I once heard addiction being described in a way that resonated with me to a chilling degree: “It was great for a while. Then it stopped being fun, but I didn’t know how to stop.” That’s how I felt my romantic relationships were. They always started with Netflix and chill and ended in incriminating pix and being physically ill. I realized that after all the initial dopamine wore off in the first year, I wasn’t enjoying relationships, I was enduring them.
My brain continued to fight the idea of having an addiction, which is apparently pretty typical of addictive brains, so to add insult to injury, on top of being an addict I was also unoriginal. I argued with Vera about how it’s a biological imperative to want to pair up with people and breed. “Maybe it’s just my biological clock . . . Without love we’d have no species. We’d be extinct!” I reasoned. I now understood why they call addiction “the disease that tells you that you don’t have a disease.”
My brain would play emotional Twister all day long to avoid coming to terms with this diagnosis. I blamed Disney movies, romance novels, magazines, social constructs, the Beatles. They told me all you need is love. Isn’t that what life is all about? Finding a soul mate? A partner? Jerry Maguire said “You complete me,” which means we’re incomplete without another person, right? ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE.
“But all you need is love,” I said to Vera.
It took saying that out loud to realize how unhealthy that song lyric is. The song doesn’t say, “All you need is love, but when you get it, you should still put yourself first, have boundaries, and keep your social life. You also need sleep, health insurance, and of course food and water. Also, don’t forget love isn’t supposed to cause you anxiety or stress! And when you’re in love with someone, you should also like them. And get a prenup!” I have a feeling if the song were written that way it wouldn’t be in the iTunes Top 100, but it would have set some more sane expectations about what we actually need. I was operating under the mentality that everything I did, made, and smeared on my face was in the name of current or future “love.”
I can’t imagine hearing that you’re an addict or that you have a “disease” is ever fun, but once it sunk in for me, I actually felt a huge sense of relief and freedom. Since addiction isn’t a choice, it made me feel way better about my ridiculous behavior in the past. Running from guy to guy, thinking a breakup was the end of the world, staring at my phone—it was all part of a neural wiring system that science could explain. I didn’t actually believe that posting a photo of me having fun on social media would make an ex appreciate me more, my disease just tricked me into thinking it would. Whew.
Again, how does this relate to Billy and my ear, which now looks like a melted candle? Well, I don’t want to anthropomorphize Billy too much because comparing him to a human is actually pretty degrading. Dogs are way cooler than people, but what I did with him was a microcosmic version of what I tended to do in relationships. Vera told me that love addicts tend to confuse love with pity, or in my case, a pitty. They also get into intense relationships with people they can “rescue.” Yup. As soon as I saw Billy suffering in a photo on Instagram, there was no turning back. My brain tells me that I’m the only person who can understand someone, save someone, that they need me. To be fair, Billy actually did need someone, because he’s voiceless, but other humans don’t need me unless they’re dying of blood loss during the apocalypse and I am the only person left on earth with their blood type.
The more people warned me that Billy was dangerous, the more I wanted to protect him. Similarly, when people warned me about guys, it only made me want to commit to the guy more because I now had skin in the game in the form of my ego. In the past, any time I heard something negative about a guy I was dating, it strangely bonded me to him. We developed our “it’s us against the world” type of relationship where we adhered to each other based on the delusion that nobody understood us. I wanted that Romeo and Juliet/Eminem and Kim Mathers type of love. And yes, I realize this is the second time I’ve referenced Eminem in this chapter, which actually makes a lot of sense since he’s at the top of the list of people with whom I’d like to be in an addictive relationship. I’m clearly also addicted to referencing him.
When I was a kid, I read Romeo and Juliet. I know Shakespeare is amazing and all, but I am very confused about why schools think it’s a good idea for kids to read this play while still formulating a blueprint about how relationships should look. But I guess for me the damage had already been done, because I remember reading that they committed suicide and thinking it was an excellent solution to their problem. As a teenager, I watched Sid and Nancy and thought it was the most romantic movie I’d ever seen. This is not a healthy reaction to either of these stories.
I was an expert at ignoring negative information about romantic prospects. I used to see a red flag, and if it wasn’t congruous with my plans to date someone, I’d just paint it white. And Martha Stewart ain’t got nothin’ on me when it comes to redecorating reality, especially wallpapering over the writing on the wall.
Once I got Billy, I overlooked all the red flags that warned me to take things slow: he had a year’s worth of history I knew nothing about; he was untrained; he had a mouth full of tiny razors. I gave him credit for things he shouldn’t get credit for—for example, “He was so good with my dogs!” Like a guy calling you on the phone, this is something to file under THINGS YOU DON’T GET POINTS FOR. I did the same thing with men. I constantly gave points to men for things that should be filed under “the least you can do.” My girlfriends forced smiles when I announced, “He didn’t yell at me for checking luggage! Isn’t he amazing!?” Having a low bar is a lovely place to be for a while because everything that happens is a dazzling delight. Every day is like a surprise party. He didn’t cheat on me today? He’s the one. He’s not addicted to gang-bang porn? My knight in shining armor!
The engine of my addictive behavior for sure involved an adrenaline addiction, but also an intense fear of abandonment. I didn’t see the madness in this fearful thinking until one day Vera realized what was going on and dropped a bomb on me: “Adults can’t be abandoned, Whitney. You have a car. You have a house. Adults can only abandon themselves.”
Bang. Tweet it, blog it. Retweet it, screen-grab it.