This post contains some of the best deep love addiction quotes.
What Is Love Addiction?
Love addiction is a psychological condition in which a person becomes addicted to the idea of being in love or being in a romantic relationship.
Love addicts often experience intense emotions and cravings for romantic attachment and may feel that they cannot function without a partner.
This condition can have negative impacts on an individual’s personal and professional life, as well as their mental health.
Some common signs of love addiction include:
1. Obsessive thoughts about a current or past partner
2. Constant need for affection and attention from a partner
3. Difficulty maintaining healthy relationships due to clingy or needy behavior
4. Fear of abandonment or rejection
5. Compulsive pursuit of new relationships, even when they are unhealthy or damaging
6. Sacrificing one’s own needs and values to please a partner
7. Difficulty functioning independently or being happy without a partner
Love addiction may stem from childhood experiences, trauma, or other underlying psychological issues.
Treatment for love addiction often involves therapy to address the underlying emotional and psychological issues contributing to the addiction.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy, support groups, and mindfulness techniques can also be helpful in addressing dysfunctional patterns of behavior and promoting healthier relationships with oneself and others.
Deep Love Addiction Quotes
1. “…in love addiction, we overadapt. We accommodate others out of fear and minimize or give up our thoughts, feelings, creativity, spontaneity, authenticity, and capacity for intimacy to keep others around, get their approval, or not make waves.” – Brenda Schaeffer
2. “…underneath a sex or romance addiction is a dependent love addiction problem that must be addressed for successful recovery. It is love-addicted relationships to which the human condition seems to direct most of us most often. It is so common that we frequently fail to recognize it until it wreaks havoc on our love lives.” – Brenda Schaeffer
3. “A love addict will employ indirect means to get a need met and is willing to use others or allow self to be used in the process.” – Brenda Schaeffer
4. “Another element of love addiction is its illusion of safety and predictability, which prevents a person from exploring the unknown. No matter how badly a person may treat us, that person is the drug that we have become dependent on.” – Brenda Schaeffer
Related: How To Stop Love Addiction? Top 5 Proven Steps to Overcome Love Addiction
5. “Another prominent feature of love addiction is the recurrence of bad feelings like emptiness, depression, guilt, rejection, anxiety, self-righteous anger, and low self-esteem. These recurring feelings generally result from psychological games played out by love addicts.” – Brenda Schaeffer
6. “Based on fear, love addiction begins to anticipate hurt, rejection, disappointment, and betrayal. And then, as with a self-fulfilling prophecy, love addicts create that which they fear. Underneath, there is a fantasy hope that the drug of choice—a person—will complete them.” – Brenda Schaeffer
7. “Because love addiction is so intense, there is a fear of letting go. As a result, some pathological relationships may endure for years.” – Brenda Schaeffer
8. “Because we may experience ourselves as incomplete and therefore seek other people in search of wholeness, love addiction involves attempts to change others and scrutiny of others for faults.” – Brenda Schaeffer
9. “Codependent Love Addicts, for instance, need a boost in self-esteem and self-acceptance. They must learn to build their self-condence and take better care of themselves. They must also learn to leave relationships that have become toxic Ambivalent Love Addicts, on the other hand, need to nd a healthy relationship and stay engaged even when their fear threatens to overwhelm them.” – Susan Peabody
Related: Karpman’s Drama Triangle & Codependency
10. “Healing trauma is probably the single most important factor for successful long-term recovery from sex, romance, and love addiction.” – Brenda Schaeffer
11. “In love addiction, the lovers stagnate; they often are satisfied with a monotonous lifestyle as dreams and passions are put aside in service of connection. They put more energy into concern about their relationship than into personal growth—self-actualization.” – Brenda Schaeffer
12. “In love addiction, we may refuse to love ourselves unconditionally and rage or weep when others fail to love us in that way. And if we do not love ourselves unconditionally, we are more apt to believe we must earn love or become needy and cling to others.” – Brenda Schaeffer
13. “In love addiction, what appears to be altruistic giving often is not. Love addiction is conditional; the underlying hope is “If I do the right things, I’ll get what I want.” Asking directly for what one wants or giving spontaneously often is seen as giving up, giving in, or losing part of oneself.” – Brenda Schaeffer
14. “Like an addiction to alcohol and other drugs, a dependency on love begins to feel like an unstable state in which a person begins to lose herself to the experience.” – Brenda Schaeffer
15. “Love addiction demonstrates what Freud called the repetition compulsion, or the impulse to re-enact earlier emotional experiences and to seek out players that fit our script. The repetition ultimately results in more pain than pleasure.” – Brenda Schaeffer
16. “Love addiction gives the illusion of intimacy without our having to be fully vulnerable. That illusion—that we can have human closeness without risk—is a large part of the attractiveness of love addiction.” – Brenda Schaeffer
Related: 7 Stages Of Trauma Bonding (+FREE Worksheets)
