Love

I’m a big believer in being able to form a definition for the words you use. Certainly one of my main objections in life is those who throw words around flippantly, and perhaps no other word is used as thoughtlessly as "love."

What is love? Love is an addiction to a specific other. I am not being metaphorical in any way. By addiction, I am referring to any activity that alters your brain chemistry to form a dependence upon that activity in order to maintain a sense of wholeness or normalcy. Because of this, addictions are habit forming, meaning that one is strongly inclined to repeat the activity. Addictions also elicit obsessive thoughts regarding the activity. In love, the activity is being with a specific other.

Love, in all its forms, entails caring for another’s well-being. A chief characteristic of love is missing someone when you’re not with them. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t think either of these things can be deemed unselfish. In fact, wouldn’t it be kind of horrible if your thought process was, "I love you and enjoy spending time with you, but it is wholly for your benefit and I want nothing from it at all."? When you’re in love with another, the motivation for being with them is essentially a selfish desire to feed your addiction.

The physical and emotional responses associated with love are the same as with any other addiction, and like any other addiction, humans have a tendency to let their decisions be heavily influenced by their desire to feed it. As any Alcoholics Anonymous member will tell you, a good first step is to recognize your addiction for what it is. Once love addiction is recognized, one is be better able to keep it in perspective. Like other addictions, love provides a sense of euphoria at first, which, unless you continue to increase the dosage (which is measured in quality moreso than quantity,) wears off over time, leaving only a sense of withdrawal when deprived of it.

The easiest and most effective way of strengthening a habit is through variable interval positive reinforcement conditioning. This consists of rewarding an activity at unpredictable times. Gambling makes effective use of this conditioning. Because a gambler wins every so often, he is apt to continue gambling even despite long losing streaks. The relevance is that it is very easy to manipulate a person in love with you; you simply do something nice for the person in love with you every so often (but not consistently or predictably).

An addiction alone is never a sufficient or acceptable reason to feed that addiction. Neither is it always necessary or beneficial to ween yourself from an addiction. The addiction must be put into perspective of how it is influencing the rest of our life. In order to determine whether you should continue being with another, you should consider factors in the relationship more tangible and beneficial than love. In future posts, I intend to explore and opine on various factors which influence the health and prudence of a relationship….