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Men and women suffer from Love Addiction. If you are obsessed about a past love, trying to match a past Falling in Love experience, or if you are practicing serial monogamy because you keep falling in and out of love, you may be a Love Addict. The link below leads to a questionnaire that will help you reflect on your past or present love feelings and experiences.
Help is also available at an Edmonton 12-step group where you will find acceptance for yourself and help with your problem. Please call SLAA Edmonton at 423-1315 and leave a message.
Do a Questionnaire?
40 Questions for Self Diagnosis excerpted from © S.L.A.A.
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Love Addiction has only recently been recognized as a problem in Western culture. Romantic idylls like Tristan and Isolde have been idealized. Who does not feel for Romeo and Juliet? In these tales, not of love but of Falling in Love, we recognize the transformative and fateful power of Falling in Love and how it can change or even destroy lives.
The deep longing, which is a chemical high, comes with Falling Love but it only lasts if the love object is unattainable. The Medieval poets wrote much about knights and chivalry and their devotion and longing.
If the dream of love is fulfilled, and from that very moment, the feeling and the chemical high begins to wane.
For the Love Addict this is a terrifying moment. The Addict must find a new object and fall in love again to regain the high.
And What is Healthy Love?
To keep the relationship we find, we must respect the power of romantic love and recognize (1) the high does not last and (2) that does not mean we have the wrong person.
When the new relationship high and the idealization of the other is gone, our work on long lasting and healing love begins. Our relationship offers us the opportunity to help each other develop as individuals and to grow as a couple. Long lasting relationship love is a healing experience.
Read Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt, Receiving Love
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