Dr. Margaret Cary, who wrote the Foreword to LOVE ADDICT: SEX, ROMANCE AND OTHER DANGEROUS DRUGS, passed along a couple of interesting articles, and I pass them along to you.

First, the New York Times published a piece by Richard A. Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, called I Heart Unpredictable Love, about how some people (guess who?) are neurochemically drawn to inconstant lovers.  Dr. Cary smiley-faced, “You could have told them this years ago.”

Then, from the same source — both Dr. Cary and the Times — is a piece by Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. New Love: A Short Shelf Life again connects the dots between surprise, lust and dopamine.  The professor also offers advice on how to keep a long-term relationship fresh — in case any of you are in long-term relationships, and somehow I suspect that’s not too many of you.

Check ‘em out.

There are a couple of things love addicts do that baffle observers.  Okay, there are a hundred things love addicts do that baffle observers, but this conversation is about two of them, a pair that seem to be diametrically opposed.  And yet, I believe, they stem from the same mental quirk.

Tell me if you relate to either of these behaviors: When approaching a new relationship (or, for that matter, applying for a job) we tell ourselves “Oh, it’s not that important.  I don’t really want it.  I don’t mind that much if it doesn’t happen.”  It’s a preemptive strike, an attempt to assuage our disappointment if/when the romance/job/tax refund/new puppy doesn’t materialize.  It doesn’t work, but that’s beside the point.

At the same time, however, love addicts are magnetically drawn to the least available partner in the vicinity.  You’re leaving the country?  I love you.  Married?  We can work with that.  The married Director of the CIA who is usually out of the country?  Perfect!  (I’m talking to you, Paula Broadwell…)

This second quirk, you would think, is a set-up for failure.  And anyone so afraid of failure that they will delude themselves they didn’t want whatever it was in the first place would, you would also think, avoid these set-ups.  And yet, these seemingly contradictory ideas coexist uncomfortably in the same heads.  Like mine.

Here’s what I think is going on in our addict brains.  We are managing our expectations — and addiction is all about expectation — in order to do what alcoholics call “control and enjoy” their drinking.  Bear with me while I try to connect some dots. 

Sex and love addicts — most addicts — live in the black and the white.  Highs and lows, peaks and valleys, ecstasy and despair.  This is all part of a brain reward system gone amok, the physiological component of addiction.  (There’s also a psychological and a metaphysical element.)  We love junkies, intoxicated by romance, thrive on anticipation and rarely feel satisfied.  The gap between high expectations and low results is despair.  The gap between low expectations and high results is ecstasy.

So if you prefer the ecstasy to the despair — and who doesn’t? — wouldn’t you rather have the rare and thrilling high of getting the ungettable than the frequent and thudding despair of losing anything else?  The flood of dopamine accompanying nailing that rock star makes up for a hundred lost jobs, especially when we tell ourselves the job wasn’t that desirable in the first place.  Managing our expectations.  If I expect little, I will be less disappointed if it doesn’t happen and way more appointed (is that a word?) if it does.

The downside of this system is that it’s insane addict thinking.  We are in fact every bit as disappointed when we don’t get the thing we pretended not to want in the first place.  And if we actually land the object of our obsession, that unfaithful/married/gay/felonious/foreign stranger, we rarely get to keep them because, after all, they were never a very suitable match.

Of course, we never really wanted them anyway….

And we’re back.  Still working my way through the pile of reader questions from JEZEBEL.  Hoping to have it completed before October, when I will be the Guest Expert of the Month at www.AddictionLand.com (“Easy to get in, but can you get out?”) and the floodgates will open once again.  

So far, the top contenders for my Dear Abby/Ann Landers’ Evil Other Twin name are: MISSED MANNERS, ANN BLUNDERS, DEAR ABBY-NORMAL and the one up there in the header, DOWNTOWN ABBY.  Feel free to add your own.

Minnesota 2012 asks:  Why do I continue to have sex with someone who doesn’t care about me? I know it’s a waste of time, I know I deserve so much better, blah, blah, blah - This doesn’t change that I still do it. Willingly. What is it about the sex act that makes a woman forego all logical self-respect?

