(Both relationships lasted decades, although my parents ultimately divorced.)Īs a teenager, I was flirtatious, inviting attention from boys (and men), even when I wasn’t sure I wanted it.
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They fell in love in May and eloped before the summer was over. For my parents, who met at a rock concert in New York City, it was two months. My grandfather paid a deposit on a house on their third date a gesture my grandmother found utterly charming rather than deeply alarming. My grandparents were married within 13 days of meeting one another. I carved a heart into my arm with a razor for another.Īdded to this were the love stories in my family – tales of urgent, passionate, determinedly unpragmatic romance. With one boyfriend, I stayed on the phone all night, receiver by my ear, so we wouldn’t have to part.
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But where others packed it in past puberty, I continued to insist that real love must be full of ecstasy and agony. Like most girls, I drew hearts on notebooks and gorged on movies and pop songs about breathless devotion. You need to understand how I see love to grasp how I ended up in this situation. Once the thrilling vision of a new life with K shimmered on the horizon, I could think of little else. I wanted to be told not to leave my marriage, but the advice didn’t take. Wracked with guilt, I confessed to my husband about the affair, and he and I went to a couples counsellor, who also tried to warn me. The home I’d left in New Jersey was chaotic: my sister was struggling with a heroin addiction and my parents were going through a divorce.įriends advised me against betting on him. I fell hard for his cinematic good looks and even more for his sense of humour. K and I first met when I was 18 and on a gap year in San Francisco.
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‘Love addiction’, on the other hand, sounds deeply romantic. ‘Sex addiction’ sounds creepy and dangerous.
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Instead I recognised them as my own – each one a variant of passion that was the most natural thing in the world when you loved someone. But as those around me shared their tales of obsessive thinking, incessant texting and jealousy, I didn’t see their behaviour as problematic at all. All I could think was: Is that a lot?Īt the time, I was having an affair with an ex-boyfriend – who I’ll call K – and had come to the meeting at the urging of my therapist. Towards the end, one young woman told us that she had texted the man she had recently started dating over 300 times the previous day. I imagined compulsive cheating and unsavoury public sex but, as the meeting wore on, I realised that no one was really talking about sex at all. The place where the scuffed toe of my ankle boot met the sole seemed like a safe spot to direct my gaze, as a room of strangers gathered in a circle around me to share the stories that had brought them here. I looked at my shoes for most of my first sex and love addicts anonymous (SLAA) meeting. Photo credit: Alina Linnik / EyeEm - Getty Images