You can’t eat, you can’t sleep and all you can think about is your next fix. You may be addicted to love.
Intense romance can often come with symptoms resembling addiction – euphoria, craving, dependence, withdrawal and relapse – and brain scans have shown that it can be linked to drug-addiction-like activity in the brain’s reward centres.
But the idea that people can be addicted to love is contentious. “It gets complicated because people disagree on the correct theory of addiction, and people especially disagree about what we mean when we use the term ‘love’ ”, says Brian Earp, at the Oxford University Centre for Neuroethics.
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Abigail Beall 