LOVE CAN BE AN ADDICTION

Michael and Joanna became lovers while he was in his third year of university and she was in her first. Neither had ever had a love before. Whenever possible they spent their time together. They isolated themselves from their friends. They supported each other in conflicts with their families. After a few years they married and moved to another city.

There their social and political life became more active. They both began careers. They no longer needed each other as much. Michael felt free of the situations that made him feel inadequate. Joanna grew more confident and found that she didn't need a dominant man to direct her actions and her feelings. Their marriage ended immediately after Joanna revealed she had been having an affair.

People can become addicted to other people in the same way they become addicted to drugs, say psychologists Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky. They came to this conclusion after studying the addiction process and looking at many relationships that ended, like Michael's and Joanna's, in separation or in a therapist's files.

By addiction, Peele and Brodsky mean the classic semi-physiological syndrome characterized by tolerance and withdrawal. A person has built up a tolerance when he requires larger and larger doses of a substance in order to obtain the desired effect. Withdrawal is the body's traumatic readjustment to a drugless state. Most agonizing, apparently, is an intangible feeling that something central is missing from the addict's body and his existance.

That concept of addiction - as an physical dependence - had been refined to include a largely psychic dependence. The biochemical aspect of addiction is only half of the story. The other half is that addiction can be self- induced. A person may use drugs, for example, to give structure to his life and to secure him from changes and challenges.

As a person becomes more involved with a drug, he becomes more dependent on the reassurance it offers. As a result he becomes less able to deal with the problems and uncertainties that made the drug desirable in the first place. Eventually he reaches a point where he can't be deprived of this source of reassurance without considerable trauma.

If addiction is more mental than physiological, then many things other than drugs can be addictive. Anything that is repetitive, safe, predictable and sufficiently consuming will do.

The most prevalent form of addiction, say Peele and Brodsky, one that touches all our lives to some degree, is interpersonal addiction - addiction to someone we love or think we love.

An addictive relationship is a single overwhelming involvement. For addicted lovers, the relationship becomes paramount. It becomes their only point of certainty.

They may let go of other interests and activities. They use each other to fill the emptiness in themselves, and each begrudges any form of the other's personal growth. They are not together for mutual growth or self-expression, but for comfort and familiarity. Eventually they reach a tolerance for each other. Addictive relationships are ultimately self-destructive.

A mature not-addictive relationship, on the other hand, involves a desire to grow and expand through the relationship.

Mature lovers are improved by their relationship; they are stronger, more accomplished, more sensitive individuals. They maintain serious interests outside the relationship - including other meaningful personal relationships. They are friends as well as lovers, and each has a strong belief in his own value.

This concept of love as an addiction provides a useful means of self-examination. It is a way of distinguishing love from the destructive exploitation of self and others that often masquerades as love.

DR. SHEILA WILLSON
TORONTO DAILY STAR

DON SAYS: This is a decidedly different outlook on addiction. The article made me pause and look at my own relationship with my wife, in our fiftieth year of marriage. I have often said to her "I am addicted to you, body and soul." In my case it is a good addiction, because over the years we have managed to lead seperate lives, me with my occupations and writing, as well as hobbies. We both do Civil War Reenacting, I write, she belongs to the Sweet Adelines, a singing group as well as running cross country skiing groups in both Orillia and Barrie. I volunteer at Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie. We do a lot of things together, and a lot apart. We are seperate entities, off on our own paths, coming back home at night to share our day's works. Ours is a constructive addiction, and I recommend it to anyone.