Today I’m super excited to share this gorgeous post about love, created by the lovely Lisa Eddy at Angelorum and Tarot Mystic. I love Lisa’s writing and I don’t often write about romantic relationships here in my blog so I hope you’ll enjoy this one.
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If it resonates please leave a comment and share on social media.
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Thank you!!
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Love, Karina
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We have all heard the song ‘Addicted to Love’ and the term ‘love addict’ is quite well established by now. However, I believe this is a total misnomer. You cannot be addicted to love because, deep down, you are love. You, or rather your physiology, however, can get addicted to being in love, which is a different matter entirely. Louis de Bernières clarifies the nature of falling in love perfectly in the quote below:
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. (Captain Correlli’s Mandolin)
It often takes a lot of courage to admit to yourself that you are a romance addict because when the realisation first dawns on you, it may feel a bit like you are poised at the edge of a bottomless pit. What you need to understand that this bottomless pit is only a mental representation of all the love you have withheld from yourself due to fearing that you may not be lovable and therefore kept seeking approval in the form of the love and devotion of a romantic partner.
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1. Your happiness depends on pinning down ‘The One.’ You simply cannot perceive ever being completely happy without being coupled with someone whom you can consider your ‘other half.’ You do not feel complete when you are single and you dread spending time on your own. Thoughts of a future where you continue being single cause depression and anxiety. Romance is the most important part of your life.
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2. You have a history of giving your heart away before you know the other person. All it takes for you to declare that you are in love, is the emotional rush that is triggered by having chemistry with someone. Sometimes you even manage to manufacture this chemistry with your mind over someone you have only met online (that is actually quite an astounding feat when you stop to think about it!). You may or may not be aware of this pattern yet, but your friends and family will recognise it all too well, as they have witnessed one trainwreck of a relationship after another.
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3. You lack boundaries. Your lack of boundaries is down to not being met with respect as a child, so you do not how to respect your own boundaries enough to enforce them. This makes it very easy for you to fall prey to takers and even people with psychopathic tendencies.
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4. You are not aware of your core needs or how to assert those needs. This is related to the boundaries issue and is often (almost always) down to not having your needs met or even recognised as a child. It may take some counselling to sort this out.
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5. You stay in bad relationships. This one may seem a mystery at first. However, once again it is down to chemistry. You have simply become addicted to the highs and lows of an inherently abusive relationship and a normal relationship may even seem boring by comparison. The good news here is that once you realise that it is a hormone (oxytocin) you are addicted to rather than the other person, it becomes easier to begin disengaging from the abuse. The root cause is growing up with abuse or having been exposed to emotional abuse for an extended period of time during your formative years.
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6. You do not give yourself time to heal between relationships. You are a strong proponent of the old saying that ‘sometimes you have to get under someone in order to get over someone else.’ This, of course, makes it impossible to integrate any lessons learned from your most recent relationship and you enter the next relationship needy by default.
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7. You tend to become limerent:
“Limerence is a state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person typically including compulsive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to form or maintain a relationship and have one’s feelings reciprocated.” (Wikipedia
8. You neglect your friendships when you are in a romantic relationship. It is possible that late in life you will find yourself quite alone because of this unfortunate pattern. Let’s hope it is not too late to make amends! Understanding friends are likely to remain by your side and the others can perhaps be made to understand that you abandoned them for the same reason a heroin addict would abandon anyone unable to provide him with either the fix or the means to get his next fix.
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9. Approval-seeking doesn’t stop once you are in a relationship. Your need to compensate for a lack of self-love makes you extremely clingy, demanding and needy as a partner. You are constantly looking for signs of approval/disapproval and those signs dictate how you feel. A person with a healthy amount of self-love is inner-directed and does always on high alert for these signs.
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10. You do all the work in the relationship. Unfortunately, people who are addicted to being in love attract emotionally unavailable partners more often than not. This is because emotionally available partners are too healthy to hook up with an extremely needy person. An emotionally healthy person seeks love rather than co-dependency. The deeper underlying reason why romance addicts attract emotionally unavailable partners is because they are (subconsciously) seeking to reaffirm that they are not lovable. This is the addiction speaking because it perpetuates the rollercoaster ride of falling in and out of love which provides the ‘fix.’
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If you recognise yourself in the ten points above, please don’t despair. The way to get off the rollercoaster is to understand that you are on one in the first place. It then becomes possible to make a conscious decision to get off. My favourite tool for working through issues related to romance addiction is the Tarot. This is because the Tarot acts as a mirror for the soul and helps you face your issues dead on. The cards also provide a way forward.
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Lisa Frideborg Eddy is a spiritual teacher, Tarotist, Certified Angel Card Reader™ and healer who lives in the North of England with her husband, youngest daughter and two cats. Her main love in life used to be romance and now it is helping people become emotionally liberated. You can find her musings on www.angelorum.co and www.tarotmystic.co
