Obsessive love

Psychology

The problem with obsessive love is not so much a question of loving too intensely, but rather of anger over rejection, or feelings of abandonment. Susan Forward states that in her practice, she found four conditions which helped clarify when somebody is suffering from obsessive love:

1. They must have a painful, all-consuming preoccupation with a real or wished-for lover.
2. They must have an insatiable longing either to possess or to be possessed by the target of their obsession.
3. Their target must have rejected them or be unavailable in some way, either physically or emotionally.
4. Their target's unavailability or rejection must drive them to behave in self-defeating ways.

— Susan Forward, Obsessive Love: When It Hurts Too Much to Let Go

John Moore describes the process of those who "confuse love with obsession" as a cycle of four phases he calls the "Obsessive Relational Progression":

1. Attraction, characterized by an initial overwhelming attraction to a new person, unrealistic fantasies, an immediate urge to rush into a relationship, and the start of controlling behaviors.
2. Anxiety, a turning point which usually occurs after a commitment has been made, where unfounded thoughts of infidelity, betrayal and fear of abandonment occur, resulting in mistrust, depression, anxiety, and the escalation of controlling behaviors.
3. Obsession, when extreme behaviors begin to overwhelm, resulting in obsessive surveillance, stalking, and possibly violence.
4. Destruction, where the partner flees the relationship.

Obsessive love may be related to the anxious attachment style. The mania love attitude (for obsessive, dependent love) has been correlated with attachment anxiety, and also the personality trait neuroticism.

The anthropologist Helen Fisher believed that "abandonment rage" (anger after a rejection) can be explained in terms of the frustration–aggression hypothesis, where rage is triggered when an expected reward is in jeopardy. Romantic love and rage are connected in the brain by similar circuitry; both involve arousal and energy production, and both drive obsessive focus and goal-directed behaviors. Fisher believed that ordinarily the evolutionary purpose of abandonment rage is to facilitate separation and the search for a new partner, although sometimes abandonment rage erupts into violence instead.

Another feature of obsessive love is jealousy, which seems to be related to OCD for its obsessional qualities and compulsive checking (for signs of infidelity). This can also take the form of pathological jealousy (or "Othello syndrome") where the sufferer has a delusional or paranoid belief in their partner's infidelity, despite actual evidence. Jealousy is strongly associated with irritability, which can erupt into violence: spousal murder is often related to infidelity (real or suspected). It has been suggested that this seemingly self-defeating behavior of murdering one's own partner results from a kind of "brinkmanship", where a looming threat of violence is used to control women as sexual partners—a threat which sometimes (paradoxically) escalates into actual violence to be "credible".

It is argued that non-pathological jealousy evolved as protection against reproductive competition, which is adaptive as long as it serves to maintain a relationship.

Obsessive and harmonious passion

The dualistic model of passion (DMP) is a theory invented by the psychologist Robert Vallerand which suggests that passion can be split into two components, termed "obsessive" and "harmonious" passion:

DMP has been extended to romantic passion, with a study finding that harmonious romantic passion was associated with secure attachment, while obsessive romantic passion was associated with anxious attachment. One issue addressed by the model is the idea that passion is either positive or negative based on whether it's reciprocated or not (as in Elaine Hatfield's conception of passionate love), because this ignores the possibility of negative outcomes occurring inside a relationship. Negative relationship outcomes are proposed to be mainly associated with obsessive passion.

The obsessive–harmonious distinction has also been compared to the distinction between two of the love styles invented by John Alan Lee: mania (obsessive) and eros (harmonious). Both eros and mania correspond to concepts like romantic love, passionate love, and falling in love; however, mania is regarded as the more obsessive of the two.

"Limerence" is a term invented by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov to refer to the state of being in love, particularly when it takes the form of obsessive passion. Limerence and mania have been compared as being similar concepts, identified and developed by their respective authors around the same time.

Research on the Passionate Love Scale (PLS) by Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron also found that while it was intended as a unidimensional measure of love feelings, it actually has two general components (called factors): an obsession factor and a non-obsession factor. The PLS obsession factor has items like "Sometimes I feel I can't control my thoughts; they are obsessively on my partner." and "An existence without my partner would be dark and dismal." The non-obsession factor has items like "For me, my partner is the perfect romantic partner." and "I want my partner—physically, emotionally, and mentally."

Acevedo & Aron also compare being in love with obsessional elements to concepts like mania and limerence, while love without obsession is compared to eros. Taken together, eros and mania correspond to the way passionate love is operationalized on the PLS.

