Dr. Cortney S. Warren: A Conversation About Love & Addiction

For daters new to your work, can you tell us more about what love addiction is?

Have you ever fallen in love? Been so consumed with your lover that you feel obsessed? If you have, you know the feeling I’m talking about. You meet someone new and you become enchanted—a rush of physical, sexual, and emotional chemistry and attraction takes over your being. You want to be with them all the time because you feel amazing when you’re together. When you’re apart, you’re pining over them, fantasizing about your next meeting, and sharing details of your new love affair with your closest friends. This one special person quickly becomes the focal point of your life. 

Emerging research suggests that falling in love can look very much like getting high from a drug in your brain (Fisher, Aron, & Brown, 2005). In essence, falling in love is like being addicted to your lover. It’s just that when our relationships are going well, we don’t think of love addiction a problem. In fact, it’s blissful! The problem emerges when you feel addicted to someone that’s unhealthy for you or your relationship ends and you can’t seem to move on. Then, being addicted to a lover can turn into a host of miserable symptoms (Field, 2017). 

So, although not a clinical diagnosis, love addiction is a term often used to describe a pattern of harmful symptoms that center around a current or former love interest that cause negative consequences to a person’s life. For example, people who feel addicted to their ex (also referred to as exaholics) become hyper-focused on with their former lover after a breakup. They obsessively think about them, crave contact with them, feel emotionally reactive and distressed, and act in unhealthy ways to reconnect with their ex or distract themselves from their current misery. Like all addictions, people struggling with love addiction often want to stop thinking and acting in such damaging ways, but they can’t seem to move on. 

I’m currently writing a self-help book called Addicted to Your Ex for anyone going through a painful breakup and can’t seem to get over their ex who wants help. It’s scheduled to be published within the next year.

What role does love addiction play in dating? How has your work in self-deception informed your understanding of this?

There are a couple of ways love addiction affects dating very obviously. The first is if you feel addicted to an ex, if you’re still in love with or addicted to your ex—you can’t stop thinking about your ex, miss them, or are trying to get back together—it’s clearly going to affect your experience dating new people. Because in your mind and your heart, you’re really not available for a new relationship. Even if you meet an amazing new person, you’re probably not going to be able to give yourself to a new relationship because you’re still stuck in your old one. Any new people you date really don’t have much of a chance of winning your heart, even if they’re great, because you’re preoccupied by your ex.  

In addition, if you tend to feel addicted to other things in your life—you have a problem with  have a drugs or alcohol, gamble too much, feel addicted to social media or games online—you may be more likely to struggle with love addiction. Developing an addiction to anything is going to be influenced by your genetics, biology, and environment. Your risk to become addicted to something is probably determined by a very complicated interaction of these factors. But, the more you tend to be addicted to things in your life of any kind, the more likely you may be to feel addicted to new people. A large body of research and writing on codependence or characteristics of people who quickly become preoccupied with new dating partners, sometimes rushing into new relationships, can be of use for anyone who thinks they may get emotionally involved with new lovers too quickly.  

In terms of how love addiction relates to self-deception, let me start by saying that self-deception is rampant in all of us. All humans lie to themselves. There are many characteristic ways that we lie to ourselves—which is a much longer conversations. What I can say very confidently is that where you feel insecure, uncomfortable, or unsure of yourself is where you’ll lie to yourself the most. So, if you’re feeling uncomfortable with the prospect of dating or interacting with new partners, it’ll help you to continually reflect on how you feel, what you’re thinking about, and how you’re acting to ensure that you’re aware of and understand yourself. As you do, you can take action to make the healthiest choices for yourself. 

In addition, when you’re in love, you’re very likely to be lying to yourself about who your partner is. Because you don’t know them yet! And anything you don’t know you’re likely to replace with who you want them to be. You fill in the blanks with all good things! That’s clearly lying to yourself on a deep level. And it fuels the belief that this person is perfect, your one true love, and that as long as you’re together, you’ll be happy. Unfortunately for all of us, none of that is true even though we’d like to believe it is.

Many daters are nervous to be honest upfront because they're worried about scaring someone off. Some people will say they are looking for something casual when they want something serious, and others will say they want a relationship when they aren't ready to commit. Why is it so difficult for people to be honest about what they're looking for? (or, what contributes to people being dishonest in dating?)

