Love Addictions

I just want to give you a short quiz on what you think love is. A, Do you think that love is about reciprocity? B, Do you feel that love is about openness, honesty, and sharing? C, Do you feel that love is about calling someone ten to twenty times a day, monitoring their Facebook page like it is a stock market message board, and conducting casual drive-bys to see if they are home is love? If you answered C, then I regret to inform you that you fall into the category of being an emotional stalker.

What is an emotional stalker? It is a lot like an obsession, but goes beyond harassment and intimidation. People who are emotional stalkers suffer from a serious case of mistaken identity. Emotional stalking is actually very common and many famous people have been known to have this disorder. Pepé Le Pew spent his whole career in pursuit of a female cat, which he believed was a skunk. The cat worked hard to escape his repugnant smell, but Pepé was relentless in his pursuit.

Pepé Le Pew is not the only one. Millions of people are chasing after the wrong people. Their desperation is like a repugnant smell. It is an immediate turn-off that sends people running towards the door. However, emotional stalkers just can’t take the hint that people are just not interested. They continue to pursue them, until they get a restraining order in the mail. Emotional stalking is actually a very serious condition that stems from the malnourishment of love.

In truth, our souls need love in order to grow and heal. However, so many of us grow up in environments where love wasn’t always expressed. Even people who come from relatively healthy homes may have had to bargain for love. They may have faced situations where they were only loved if they behaved in a certain way. Conditional love is almost as bad as not loving at all. Because with conditional love, we are not fully accepting the people we care about.

Since we didn’t have love when we were younger, we grow up and have a ravenous appetite for love later in life. We want to devour people who give us just a little attention. We want to bring in the U-Haul after just one date, and we are willing to give everything up, and sacrifice ourselves, just to feel loved. Emotional stalkers don’t take no for an answer, because they can’t. To them, it is a life or death situation, where they need to seriously feed on love in order to survive.

But that’s the biggest problem with emotional stalkers. Other people can “smell” their dysfunction and they are repulsed by it. They are turned off by clinginess, by co-dependency, by desperation that is gleaming in their eyes. They are like the skunk, chasing after the cat. They are longing for people who are unavailable and looking for something that they can only find within themselves.

Emotional stalkers may have a hard time finding love and getting affection from other people. So they are going to have to find ways to generate the feeling of love within them selves. We’ve all heard the expressions that you can’t love anyone unless you love yourself. Or that the most important relationship you’ll ever have is the one with yourself. All of these things are true. However, there is no real love except for the love that you have for yourself.