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Love and Relationship Addiction

When being in love means being in pain we are loving too much. When we find ourselves unable to end relationships with unhealthy, unloving, unavailable, inappropriate, or uncaring partners it is important to understand how our wanting to love and be loved, our loving itself, may have become an addiction.

At the root of relationship addiction, an obsession with someone who isn't good for us, is not love, but fear — fear of being alone, fear of being unlovable and unworthy, fear of being ignored or abandoned or destroyed. We give our love in the desperate hope that the person with whom we're obsessed will take care of our fears. Instead, the fears—and our obsession—deepen until giving love in order to get it back becomes a driving force in our lives. And because our strategy doesn't work we keep trying to love even harder. We love too much.

Carolyn first recognized the phenomenon of "loving too much" as a specific syndrome of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors after several years of counseling alcohol and drug abusers. The chemically dependent clients may or may not have grown up in troubled families; but their partners nearly always came from severely troubled families in which they had experienced greater than normal stress and pain. By struggling to cope with their addictive mates, these partners (known in the alcoholism treatment field as "co-alcoholics" or "co-dependents") were unconsciously recreating and reliving significant aspects of their childhood. Their personal histories revealed their need for both the superiority and the suffering they experienced in their "savior" role and explained the depth of their addiction to a person who was in turn addicted to a substance. It became clear that both partners in these couples were equally in need of help, one from the effects of chemical abuse, and the other from the effects of extreme stress. These co-dependent people proved the incredible power and influence their childhood experiences had on their adult patterns of relation to mates. They have something to tell all of us who have loved too much about why we have developed our predilection for troubled relationships, how we perpetuate our problems, and most importantly how we can change and get healthy.

Symptoms of relationship addiction, or loving too much, include:

Excusing our partners moodiness, bad temper, indifference, or put-downs as problems due to an unhappy childhood and we try to become their therapist.
We read a self-help book and underline all the passages we think would help our partner.
We don't like many of their basic characteristics, values, and behaviors, but we put up with them thinking that if we are only attractive and loving enough they will want to change for us.
When our relationship jeopardizes our emotional well-being and perhaps even our physical health and safety.
In spite of all its pain and dissatisfaction, we almost believe it is the way intimate relationships are supposed to be.

Most of us have loved too much at least once and for many of us it has been a recurrent theme in our lives. Some of us have become so obsessed with our partner and our relationship that we are barely able to function. With help, people can understand the origin of their destructive patterns of relating, and gain the tools for changing their lives.