Hollywood has a lot to answer for. Think of all those boy-meets-girl movies when they fall for each other in the first scene, hook up straight away – and then it’s happy ever after. But life’s not usually like that and sometimes things get messy in the love stakes.
 
Love or relationship addiction is a real thing and sometimes it gets so bad we need help. No-one ever taught us how to navigate a relationship, right? And if we come from dysfunctional families (as most of us do) we need to learn how to go about this tricky business.
 
Falling in love/lust/whatever floods the brain with neuro chemicals that make us feel really good. It’s no wonder some people can’t get enough of this feeling.
 
If you’ve had a series of intense relationships that become the focus of your life, you’ll know that it’s difficult to focus on anything else when you’re in the relationship.
 
If you think you might be addicted to love and relationships, here are a few questions you might find helpful to ask yourself:

• Do you crave having someone to love?
• Do you feel sad when you’re not in a relationship?
• Do you spend a lot of time thinking about romance or sex?
• Are you very needy when it comes to relationships?
• Do you fall in love and get into relationships quickly?
• Do you feel anxious when your partner isn’t around or doesn’t respond quickly to texts or phonecalls?
• Do you use manipulation to get a partner, or keep one?
• Have you gotten into relationship more than once with someone who isn’t able to commit?
• Do you find you stay in relationships past their use-by date?
• Do you do things against your will because you’re scared the relationship will end?
• Have you lost focus on your job or other relationships in order to maintain a romantic relationship?
• Do you give up hobbies or other interests to please your partner?
• Are you the only one in love in the relationship?
• Have you gotten into a relationship for the wrong reason because you were lonely?
• Do you feel ‘less than’ when you’re not in a relationship?
• Do you try to be what you think your partner wants you to be?
• Do you believe that if a person got to know you, they wouldn’t like you?
• Have you stayed in an abusive relationship?
• Do you pursue someone even though they are in another relationship?

 
Love Addiction Is Also Known as Co or pro-dependence
 
One definition of co-dependency is ‘excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner, typically one who requires support on account of their illness or addiction’.
 
The co-dependent person often puts another’s needs ahead of their own and becomes so focussed on their partner that they stop caring for themselves and can get sick as well.
 
Codependency usually gets started in childhood. Often, a child grows up in a home where their emotions are ignored or punished. This emotional neglect can give the child low self-esteem and shame. The home may also be affected by addiction, usually a parent or both parents whose addiction will disrupt the healthy development of the child or children.
 
One of the leading authors on the subject of codependence and love/relationship addiction is Melody Beattie whose book Codependent No More is full of good information on the subject. Her definition of a codependent person is one who has let another person’s behaviour affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behaviour.
 
Other codependent behaviours may include:

• Always being attracted to people with addiction and who are emotionally unavailable
• Feeling as if you must be in a relationship with anyone for your life to be worthwhile
• Trying to control others’ behaviours, especially loved ones
• Not being able to end a relationship that you know it’s not good for you
• People-pleasing at your own expense
• Forgetting to take care of yourself because you’re so focussed on helping others
• Practising these behaviours over and over and not being able to stop

 
Children whose parents were emotionally unavailable run the risk of being codependent themselves. As adults, we often find ourselves in relationships in which our partner is emotional unavailable – we’re attracted to what we know. And that’s where the trouble often lies because we stay in the unhealthy relationship, wishing to change our partner. We hold out with the hope that, against all the odds, one day things will be OK.
 
Deep down we hope that our partner will see all the good in us and want to change and that if we just hold out and try harder, give all our love and understanding and support, we will finally get the love and affection that we crave.
 
This thinking is damaging to us and our relationships. It’s particularly destructive if our partner is abusive – either emotionally or physically – or both. It gets dangerous when we don’t understand the reality of the situation and carry on living in a loveless relationship because we don’t in fact know what that looks like.
 
Codependent people often don’t believe they are worthy of love and they settle for less, finding themselves putting up with emotional, physical and even sexual abuse from their partner. Codependents will often look for external things to feel better – alcohol and other drugs or behaviours that are not healthy. They start relationships that are unhealthy, wanting to ‘fix’ the other person who is often in active addiction themselves and therefore emotionally unavailable.
 
Good reading on the subject of codependence and recovery from it can be found at:
​ www.coda.org
Or Dr Rob Weiss’s excellent book:
https://www.fishpond.co.nz/Books/Prodependence-Weiss-Robert/9780757320354?utm_source=googleps&utm_medium=ps&utm_campaign=NZ&gclid=Cj0KCQjws4aKBhDPARIsAIWH0JUpdU48-lJJkEFFS3TRpCgL4HIHVlgiGrDsFDiwrx5aKMzgRAB_g8gaAky3EALw_wcB

Fear of intimacy is a terrible thing. It’s gets in the way of relationships, a good sex life, and is at the core of sex addiction.
A researcher and writer who I admire is Marilyn Mason, PhD, LCP, whose booklet simply called Intimacy is a good read. She says there are nine types of intimacy and you need to practise them all within the context of a committed relationship in order to develop an intimate relationship. Sex is an intimate experience, but doesn’t mean you’re having an intimate relationship. That takes time and commitment.
Intimacy is a multi-faceted thing.
Dr Mason says the following are the nine different types of intimacy.

