. Plato presented erotic love as a mental disease, while he couldn’t avoid returning to the topic with his own brand of passion. His teacher, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, also grappled with the concept of love, putting such phenomena as soulmates on our horizon.

More contemporaneously, Nietzsche described love as the lustful craving of people to possess each other. (For a simple, quick, and good rundown of the history of philosophy on love, see Neel Burton.*)

We sometimes label our most intense romantic connections enabling, symbiotic, codependent, and other unflattering things. We worry about feeling addicted to love, since we have been taught that addiction is…