Abstract
In this article, I show that the experience of addictive desires, which I also refer to as cravings, is similar to the
experience of the state of being in love or of limerence. In other words, I argue that some part of the experience
of addiction resembles some part of the experience of romantic love. Many in the literature have tried to show
that one can be addicted to love in the way that love constitutes an addiction. Yet, none seem to have taken
the opposite route, which takes love not as an object of addiction, nor as something that can be reduced to it,
but rather as a model from which we can understand addiction. This is odd, as such a perspective is warranted
by first-person accounts of addiction. Therefore, in my view, addiction is like love, and not the other way
around. Nevertheless, it is not addiction as a whole that is similar to love; love in itself cannot be compared
to addiction: it is precisely the experience of addictive cravings in addiction that is like limerence. In order to
put forward the similarities between experiences of cravings and experiences of limerence, I go through the
basic components of limerence as described by Dorothy Tennov (1979), and prove that they are found in the
experience of cravings. This comparison between the two phenomena allows me to introduce the notion of
reciprocation in the addiction literature.