When Love Becomes a Fatal Attraction or Addictive

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        It’s 3 a.m. and most people are sleeping.  Caroline, however, is in her car driving to her ex-boyfriend’s house.  It’s her third time this week.  “I just want to see if he’s at home,” she says. “I’ll know because his car will be parked outside.” 

        But seeing his car won’t make Caroline feel any better because she’ll do the same thing again tomorrow night and the night after that and most likely the night after that as well, for weeks or months to come.  The problem is, Caroline is a love addict.

        Perhaps you have never done anything so extreme, but have you ever been addicted or obsessed about a person or relationship that was over? If so, you might be a love addict too.

        Susan Peabody, a relationship counselor, describes addiction as “an unhealthy dependency on a person or relationship that begins with a mood-altering experience–i.e. one that makes you feel good or kills the pain.  Falling in love is usually the best example because the chemicals released into our bloodstream are mood-altering when we fall in love.  The trouble is, the love addict gets hooked on the experience.”

        And trouble for the addict can come in three forms:  addiction to romance, addiction to a person and addiction to a relationship.

        Romance addiction is epitomized by the Casanova who loves the honeymoon phase and recreates it with a different partner each time.  This kind of romance always ends before it can advance to a deeper stage.  If a partner wants more than dating, the Casanova usually ends the romance.  He or she is hooked on the courtship, not the person or the relationship.

        Person addiction, on the other hand, means being hooked on the individual and if this is you, you’ll go to any lengths to draw the partner into your life.  The film Fatal Attraction and the real-life OJ Simpson case illustrate this point.  In real-life addictions there are often constant reconciliations and a great deal of passion.