Four years ago, Yanti (not her real name), a 42-year-old literary writer and stage actress, had a love affair with a married man who was 15 years older; her senior whom she met in her theatrical troupe.
“I knew he was already married. I got into the relationship simply because I was so lonely. One day, when we were rehearsing for a play and he was falling asleep on the studio floor, I grabbed his cell phone, which he left lying there, browsed through his WhatsApp messages and found some pornographic conversations he had with multiple women,” Yanti said.
Upon being confronted about his other affairs, the man eventually dumped her.
She said she had always fallen in love with unavailable men: “Married men, those much younger or older than me. I have even fallen in love with Catholic seminarians” she said, laughing a bitter laugh.
Yanti was a self-proclaimed love addict, defined by United States-based Center for Healthy Sex website (centerforhealthysex.com) as compulsively seeking relationships or romance despite negative social, emotional, financial or physical consequences.
According to the center’s clinical director, Alexandra Katehakis, preoccupation, fantasy and obsession are distinctive hallmarks of the love addict’s plight.
“There’s also a narcissistic configuration whereby they look at someone who seemingly has all the qualities they perceive as lacking in themselves, along with a rescue fantasy,” Katehakis told The Jakarta Post in a video call interview recently.
She added that the fantasy and idealization often caused them to fall in love much too quickly with another person.
The idealization can also cause love addicts to always blame themselves for their relationship failures: “They will think, ‘If only he sees how great I am, he’s going to want me,’” Katehakis said.
These behaviors are deeply rooted in deprivation during childhood, according to Katehakis. “Love addiction is an attachment and intimacy disorder, where these children grew up in households where they were not seen and heard, where their parents might not be very loving or in some cases even neglecting or abusing their children”. Growing up in volatile households could also cause love addicts to confuse intensity with intimacy, she explained.
Oftentimes, she added, some adults would end up chasing people who did not want them because subconsciously they wanted to rectify the pain of being rejected by their parents in childhood; furthermore, to distract themselves from the painful emotions of their childhoods, they would keep obsessing over their love objects.
“The love addict is no more available than the person he or she is chasing because if he or she is truly available, he or she wouldn’t be chasing someone who does not want them,” Katehakis explained.
Yanti acknowledged that her parents frequently fought in front of their children and as a child she once discovered a photograph of her father with another woman, which had caused her to no longer trust love.
Pras, a 23-year-old student from Surabaya, East Java, and a self-proclaimed “love addict”, meanwhile, said his father was always absent in his childhood, spending all his money irresponsibly. As a result, his mother had to work extra hard to provide for the family, causing her to have no choice but neglect her children.
When so-called love addicts are abandoned by their love objects, as with any sort of addiction, they go through withdrawal.
“Withdrawal can cause high anxiety, feelings of loneliness and being abandoned, difficulties getting out of bed or conducting activities; accompanied by lots of obsessive thoughts about the love object, while talking about their love objects endlessly,” Katehakis said.
Pras said that when his ex-girlfriend hooked up with a different man, it caused him to suffer from chronic insomnia for three years due to his inability to stop obsessing over his ex.
Yanti, meanwhile, was diagnosed with clinical depression upon being abandoned by her ex, causing her to almost lose her job because of high absenteeism.
Katehakis said some love addicts had to go through a lot of pain first before they eventually sought help: “They might feel like, ‘I don’t have a life and my partner has cheated on me 100 times,’” she mentioned. For deep-seated childhood trauma, Katehakis advised people seek therapy. Therapy, however, is not the be all and end all remedy for love addiction.
“Take up hobbies so when you’re feeling lonely you can draw or paint instead of calling your love object. Have no contact with your love object. Do not masturbate to the love object’s image,” she advised.
Yanti said she rediscovered her life’s meaning in her activities as a stage actress and literary writer upon being abandoned by her married ex-boyfriend, while Pras was enthralled with vigorous physical exercises. “I am jogging and doing push-ups three times a week,” Pras said. They have gained greater self-confidence from these activities, which helped them to get over their love addiction.
Furthermore, as most of us are wounded by relationships, most of us need relationships to heal.
“Seek comfort from other people, if that’s what’s missing from childhood. Build a community of concern. This way, love addicts will start to feel like they matter again, knowing that there are people who want to hang out with them and take them for walks,” Katehakis said.
Likewise, Yanti said her friends played a big role in her recovery, rekindling her spark of life again. Katehakis said that social support, self-discovery through hobbies and therapy would help love addicts break the cycle of always attracting unavailable, narcissistic partners.