Honesty is tough when you’re dating because it requires that you’re really secure with who you are. That you know yourself. You know what you want and who you are and aren’t afraid to put yourself out there. Often, people are dishonest when they date because they’re insecure or uncomfortable being vulnerable. It’s more risky to say who you really are when you’re dating because you could be rejected! And that’s really never much fun, but it feels worse if you think it’s because they’re rejecting the real you than if it’s a protected, guarded version of you who can claim that you didn’t like them anyways. Self-deception is protective—it keeps us from painful realities that we don’t want to admit. For example, if you say you want a serious relationship, meet someone you really like and they aren’t interested in getting closer to you, that hurts more than if you say you just want a fling (but secretly hope they fall for you) and it doesn’t work out. 

So much of dating is about knowing yourself. Overcoming any fear you have of rejection. Taking risks and seeing the entire experience as an experiment to learn what you really like about yourself and others. 

The biggest piece of advice I can give to any daters out there is that telling the truth will lead you to the best outcomes. Why? Because the chances that someone loves you just as you are increases if you show them who you are! And vice versa. Of course, we all want to put our best foot forward when we’re dating new people. And that makes perfect sense. But when you become too focused on what you think other people want or like, you lose your authentic self. You lose the best of you. Really, do you want someone to fall for a fake version of you? Or to be shocked when they meet you and you’re nothing like what you put on your profile? Clearly not. So just be yourself, try to enjoy the experience, and see what happens as you go along.

What are signs someone is addicted to their love interest? What is the difference between addiction to a love interest and a deep, healthy connection?

The tricky thing about love addiction is that many researchers argue that the very healthy, natural process of falling in love is—in fact—addictive. And there are important biological and evolutionary reasons for that. When you fall in love, the brain’s reward system is activated, which includes dopamine-rich regions that are also stimulated when using drugs. As a result, you're likely to experience symptoms typical of addiction of all kinds, including intense cravings, euphoria, tolerance, withdrawal, and emotional dependence. It’s our bodies way of encouraging us to fall in love, have sex, have a baby, and stay together at least long enough to ensure survival of the child. 

How love addiction differs from a deep healthy connection is a much more complicated question because relationships are messy! With lots of power dynamics and learnings along the way. The simplest answer I can give is that if you’re in an unhealthy or unhappy relationship and you stay because you feel addicted to your partner—you can’t seem to detach or leave even if you want to or know you should—that would be a red flag that you’re in a state of love addiction instead of a healthy bonded relationship. 

Is love addiction only in relation to love interests, or can this be seen when people are in a full-blown relationship? Is love addiction positive if it's reciprocal?

There are many dynamics at play when people are in relationships. If both people are in love and want to be together, they may feel addicted to each other and it may feel wonderful. And even help to create a healthy framework for a long-lasting relationship. That said, relationships go through many phases. In your brain, relationships often start with some sort of lust—the sexual attraction and sex drive towards someone. Then romantic love or falling in love may happen, which is the stage that’s most associated with love addiction. If you’re together long enough, you may enter into a stage of attachment. This is a much less passionate but also much more bonded and committed state in a relationship. In general, people don’t stay “addicted” to their lover in the way we talk about love addiction over the entire course of their relationship. It’s more associated with the honeymoon phase. At some point, if you’re with someone long enough, you're going to get the real raw picture of your partner—and not all of it will be pretty. But if you’re bonded, you’ll find a way to like and love them enough to want to stay together anyway.

Resources

Field, T. 2017. “Romantic Breakup Distress, Betrayal and Heartbreak: A Review.” International Journal of Behavioral Research & Psychology. 5:217-225. 

Fisher, H. E. 2004. Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. 1st ed. New York: Holt Paperbacks.

Fisher, H. E. 2016. Anatomy of love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. Completely revised and updated ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Fisher, H, A. Aron, and L. L. Brown. 2005. “Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for Mate Choice.” The Journal of Comparative Neurology. 493:58-62.

Warren, C. 2014. “Honest liars -- the psychology of self-deception: Cortney Warren at TEDxUNLV.” TEDx Talks.