© 1975 Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky.
Reprinted with permission from Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc.

I need your love to survive
Without it I'm just half alive . . .
. . . I'm forgetting all my pride
I couldn't leave you, girl, if I tried
Before I love someone else
I'd rather be by myself
Baby, I've got to have you Baby
—AL HAMILTON, HERMON WEEMS, WILLIAM GARRETT, I've Got to Have You
©1968, Jobete Music Company, Inc., Hollywood, California, U.S.A. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Several years ago I began to think that what people call love can sometimes be an addiction. It was my way of making sense of some observations about drugs and about people. This was in the late 1960s, at the height of the drug explosion, when reports on acid-tripping and speed-freaking (along with the use of marijuana and heroin) were widely broadcast. At that time, newspapers and magazines began to print tables of drugs to enlighten the public about what effects these drugs had. Two things struck me in reading these tables—first, how many misconceptions I and the people I knew had about drugs, and second, how much inexact information the tables themselves contained. The assumptions I and others were making about the power of psychoactive drugs did not seem justified by any existing evidence. To me this signaled a large undefined area where the motivations and attitudes of people who took drugs could come into play. It also indicated basic fears and irrationalities in our society about drugs and what they could do.

At about the same time, though for unrelated reasons, I was beginning to look more critically at the concept of romantic love with which I had grown up. In today's open society, many varieties of male-female relationships can readily be observed in life, in motion pictures, in novels, in song lyrics. What I saw in these contexts was often disconcerting. Relationships which supposedly entailed some notion of growing together were really based mostly on security and the comfort of spending as much time as possible with someone totally sensitized to one's needs. In those cases, loving another person actually seemed to bring about a contraction in the scope of one's life. What made such relationships stand out for me was the feeling that there was something fundamental in their nature that made them this way. I could think of only one word to describe it: addiction. The individuals involved were hooked on someone whom they regarded as an object; their need for the object, their "love," was really a dependency.

At first this idea was only a metaphor to me. I didn't try to apply it seriously until I read an account of the daily lives of three married couples. In its lighthearted way, the account indicates that the writer was thinking along much the same lines as I was:

It's amazing how marriage affects people's use of the telephone. First off, there's Mike and Betty. Whenever I call Mike, even on what amounts to a business matter, I have to endure long silences, stretching the conversation to twice the length that would otherwise be necessary while he fills Betty in on what I have just said. Still, hers is a benign form of interference. Betty thinks of herself as a friend of mine too, and she might reasonably be said to be expressing an interest in my welfare when she jumps up and down in front of the phone screaming, "What's he saying?" The kind of thing I'm talking about becomes malignant when you try to talk to Herman. We all know that Herman's wife hardly ever lets him go to a basketball game, and that when she does let him go she goes with him and makes him reserve seats far away from his friends. But lately he can't even carry on a phone conversation without muffling the receiver each time you say something and repeating the message verbatim to his wife, so that she can tell him what to say.

Janet, too, has her own style of relating over the phone. On the rare occasions when Arnold is absent for more than an hour or two in the evening, she will call me and keep a long, aimless conversation going so as to avoid having to find something to do on her own. (Often, in her desperation to find a substitute, she will get stoned—a bad move, since it makes three hours without Arnold seem like six.) But should Arnold return, even if we've been talking only a short time, or we're in the middle of an important topic, Janet will scream out his name as soon as she hears the key in the door and hang up before I can even say goodbye.

He continues with a description of the study habits of two of these couples:

Janet and Arnold have worked out a modus operandi for studying which contrasts interestingly in its elaborated rigor with Mike and Betty's primitive approach to the same problem. Mike, you see, is known not to resist distractions very well. Even so, Betty does not feel any responsibility to avoid disturbing him while he's studying for finals. So incapable is she of passing time in their apartment without talking to him that she just goes on offering him distractions, and this makes him angry at her. It is a long way from this situation-comedy atmosphere to Janet and Arnold's assembly-line efficiency. These two have a set of rules whereby when one has exams at a time when the other has nothing of comparable urgency, all normal life (work, acquaintances, freedom of movement) is suspended for the second partner, who must, at all times when the first is actually studying, be (a) in the apartment, (b) awake, and (c) in the same room as the first, though silent, so as to be available to meet the slightest request.

My God, what is wrong with all these people? Don't they have any notion of two people eating and sleeping and having fun and doing worthwhile things together while maintaining at least some separate studies and interests and separate places in which to carry them out? Or at least while having dignified telephone conversations separately?