It’s not the sex act; it’s the neurochemicals produced by the anticipation of sex (dopamine) and the cuddling afterwards (oxytocin) — not to mention the barrage of endorphins during the delightful bits in between.  And it’s not all women; it’s you.  Also me, and a bunch of us who are addicted to said feelgood brain chemicals.

So while the logical and rational front brain is saying “This guy doesn’t care about me, it’s a waste of time, I know I deserve better,” the lizard brain tucked way in the back is saying “Oh baby, oh baby. harder faster more.”  It’s a contest the lizard brain will always win… unless you stack the deck.  The process of  recovery is learning how to stack the deck: a supportive group, a counselor, contrary action, bottom lines/abstinence, blah blah blah.

You gain self-respect when you behave in a way that respects yourself.  I have to act myself into right thinking, because I can never think myself into right acting.  Stupid lizard brain always gets in the way.

Woman 23 asks: I would love to hear your thoughts on jealousy, open relationships, etc..

When I was in the throes of love addiction, I was pathologically jealous.  I was the kind of girl who would read his journals and freak out over women he was with before he ever met me.  When I was getting clean from cocaine, I gave up four months of sobriety because I saw the guy I liked dancing with another girl.  (I say “girl,” but I was 35 at the time and assume she was about the same.  This isn’t the junior prom we’re talking about, here.)  I never actually cut up anyone’s clothes or burned his car — I know women who have done both — but I have fantasized about it. 

I’m not like that any more, thank God.  I wouldn’t be with a guy I didn’t trust, for one, and I also know that having a man’s attention 100% of the time is not the stairway to heaven.  That being said, open relationships are not for me.  I don’t poke sleeping dogs with sharp sticks, and love addiction is a very large, very dangerous dog.  I could pretend I had no problem with polyamory, either out of sheer denial or in vain hopes of converting the guy to monogamy, but for me that’s just a heartache looking for a place to happen.

And Precious Little of That asks: How do you convince a stubborn Baby Boomer to get into therapy when they don’t want to see a “head-shrinker?” I’m asking for…um…the child of a friend.

You’re singing my song, sister!  I tried to get my hypercontrolling, manic-depressive, gambling addict mother into therapy, into Gamblers Anonymous, into Alanon, into anything that might help her heal.  For probably 20 years.  Not only didn’t she go, but she resented that I judged and criticized her all the time and kept wanting her to change.

Kind of like I resented her all my life for judging and criticizing me, and forever wanting me to change.  Go figure. 

In the end, we can never change anything but our own actions and our own attitude.  The weird thing is, that changes everyone around us.

In your… um, friend’s case, I recommend being as happy as possible and, if asked, credit your tiny, shrunken head.

Erin Gloria asks:I once read that your romantic sophistication/development as a person ends when a long period of never being single begins — say, if a woman spent ages 20-3o hopping from boyfriend to boyfriend and suddenly finds herself single, when she tries to go out and date, she’ll approach it like a 20-year-old would.

What would your experience say to that? Do you believe that constant relationships impede personal development? Did it impede yours?

For most people, I credit this more to acculturation than personality development.  Dating  habits are formed when you were last dating, so you’ll revert to that until you learn new habits.  Other than creating some awkwardness that will make cute dinnertable chit-chat on your next internet date, I don’t see it as a big issue.

In the world of addicts (AdditionLand!  Easy to get in, but can you get out?), however, it’s a different story.  An addict’s personality development and life coping skills stop when they start using.  For most of us, this is smack dab in mid-adolescence because, after all,  there’s nothing to make you need a drink like puberty.  So we begin our “sober dating” life at 30 or 40 or 50… with all the romantic sophistication of a 15-year-old. 

This is past awkward to the point of potentially lethal, like underage driving.  We should all get learner’s permits. 

I WANNA KNOW WHAT LOVE IS

“Lindsay” and I are a lot alike.  A lot like you, too, I suspect.  Someone pointed her to this blog and she had one of those V-8 moments – you know, when you slap your forehead and say “Good Lord!  It was staring me in the face the whole time!”