According to a meta-analysis by Acevedo & Aron, romantic love with and without obsession (using the PLS) have slightly different trajectories in a relationship. Romantic love with obsession was more associated with satisfaction in short-term relationships than long-term, whereas the associations between satisfaction and romantic love without obsession were similar and large for both short-term and long-term groups. Additionally, it was found that romantic love may sustain over a longer period than previously assumed, but without the obsessional features. Another meta-analysis found that the mania love attitude was associated with decreased satisfaction, as it continues over time in a relationship.

Stalking

Love obsessionality can in some cases lead to stalking, although stalkers also often have other conditions. Like falling in love, stalking is also described as a form of addiction. A 1999 study by Paul Mullen and colleagues classified 145 stalkers according to several kinds of groups:

• Rejected ex-partners (41 of 145), who mostly had personality disorders, although 9 were delusional, 5 of whom had morbid jealousy. Rejected stalkers often had mixed desire for reconciliation and revenge, as well as frustration, anger, jealousy, vindictiveness, and sadness.
• Intimacy seekers (49 of 145), who were attempting to establish an intimate relationship with their "true love", most of whom were delusional, and further classified as follows:
  • Those with erotomania (27 of 145), with a delusional belief their love was reciprocated.
  • Those with morbid infatuations (15 of 145), who did not believe their love was reciprocated but still believed a delusion of their eventual success.
  • Those who had personality disorders (7 of 145), but were not delusional.
• Incompetent stalkers (22 of 145), who regarded their victims as attractive potential partners, but who were intellectually limited and socially incompetent instead of being infatuated.
• The other 33 stalkers identified by the study had motives other than a relationship (e.g. broken friendships/family, sexual predation, or scaring a victim).

Limerence is another type of love obsession which is being compared to the others, but the motives and emotional foundations behind limerence are different from stalking. A person in limerence hopes for mutual feelings, and their mood depends on whether their romantic interest seems to be returned, whereas the motive for stalking is to force contact, control or punish a victim for rejection. Limerence can cause distress if it becomes too intense, but it's also a feature of early-stage romantic love for many people.

A preoccupation with the fantasy of a special and unique relationship with the object of one's love is normal in the early part of romance or infatuation; however, in the case of the stalker, where pathological narcissism is an issue, the humiliation of rejection is expressed through rage or entitlement and pursuit of the victim.

Neuroscience

Obsession

Obsessive thinking about a loved one has been called a hallmark or a cardinal trait of romantic love, ensuring that the loved one is not forgotten. Some reports have been made that people can even spend as much as 85 to 100% of their days and nights thinking about a love object. One study found that on average people in love spent 65% of their waking hours thinking about their beloved. Another study used cluster analysis to find several different groups of lovers, with the least intense group spending 35% of their time on average and the most intense at 72%. Since the late 1990s, these obsessional features have been compared to obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). This is also sometimes paired with a theory that obsessive (or intrusive) thinking is related to serotonin levels being lowered while in love, although study results have been inconsistent or negative. Another theory relates obsessive thinking to addiction, because drug users exhibit obsessive thoughts about drug use as well as compulsions.

Addiction

The early stage of romantic love is being compared to a behavioral addiction (i.e., addiction to a non-substance) but the "substance" involved is the loved person. Addiction involves a phenomenon known as incentive salience, also called "wanting" (in quotes). This is the property by which cues in the environment stand out to a person and become attention-grabbing and attractive, like a "motivational magnet" which pulls a person towards a particular reward. Incentive salience differs from craving in that craving is a conscious experience while incentive salience may or may not be. While incentive salience can give feelings of strong urgency to cravings, it can also motivate behavior unconsciously, as in an experiment where cocaine users were unaware of their own decisions to choose a low dose of cocaine (which they believed was placebo) more often than an actual placebo. In the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction, repeated drug use renders the brain hypersensitive to drugs and drug cues, resulting in pathological levels of "wanting" to use drugs. People in love are thought to experience incentive salience in response to their beloved. Lovers share other similarities with addicts as well, like tolerance, dependence, withdrawal, relapse, craving, and mood modification.

Cultural references

The ancient Greeks called obsessive love "theia mania" (the madness from the gods). Greek mythology depicted it in stories such as Apollo and Daphne. In ancient literature, a frustrated lover was frequently depicted as violent and manic, involving murder or suicide. Such an example is Medea, whose obsessive love for Jason escalates to murder. By contrast, the depiction of lovesickness in the form of a depressed, melancholic lover is more of a cliché of medieval and modern literature, although it was present in ancient literature as well, and described by early physicians.

Obsessive love has been depicted in the movies Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction, Vanilla Sky, Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret, and Obsession, the television series You, and the novels Wuthering Heights and The Phantom of the Opera. The history of obsessive love in the cinema is explored at length by Dominique Mainon and James Ursini in their book Cinema of Obsession.