Award-winning screenwriter Ethlie Ann Vare writes the popular blog www.AffectionDeficitDisorder.com.
 
Her new book is LOVE ADDICT: SEX, ROMANCE AND OTHER DANGEROUS DRUGS (HCI Books, September 1, 2011).
 
Twitter @LoveAddict_Book

Have you ever noticed how few love songs are actually about being in love? Most love songs are about love wished for or love lost. Love songs are really longing songs. Love addicts — those of us who suffer what I like to call affection deficit disorder — are suckers for songs like that. We have an inbred tendency to confuse “in love” with “pining for.”

We also have a tragic tendency to confuse love with pain. If it cuts like a knife, at least you can feel it.

Sex and love addiction has been in the news a lot lately… okay, let’s be honest, mostly sex addiction. It makes a better headline. Love addiction is the final frontier in the study of behavioral addiction. After all, who wants to admit she’s a love addict? Good Lord, if I admit I’m a love addict, no one will want to date me!

Pause for a moment and appreciate the irony.

What, then, is love addiction? How is in different from codependency, or even a normal teenage crush? Well, for one, you’re not a teenager any more. Here’s where I draw a line between the love addict and a garden-variety codependent: Any jilted lover will get a nasty jolt when they see the ex’s car. It takes a love addict to set fire to the ex’s car. I know someone who did that, by the way, and the ex was definitely a jerk. But the neighbors whose cars also went up in smoke hadn’t really done anything bad.

Like any addiction worth the name, love addiction hurts both the addict and people in the addict’s vicinity. Like any other addiction, love addiction features the twin horrors of tolerance and withdrawal. You know what heroin withdrawal looks like; you’ve seen in the movies. If you’ve ever found yourself curled up in a fetal position staring at an unringing phone… you know what love withdrawal looks like.

Tolerance in a heroin addict means you have to shoot more and more heroin to get high. Here’s what tolerance looks like in a love addict: Your affairs become more conspicuous and closer to home, until you find yourself shagging your boyfriend’s roommate or your sister’s husband. Your bad-boy boyfriends get badder and badder, until you find yourself in the emergency room claiming that you got the black eye from rolling out of bed. You find yourself in steamy, doomed relationships with people who are at first sort of taken, then sort of living in another country, then sort of… well, dead.

You know where it ends up. It ends up like Fatal Attraction, with a pet rabbit boiling in a spaghetti pot. Or like Romeo’s Juliet or Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary or a hundred other literary role models, with a glorious suicide. It sounds romantic when a love addict overdoses and dies, but she’s no less dead than that junkie.

If you think you might have a touch of Affection Deficit Disorder, here are some self-diagnosis questions I lifted from the literature table of a self-help group called SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous.) See if you relate to anything:

1. Are you unable to stop seeing a specific person or leave a relationship, even though you know this person is destructive to you?
2. Does your love life affect your reputation? Have you ever threatened your financial stability or standing in the community by pursuing a sexual or romantic partner?
3. Do you keep a list, written or not, of the number of partners you’ve had? Or have you lost count of the number of sexual partners you’ve had?
4. Do you hide your romantic activities from friends, family, co-workers, counselors, etc.?
5. Are you afraid that deep down you are unacceptable and unlovable?
6. Are you unable to concentrate on work because of thoughts or feelings you are having about another person?
7. Do you need to have sex or be in love in order to feel like a “real woman”?
8. Have you had sex at inappropriate times, in inappropriate places, and/or with inappropriate people? Have you risked being caught, or contracting herpes, gonorrhea, or HIV?
9. Do you find that you have a pattern of repeating bad relationships?
10. Have you ever considered suicide over a relationship?

We could go on; the pamphlet has 40 questions, and torching a car isn’t even included. Neither is fantasizing about driving your car through His living room window. Or parking your car outside His house to see who visits. Or having sex in the passenger seat of the family car with the babysitter. Or… wait a minute, I think I finally put my finger on the problem.

It’s the car.