She writes: “I open your blog to ‘Hanging On the Telephone,’ and you are talking to me.  Right to me.  Me perseverating.  Me squandering brain power (which I can ill afford to squander.)  I may be nowhere near the fetal position, but I know when I’m checking my email too often, and for what.  I think some love-addiction-type crap has been screwing up my life in some less obvious but profound ways for a really long time — like, forever.”

She continues to elevate me with flattering comments on my work (along with affection and appetizers, I can never get enough flattering comments) and then drops me to the floor with a question.  A simple, straightforward question (Ethlie says, dripping with sarcasm.)  Lindsay wants to know what love is.

“Does non-addicted romantic love exist?” she asks.  “If yes, what is it?  Beyond the platitudes, and incorporating what we know about the physiology of it, really what is it?  And where does great, joyful, sexy sex fit into the picture?  What is the sexual-love piece that is more than just everyone getting off?  And what is the difference between cynicism and realism, about love and sex?”

I reminded her that more poetic minds than mine have been wrestling with that question from time immemorial.  But I know what she means.  She wants to know how we love addicts can tell the difference between addictive love and healthy love, considering we’ve been experiencing and/or craving (mostly craving) the former for our whole life.

Just as “dark” might best be described as “when there’s no light” or “weightlessness” as “lack of gravity,” I have an easier time telling you what healthy love isn’t.  It’s kind of like the definition of God’s will that was given to me when I was new to sobriety.  Newcomers are always asking how you know what God’s will is.  “You know that little jolt of excitement you get when you’re about to do something dangerous, or naughty, or secret?,” an old-timer said to me.  “That little zap it how you know it’s not God’s will.”

It’s also a good way to spot unhealthy, addictive love.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher can tell you more authoritatively than I can what love is.   She wrote an entire book about the nature and chemistry of romantic love, called WHY WE LOVE: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (Holt, 2004.)  Her historical research shows that relationship insanity defies the bounds of time and space; neither unhealthy, addictive love nor serene, “companionate” love is a product of the modern world.  Both are characterized by distinct physical and psychological patterns that can be measured and charted.

Yet none of this stops me from crushing on an inappropriate man when the wind is blowing in the wrong direction.   Self-knowledge, as they say, avails us nothing.

But… I can take my emotional temperature when I am staring at someone across a crowded room, or across a dinner table.  Does this feel more like the excitement of pulling a jackpot at the slot machine, I ask myself, or the satisfaction of watching my savings account grow? 

We all know how much fun that jackpot is in the moment.  We all know how impossible it is to plan a future around it.

Imagine for a moment that you went to a movie.  The movie was about an alcoholic who wanted a bottle of whiskey.

That’s it.  That’s the whole plot.

He gets close to his scotch, becomes thirsty, mishaps keep him from it, and he hurts other humans, damages them in his obsessive need to get to his scotch.  He encounters huge obstacles.  But through wit, charm, and deceit, he at last secures it, and drinks it down.

Is that a happy ending? 

That’s the beginning of a blog post on “Addiction and Relationships” at www.RiparianChurch.com by a fellow called Otter.  Yet, notes the Otter, isn’t that the plot of every romantic comedy every filmed?  And more than a few supernatural dramas, we might add.  Unlike any other form of intoxication, the giddy high of romance is never condemned, only celebrated.  Obtaining the object of obsession is the goal, and when that goal is reached —- “kissed and kissed often, by someone who knows how” (to use the G-rated Gone With the Wind wording) – bluebirds sing and the end credits roll.

Now imagine those soft-focus sunsets accompanying a scene of the ingénue shooting heroin.  The euphoric neurological response is identical, after all.  But no.  Leonardo diCaprio finding ecstasy with Kate Winslett in Titanic, we like.  Leonardo diCaprio finding ecstasy with smack in The Basketball Diaries, not so much.  Never mind it’s the romance that actually proved fatal.

Popular culture glorifies only one addiction, the addiction to love.  There are no feel-good movies about anorexia.  Drugstore cowboys and cocaine kings do not get any happy endings.  Even the shopaholics in Sex and the City knew their spending habits were dangerous, no matter how deep their denial about their romantic lives.  

I realize that I am powerless to be hold back the tide of songs and movies celebrating addictive love, so I’ve decided to do the next best thing:  I’m going to even the playing field.  Better yet, we’re going to even the playing field.  We’re going to come up with some titles praising the less-lauded addictions out there.  I’ll start.

