‘I CAN’T QUIT YOU’: LOVE REALLY CAN BE ADDICTIVE, STUDY CONCLUDES.
RESEARCHERS SAY LOVE ADDICTION IS REAL
For George Bernard Shaw, it was one of the most “violent” and “insane” of all passions. According to University of Oxford researchers, love is literally addictive — and may be biochemically curable.
In a new paper, the Oxford team says there now exists abundant evidence from brain-based studies to support their claim “love is (or at least can be) an addiction,” that to love intensely is to essentially be addicted to a “social object” — another person — and that people suffering “problematic” attachments ought to be offered the same supports and treatments extended to drug abusers.
According to the researchers, drugs that can inadvertently dampen or blunt lust or libido are already in widespread use today, including certain anti-depressants, almost all blood pressure pills, morphine and other opioids, as well as acid blockers used to treat heartburn. They predict less clumsy, more targeted pills, biochips or other “anti-love biotechnology” will be available in the nottoo-distant future, providing those who need one a “chemical breakup.”
The Oxford team admits that while it might seem preposterous to suggest any real similarities between passionate lovers and, say, heroin addicts, other researchers who have slid the happily-in-love as well as the heart brokenly jilted inside MRI scanners and then showed them pictures of their lovers (or rejecters), also found feelings of love can provoke strong biochemical reactions in some of the same brain regions associated with addiction. These reactions involve the release of serotonin and dopamine, neurochemicals that play crucial roles in active drug addiction.
Indeed, “so numerous are the superficial similarities between addictive substance use and love-and-sex based interpersonal attachments,” the Oxford team writes — alternating cycles of ecstasy, despair, cravings, longings and obsessive thoughts — “that a number of scientific theorists have begun to argue that both sorts of phenomena may rely upon similar or even identical psychological, chemical and neuroanatomical substrates.”
Love has fascinated and tortured poets, playwrights and songwriters for centuries, from the Bard and Bernard Shaw to Robert Palmer (“Whoa, you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah/ It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough,” Palmer sang in his iconic, MTV-era video).
“For the longest time, love — or even just ‘romantic attachment’ — was generally thought to be something too abstract, vague or culturally loaded to be studied ‘scientifically,’” first author and Oxford ethicist Brian Earp said in an email to the National Post.
“Even when studies were taking off looking at bonding behaviour in other animal species, there was a huge reluctance to try to extend or extrapolate any of those investigations to the case of humans.”
Today, scientists are increasingly trying to sort out “what is going on in our brains and bodies when we fall in and out of love,” Earp said.
Writing in the journal Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, he and his coauthors offer up two views of love addiction — a “narrow” and a “broad” one.
The narrow considers love addiction-like only in rare cases caused by abnormal brain processes that produce “chronic, ultra-strong ‘doses’ of love-based reward.” In these cases, the pining interferes with a person’s normal daily functioning. In extreme cases, it can be lethal. Earp and his co-authors cite statistics from the U.S. where, in 2011, over 10 per cent of murders were committed by the victim’s lover.
“On this kind of view, love addiction is a neurobiological disorder that has no place in a healthy or flourishing life, and it follows that we ought to offer love addicts some measure of treatment or support,” they write.
The broader approach argues that everyone who loves is essentially on a spectrum of addictive conditions, “though perhaps only weakly.” Earp says the point is not to pathologize love. “The key issue for me and my co-authors is whether the romantic attachment is, all things considered, causing harm to oneself or vulnerable others.
“Obviously, there are many ways to try to influence or change our feelings about someone that don’t involve medical technologies — just ask anyone who has successfully ‘gotten over’ an ex-partner,” Earp said.
Still, they would support medical interventions in cases where “the love in question is clearly harmful and needs to dissolve one way or another.” For example, a woman who can’t bring herself to leave a violent or abusive partner. People would also have to want to use the treatment, they add, meaning no one would be coerced or forced into it.
While the ancients advocated bloodletting and purging, Earp said there is some evidence certain modern drugs — antidepressants known as SSRIs or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — can blunt higher-level emotions such as love as an unintended side effect. The drugs are notorious for sabotaging sex drive. However, in a 2011 interview with Scientific American, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the Rutgers University researcher who led the MRI brain studies of the happily and not-so-happily in love, said “some SRRIs in some people seem to adversely affect the dopamine system, and romantic love gets squashed.”