“Addicted to Love? The Trendy Diagnosis Is Changing Our Idea of Romance.”:
People weren’t just using the notion of love addiction to talk about destructive, obsessive romantic patterns. They were using it to mount a fascinating rebellion against the narrative that love is the pinnacle of human experience.
On a website for Love Addicts Anonymous […], you can find “40 Statements” with which you might identify. No. 37 [is] “Love is the most important thing in the world to you.” This one strikes me as a question about values. If I say that love is the most important thing in the world for me — that I value it above all else — have I inched further down a spectrum of addiction? Or have I just decided to value something that countless poets and prophets all said was the noblest human experience?
[S]elf-diagnosis has its pitfalls, especially when it comes to love, which is not inherently harmful and can’t be quantified the way cocktails can. There’s an element of contagion: People can read online posts, recognize something of themselves and feel they’ve discovered exactly what is wrong.
Often, these patterns and experiences seem like the ordinary messiness of romance, the pain and yearning and confusion that have, over the centuries, been seen as part of love’s power. Looking at them through the lens of addiction means pathologizing them, treating them as symptoms of a disorder. As we do so, we redefine love itself. It is no longer something that should remake us or endure “even to the edge of doom”; that would be unhealthy. Much of what we’ve been led to expect from love, this point of view suggests, is in fact toxic or deluded.
But if we did away with old visions of romantic love, what would replace them? This is in some sense the question the man on the forum was asking about his wife: If what he experienced in marriage was toxic, then what came next?
The answer, it appears, is a kind of love that neither saves us nor breaks us. This new vision of love is cleaner, healthier. We should be with our partners because they enhance our lives in sensible ways. People should be compatible; relationships should be stable; we should be, above all else, emotionally safe. This is a tamer love, one that does not involve ardent self-sacrifice or world-shattering passions. It is the kind of love that might let you and your partner proudly tell a therapist about the progress you’ve made in “meeting each other’s needs.”
This sort of therapeutic language has lately taken over interpersonal relationships as a whole, from the bedroom to the dinner table to the office. The casual diagnosis of psychiatric disorders has become more common: We toss around descriptions of people’s personalities using DSM diagnostics like “narcissism” or “O.C.D.” People are hyperaware of “trauma” and “trauma responses” and even “generational” trauma; we talk constantly about “boundaries,” “wounds,” “attachment styles”; workers and bosses alike have learned to talk about “self-care.” The psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams has written eloquently about the consequences of this turn. It used to be, she wrote, that a woman would arrive for therapy saying she was “painfully shy,” and wanted help dealing with social situations. Today, “a person with that concern is likely to tell me that she ‘has’ social phobia — as if an alien affliction has invaded her otherwise problem-free subjective life. People talk about themselves in acronyms oddly dissociated from their lived experience: ‘my O.C.D.,’ ‘my eating disorder,’ ‘my bipolar.’” McWilliams describes this as an “odd estrangement from one’s sense of an agentic self.”
The cultural focus on love addiction, the sense that we must tame romantic love, the desire to make it less risky, less confusing, less disruptive — these are like furrows that keep deepening and spreading across the landscape. My hope is that we won’t abandon all our notions of romantic love and what it might do for us, even and especially when it is painful. My hope is that we can find a new vision of love, and of the associated pain, that is neither oppressive nor idealized. After all, how many other things can supply poetry to unpoetic lives?