Why Love Feels Like an Addiction (and Why It Shouldn’t)

We humans love a chase. And we love it even more if it provides us with an instant rush of pleasure. Think of any habit people have, most of which are unhealthy: binge-eating, endless hours playing video games, excessive shopping, over-drinking alcohol, impulsive smoking, gambling, chasing money, having rampant sex, taking drugs… The list could be endless.

Though there is one thing we forget belongs to the same category as the elements mentioned above: Love.

That Drug Called “Love”

Just a quick clarification before we begin, when I critique ‘love’ in this article, I am primarily referring to romantic attraction driven by pleasure and novelty, not enduring emotional attachment.

Now, as to not bore you to death with overwhelming scientific facts, I’ll give you the gist upfront: deep romantic love activates areas of the brain associated with pleasure and reward, as well as the same areas active in people with addictions. At a neurochemical level, in a very real way, love seems to be something we’re drunk on.

We see it all around us. People running after their sweethearts, most of whom are, in fact, chasing the physical highs they fantasise about. But, again, they are shooting themselves in the foot. What most of us fail to realise is the endurance of emotional bond versus a physical/sexual connection are not the same.

When we have an emotional connection with someone, we get to feel happy even when they’re not around us. Their physical presence isn’t necessarily required. Heck, even if it is poignant, they don’t even have to be alive or in contact with us. I still smile whenever I think about an old friend of mine with whom I’d lost contact when I was 13. Emotional connection outlasts physical contact and the person’s very existence in our lives and can persist for decades.

But while emotional bonds allow for happiness in the long term, the same can’t be said for physical and/or sexual ones. Yes, they surely give us pleasure, but that pleasure lasts only as long as the physical contact does. In other words, it is limited by the duration in which you’re physically/sexually together. Which, by all standards, isn’t really that much different to gulping a shot of whiskey; you may feel better for a while, but it’s only a matter of (a short) time before you go back to feeling however you were feeling before.

The harrowing reality is, that even amongst those who do not blindly follow their primitive impulses for physical pleasure, a good portion of them seem to be afflicted with a different curse, one which can turn even the deepest of emotional bonds into deadly chain. Some people’s sense of entitlement and righteousness can get so out of hand it causes them to lose their self-control, and act in unthinkable ways. I’ve always recoiled at stories of men who’d fall in love with someone, only to end up emotionally hurting or physically harming the girl they professed their love for. At the most extreme end, some even committed murders of their (ex)girlfriend.

How could this be? How could such a deep love turn a supposed lover into a brutal murderer?

I admit these are very rare occurrences, yet the rarity of such gruesome events should not prevent us from asking important questions. Could it be that what we crave is actually pleasure, and not commitment? Could it be that we’re just after the highs of the chase, not the stability of the stay? Could it be that, in all truth, what we crave isn’t love, but the intensity of the emotion itself, even if that emotion is hate?

We have to seriously consider these questions. If I was to make a guess, I’d lean towards an affirmative response towards them. Because from what I learned, when deep love becomes a deep hate, it shows not the love that the person felt, but the emotional depth of feeling they were chasing.

Law of Regression to the Mean

I’ve always wondered: If the mature, safest and most reasonable way of attaining a romantic relationship is taking our time to properly befriend someone until we know them well enough to engage in romance or pleasurable contact, why then, do we not follow this rule? Why do some people still place physical pleasure before emotional bonding? Why do we become lovers before we are friends? (For a deeper dive, check my article Everyone wants to fall in love, but few are willing to fall in friendship.)

One of the possible answers may lie in our desire for instant gratification, which accompanied by the powerful illusion of believing it will last, becomes the achilles’ heel that brings disappointment, sows the seeds of resentment, and undermines not only trust, but the very love we claim to have for another.

Love, at a biological level, is a function of hormones. When we feel that rush inside us, that sense of excitement, it is nothing but arousal caused by a feeling of attraction to another person. We fall into love relationships with the expectation that this intense desire for the other person will last into the future. But of course, our belief is misguided. Let me explain.

Imagine you won a million dollar lottery in Vegas. “I’m sooo over the moon!” you gush with immense joy. But research says that within a short period of time, you’ll return to whatever your emotional state was before you’d won the lottery, i.e. your baseline emotional state. In simple terms, you’ll come from over the moon down here to planet Earth. The same thing applies to drinking alcohol, ingesting cocaine, or having sex. Same mechanism. You go back to your emotional baseline after the chemical cocktail in your bloodstream dissolves away. This is the basic physiological mechanism behind all feelings of pleasure.

World-renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his groundbreaking book “Thinking Fast And Slow” explains this as the Law of Regression to the Mean. And the neat thing about this law is that it doesn’t matter if it’s money, sex or drugs—the same thing applies nonetheless. Interestingly, but perhaps not so surprisingly, it also applies to one more area which we rarely consider to be addictive: Love.

