Love is NOT an addiction. The word love that people so loosely throw around isn’t love at all, its infatuation and infatuation is an addiction, or more specifically an obsession.
Most people nowadays see love as a feeling, something that comes over you and that you just can’t control, when in reality, what you are feeling is infatuation. True love is the exact opposite of infatuation. When someone is infatuated, they feel that they can’t live without the other person. It is an all consuming desire, they must possess the other by almost any means.
The way our society goes about finding a mate is by searching for someone who sparks this feeling. Then when that blessed moment arrives and we are taken over by ‘love’, we do whatever it takes to be with that person. We try to hide all our faults and put our best foot forward. We are blind to all the faults of the others and forsake the warnings of all our family and friends. We shout joyfully “I HAVE FOUND THE ONE!” and we rush in full force. Then, after about a maximum of about two years the feeling wears off and we start noticing all the things that we turned a blind eye to when we were in ‘love. All the little things he/she does that were no big deal before, suddenly spark HUGE arguments, then after neither partner can take it anymore, they split, heart-broken and dejected the mourn the loss of their one true ‘love’, not knowing how they will ever find another. This last for different periods of time, depending on varying things such as the length of the relationship, the number of relationships either person had been in before, and the person him/herself. Then forgetting the past (big mistake) and looking to the future we start all over again, repeating the process over and over again in hope of finding our one true love.
True love in my opinion is not a feeling at all, it is a commitment. That commitment is formed because of a deep and intimate knowledge of another person. True loves basis is a friendship which blossoms into something beautiful that lasts a lifetime and gets more beautiful with each passing day. Ask most anyone who has been married for more than 20 years (if you can find anyone), they will tell you that they didn’t alway have the feeling of love, BUT the commitment to the person persisted and they were able to ride out they ups and downs and stay together. The feeling of love will come and go in any relationship, the true test of love is whether or not you will stay with that person and continue to be committed i.e. continue to love them in spite of the lack of ‘feeling’ in love, not because of it.
