What Is Love Addiction?
Love addiction by definition is the need to constantly find someone to love and to depend on.
Are You Dealing With A Love Addict?
Love addicts find it almost impossible to stay without having someone in their life. They feel incomplete and insufficient when they don’t have someone to validate their presence. Relationships for them are not about being with someone in a healthy coexistence but about hopelessly falling in love. They spend their lives searching for the perfect relationship and in the run fail to appreciate what life has to offer. So here are some of the signs that you can watch out for if you think you’re dealing with a classic patient of love addiction.
1. Mistaking kindness for love
You know how we’re usually nice to people who are nice to us and we think nothing more of it? If the person is afflicted with love addiction they’ll start dropping hints to show that they too are “in love” with you, simply because they’ll think you’re being nice because you love them.
2. Desperation and sadness while being alone
A love addict will ask you to hang around more often or will sound utterly sad and depressed when alone. If in a relationship, they’ll constantly talk about their partner and about how much they cant wait to be with them again.
3. Excessive fantasizing when single
People fantasize to imagine themselves in the most exciting situations to get a break from their mundane lives. But someone with love addiction will find themselves fantasizing more than normal and for some it may even turn into a thing to share with people.
4. Being content with emotionally unavailable/abusive partners
When one’s a love addict, one seeks someone’s presence but not necessarily the basic principles of a relationship. One is completely satisfied just with the partner being around no matter how disinterest or abusive they may be.
5. Being with partners who demand attention but give none in return
Love addicts love being the caretaker. They love the idea of being the one to put a smile on someone’s face. But they don’t really care about whether the gestures and emotions are being reciprocated or not. They most often end up with partners who demand their attention but rarely show interest in being around them. You can joke about the BDSM element here, but love addiction is a serious issue.
6. Being manipulative to holding on to people
Love addiction makes people possessive to the point of no return. They can’t bear the thought of having someone leave. They believe in holding on to people ‘by hook or by crook.’ They try their every trick of manipulation to somehow get people to stay.
7. Repeatedly turning back to old unsuccessful relationships
The need to always have someone around often makes them turn back to past unhealthy relationships. They forget about the tortures and horrifying memories of past relationships only to have someone to hold onto in the current situation.
8. Pattern of serial dating
Serial dating is when a person jumps from one relationship to another without really having a period of being single in between. The relationships start and end in a flow from one to another. So if someone has a bad case of love addiction, they’re always “hooked” and never just by themselves.
9. Lack of personal identity
That need of validation in all love addictions, makes them forget who they really are. They are constantly someone’s boyfriend or someone’s girlfriend but never really just themselves.
10. Over pleasing and over controlling
They love to please people and impress them with whatever they do. It is in a way a continuation of the manipulation point only as they use their charming tricks to keep people hooked on to them. And as lovers, they can be over controlling as their insecurities drive them to the extent of not having faith in people.
11. Unhappy childhood memories
A person’s love addiction can be almost always tracked to a childhood memory of being rejected or neglected. That feeling of not having someone around as a child drives them to be needy as an adult to make up for what they lost in their childhood.
12. Giving up own interests for a partner
They adjust and fix their life as per the needs and demands of their partner. They forget about their likes and dislikes and work like a puppet according to their partner’s demands only to please them enough to make them stay.
13. Getting anxious and panicky when alone
They don’t know what to do with themselves when they’re alone. They begin to panic as they lose their own identity and are unable to adjust to the idea of being by themselves, like they’re detoxing from love addiction drugs.
14. Going out of their way to check up on people
The moment they feel like they’re not being able to contact their partner, they pick the car or get on a bus or a train just to see that they are fine. And sometimes they use it as an excuse just to catch a glimpse of their partner.
15. Avoiding all relationships to avoid needing someone at all
Once they realize that their love addiction issue is becoming a problem, they begin avoiding all relationships altogether to stay away from people so that they don’t begin to crave someone’s presence.
So these are some of the signs to look out for if you feel that you are dealing with a love addict. Love addicts aren’t too much of a problem for others as they are for themselves. They lose themselves while trying to fit into someone else’s idea of perfection and thus lose their confidence in the long run. If you know someone who is a love addict, help is just a call away. Encourage the person to see a qualified professional to overcome the addiction. For more information about this, write to us.
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