While the difference between love addiction and love avoidance may be clear, it can be hard to figure out if either of those labels applies to you. Whether you are a love addict vs love avoidant, you struggle with relationships.
This is true for your romantic relationships as well as your platonic relationships and maybe your relationship with family members.
Whether you are addicted to love or avoid it, you exist on one side of the spectrum when you should be more in the middle. When you are in the middle, you can appreciate reassurance and a meaningful emotional connection with the people in your life.
Check out these five tips and tricks to better understand whether you are a love addict or love avoidant person and what that means for you.
This post is all about love addict vs love avoidant.
What is love addiction?
Love addiction is characterized by someone’s need to define their worth and identity through a relationship.
People who are addicted to love typically have an anxious attachment style that drives an extreme fear of abandonment. This fear of abandonment frequently drives their actions and drives their “love addiction.”
What is love avoidance?
Love avoidance is characterized by someone’s need to prioritize independence over emotional closeness. People who are love-avoidant typically have an avoidant attachment style that drives an extreme fear of true intimacy.
This underlying fear of intimacy frequently drives their actions and drives their “love avoidance.”
What is the love addiction cycle?
When a love addict and love avoidant person get into a relationship together, they create an unhealthy cycle that goes from intense and emotional to distant and distressing. In this cycle, the love addict will crave reassurance and emotional intimacy, which can be described by some as “clingy.” On the other hand, the person who is love avoidant will pull away when their fear of emotional intimacy is triggered (i.e. the relationship becomes too close and intimate for them). This will cause the love addict to become more “clingy” and need more reassurance, which will then cause the love-avoidant person to pull away more. This cycle often begins with both or all partners feeling love and joy. However, once the relationship progresses, that will quickly transform into a love addiction cycle.
LOVE ADDICT VS. LOVE AVOIDANT:
1. Notice your and your partner’s attachment style
To identify whether you or your partner may be addicted or avoidant, identify your attachment styles. Love addicts typically have anxious attachment styles because they are inherently afraid of losing their partner and require lots of reassurance.
Love-avoidant people typically have avoidant attachment styles because they fear emotional intimacy and closeness. Attachment styles, according to the original theorist, form based on how your parents or primary caregivers tended to your needs during your childhood.
Anxious attachment comes from inconsistent attention to your needs. In other words, your parents understood your needs but didn’t always fulfill them when you were younger.
Avoidant attachment comes from parents who were either unavailable to fulfill your needs or rejected you when you needed them to fulfill your needs. In this case, “needs” refers to your emotional needs.
Maybe your parents comfort you when you’re upset or help you regulate your emotions. Both types of attachment styles result from unmet emotional needs.
You may think you are avoidant or anxiously attached then change your mind when you reflect on your childhood. However, we can have a traumatic experience in our childhood without it being as clear as emotional or physical abuse.
We can develop a dysfunctional relationship with our parents no matter how hard they try. This can result from a variety of external factors, which means that your parents may have given you a loving childhood while still being unable to meet your emotional needs fully.
2. Check your relationship for unrealistic expectations
For both the love addict and the love-avoidant person, unrealistic expectations will hurt the relationship. Love addicts need reassurance and validation constantly because that’s what makes them feel safe, even if the feeling doesn’t last very long.
Alternatively, people who are love-avoidant need to feel independent. The moment they notice themselves becoming interdependent or codependent, they will pull away and avoid emotional intimacy at all costs.
So, love addicts expect constant reassurance from their partner. They need to hear that they are loved and their partner won’t leave them. A love-avoidant person will expect their partner to give them space and avoid connecting emotionally.
Neither of these expectations is healthy or possible in a relationship. Therefore, they will result in an unhealthy, uneven relationship at best and a love addiction cycle at worst. In both cases, the so-called perfect partner for the other person is different.
A love addict will believe that their perfect partner will give them unconditional love so that they experience no emotional distress. However, what they will soon realize is that no amount of reassurance or validation will make the emotional pain of a love addict go away.
They will never believe their partner will stay because of their fear of abandonment. A love-avoidant person will believe their perfect partner desires no emotional connection until they enter into romantic relationships like that and feel unfulfilled.
Suddenly, they will no longer feel vindicated in building emotional walls and recognize they want an intimate connection while struggling to understand how to do that when their major caregiver didn’t model that for them.
3. Focus on developing healthy boundaries with your partner
People who have anxious or avoidant attachment styles can develop healthy relationships. The goal is that these people will learn how to develop a secure attachment style.
However, as long as they learn a coping mechanism for their attachment style, they can develop strong relationships with others. This starts with developing personal boundaries. Boundaries refer to the invisible “lines” you draw around yourself to avoid unnecessary triggers.
When you create a boundary, you communicate to someone that the way they’re treating you is hurting you in some way, hopefully unintentionally. From there, you explain to them how you will react to a similar situation in the future to avoid feeling hurt again.
Maybe you will hang up the phone on your mom when starts complaining about your sister again. Boundaries are most effective when you explain what your boundary is, how you will respond when it’s crossed, and why you are putting that boundary in place.
For love addicts, boundaries can start with arguments. Maybe you let your partner know that arguments scare you because you can’t be sure they will stay with you. So, you ask them to tell you how much time they need to cool down.
If they don’t, you may want to call someone and talk about the argument or re-evaluate if this is the right relationship for you. If you are love-avoidant, you may struggle with emotional conversations that come out of nowhere.
So, you ask your partner to only initiate these conversations during certain times of the day or warn you first to get you prepared. If they don’t, you may have to leave and self-regulate.
4. Do a self-check on your own needs
It’s often difficult to understand our needs if we haven’t been taught how to do that. However, you can start by asking yourself what feels good. When you think about your relationship in the context of facing love addiction or love avoidance, look for reassurance and emotional intimacy.
The typical love addict will need their partner to constantly tell them they love them and they want to be with them. So, for a love addict, they feel good when you tell them you love them. It will feel so good that they will live for it and obsess about it when it’s not present.
Love addicts are addicted to reassurance, which leads their romantic partners to feel exhausted and under appreciated. On the other hand, a love avoidant partner will feel most confident when they are engaging in physical intimacy and superficial conversations.
Anything that makes them feel remotely vulnerable will give them anxiety, which will cause them to pull away. Avoidant people often need to feel independent and spend time away from their partner. For both the love addict and avoidant person, their needs are understandable.
It’s important to ask for reassurance as well as independence. However, both types of people take it to the extreme and have these needs because of a lack of love and fulfillment from their parents when they were younger.
5. Take advantage of professional help from a mental health professional
You’re taking the first step towards understanding why you often develop an unhealthy relationship with your current partner. But, you don’t have to do it alone and you are allowed to ask for help.
Visit a marriage and family therapist or visit a support group. You can find structured, professional help to guide you as you work through love addiction or love avoidance in both.
It’s also possible to be an avoidant love addiction since your fears originate from the attachment disorder you developed as a child and adolescent. It takes time and practice to work through your relationship addiction or love avoidance.
You need to understand that your romantic tendencies come from your fears. So, once you understand the fears that drive your troubled relationship with your partner, you can work on overcoming that addiction or avoidance.
The important thing is that you’ve read this post and gotten far enough into research that you recognize you may struggle with addiction or avoidance. Know, as you continue your journey, that there is nothing inherently wrong with you based on your attachment style.
Any attachment style can engage in intimate contact and trust your partner without engaging in compulsive behaviors that cause your relationship to become unhealthy, end prematurely, or possibly become codependent.