• Social intimacy develops when you share a group experience like a family reunion, a church group, community organisations. Or maybe you’re in recovery and share with others in a group like AA or other 12 Step fellowships. We get vulnerable with each other in meetings and this promotes a type of intimacy that bonds fellows.
• Intellectual intimacy is the intimacy of sharing thoughts and ideas, or how we think. We share our values when we talk to each other about intellectual expressions. We think out loud, clarifying our ideas.
• Emotional intimacy happens when we share our feelings, something that’s hard for people with addiction to do. Often it wasn’t safe in our family of origin to talk about how we felt when we were scared, and this becomes a barrier to intimacy in later life.
• Physical intimacy through working together – gardening, dancing, exercising alongside each other.
• Recreational intimacy happens when we share a sport or a hobby or other activities that are fun. Even playing cards or games can lead to a form of shared closeness and developing a bond.
• Aesthetic intimacy is all about sharing what we find beautiful – and we don’t even need to talk about the art or the sunset or the music, just the sharing of it will create the intimacy.
• Affectional intimacy develops through non-sexual touching – hugging, holding hands, a touch on the shoulder.
• Sexual intimacy. I love the quote Mason includes in her booklet: ‘Love will get you through times of no sex better than sex will get you through times of no love’ – US folk singer, Michael Johnson, lamenting the loss of love in his 1973 song Sex and Love.
• Spiritual intimacy happens when we share an experience that connects our spiritual core with each other, feeling at one with another and often comes as a surprise. Tears may be involved.

I believe that an intimate relationship can exist when we practise shared intimate experiences with someone – like those above – over and over again within the context of a committed relationship. And with the belief that the relationship will continue over time. It’s that commitment that’s the clincher.
Otherwise, it’s just casual sex. Sex without commitment can be like a pyrrhic victory. Images come to mind of that harrowing 2011 film Shame with Michael Fassbender as an out-of-control sex addict. His casual encounters with random women left him devastated - and me as a viewer, reeling.
In my work as a sex-addiction therapist I’ve come to the conclusion that sex addiction is an intimacy disorder. That fear of intimacy keeps people in a loop of repeating the same behaviour (watching porn, paying for sex workers, extra-marital affairs) while expecting a different outcome.
The hapless sex and love addict who can’t find true connection with his/her partner goes looking for it with other men or women, only to be heart-broken each time the affair ends in tears and more scar tissue forms on their heart.
It’s hard work, maintaining a long-term relationship and the sad thing is that lots of people just give up and give in and live in despair. I don’t think Thoreau meant that we should abandon hope when he wrote about ‘the mass of men living in quiet desperation’ in his book Walden.
It does require a certain type of self-reflection, of course, and getting rigorously honest with ourselves.
I’ll finish off with my favourite quote from Hamlet: To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

George Bernard Shaw once said something along the lines of ‘Youth is wasted on the young’ and I get what he means – i.e. you fritter away your life as a young person because you don’t appreciate the gift of youth.
I always wanted to be older, more grown-up, longing to do the things that my parents did like drink and smoke and swan around, seemingly without a care in the world. Whereas my world was full of angst and fear and slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet). No matter that my parents had endured their own slings and arrows, having survived WWII. I’m still coming to terms with the privations they must have suffered as a result of that ghastly war.
So, after reading Kerala Taylor’s excellent Medium piece, My Daughter is Gorgeous, and I Wish She Wasn’t,
​https://medium.com/the-motherload/my-daughter-is-gorgeous-and-i-wish-she-wasnt-8a18f698970b
I want to modify Shaw’s quote and say that beauty is wasted on the young. Most babies are born beautiful – that skin, the innocence, the trust – and they haven’t a clue. Then later, the long, leggy, gawky teenagers with pimples – not one iota of understanding about their youthful beauty, so agonized by the acne.
Only with the benefit of hindsight, I can see my own beauty when I look at old photographs with a certain amount of objectivity. I had no idea at the time. I was so full of insecurity and fear (that word again), that I was blinded by the fright of it all.
I’m now at that strange stage of being seemingly invisible. I forget I’m a middle-aged woman and sometimes expect, but then miss, the looks of men in the street. They look right past me.
Back in the day (New Zealand men were slow to grasp the concepts of feminism), I had mixed feelings when guys on building sites whistled at me. I knew it was somehow wrong, but I liked the attention. And if I was quick enough, I would get in first and whistle at them. It gave me a bit of a thrill to see them perched up on their struts and nearly falling off at the shock of a 20-something female whistling at them, way below on the street. Cheeky tart
We used to do that kind of thing a lot. The shock factor was a little bit thrilling. Back then, there were such things as public bars that wouldn’t serve women. So, with our burgeoning feminism strapped tight across our chests, we would storm such bars, demanding to be served. I remember at one bar in Wellington, circa 1971, the barman suggested that I might like to go into the ‘ladies’ parlour’ because I mightn’t like the language of the men in the public bar.
‘I don’t give a fuck,’ I said, standing my ground. He chuckled and gave me my drink. Part of why I got away with it was because I was cute.
Still in my 20s, I got a job reading the news on a regional television news programme. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because of my journalistic chops.
And that led me to the conclusion that there’s a bit of a double standard operating between the genders. My male colleagues who went on to have stellar careers in front of the camera did get the jobs because of their chops. It sure wasn’t for their looks. If women looked like some of them, they would never have got near a camera.
The attention was still a mixed bag, because when our little new program first went to air, I didn’t like being written about in the local newspaper. But I was lucky because in the early 80s the so-called cult of celebrity still hadn’t reached these distant shores and my private life stayed private.
Unlike my fellow Medium scribe, Kerala Taylor, I'm still worried about too much attention (although I’d like a few more kind followers, hint hint, so I can have a crack at being paid) because I haven’t been trolled and am wondering how I’d cope if someone wrote something nasty in the comments.
It also brings to mind another quotable writer, Oscar Wilde, who cleverly said, 'There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.'
After being such a compulsive writer for so long (I was a journo for 30-odd years), I’ll keep going in the chance that maybe one day I’ll earn a buck or two because my writing, not my looks, will earn me the recognition I deserve.
But I need to get 100 followers first.