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.

“I don’t care how long you’ve been clean and sober.  Drug addicts and alcoholics should not have handguns in the house.”  That advice was given to a roomful of clean and sober addicts and alcoholics, me among them, twentysomething years ago.  The advice-giver went on to say that addicts and alcoholics are by nature over-sensitive and over-reactive, and can’t trust ourselves not to make a lethal snap judgment.

 All these years later, science has proven her right.  The recent, much-publicized sibling study at Cambridge University demonstrated an inherited defect in the decision-making brain tissue of addict families.  It doesn’t matter whether or not the sibling is actually using drugs (although I would love to get a look at the “normal” sibling’s eating, smoking and gambling habits!) — some people are hard-wired for impulsivity.

We already knew that anecdotally, of course, but it’s always nice to see it in a controlled double-blind research paper. And as long as we’re applying it to handgun ownership, I don’t mind one way or the other, since I never felt the need to own a handgun.

But if we extend the science  — and we should, although even I don’t like where this is heading — sex and love addicts really shouldn’t be cruising online, either, whether in recovery or in active addiction.  Internet dating is not a good idea for any addict or alcoholic, really.  Here’s why:

Those of us with the genetic predisposition for addiction not only have quirky deciding brain cells, we also have quirky rewarding brain cells.  When these reward cells — the dopamine receptors — work poorly, you have trouble feeling pleasure.  So, impulsively and without much thought to the consequences thanks to Quirk A, addicts-in-training do things to increase our dopamine production.  Fast cars, maybe, or sky-diving.  Usually, it’s your basic sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.  Works great to increase dopamine production.  Sadly, all that nice positive feedback sets us up for some pretty negative habits.  

What has this got to do with online dating?  Novelty and anticipation stimulate dopamine production.  A lot.  Think about the gambler at the slot machine, compulsively pulling the handle because the expectation of a jackpot is so enthralling.  Or the rat in a Skinner box, tapping the lever in expectation of food.  How different is that from you clicking your way through QuickMatch on OK Cupid? 

“Next!  Next!  Next!”  This the happy cry of a brain feeding on hits of dopamine.  Which is fine, as long as you keep feeding it.  A neurochemical surge is invariably followed by a neurochemical withdrawal, followed by a craving, followed by another hit, followed by… yeah, you’re way ahead of me.  Be honest: How many years do you want to speed date?  

Don’t shoot me; I’m only the messenger.  You aren’t even supposed to have a handgun in the house, remember?

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)

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.

Ethlie Ann Vare will be taking questions live on the air this Sunday, January 15 at 8-9 pm (Pacific Time) on KLEAN Radio, KFWB News Radio 980 in Los Angeles and KFMB 760 in San Diego, streaming live web-wide at http://www.kleanradio.com/live-stream/

A lively debate is always welcome.  Please call and give her a hard time. 

I let two calls go to voicemail this evening.  The first was from Minnesota, so it was probably Senator Al Franken’s campaign office asking for money (dude, you already got elected; let it go) and the other was from one of those fake numbers that’s probably someone calling via Skype to sell me prescription drugs from India, which is a mean thing to do to a recovering drug addict.

     The point of the story, though, is not the insanity of our cash-mad political system or the lure of gray market Ambien.  The point is that I didn’t pick up the phone.  

     In the past, I might have convinced myself that the caller from Minnesota could have been that cute guy I met on that trip to St. Paul that time.  Or reminded myself that the Australian bodybuilder I once dated would call on Skype.  The love addict gremlin that lives in my reptile brain could always come up with some reason to grab for the phone and anticipate the mail. 

     My insanity is, if nothing else, optimistic.

     I think the quickest way to spot a sex and love addict is to see how easy he or she is to reach.  Sex and love addicts leave forwarding addresses.  We transfer our calls to our cell phones.  We leave word where we can be found at any hour of the day or night.  God forbid that our soulmate should try to contact us and not be able to!  Somewhere in the back of every love addict’s head is the fantasy that Prince Charming is out there somewhere, and you never know if today is the day he’s going to reach out and touch you.  Maybe this is the morning your unrequited crush will realize you were The One all along.  You never know. 

     Yes, people are more wired today than they were only a few years ago, and you can tell me you’re glued to your devices purely for business purposes.  But in your heart, you know what call you’re expecting.  And every time the caller isn’t your true love, but just another fundraiser from Minnesota or telemarketer from Bangalore, doesn’t your heart sink a little?  It fills every day with a parade of disappointment and unmet expectation.  No wonder love addicts get depressed.

     In my book, it’s a signpost of recovery for any sex and love addict to not pick up a phone.  Prince Charming can leave a damn message. 

Exactly what hole are you trying to fill? I mean that in the most existential sense, I promise. 

Do you see yourself in this description?  If you do, don’t worry.  You’re not alone.