Why We Chase the High of Connection
Everyone wants to be loved. It’s the most universal craving, and, for many of us, the most dangerous. Because when love becomes a fix instead of a feeling, it stops being connection and starts becoming addiction. We like to think of love as pure, selfless, transcendent. But biologically, it’s messy. It’s chemical. It’s survival dressed up as romance. And when you strip away the poetry, the truth is startling, love hits the brain in the same way drugs do.
That’s why heartbreak feels like withdrawal, obsession feels like intoxication, and infatuation can turn into compulsion. We’re not just addicted to people, we’re addicted to the feelings they give us.
The Chemistry of Connection
When you fall in love, your brain floods with dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, the same neurochemicals that flood the system when you take cocaine, opioids, or alcohol. Dopamine fuels the excitement, oxytocin builds attachment, serotonin creates calm, and all three together create euphoria. You feel alive, seen, chosen, complete. You don’t want to eat or sleep. You can’t think about anything else.
It’s intoxicating, and it’s meant to be. Evolution wired us to bond this way so that we’d stay connected long enough to survive. But like any high, it comes with a crash. Because what goes up chemically must come down.
When that connection is lost, through breakup, rejection, or even emotional distance, the withdrawal feels brutal. The same circuits that light up during drug addiction now scream for their fix. You don’t miss the person, you miss the neurochemistry.
The Rush and the Ritual
Every addict knows that it’s not just the substance that hooks you, it’s the ritual around it. The same applies to love. The texts. The anticipation. The waiting, the longing, the chase. The micro-hits of dopamine every time your phone lights up.
It’s not the love that keeps you addicted, it’s the almost. The constant near-miss of satisfaction. The uncertainty. The hope that keeps you hooked. That’s why healthy love can feel boring to people who are used to chaos. Stability doesn’t flood your system the same way unpredictability does. You miss the highs, so you unconsciously create them, through arguments, distance, jealousy, or sabotage.
You don’t crave the person. You crave the chemistry.
When Love Turns into Withdrawal Management
Codependency is the emotional version of addiction, one person becomes the drug, the other becomes the user. You rely on their mood for your stability. Their attention for your worth. Their presence for your peace. It starts as romance and ends as regulation, they calm the parts of you you’ve never learned to soothe yourself. Without them, your nervous system panics.
That’s why “letting go” feels impossible, because you’re not letting go of love, you’re detoxing from the illusion of safety. And just like substance addiction, withdrawal from codependent love hurts. Your body shakes, your appetite disappears, your brain spirals. You feel sick. Empty. Unbearably sober. You don’t want them back because they were good for you, you want them back because you can’t handle the crash.
The Addict’s Love Story
For many addicts, love is the one addiction society still rewards. You can lose everything to it and still be called passionate, devoted, or romantic. That’s what makes it so seductive. Love gives you the same chemical release as substances, but with social approval. Nobody warns you about love addiction because everyone’s chasing it.
In early recovery, it’s common for addicts to transfer their addiction to people. You’ve lost the drug, but your brain still craves intensity, so you find it in romance. It feels safer, more human. But underneath, it’s the same neural pathway firing, “I need something outside myself to feel okay.”
Why Love Feels Like Rescue
Every addiction has a fantasy. The drink will calm me. The pill will fix me. The person will save me. That’s the real addiction, not to the thing itself, but to the illusion of rescue. Love becomes the ultimate escape hatch. If someone can love you enough, maybe you won’t have to face yourself.
You project your healing onto another person, asking them to do the work only you can do. And when they fail, as they inevitably will, you feel abandoned, betrayed, enraged. But it’s not betrayal. It’s biology. No one can keep feeding your nervous system at that pace forever.
Real love isn’t rescue. It’s recognition. It doesn’t fix you, it meets you where you are, if you’re willing to stay there.
The Cycle of Obsession
Addictive love follows the same pattern as any addiction.
Euphoria → Dependence → Withdrawal → Relapse.
You start with excitement, the rush of attention, the novelty, the validation. Then dependence sets in, you can’t relax unless they’re there. Then comes withdrawal, they pull away, or reality sets in, and you start chasing. You text too much. You overanalyze. You bargain. You relapse.
And the cycle resets, disguised as a second chance. You tell yourself it’s love, but it’s actually craving. You’re not addicted to them, you’re addicted to who you get to be when they want you.
Why “Limerence” Feels Like Love
Psychologists call this state limerence, the obsessive phase of infatuation where your brain floods you with reward chemicals every time you think of the person. It’s not love, it’s biochemical obsession. You project perfection onto someone and ignore evidence to the contrary. You chase validation the way an addict chases a high.
The problem is, limerence feels spiritual. It feels like destiny. It feels meant. But so did your addiction, once. That’s why recovery from love addiction can feel more painful than drug withdrawal, because this time, the thing that hurts you is something everyone else calls beautiful.
The Sober Kind of Love
So what does love look like when it’s not a fix? When it’s not a rollercoaster of highs and withdrawals? It looks ordinary. Gentle. Slow. Healthy love doesn’t flood you with dopamine, it balances it. It creates safety, not obsession. It feels stable, sometimes even dull, because your nervous system isn’t in crisis.
That’s the irony, the kind of love that heals you doesn’t feel like the kind of love you’re used to. At first, it feels wrong. You might even mistake calm for disinterest. That’s not boredom. That’s regulation. That’s your brain learning to exist without chaos.
Healing the Craving for Love
Healing love addiction doesn’t mean swearing off connection. It means learning to connect without losing yourself. That starts with learning to self-soothe, to meet your emotional needs without outsourcing them to another person. It means recognising when your attraction is to intensity, not intimacy.
Ask yourself:
- Am I drawn to this person or the way they make me feel about myself?
- Do I want love, or do I want relief?
- Am I bonding, or am I trying to escape?
If the answer feels uncomfortable, that’s where the healing starts. Because what you’re really craving isn’t another person, it’s yourself, before you learned to need saving.
The Loneliness We Don’t Talk About
Here’s the truth few people in recovery admit, sobriety can feel lonely, especially at first. Without substances, the world feels too sharp, too quiet. That’s when love comes in like a storm, something to fill the space. Something to distract you from the ache of being alive.
But loneliness isn’t failure. It’s part of recovery. It’s the space where your identity rebuilds itself. If you can sit through it, if you can survive the emptiness without reaching for a person or a pill, you start to find something even stronger than love. You find presence.
When the High Wears Off
Every love story reaches a point where the fantasy fades and the reality appears. That’s the detox. You see each other clearly, flaws, fears, histories. It’s where addictive love usually ends and authentic love begins.
The people who survive that stage are the ones who don’t run when the chemistry calms down. They understand that love isn’t supposed to keep you high, it’s supposed to keep you human.
Loving Without Losing Yourself
In recovery, the goal isn’t to stop loving, it’s to stop using love as anesthesia. You can still crave connection, intimacy, affection, that’s human. But when love stops being about escape, it starts being about expansion.
You no longer need someone to complete you because you’ve stopped abandoning yourself. You no longer mistake intensity for intimacy because you’ve learned that calm is a kind of ecstasy too.
That’s the sober kind of love, not the kind that takes your breath away, but the kind that lets you breathe again.