For many years, Kiovanna Rotem fought with an addiction that took control of her life, disrupting her relationships with family and friends, distracting her from her work, and putting her in physically dangerous situations. In an attempt to heal herself, she moved to India, shaved her head, and lived as a celibate nun for a year. But her addiction resurfaced when she returned to New York. One day she found herself in a fight with an abusive boyfriend and knew she couldn’t hide her problems anymore.
“That’s devastating, when I couldn’t hide it,” Rotem said. “I was like, ‘Okay, I need to get help.’”
Rotem’s vice was not a drug or alcohol or anything society is accustomed to battling. What turned Rotem’s life inside-out was love.
A study conducted by three scientists suggests that, like Rotem, we may all be addicted to love. In three separate experiments, Helen Fisher, an anthropologist, Arthur Aron, a social psychologist, and Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist found that the part of the brain that responds to love is the same part of the brain that responds to cocaine. A person who experiences love and a person who takes a dose of cocaine both experience a rush of dopamine, a chemical responsible for feelings of pleasure, in the brain. Some people become addicted to the emotional “high” they get from love.
“It's not that I would have a lot of relationships, but I would just go from one intense, serious relationship to the next,” said Rotem, 34. “I found dating boring and unfulfilling because I wasn’t getting the fix. You need someone completely locked into you and hooked into you to get — for me as my type of addiction — to get the rush.”
Fisher, Aron and Brown mapped the rush that Rotem reported feeling. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, they scanned the brains of 17 people who had recently fallen in love, 15 people who had just been rejected by someone they were in love with, and 17 people who had been married for an average of 21 years and who reported that they still felt madly in love with their spouses. When each subject was shown a picture of their loved one, an area at the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area was activated, sending dopamine to the brain’s reward system, which controls our behaviors through pleasure.
“We found exactly the same area becomes activated by the rush of cocaine,” Fisher said.
The 15 people who had been rejected also showed activity in the part of the brain that deals with addiction, attachment and craving.
From these experiments, Fisher concluded that there are three types of love in the brain. “Lust” is the craving for sexual gratification. “Attachment” is the calm and security a person feels from a long-term relationship. The final type of love, and the one that love addicts struggle with, is “romantic love,” which is the feeling of being in love.
"I came to believe that romantic love is an addiction,” Fisher said in a talk in December in Paris. “It has all the characteristics of addiction."
Listen to Rotem describe the withdrawal after she sought recovery from her love addiction.
Rotem says her addiction progressed throughout her adulthood. She found that the attention of men helped fill a void she had felt since childhood. When she was 15, her mother passed away and she grew up in a household with her father and siblings. In law school, she craved attention and fed her addiction by dressing provocatively.
“The rush is just feeling powerful, feeling secure, feeling safe, feeling important, feeling attractive, feeling desired, filling the void with those feelings,” she said. “But when you need it, that’s when it bridges on unhealthy.”
Rotem used sex to get her fix, but the rush she craved was never from sex itself. Instead, she used it to feel intimacy with another person.
“The physical, you know, intimacy was an easy score,” she said. “I was never addicted to the actual act, to sex, to the feeling. It was more the conquest, the chase, the being chased, the having a network of options, having backburners when something didn't work out with someone."
During her three years of law school, Rotem had four relationships. None of them was fulfilling, she said, and the initial happiness she felt at the start of each eventually passed. Because she always put her relationships first, her life outside of them fell apart. After law school, she moved to India where she thought practicing meditation and celibacy would cure her. But when she moved back to New York, she relapsed.
“Going back into the real world it was right back where I started, only worse,” she said.
cocaine. A person who experiences love and a person who takes a dose of cocaine both experience a rush of dopamine, a chemical responsible for feelings of pleasure, in the brain. Some people become addicted to the emotional “high” they get from love.
put her relationships first, her life outside of them fell apart. After law school, she moved to India where she thought practicing meditation and celibacy would cure her. But when she moved back to New York, she relapsed.