In the world of romantic attraction, we see a familiar pattern. The only appreciable difference is that, in the case of love, the chemicals responsible — dubbed “PEA chemicals” — last in the brain for quite a long time — anywhere between 1.5 to 3 years. An initial early “passionate love” phase characterised by intense passion and even obsessive thoughts, covers the first few months or so of this period. For interested readers keen on gaining a deeper understanding of how love works, I’d recommend checking Helen Fisher’s video where she explains the various stages of love in greater detail.

Merging what we know about the development of love chemicals in the brain over time with Kahneman’s arguments, we see that even from the lens of neurochemistry it’s perfectly natural for the brain’s initial “high” in a new romantic relationship to regress to a more stable baseline. This doesn’t mean love disappears; it means that it is undergoing a natural transformation into something deeper and more sustainable. Believing that love fades when the spark disappears, is just as silly as believing a caterpillar is gone when it enters its butterfly cocoon.

As we gain a deeper, more comprehensive idea of why it’s completely normal — even expected — for that initial ‘spark’ we feel early on to fade over time, we can begin to reap the rewards of our newly-gained insights. And the benefit to all of us is that by basing our understanding of love on the sciences of statistics and neurochemistry, it could help us remove any pain, despair, or shame we might be feeling about our love life.

She Likes Me. She Likes Me Not.

How would you reply if somebody came and asked you “If you like someone today, what’s the guarantee you’ll like them tomorrow?” I’d struggled with this question for quite a long time, till one day I had a profound realisation.

I realised that it's less about who am I attracted to or who do I like, and more about "Who am I sure I can still love, and who will still love me, even when we can't stand each other? Even when we fight, argue and feel like we want to slap each other in the face? Who will I be able to love even in the moments when I do not like them?” As it turned out, those were the real questions.

But how do we ‘love’ someone even when we cannot stand them (let’s say, they did something stupid)? How can love survive a loss of liking? Yet another baffling question, I thought. But after being introduced to some Eastern philosophy and the work of the late Ram Dass, I realised the answer was staring me down all along: Appreciation of the other—no matter what happens.

Appreciating one another. What a simple yet elusive concept! How often do we hear the words "I appreciate you" from a friend or loved one? Our society seems to be predicated on this false notion that "love"—namely a particular strain of it called ‘romantic attraction’—is the only thing that matters.

But is it, though? Is our over-romantic culture serving us? Is our obsession with love helping more than harming us? Are our hypnotised, love-struck minds unconsciously sleepwalking into a world where appreciation is lost, in favour of an oftentimes fragile, and misunderstood emotion called “love”?

I’ve been thinking about this, which led me to a further realisation. Romantic love — indeed, any type of love — should not be that much different from loving your child. Hear me out.

Real or hypothetical, if you had a child, would you say you loved them? Of couse, right? Ok. You know full well this child is going to get on your nerves, break things around your house, ruin your sleep schedule, and get you late for work and will do it in a way that’s more annoying than a rooster playing his saxophone at 5 am. And you will not like your child at those times. Yet, even in those moments, you’ll still love them. You may not particularly ‘like’ them, but you will still love them. And that, is how love endures the inevitable storms in a relationship, any relationship.

Because eventually, when those PEA chemicals dissolve away, and regression to the mean takes over, the only thing that will remain will be your love for each other—not how much you ‘like’ each other. That’s true for any connection, not just the parent-child bond.

The Law of Conservation of “Love Energy”

Not as a scientific claim, but as a philosophical metaphor, it is possible to see how just like kinetic or and potential energy, love, too, is a form of energy. But it is far more profoundly fundamental than we imagine it to be. Love is the energy that keeps the world alive; the life force that makes the world livable despite all its horrifying atrocities. It is the world's transformation agent, the one that holds it together when all fall apart. So, in that essence, love is energy, and energy, is love. And just like energy, love cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be converted from one form to another.

Energy manifests in many forms, so does love. In such a world, does it matter what kind of love we feel for someone so long as we love them? Does it matter what kind of energy we feel so long as what we feel is the energy of love? Who cares if it's romantic love or platonic love? What difference does it make? Those who want to love someone, will always find a way to keep that love alive—even if it changes form.

Our love for someone can evolve over time, or it can diminish. To the uninitiated observer, it may seem that love gets created and destroyed. So are we violating one of nature's fundamental laws? Hardly.

Love is a form of energy. It transforms into something else. When we love someone, some of our soul’s energy transmutes into love energy. And that energy will find its way to us, sooner or later. As Kafka once wrote:

"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."

I find it so encouraging how even when we feel a loss of love, that in the end, love returns to us in a different form. When we attract the energy of love by having good hearts, love always finds its way to us. Like a free bird, it may leave the nest we made for it, but if we make it feel safe to come back, it surely does return.

In the end, it’s not about chasing love’s peaks or fearing its lows. It’s about simply choosing to be someone who loves, who appreciates others without expecting anything in return. When we love with no expectations, love eventually finds its way back to us in its own time, in its own form. Because love isn’t just a feeling to pursue, but a way of life to embrace.