Can You Really Be Addicted to Love?
Love addiction is not a formal diagnosis—at least yet. But research continues.
Updated September 9, 2025 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
We live in a world of fast and easy, social-media-fueled diagnosing and pathologizing. There’s an endless stream of popularized acronyms and misleading self-diagnostic memes that confuse and frustrate seasoned mental health clinicians (let alone public consumers), who understand the hazards of both under- and over-pathologizing.
For example, terms such as “ rejection sensitivity dysphoria” achieve instant diagnostic status—and an acronym (RSD)—due to their popular, intuitive appeal. It’s highly misleading and can do more harm than good when people embrace such concepts naively and out of context, what has been dubbed "social-media-associated abnormal illness behavior (SMAAIB in How Does Social Media Contribute to Teen Mental Illness? ).
In essence, the internet can make you sick. Do we really need a diagnosis of "love addiction "? Or, perhaps, a more clinical-sounding permutation, "persistent problematic romantic relationship disorder" (PPRRD)?
Within context, the experience of emotional pain in the face of social or intimate rejection is transdiagnostic and also part of the non-diagnostic, ordinary human experience—neither its own thing nor specific to any condition because rejection sensitivity occurs across a range of conditions, from mood and anxiety disorders to developmental disorders to personality disorders . To the extent that normal experiences are given pathological labels, resilience to life’s expected, if painful, challenges can be undermined.
"Love addiction" (LA) is an interesting example because published literature going back to at least 2010 (Reynaud et al., 2010) asked, “Is love passion an addictive disorder?” Love addiction, authors note, could be seen as a behavioral addiction, overlapping with both substance use and gambling addictions. LA has neurobiological (“chemical”), behavioral, emotional, and cognitive elements, similar to all addictions and compulsions. Passionate love has an all-consuming quality that can hijack people’s decision-making capacity and undermine good judgment. There is also overlap with popularized notions of insecure attachment —especially anxious attachment —and stress -related reactions, such as “ trauma bonding ”.
In short, there’s a general recognition that people can form a near-instant, lifelong attachment—fall in love—to their detriment and against their better judgment. And some folks seem to do this over and over again, both in short-term, tumultuous, and heart-breaking cycles, as well as in long-term, ultimately unsatisfying “serial monogamy ”. Are we really getting to know the other person? Is it a real relationship or a facsimile, a chemical romance fueled by something other than authentic relatedness?
After much serious and consistent consideration, LA has not been deemed a formal psychiatric diagnosis, which is likely prudent. Before modern researchers took a stab at it, William Shakespeare spelled sick love out in Romeo and Juliet (Act 1, Scene 1):
O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this. Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, Sick and healthy, asleep and awake—it's everything except what it is!
Unpacking Love Addiction
Despite the knotty problem of human relationships and star-crossed lovers, researchers have remained interested in the concept of love addiction. Two recent papers (Cavalli & Velotti, 2025; Cavalli et al., 2025) address LA with, respectively, a review and a meta-analysis and new research analyzing structured interviews using the Love Addiction Interview (see references) to derive basic factors for the construct of love addiction.
The first paper looked at 15 quality studies from a total of 27, pooling data from 3,628 participants. It found a positive correlation between LA and anxious attachment and a negative correlation with avoidant attachment. The findings affirm and add to the attachment underpinnings of problematic intimacy.
In the second paper, researchers conducted two studies. First, they reviewed the literature to identify core factors that might underlie LA, in a focused pooled analysis of related issues, such as abusive relationships with pathological dependency. Then they interviewed 33 participants, average age 36.5 years, predominantly women (87.88 percent), using a semi-structured format designed to elicit underlying factors, along with the LAI.
The interview data identified four basic themes of relationships, each framed by three factors with positive and negative polarities.
The four thematic clusters were: Emotional Change, Relationship History, Issues, and Expectations. They identify what participants found key in thinking about relationships: emotional factors, history in prior relationships, problems in relationships (issues), and their expectations for and about relationships.
The three factors within each thematic cluster were: path, the role of relationship building, and work on relational self, each of which has negative and positive poles. Path covered History to Evolutionary, roughly being stuck to moving forward. Relationship Building went from Exploration of Relationships to Safe Haven, and Work on the Relational Self from Awareness of Difficulty to Processing of Difficulty. Path explained 46.9 percent of the variance, relationship building 30.49 percent, and work on relational self 22.59 percent.
Further Considerations
Setting aside whether love addiction deserves diagnostic status, to me, the real value of the studies is the framework: It helps individuals make sense of their patterns, guides constructive change, and gives researchers a clearer lens on relationship dysfunction. The clusters and practical factors could unify how we understand problems and chart paths to improvement.
If one were to propose a new diagnosis, excessive negative polarity could define pathology—but only if it causes clinically significant distress or impairment. Assuming that the construct could be further refined, statistically validated, empirically grounded, and navigate approval politics , it must be shown that “love addiction” isn’t better explained by existing conditions (e.g., current mental illnesses, insecure attachment, developmental trauma , or temperament-driven differences in emotion and intimacy). We need empirically grounded diagnoses tied to clear cause-and-effect pathways, treatments, and outcomes— not just more statistical clusters .
Whether “love addiction” will become a diagnosis remains doubtful. In my view, it would be misguided—and potentially harmful—given how universal heartbreak is. Notably, more than 86% of popular song lyrics reflect insecure attachment themes (Jorgensen-Wells et al., 2021), further underscoring how pervasive such experiences are in human life.
Yet, on a gut level, it is hard to doubt that there are times when romantic love is "sick love", as the Red Hot Chili Pepper's eponymous song goes:
Rivers get connected so much stronger than expected, well Sick love comes to wash us away Prisons of perspective How your vision gets corrected and Sick love is my modern cliché.
Something so common can't be an illness, can it?
Facebook image: PeopleImages/Shutterstock
Shakespeare, W. (2004). Romeo and Juliet (B. A. Mowat & P. Werstine, Eds.). Simon & Schuster. (Original work published ca. 1597) — Act 1, Scene 1, lines 174–180.
Cavalli, R. G., & Velotti, P. (2025). A voice in the minds of love addicts: Textual analysis of clinical interviews. The American Journal of Family Therapy . Advance online publication.
Cavalli, R. G., Feeney, J., Rogier, G., & Velotti, P. (2025). Conceptualizing love addiction within the attachment perspective: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Behavioral Addictions , 14(2), 611-629.
Jorgensen-Wells, M. A., Coyne, S. M., & Pickett, J. M. (2022). “Love lies”: A content analysis of romantic attachment style in popular music. Psychology of Music , 51 (3), 804-819. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356221110633
Reynaud M, Karila L, Blecha L, Benyamina A. Is love passion an addictive disorder? Am J Drug Alcohol Abuse. 2010 Sep;36(5):261-7. doi: 10.3109/00952990.2010.495183. PMID: 20545601.
The Love Addiction Interview (LAI) is organized into five sessions. Here's a condensed version:
Session I: General Free Narrative
Tell the story of your relationships from earliest memory to now.
Samples: “Organize into chapters.” “Any questions before we start?”
Session II: Narrative of Addiction
Do you believe you have an emotional/relational problem?
Samples: “What caused it?” “How does it affect your relationships?”
Session III: What Has Changed and What Has Not
Since it began, what changed vs. stayed the same?
Samples: “Emotional/intimate, social/family/friends, work, impact on others, thoughts/feelings, personality.”
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.