Love Addiction: Reply to Jenkins and Levy

We thank Carrie Jenkins and Neil Levy for their thoughtful comments on our article about love and addiction. Although we do not have room for a comprehensive reply, we will touch on a few main issues.

Jenkins points out, correctly in our view, that the word ‘addiction’ can trigger “connotations of reduced autonomy.” It may therefore be used, she argues, to (illegitimately) “excuse” violent or otherwise harmful behaviors—disproportionately carried out by men—within the context of romantic relationships. Debates about love addiction, therefore, “are best addressed with an eye to the more general issue of how we as a society apportion responsibility for things like date rape and intimate partner violence” (Jenkins, 2017, p. 94).

Jenkins is right to call attention to this fraught backdrop (for further discussion, see Earp, Sandberg, & Savulescu, 2015; Earp & Savulescu, in press); and we agree that the word ‘addiction’ must be applied carefully. The last thing we would want to do is to create an ‘excuse’ for violent behavior, if that meant taking such behavior less seriously, whether from a socioethical or legal perspective. Therefore, we should be extremely skeptical about easy appeals to addiction, especially by way of self-diagnosis, insofar as the goal is to downplay one’s culpability for causing harm. This argument just goes to show how important it will be to solve the underlying ‘mystery’ of autonomy and responsibility as it relates to genuine love addiction (as we highlighted in our paper).

In solving this mystery, we must of course be on the lookout for mere excuse making (see Bargh & Earp, 2009; Earp, 2011). However, based on the evidence we reviewed, we should also be open to the possibility that some forms of romantic attachment really could entail a loss of control in certain circumstances. This loss of control, especially if it became associated with violent behavior, might reasonably influence our judgments about ultimate moral responsibility (depending on a range of factors), but it would by no means necessarily justify a more ‘lenient’ response. In fact, if it could be shown that a person ‘really could not help’ his or her out-of-control, harmful behavior on account of a bona fide romantic addiction, then forcible intervention of some kind could possibly be justified, up to and including involuntary confinement. At the end of the day, understanding the true etiology of harmful behavior, including cases in which diminished autonomy is indeed a contributing factor, will be necessary for designing more effective strategies for preventing it (see Earp, 2010).

Jenkins also worries about our use of the word ‘love.’ She cites the work of another author, bell hooks [sic], who argues that ‘genuine’ love is incompatible with the sorts of toxic relationship characteristics that we used to illustrate romantic addiction. On a practical level, she writes that “using the word ‘love’—with all its attendant positive connotations and associations—to describe [harmful] relationships can be a dangerously rhetorically effective way of concealing how bad they really are” (Jenkins, 2017, p. 95).

We agree that such rhetoric can be problematic. Indeed, given this type of concern, we are sympathetic to the normative argument that the word ‘love’ should only be used to describe relationships, feelings, attitudes, forms of romantic attachment—and so on—that are conducive to the flourishing of everyone involved. In other words (according to this argument), if it is not positive, happy, or healthy, it isn’t ‘really’ love. We have no particular disagreement with those who use ‘love’ in this restricted way, nor would we want to go out of our way to defend an alternative definition. We would simply note that, throughout history and in much of Western literature, romantic love has been variously described as a sickness, a form of insanity, and even a threat to the social order—calling attention to the power of amorous passion to interfere with our higher-level desires, goals, commitments, and obligations (see Earp, Wudarczyk, Sandberg, & Savulescu, 2013). This use of the term, which has clearly negative...