To crave is like to be in love

Abstract

In this article, we wish to show that the experience of addictive desires is similar to the experience of limerence, which can be defined as the state of being in love. In other words, we want to argue that an inherent part of the experience of addiction is found in the experience of romantic love. Many in the literature have tried to show that one can be addicted to love in the way that love constitutes an addiction. Yet, none seem to have taken the opposite route, which rather takes love as a constituent of the addiction itself. This is odd, as such a perspective is warranted by first-person accounts of addiction. In this regard, in our view, addiction is like love, and not the other way around. Nevertheless, it is not addiction as a whole that is similar to love; love in itself cannot be compared to addiction: it is the experience of addictive cravings in addiction that is like limerence. In order to put forward the similarities between experiences of cravings and experiences of limerence, we will go through the basic components of limerence as described by Dorothy Tennov (1979), and prove that they are all found in the experience of cravings.