“I Can’t Live, If Living is Without Booze”: a full-throated power ballad about an alcoholic and his Jack Daniels.

Speed: a documentary about the daring backyard chemists who mix up methamphetamine in the washtub.

“I Wanna Hold Your Hair”: a classic tune about a bulimic and the loyal friend who keeps her ponytail out of the toilet. 

Codependence Day: a big-budget special effects movie about siblings with mushy boundaries.

“The Gambler”: this time, the country ditty ends with the old guy winning the railroad in a card game.

We close with a musical medley to nicotine junkies everywhere: “Every Breath I Hack”/”When Smoke Gets in Your Lungs”/”You Light Up My Pipe”

Now it’s your turn.  Go!

THEY’RE ALREADY AT IT:

Britt suggests:  Along Came Xanax….My Best Friend’s Needle….The Wedding Drinker….When Heroin Met Sally….

Here’s why I love 30 Rock: Amid the show’s caricatures, cartoons and buffoons, they still manage to slip in a Temple Grandin porno pun.  They did go with the “rammed in” wordplay, and I would have riffed off “gangbang”… but each to their own poor taste.

 The point is, it served to remind me of HBO’s The Temple Grandin Story, about the austic animal behaviorist, and also of a fascinating blog I read on www.WrongPlanet.net about Aspberger’s Syndrome — one of many neurological hues on the autism spectrum — and how it relates to love addiction.

My research leads me to believe that, biochemically, love addiction is closer to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder than what most people would characterize as love.  If you read this blog, you already know that interaction of dopamine, oxcytocin and serotonin and what we think of as attraction, affection and attachment — or, for us slightly sicker souls, Lust, Limerence and Longing.  If the blog isn’t enough, I also have a book on the topic.

Turns out, the same neurochemicals play a role in Asperger’s Syndrome.  

“Research showed similarities between serotonin’s role in OCD and the role serotonin plays in neurochemical bonding, more commonly known as ‘love,’” wrote blogger Alexander Plank.  “You could say that the lovestruck couple going to prom together for the first time have actually fallen into OCD with each other.

“Serontonin is the chemical that plays a role in causing aspies to pursue their special interests, and similarly causes people with OCD to be obsessive or anxious. Certain levels of serotonin are also linked with the autistic tendency of ‘stimming.’” 

Plank continues by quoting the Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology,which published a study in 2003 entitled Oxytocin Infusion Reduces Repetitive Behaviors in Adults with Autistic and Asperger’s Disorders.  As the title indicates, researchers found that if you dose an autistic adult with oxytocin, he is less likely to do things like rocking, tapping, or counting,  This is what Plank calls stimming, and which I contend is hiding somewhere behind the love addict’s obsessive text messaging, drive-bys, or writing “Mrs. Davey Jones” 100 times in your notebook.

I think it also explains why I find Freecell computer solitaire so damn soothing.  All those lovely numbers piling up and floating off, mindless yet logical, click click click until that blessed mental dial tone… anyone with Asperger’s would recognize this as stimming behavior.  It’s no wonder that the most basic digital game outside of Pong still resident on Microsoft computers.  Observers have long surmised that Bill Gates has Asperger’s.  I have no idea whether he also has (and successfully controls) love addiction.

If he has, I would like some hints.  A research grant would also be nice; I’m dying to stick a bunch of  love addicts in an fMRI.  I would ask him for a new computer, as well, but I use a Mac.

You’re expecting me to say that love addiction killed Whitney Houston, aren’t you?  When all you have is a hammer, after all, every problem looks like a nail.  My hammer is the addictive model of romantic fantasy.  I’m the one who said Amy Winehouse died of love addiction, that drug and alcohol dependence were her coping mechanism for an underlying problem.  I said that Etta James — who wrote “I’d rather go blind/ Than see you with another girl” — was the vocal standard-bearer for the love addict.

