She outlined to me how love addiction works—or for that matter, doesn’t work. Since I’m obviously not a psychiatrist, I don’t want to generalize about all love addicts because I can’t speak to anyone’s experience but my own, so I’ll just tell you how mine specifically manifests.
When in “love,” I overlook red flags and the other person’s shortcomings to justify staying in the relationship. This is a form of denial that has helped me justify dating people who follow thirty porn stars on Instagram and ask me to pay off their student loans. My brain is able to instantly turn red flags into green lights by twisting the negative into a positive: “He’s asking me to pay his student loans . . . I mean, look at the bright side! He went to college!”
I would glorify the person instead of accepting the reality of who they have actually shown themselves to be. I put them on a pedestal and exaggerated their good qualities and minimized their negative ones. I’d give points for things that should be categorized under baseline basic respect—for example, “He called me! He’s such a class act!” To be clear, you don’t get points for making a phone call to a person you are dating.
I tended to get in relationships with people before I actually knew them. I’d fill in the blanks with projections of what I hoped they were. I saw that as way more convenient than finding out the truth, because, well, the truth always ruins my love affair with dopamine. If I actually knew someone’s low credit score or history of incarceration, it would destroy my fantasy and mess up my to-do list, on which “being in a relationship” always seemed to be number one. I avoided asking questions I didn’t want to know the answers to under the guise of “it’s none of my business what happened before me.” Which is of course false, because if someone got herpes before me, it’s my business and my business’s business.
I would fall in love with someone’s potential rather than with who they actually were. I’d walk in, find a guy who was smart and funny but a complete mess, and light up like a talent agent from the 1950s. I’d think to myself, “This kid’s gonna be a star!” I’d take on a guy the way Michelle Pfeiffer took on the punk-ass kids from Dangerous Minds, seeing the best in them and pushing them to be better. And also like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, I had to teach a couple of guys how to read. Of course, this dynamic caused my relationships to feel maternal, making my partner resent me and making sex feel like incest. To add insult to injury, I basically ended up coaching a guy to be the best he can be for the next girl who came along. To anyone dating my exes, you’re welcome for getting them together so you could have the perfect boyfriend. Love you, girl.
If a friend disapproved of the relationship, I’d distance myself from the friend until the relationship was over the same way that I’ve seen drug addicts and alcoholics push away anyone who confronts them about their using and drinking. I made excuses and tried to protect the person when friends pointed out warning signs or bad behavior. I would actually end up projecting the criticism I should have used for the guy I was with onto my good-intentioned friends. For example: “Lindsay is just really judgmental and narrow-minded.” Instead of thinking clearly: “Lindsay’s right, it’s a total deal breaker that the guy I’m dating didn’t tell me about the kid he has with another girl.”
I was constantly in an adrenalized state of fear and uncertainty, but it never occurred to me to leave the relationship. I mistook the ominous anxiety in the pit in my stomach for “passion” and “butterflies.” In some relationships I cried so much that I might as well have been dating an actual onion. Also, as a society can we stop confusing everyone by romanticizing that tingling feeling we get in our stomachs by calling it “butterflies”? Maybe we can use a less attractive bug that actually reflects the macabre nature of what our physiology is trying to tell us? Maybe, like, a flesh-eating maggot, or to stay on theme with this chapter, an earwig?
I chose people who made me feel anxious and insecure and re-created my childhood circumstances of getting erratic attention. I gravitated toward people who were either physically or emotionally unavailable to subconsciously ensure I was getting a constant hit from my “internal drug cabinet.” Instead of heroin or cocaine, I used to be addicted to cortisol and adrenaline (which turns into dopamine! Yay!). That drove me to pick people who couldn’t give me safety or stability, which caused those chemicals to go buck wild on my brain. You live in London? Yes, please. You work until three A.M., and when you are available, you’re super tired, so every time we have the chance to connect, your eyes are half closed? Sure, let’s move in together. One day you tell me you’re in love with me, but then you disappear and go on a week-long bender on Long Island? Absolutely. You travel for four months at a time in places that have horrible cell service? Don’t mind if I do marry ya.
I found myself in numerous relationships at once, out of fear that one would end or that I’d be abandoned. From what I understand, this is a classic addict move. We hoard our supply or always have a backup plan for how to get a hit of our drug. I mean, no self-respecting addict has only one drug dealer.
There are many more elements to love addiction that I could mention, but I want this book to be able to fit into your carry-on bag. Also, I’m going to keep it specific to my deal because I can’t speak for anyone but myself in terms of how it manifests. At first I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept of love addiction, but it really helped to use the metaphor of drug or food addiction, since I was told by people way smarter than me that it’s all basically the same neurological reactions, even if we all pick different drugs. My excuses are all pretty congruous with how other addicts talk when they minimize their behavior to justify using substances: “I only do blow on the weekends”; or someone I know who just got a DUI saying, “But I’m only drinking beer now instead of whiskey”; or “But red wine is actually supposed to be good for you! So many antioxidants!” I employed those same types of rationalizations with guys who were terrible for me: “So what if he cheated before? His girlfriend was so mean to him!” “A little conflict is good for me. He calls me out on my shit!” “We’re going to see each other four times a week now instead of every night” as if making a schedule would magically change a person’s values.