Are you in love or just obsessed?

YOU might as well face it; you’re addicted to love. When it comes to love, as far as your lower brain is concerned, you could be using ice, playing the pokies or endlessly shopping for that elusively perfect pair of shoes.
Love by its very nature is an addiction, so if you’re in love and feeling obsessed with your beloved, then please welcome yourself into the ranks of the normal.
And you’re not only normal, your feelings of all-consuming passion are probably fuelling some intense creativity in your life as well. Where would poetry and rock and roll be without love addiction?
On the same note, love without some obsession isn’t love. If you want to avoid the addictive rush of romantic feeling in your relationship, then I would recommend purchasing an attractive fern. Just make sure you keep watering it.
But you don’t have to completely avoid the heady love potion of romance to stay sane. Because as anyone who’s ever been in a happy long term relationship knows, love is more than a feeling.
When it comes to distinguishing obsessive from healthy love, the proof has less to do with the way you feel and everything to do with how you behave. Our humanity rests on our ability to choose how we act regardless of how we feel. And the way to tell healthy love from impulse-driven obsession is to look not at how crazy in love you are with your paramour, but at how able you are to be truly loving towards them and yourself while you’re hooked on that feeling.

There’s a fair amount of obsession in Fifty Shades of Grey. Source: Supplied

Anything that you do to yourself or your loved one that keeps either of you from growing into who you are or are meant to be, is not love. So while you may be feeling that you just can’t get enough, if you believe in love then you’ll need to bear the suffering of not always having what you want.
But maybe you’re finding yourself lacking in the impulse control department. Maybe you have a really hard time being alone or stopping yourself from getting lost completely in the thrill of a new relationship. Maybe it’s easy to make you feel jealous or anxious or rejected. Maybe you can’t seem to stop yourself calling, obsessing or completely depending on the one you love. Or maybe you feel so untrusting that you’re constantly looking for where the axe might fall. If this is the case for you, then it’s going to be hard not to give in to obsession.

Obsession control is the business of the upstairs brain, the part of us that’s in charge of deciding how we’ll make sense of the demands, fears and cravings of the downstairs brain. The problem with the heady potion of love, is that if you don’t have such a well-developed upstairs brain, love can literally blind you.
You develop your upstairs brain in the arms of someone who loves you when you’re very small. You grow it listening to their soothing words and feeling a deep trust that they love you and accept you just as you are. But if you didn’t get enough of this kind of good loving when you were tiny, you’ll crave it as a grown up and find it hard to stop yourself acting like a demanding baby when it’s on offer.
So if your love is feeling too much like bad medicine, see if you can step off the train long enough to get some help for yourself. There are meditation classes everywhere to help you to calm your out of control senses and therapists who can help you learn how to care for and soothe yourself enough to begin to love in a healthy way.
And whatever you do, don’t despair. It’s a living thing, love, and if you commit to the business of giving love the space it needs to grow, you will be rewarded by a steadiness that will allow you to surf the urges of love’s obsessive call all the way to the shore.