And now there’s Whitney Houston, simultaneously a transcendent world-class talent… and a hope-to-die drug addict.  She first gained fame thanks to an Eliza Doolittle/Professor Higgins relationship with record executive Clive Davis, who famously locked a roomful of music critics in a studio and made them listen to her debut album from start to finish.  Later, her insane marriage to Bobby Brown played out in the tabloids and on reality TV.  Still, her most destructive love affair was with the pipe.

Scratch an alcoholic and you’ll usually find a codependent, which is the nicer way of saying love junkie.  And crack addiction is alcoholism… well, on crack.  An addict in recovery will tell you that drugs and alcohol were a solution before they became a problem, a way to soothe an existential dis-ease that permeates the very marrow of our bones.  A neuroscientist will tell you that cocaine activates the same chemical “reward cascade” in the brain as being in love. 

When Kenny Rogers sang about “love or something like it,” he probably didn’t realize that “something like it” sells by the $20 rock.  But, chemically, it does.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to Dolly Parton, who wrote Whitney’s signature hit “I Will Always Love You.”  It sounds like just the sort of pop song I decry, a desperate declaration of undying enmeshment.  Pop music has always specialized in the longing and the loss; anything between “I want you so bad” and “I miss you so much” is generally overlooked by the Top 40.  Not so “I Will Always Love You.”

“I hope life treats you kind/ And I hope you have all you’ve dreamed of/ And I wish to you, joy and happiness/ But above all this, I wish you love.”  A sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous may recognize this sentiment as the template for a Resentment Prayer.  When we simmer with anger towards another — and who isn’t angry at their ex? — we’re supposed to pray for them to have all the gifts we would wish for ourselves.

Personally, I usually preface the prayer with “Okay, God, you and I both know I really want him to eat glass and die.  But….”

“I wish you joy and happiness… I wish you love” is not the wounded cry of the love junkie.  That’s the prayer of a healthy person who can separate and remain whole.  It was written by a woman who’s been in a “monogamish” relationship with the same man since 1964.

So, yes, I think Whitney Houston was addicted to love and I think it contributed to her early and tragic death.  But she leaves us with a transcendent soundtrack of recovery.  It is possible to let someone go with love, instead of leaving claw marks all over them.

(Photo by Jim Steinfeldt c1987)

Craving is a hunger so deep no amount of ANYTHING will truly fill it.  But we love addicts keep trying, and trying, and trying…

The main criteria for labeling something an addiction are the phenomena of Craving, Tolerance and Withdrawal. Some find it hard to get their heads around the concept of tolerance in sex and love addiction. I don’t.

My long response to the good doctor will be up on The Fix, or HuffPo, or maybe the Studio City Patch.  Journalism has become a crazy party game of late, something between Pin the Tail on the Donkey and throwing copy into a large fan and waiting to see where it lands.   

Anyhow, David Ley is the psychologist who makes his living denying that there is such a thing as sex addiction.  His new book is called The Myth of Sex Addiction, and his latest article in the London Telegraph is being widely spread by the large fanblades.  

I can — and do — delineate the scientific problems with his thesis, but the main problem I have is with Ley’s logic.  He falls prey to what’s known as the Deductive Fallacy.  He posits that those who believe sex can be addictive are moralist anti-sex bible-thumpers, and therefore should not be taken seriously.

Here’s the thing.  Just because moralist anti-sex bible-thumpers believe there is such a thing as sex addiction, does not mean that people who believe there is such a thing as sex addiction are moralist anti-sex bible-thumpers.  It’s like saying that because Crips wear blue t-shirts, if you wear a blue t-shirt you must be a Crip.  Junior high school kids in L.A. have gotten shot over that particular deductive fallacy.  

I am not anti-sex; I love sex.  (References provided upon request.)  I have never read the entire bible, much less thumped it.  Addiction is a health issue, not a moral one — although people do some pretty heinous things to satisfy their compulsions, whether for sex or gambling or alcohol or prettied-up-in-pink-bows romance.  IMHO, slashing your ex’s tires is an immoral act.  Sue me.

BUT…just because sex an be addictive doesn’t mean that everyone who has sex — even a lot of sex — is an addict.  AND… just because reigious fanatics counsel sex addicts, doesn’t mean all sex addiction counselors are religious fanatics. 

You’re a doctor.  Apply some scientific rigor to your arguments.