22. Relationship addiction often confused with love

By Tom O'Connell

It's easy to confuse relationship addiction with love. Is your behavior making your life unmanageable? Are you relying on someone else to get your unmet needs fulfilled? If so, think of yourself as a relationship addict.

Do you feel consumed? Are you afraid of letting go? Do you give in order to get? Do you want to change the other? Do you need the other to feel complete? Do you demand and expect unconditional love? Do you avoid commitment? Do you fear being  abandoned during a routine separation? Do you desire closeness yet fear it? Do you play power games? Have you lost your boundaries, no longer knowing where you end and the other begins? Then consider yourself a relationship addict.

Psychologist Erich Fromm says, "Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality." In this kind of love, he says we "have an active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love."

The key word in addiction is "self-centeredness." To love we need to transcend our own selfish desires, and that's difficult work. After all, during the honeymoon period of a relationship we become consumed by our own wish to achieve happiness with the other person. And we can't imagine this unity including such realities as fundamental differences in values, disagreement, conflict, and separation of one kind or another.

Describing infatuation, Erich Fromm says that two passionately attracted people "take the intensity of the infatuation, this being 'crazy' about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness." When we're infatuated our inner emotional seascape is a whirlpool of possessiveness, eroticism, and fear. It certainly isn't a calm cove of contentment.

Instead of practicing love, relationship addicts mistake intensity for intimacy, try to make their partner fit their fantasies, use control to provide a feeling of security, and substitute obsession for real caring. Relationships addicts use sex as a way to cope with life, to relieve pain, or to increase pleasure. And this makes a sex object out of the partner. But healthy love doesn't use another person as a tool to satisfy our own selfish desires.

So how are we going to know the difference between relationship addiction and healthy relating? Psychologist Stanton Peele suggests an evaluation process which is reflected in a series of questions.

Does each lover have a secure belief in his or her own value? Are the lovers improved by the relationship? Do the lovers maintain serious interests (and other meaningful relationships) outside of their relationship? Is the relationship integrated into, rather than being set off from, the totality of the lovers' lives?

Are the lovers beyond being possessive or jealous of each other's growth and expansion of interests? Are the lovers also friends? Would they seek each other out if they should cease to be primary partners?

These standards represent an ideal that can help us avoid addictive relating which  is destructive to self and others instead of life-enhancing.

- Back -