17. “Love addiction goes into remission, and life gets better— even glorious sometimes—if you change.” – Susan Peabody
18. “Love addiction is a parasitic arrangement. In it, people feed off each other. The love addicts need each other to feel whole, balanced, and secure. Anxiety occurs whenever this unhealthy symbiosis is threatened. Often, that anxiety explodes into emotional or physical violence.” – Brenda Schaeffer
19. “Love addiction is a psychological and behavioral disorder in which a person looks to another person to satisfy a hunger for security, sensation, power, identity, belonging, and meaning. It is an unconscious attempt to fix or avoid pain, present or past. Rather than a bonding, it becomes a psychological bondage. In the process, a love addict becomes emotionally and biologically dependent on the love object. The gradual enmeshment with the love object occurs over time and can have a soothing, satiating effect on the brain, not unlike alcohol.” – Brenda Schaeffer
20. “Love addiction is heaped with denial. Denial is fertile ground for the “three Ps” of dysfunctional relationships: projection, personalizing, and power plays.” – Brenda Schaeffer
21. “Love addiction refers to an unhealthy dependency on the object of love. It is a form of passivity in that we do not directly resolve our own problems or ask for what we need, but attempt to collude with others so they will take care of us and thus take care of our problems. We take care of others at our own emotional expense, or we attempt to control others to meet our needs at their expense. No matter how it plays out, we look to others to “fix” our fear, pain, and discomfort, and we tolerate or inflict abusive behaviors in the process.” – Brenda Schaeffer
Related: Top 10 Signs Of Trauma Bonding & How To Heal A Trauma Bond
22. “Love addicts deny parts of themselves to keep people, even toxic people, around and ensure predictability. In their attempt to control a relationship, they slowly go out of control.” – Brenda Schaeffer
23. “Mature love nourishes; immature love can be lethal. Immature love leads us to love addiction.” – Brenda Schaeffer
24. “Most, if not all, love relationships harbor some elements of love addiction. Narrowing our focus to one mate is a natural setup for both healthy and unhealthy dependence.” – Brenda Schaeffer
25. “Once again, love addiction is grounded in fear: fear of rejection, fear of pain, fear of losing control, fear of loss of self or loss of life.” – Brenda Schaeffer
26. “Overcoming love addiction is possible, just as it is possible to transcend co-dependence and rebuild a healthy relationship with ourselves and others.” ― Christopher Dines
27. “People often ask me why a person should get out of love addiction. My answer is “because it is deadly to stay there.”” – Brenda Schaeffer
Related: How To Achieve Emotional Sobriety? (+FREE Emotional Sobriety Worksheets)
28. “Perhaps the most pronounced characteristic of love addiction is this unwritten rule: “You take care of my feelings, and I’ll take care of yours. You make me feel whole and good, and I’ll do the same for you.”” – Brenda Schaeffer
29. “Remember, your love addiction fits you like a glove. Stop putting the problem on the other. Why do you need an unresponsive woman? Why do you need an angry man? Why do you work for a tyrannical boss? How does your relationship fit you?” – Brenda Schaeffer
30. “Romance addiction refers to those times when the object of love addiction is also a romantic object. This object/person can be a romantic partner or live only in the love addict’s fantasies. The “fix” may be an elaborate fantasy life not unlike the story line of a romance novel, or the euphoria of a new romance. In either case, the rush of intoxicating feelings experienced during the attraction stage of a romance—a state called limerence by Dorothy Tennov, Ph.D.—is like a drug that can become a substitute for real intimacy.” – Brenda Schaeffer
31. “Some become addicted to the chemical high sex produces, and it becomes their “drug” of choice. Others discover that when the euphoria of infatuation dwindles, they become depressed or restless and jump from one romantic high to another. There are still others who, for the many reasons we will discuss, cannot make the full leap into an intimate bonding and opt for love addiction, which simulates real love but is not.” – Brenda Schaeffer
32. “The love addict seeks total immersion in the romantic relationship, real or imagined. Since the romance-driven high is dependent on the newness of the relationship or the presence of a person, romance addiction is often filled with victim/ persecutor melodrama.” – Brenda Schaeffer
33. “There are two energy-depleting roles assumed in love addiction— the grandiose role and the victim.” – Brenda Schaeffer
34. “Breakups are a horrible thing for almost everybody I know. For someone who is a love addict, it’s debilitating.” — Alanis Morissette
35. “addictive love is limiting.
It limits your ability to feel content.
It limits your ability to function and to live up to your potential.
It limits your openness to new experiences.
It limits your ability to enjoy and live in the present.
It limits your energy for creative pursuits.
It limits your personal power and your freedom.
It limits your ability to accept others.
It limits your willingness to face your fears.
It limits your spontaneity.
It limits your level of consciousness and your spiritual potential.
It limits your capacity for intimacy and your ability to truly love.” – Brenda Schaeffer
Related: How To Step Out Of Denial? Top 10 Steps To Overcome Denial When The Truth Is Heartbreaking
References
- Portions of this article were adapted from the book Is It Love Or Is It Addiction?, © 2009 by Brenda Schaeffer. All rights reserved.
