Being in love is an amazing, beautiful thing, but it can also make you feel crazy and turn you into someone you don’t recognize. Love can make you act irrational and lead you to do and say things you normally never would. To be honest, in many ways, love is basically just a form of addiction.
- Love can make you feel like you’re on a high. You probably haven’t experienced many highs quite like falling in love; it lifts you up more than you thought possible and makes you happy in a way that’s indescribable and impossible to compete with. Addictions often do the same, which is why both are easy to get trapped in and obsessed with, no matter the consequences.
- It can also bring some of the lowest lows imaginable. Like any addiction, the lows of love are just as extreme as the highs. This can make your emotions unpredictable and your moods can become unstable when it’s reliant on how much love you feel or don’t feel at that given moment from someone else. The lows of addiction can cause depression, anger, irrationality, and more—just like a drug addiction.
- You become dependent on it. Once you fall in love and taste the high that love gives you, it seems impossible to live without it. When you don’t have that same feeling anymore, you chase it with all of the energy you have. You’d do anything to keep it when you do have it and if it goes away for whatever reason, you search high and low to find it again, no matter what sacrifices you have to make. Your life feels incomplete without love.
- You move mountains to keep it. Just like addicts move mountains to get their supply of whatever it is they’re addicted to, attaining and keeping love often becomes your first priority. You would bend over backward or run your whole life into the ground just to feel loved, the same way you would do anything to feed a chemical addiction.
- Love can cause you to have an irregular sleep schedule. When you’re in love, you might lose sleep when you’re happy because you just feel so energized and excited. If that love gets taken away and you become heartbroken, you might feel like you can’t sleep because you’re so upset. On the other hand, losing love you once had can lead you to oversleep and feel exhausted, especially compared to the adrenaline rush that being in love often gives you. Disrupted sleep patterns such as these are often symptoms of addiction as well.
- It can cause you to have a one-track mind. You might find that when you’re in love with someone, you can think of nothing else but this person, almost to the point of obsession. The same goes for an addiction—you probably can only think about what you’re addicted to and little else. You may appear distracted in other aspects of your life when you’re in love or when you’re suffering from another addiction.
- It can make you overly possessive. When you love someone, you often want to keep that person all to yourself. You don’t want to share the love you’re feeling or potentially have it stolen by someone else. It can cause you to cling to the source of the love and be very possessive of it. When you’re addicted to something, you often become irrationally possessive over it because you’re afraid of running out or losing it.
- Love makes you act irrationally. We’ve all done mad things or acted out of character because we were in love. This also happens when you’re addicted to something; you might act irrationally because all you can think about is whatever it is you’re addicted to. Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t entertain half the things you think, say, and do when under the influence of love.
- You neglect your responsibilities for it. Just like an addiction steals all of your attention, love can do the same. It can make you neglect responsibilities of all kinds, whether it’s a big work project, your cousin’s wedding, or your best friend’s birthday. Love can make you forget to do basic things as well, such as forgetting to eat. It sounds silly but it’s true.
- You might isolate yourself from friends and family because of it. When you’re addicted to something, you might isolate yourself from people who don’t share the same addiction and spend time with only those who support or encourage it. The same goes for being in love; you may isolate yourself from anyone else besides your partner because nothing seems as worthwhile as the feeling you have when you’re with him. Isolation can be one of the main reasons it’s hard to quit an addiction or leave an unhealthy relationship.