5. Addictive relationships are confused with "love"

By Tom O'Connell

Addictive relationships, all too often, are confused with "love." The result? Serious problems. An example of sexual addiction can be found in Albert Camus' story "The Fall."  

The central character says, "My relationship with women was natural, free, easy, as the saying goes....I made use of them more often than I served them." Right away we learn that the man is interested only in his own satisfaction. But lasting satisfaction doesn't come with addiction. "True love is exceptional--two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom."

Describing his past, he admits, "Sensuality alone dominated my love life. I looked merely for objects of pleasure and conquest....my sensuality was so real that even for a ten-minute adventure I'd have disowned father and mother."

Thinking of sensuality as a game, he says, "I played the game...I often changed parts, but it was always the same play...As a result of not being romantic, I gave romance something to work on...I believed what I said; I was living my part."

He equates his womanizing to gambling. "You see, I can't endure being bored and appreciate only diversions in life. Any society, however brilliant, soon crushes me, whereas I have never been bored with the women I liked. It hurts me to confess it, but I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for an initial rendezvous with a pretty chorus girl."

Enough to get the picture across? Where's the relating? To "relate," according to American Heritage Dictionary, means, "to have connection...to interact with others in a meaningful or coherent fashion...to respond."

Unfortunately, for many people in our society the words "being in a relationship" mean the same thing as the words "having sex." And vast numbers of people in "relationships" don't know the first thing about relating. They are sexually addicted.

Psychologist Stanton Peele wrote some very interesting observations about addictive "love." He says, "Love is an ideal vehicle for addiction because it can so exclusively claim a person's consciousness...When a constant exposure to something is necessary in order to make life bearable, an addiction has been brought about, however romantic the trappings....Often two people simultaneously engulf and are engulfed by each other. The result is a full-fledged addiction, where each partner draws the other back at any sign of a loosening of the bonds that hold them together." Couples such as this focus on sensuality as their source of ecstasy, have withdrawal symptoms during separation, and suffer from intense craving to reconnect for more of the excitement.

Partners in an addictive relationship, according to Stanton Peele, "are motivated more by their own needs for security than by an appreciation of each other's personal qualities...Thus they are likely to demand unchallenged acceptance of themselves as they are, including their blemishes and peculiarities...they create a private world which others can't enter and would not want to enter."

Peele explains, "Paradoxically, at the stage when they have rejected the rest of the world, when they need each other most, the lovers have become least critical and aware of each other as unique individuals." That becomes their stumbling block. 

What about the intensity or "passion" of the two lovers? "The intensity that we see is that of desperation," says Peele, "not of a desire to know each other better. In healthy relationships the growing attachment to another person goes with a growing appreciation of that person; among these relationships are those inspiring love affairs where two people continually find new facets of each other to admire and delight in. In addiction what is apparent is not the intensity of passion, but its shallowness."

He compares addictive love to drug addiction. "As with heroin and its irrecoverable euphoria, or cigarette smoking in routine excess, something initially sought for pleasure is held more tightly after it ceases to provide enjoyment...The love partner must be there in order to satisfy a deep, aching need, or else the addict begins to feel withdrawal pain."

According to Peele, "The addictive foundations of such a relationship are revealed when it ends in an abrupt, total, and vindictive breakup...because the involvement has been so total, its ending must be violent. Thus it is possible for two people who have been the most intimate friends suddenly to turn around and hate each other, because they have been thinking more of themselves than each other all along."

Well, is there such a thing as healthy relating? Peele quotes Erich Fromm's "The Art of Loving," a classic work: "Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality." This kind of love includes "an active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love."

Such a union, according to Fromm, involves a "full commitment in all aspects of life." But there is a catch. "If a person loves only one person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

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