Addicted to Love

[Trigger warning for stalking.]

So, I'm reading this article about new research (yay, new research!) which purports to have found that "the brain may treat love as an addiction" after researchers discovered that photographs of people by whom participants were recently dumped triggered increased activity in the same part of the brain "associated with profound cocaine addiction, as well as in a region associated with nicotine addiction."

Having not read the study report, I don't know why the presumption is that the brain treats love like an addiction, rather than that the brain treats cocaine and nicotine addictions like love.

I do know, however, that a headline about people being "addicted to love" is sexier, as they say in the news biz, than a headline about addicts' brains mimicking feelings of romantic love to sustain the addiction.

Anyway, halfway through we do get a boring old caveat from one of the study authors about how even being "addicted to love" doesn't inevitably cause "unhealthy behaviors."

Other issues, such as impulse control, would feed into disruptive actions such as stalking.

Some people handle rejection better than others, and research should be done to see what differentiates those people, Fisher said.

I'm not sure I've ever heard stalking described in a nicer way than a "disruptive action" done by people who can't handle rejection.

And to further normalize obsessive behavior, the story then relates an anecdote about 38-year-old Mel Brake of Springfield, Pennsylvania, who has "been saving voice mails from his former girlfriend since their breakup four years ago but didn't feel completely comfortable hearing her voice on them until last week."

The study is about people who got jilted, but Mel did the breaking up.

Mel's story is offered as evidence that love is a lot like addiction. Um.

The story then ends with an anecdote about another dude, which includes this line: "As for the girl who turned him away so long ago, Dailakis doesn't hold any grudge today."

As if, you know, it's normal for a man to "hold a grudge" against a woman who has the unmitigated temerity to decide she doesn't want to be with him.

Yikes.

You know, it's not even like I particularly care about this specific article, but it's just that there are dozens of articles published like this every day, each of them eminently willing to uncritically (or deliberately) reinforce the vast and varied and vicious narratives of the rape culture, normalizing the obsessions and entitlements that underlie sexual violence.