Longing for Love

Dealing with love addiction, limerence, infatuation, obsession — and other things we call “love”

They call it love addiction, anxious attachment, limerence — or extreme neediness. There are books about it. Self-help programmes about it. A million articles and posts.

I’m talking about that situation in dating where you’ve got attached to someone and are desperate for their attention — feeling elated if you get it and depressed if you don’t. You feel disempowered, and emotionally dependent on their every move.

This is more common than you know. So common that many people think that this is what romantic love feels like. Singers like Adele have made a career about those intense emotions that we confuse with love — and they’re hugely best-selling because so many people relate to it.

Manic dating

We check their last seen on WhatsApp. We check their social media. We check to see if they’ve messaged back. Our day is made or ruined by whether they texted us back or not — or what they said. We do all this and then cringe that we’ve done it. And then we do it all over again the next day.

We speak to our friends for hours about this connection we have with someone. Then we ignore their advice and next week speak about it for hours again.

One time we’re talking about one person who’s “the one”, the next it’s someone else and we’ve totally forgotten the last one, knocked out of the way and instantly replaced like a winning boule ball.

When we’re endlessly focusing on someone else and their life — we are neglecting ourselves and our life. No wonder we feel empty. In other words, in the process of longing we’ve left ourselves and that feels like abandonment. It’s that we that have abandoned ourselves — and then we blame them for it.

They call it going for unavailable people, infatuation, obsession — all labels that lead to people being worse about themselves, not better. I call it being a passionate person experiencing a lack of self-love. And the answer then, as it so often is, is to love ourselves more. The only ones who can give you what you are looking for is you and what you may call your Higher Power. When we get those relationships sorted — our relationships come into balance, too.

Nothing wrong with who we are

The passion isn’t the problem, it’s really great to like someone and have attention. And you didn’t choose to like them, it just happened. So why make yourself wrong about it? The problem is when we judge our desires — we try to stop them — we call ourselves needy — we say we’re a loser. The problem is when we take our attention totally from loving who we are and instead criticise who we are, all the while putting the object of our desires on a pedestal.

So what people call “infatuation” is a state where we are more into them than we are into ourselves; we totally ignore the person that we are which creates a void. And then we think we need them even more.

As an aside, another component of those infatuations is this: we want that person because we want to embody a quality they have. It could be their confidence, their success, their talent or even their sense of humour. Often, in truth, we probably have that quality but we’re just not owning it. When you really look back at those people you were into — could it have been this that made you want them?

Ultimately we say we want them to love us like we love them. But even if they did, it might not be enough. Because as I said it’s our own self-acceptance and love that we want. And/or love from our Higher Power. And the access to this is to love and appreciate, rather than looking for love and appreciation.

You don’t have to change yourself

So, right now, in all your neediness and wildness and obsessiveness, you can love yourself just the way you are. Yes, you’re adventurous, you love excitement — it’s OK. Turn this focus onto you and make a commitment to love who you are above all. When you achieve this unconditional self-love — and it takes practice — your whole life and the whole world changes with you. And that includes your relationships.

Love your wildness, you’re emotional highs, your epic love story intensity. You can’t love yourself and criticise yourself at the same time— and criticism, which often includes “working on the pattern” — is just another way to get stuck in the pattern.

I know you will find the idea of self-love nowhere near as exciting as chasing for it out there — and I agree. But once you sort the self-love, you will have it all. Both the confidence and the excitement. The ability to live the adventure yet also have the ability to navigate your way through it. You will get the highs without the lows.

If you’re thinking that something about you is the problem and needs fixing— it’s really not — it’s self-hatred that’s the problems. So kickstart your self-love by accepting yourself as you are — and this pattern as it is — right now.

Relationship Trigger — a solution

I created a process called the Relationship Trigger which is the answer for dealing with this scenario once and for all. Not only does it ease the pain abandonment and the emptiness that characterises this state of mind — but it also deals directly with the cause of the problem. It gets you to come back to self and give yourself what you are looking for from that other person. Whenever you are triggered, you do this technique for instant soothing. When the trigger arises is the perfect time to heal it, so it’s not a bad thing it’s coming up — you will learn to see being triggered as a nudge to do this good-feeling practice.

Discover the Relationship Trigger— a process designed to soothe the intense feelings and at the same time heal the pattern behind them — in the book Feel Better, No Matter What by Michael James and published by Watkins Publishing. http://instagram.com/michaeljamesbe