I fall in love too easily. I fall in love too fast. I fall in love too terribly hard for love to ever last.
Hi, I'm Rick and I'm a loveaholic. I'm a passive aggressive, obsessive compulsive,
co-dependent adult child of an alcoholic. My bottom lines are falling in love at first.
I think I'm using sex and love. I started coming to this group in July after spending a month obsessing about a woman
who ended a short but intense relationship. I just want to get current.
I'm not initiating contact with my qualifier but I am checking Facebook and email obsessively and I think I see her car everywhere.
I just want to say that I'm grateful for all of you and for this group.
I'm Rick and I'm a loveaholic. Addiction, romance addiction, relationship addiction, love addiction, not unlike drug and alcohol addiction.
Except that the drugs involved are the chemicals in the brain, the neurotransmitters, endorphins, endogenous morphine,
the do-it-yourself heroin that you make in your head. These brain chemicals excite and inhibit.
Bring pleasure and pain. Here's one.
Dopamine, precursor of adrenaline, drug of choice of bungee jumpers, skydivers, extreme sports enthusiasts.
Dopamine, the romance drug, present in high concentrations during that first blush of romance.
It makes you feel great. It doesn't last though, does it? Then things get a little complicated.
Oxytocin, related to reproduction. Oh, remember reproduction, the original reason for love and sex and relationship?
Yeah, oxytocin, the relationship drug, present in high concentrations in those that have been in successful long-term relationships.
Lower levels found in those that have been abused. That makes sense. You don't want to bond with a partner that's being abusive.
Romance addict, somebody who's really addicted to that first blush, rush, and just can't commit.
Relationship addict, somebody gets easily attached, bonded, and maybe obsessed.
Falling in love versus being in love.
Now there's brain chemistry and addiction theory, and there's also popular culture.
It doesn't help that every other song and movie evokes images of heartbreak and unrealistic expectations of happy endings.
Songs like, I fall to pieces, each time I see you again.
Or in those movies, every single one, the boy gets the girl at the end.
Well, here's a little scene that would be an army movie.
Oh, nice room. I think I'll check this, look. She's on chat.
Oh, she's chatting me up. How's the hotel? How good can it be? You're not here.
Wish I could be there, work. Wish I didn't have to be away, work too.
There's nothing I'd like more than to jump around on a shiny new hotel bed with you and rip open the wrappers to all the soaps and motions.
Oh my God, that sounds incredible.
Say, did something just get slipped under your door right now? What? You're creeping me out.
Did you come down? Are you here? Check outside your door.
She had a hotel send me a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies and cold milk.
I don't think he's ever done anything like this for me before.
Has anybody ever done something like this for you? I may have you just met them.
Oh God, I love you.
I really don't know what those cookies and milk meant to her. Maybe nothing.
Maybe I never really meant anything to her, but I know what they meant to me.
A new universal formula was created on that day. Cookies plus milk equals love.
Okay, you know, I took those cookies, the leftovers, put them in the cellophane that they came in, put them home on the plane.
I put the crumbs in that same cellophane.
I still have the stupid crumbs. I can't let go of anything.
After it ended, I got addicted to Facebook. Checking her status incessantly.
Just wanted to figure out, what is it that she's doing? You know, she dreamt that I was following her.
I was on Facebook. The last thing that she wrote to me was,
Please don't visit your obsession of me on me.
I just started writing about it. I couldn't talk to her, so what was I going to do?
I started reading all these books. I started holding pads.
I escaped from intimacy, untangling the love addiction, sex, romance, and relationships.
The grief recovery handbook. Sex and love addicts, anonymous.
Anxiety and depression for dummies. How to behave, dating and sex.
I couldn't stop writing about it. I wake up in the middle of the night, writing down a new insight,
driving over Highway 17 to work, revising them as a driving, just trying to process instead of obsess.
Say the right words, sing the right song, make the right move, play the right part to make you want me again.
Someone who sees me and accepts, likes, loves, wants what she sees. What good is freedom if you give it away to another person?
If you reveal too much about yourself, you'll never have a woman be interested in you.
What am I doing?
I'm just trying to, I'm looking at the void.
What is that? Loneliness.
I'm wondering whether life is eating, even has any meaning at all. The inevitability of disease, old age, and death.
Trying to fill this with drugs, alcohol, love, relationships, sex, nothing will fill this up.
If God didn't exist, we'd have to create him in order to fill this void.
Surrender to the void. Confront it. Face it. We have to fill it with something.
I think what I really want is a Hollywood ending.
You know, I talked to an actress about staging a Hollywood ending for this piece.
I told her that it would involve kissing. She never got back to me.
What I really want is to look out on the audience and to see a familiar figure rise up in the middle.
And to see that silhouette and recognize it.
And for my silhouette to go back and join with that one.
And for both of us to go out the back of the theater and live happily ever after.
My heart should be while it's gone. Cause I've been fooled in the past.
But still I fall in love two years away. I fall in love too fast.
Thank you.
