A big part of addiction involves managing your supply. This means that basically you go apeshit when your “supply” is threatened. Managing my supply manifested itself in some really sad and expensive ways: not traveling too far from home and/or going with the guy I was dating wherever he went. I mean, he did invite me, I didn’t just follow him like a crazy stalker, but I often found myself sitting alone in a hotel room watching cat videos when I could have been way happier sitting alone in my room watching cat videos. I spent countless parties and weddings distracted and paranoid, on my phone, getting my hits of the guy I was dating instead of enjoying the present company. I remember spending an entire bachelorette party buried in my phone texting with my drug of choice when I could have been having way more fun doing actual drugs with my friends.
When love addiction takes hold, my world gets very small. When Billy came into my life, he became my primary focus. I sent my other dogs to be boarded so I could focus solely on him and make him feel special. I was so worried about him feeling alone that I rushed home from work early to see him, speeding through stoplights, texting and driving, weaving in and out of cars. If active alcoholics drink and drive, perhaps love addicts text and drive. This is the behavior driven by the engine of an addictive brain: when in order to get our perceived emotional needs met, we put our physical selves in danger.
After working with Vera, I now understand love should not be urgent or stressful. It should not make my life harder, and I should not be risking my health or safety when I’m in a relationship. If I can’t keep my priorities straight when I’m with a person, I’m gonna have to face it, I’m addicted to love.
Love addiction is about being addicted to a person and all the neurochemicals being with that person triggers, and before I had a game plan to manage it, I can’t even describe how scary it was. Obsession is a word that’s thrown around a lot about things like froyo, binge-worthy TV shows, and a perfume I wore in the nineties, but when you have an addictive brain, obsession can be crippling. And my addiction doesn’t discriminate; it doesn’t have standards or good taste. In fact, usually the more damaging the person in my life is, the stronger my addiction can be. The stronger the heroin, the higher a person’s tolerance can get and the more addicted they become. I never got addicted to a relationship with a nice college grad who did charity work because that was too safe; it wouldn’t provide the adrenaline that fed my addiction. I never particularly liked or respected any of the relationships I was addicted to, yet my brain told me I couldn’t live without them. One guy was a clinical narcissist with a cocaine habit, one was a nightclub promoter, one was super into drag racing . . . so the truth is, I’d probably have died with them.
A week or so after the incident, I took Billy to get an aggression test from Brandon McMillan, a very badass dog trainer and animal behaviorist, to find out if Billy had aggression issues that were insurmountable. I was terrified. If it had not been for the painkillers I was taking for my ear, I never could have handled the anxiety of possibly finding out that he attacked me on purpose. To ascertain if Billy was aggressive, I watched Brandon do a series of exercises to test Billy. With a foam arm contraption, Brandon put Billy in situations where even nonaggressive dogs would have retaliated, cornering him against a wall, causing him stress on purpose to see if he would react in a maladaptive way. Billy didn’t bite or even growl, even when his life seemed to be at stake. I beamed with pride. Turns out he wasn’t inherently violent, he just had the tricky combination of no impulse control and big giant teeth, which I can relate to. I was relieved to learn that he wasn’t the asshole, I was. The good news is I wasn’t totally delusional about Billy, but per usual, I was delusional about who to let into my bed on the first night we met.
Since the Billy debacle, I’ve learned a lot about what happened that day and why. A lot of it was my fault. I know now that I should never have let him in the bed with me or lie on top of me all night because that’s actually a dominant behavior that I conflated with us being soul mates. It was selfish of me to cave in and allow adorable selfie-worthy behavior to eclipse what was best for Billy and our relationship. What he needed was discipline and clear boundaries. I got so swept up in “loving” him that I forgot to actually love him. This was not fair to Billy because it set him up to fail. He had no training or coping mechanisms yet, so he made an honest mistake. The problem is that when small dogs make mistakes, you might get a scratch on your ankle, but when pit bulls make mistakes, you end up looking like a cubist painting.
When I saw his sweet face and learned that he was abused, I threw all logic and reason out the window. I felt entitled to the happiness Disney movies promised me as a kid. I wanted love to conquer all, I wanted love to be blind, I wanted us to be soul mates, everything Céline Dion said on the Titanic soundtrack. As Carrie Bradshaw said in the finale of Sex and the City, which was later plagiarized by a Bachelor contestant and now me, “I’m looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming can’t-live-without-each-other love.” I wanted to be Carrie and I wanted Billy to be Mr. Big.
Billy wasn’t Mr. Big, but he did become my teacher. It took losing an ear for me to learn to take it slow with people, friends, work relationships, house hunting, hair color decisions, and the animals I bring into my home.
Today I try to take people at face value instead of projecting my hopes and dreams onto them. I no longer believe people change unless they’re working their asses off to change. And someone saying they want change doesn’t count. Downloading an app of daily meditations does not count as changing either. Someone saying they want to do work or intend to do work doesn’t count as actual work. Me doing work for them does not count as them doing work. If these adages had only been in a fortune cookie when I was sixteen, I would have saved a lot of time and money in two A.M. cab rides to weird neighborhoods and getting into fights about Facebook comments. I no longer think my “love” can change someone’s neurology or value system, which is huge progress given I truly used to think that a well-written Valentine’s Day card outlining how much I love someone was going to do in one day what psychotherapy can hardly do in ten years.