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Untangling Love Addiction in the Brain
If love follows a similar cycle to addiction in the brain, how can the pattern be broken?
After years spent studying the brains of people newly in love, rejected in love, and in long-term love, renowned biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher doesn’t hesitate to equate love and obsession.
“I have come to believe that romantic love is an addiction — a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly,” says Fisher. “And indeed it has all the characteristics of addiction: You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality.”
Fisher also believes there’s a biological reason people become hopeless romantics. This particular addiction “evolved millions of years ago to drive us to form a pair bond and send our DNA into tomorrow,” she says. Human beings possess, as a species, an inherent drive to procreate. But whatever the reasons behind why people become stuck on love, experts say the underlying mechanisms operate similarly in the brain as in other kinds of addictions.
“Getting hooked is really what our brains are about,” says Dr. Judson Brewer, director of Research and Innovation at the Brown University Mindfulness Center. A psychiatrist and research affiliate at the MIT, Brewer is widely considered an expert on addiction and the science of self-mastery. “Our brains are prediction machines. When we receive a reward, the first time we get it, they want us to do it again. Over time, with repetition, we go to anticipating that reward as opposed to actually getting it.”
In other words, looking forward to a reward — in the case of relationships it is love and happiness — becomes enough motivation to repeat the reward-seeking behavior, like texting, flirting, and fantasizing about a love interest. Repeated enough times, the habit loop is born and the idea of Person X is cemented in our minds as an elusive finish line worth reaching for.
“Our brains are great at anticipating and idealizing as ways to keep us going in our own stories of what is good and best and perfect,” says Brewer. When it comes to love, the more someone fantasizes about imagined bliss with Person X on the heels…
