© 1975, 1991 Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky.
Reprinted with permission from Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc.

Authors' Preface, 1991 Edition

Stanton Peele
Archie Brodsky

When Love and Addiction appeared in 1975, it was disturbing, confounding, infuriating—altogether ahead of its time. A decade and a half later, it still is. This may seem a puzzling statement in view of the success the book has enjoyed in recent years—years that have seen an explosion of interest in addictions of all kinds. Our once shocking notion that people can be addicted to love and other nondrug-related experiences has become a commonplace of the TV talk shows. Doesn't that mean that our ideas have been accepted? Actually, only half of our thrust was accepted, and the less important half at that.

In Love and Addiction we sought to show that a person can become addicted not just to drugs, alcohol, or even food, but to any kind of experience that the person finds sufficiently rewarding and consuming. We emphasized dependent love relationships, the hidden addiction of mainstream America, to show how little addiction really has to do with biochemical reactions, as well as to let readers take a fresh look at unrecognized unhealthy dependencies in their own lives. Although the idea that personal relationships and other ordinary human experiences (such as work, shopping, and watching television) can be addictive met with some initial resistance, it has since been taken up with an enthusiasm far beyond our expectations.

By the time we suggested that love could be an addiction, people's image of what an addiction is had been shaped by the 12-step ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous, a set of religious precepts further sanctified by the modern priesthood of medicine. Americans had learned to call addiction a "disease." The association had become so ingrained that those who saw it was nonsense felt a need to disavow the idea of addiction itself, as by saying, "That love relationships can be addictions—how absurd." We believe, in contrast, that relationships can be as addictive as drugs and alcohol, and that addictions of any type are not diseases.

For the most part, however, as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, many more people embraced the notion of addictive "disease" as a simple explanation for a wide range of unhealthy or self-defeating habits. And this was how "love addiction" entered the popular vocabulary. A decade after Love and Addiction, Robin Norwood's Women Who Love Too Much (1986) became a huge best seller. Meanwhile Janet Woititz's 1983 book Adult Children of Alcoholics continued to grow in prominence, describing people—primarily women—who were scarred by parental alcoholism even though they themselves didn't have a drinking problem.

But Norwood, Woititz, and the others took our idea in the opposite direction from us. If human relationships were really a form of addiction, the only definition these writers had for addiction was the standard one of a "lifelong, progressive disease," and the only remedy they could offer was the twelve steps of A.A. Thus Al-Anon groups grew for spouses of alcoholics and others who were called codependent along with Women Who Love Too Much and Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACoA) groups.

While putting love addiction in this context gave it broad popular appeal, the 12-step approach to relationship problems is ineffective. It burdens people with a new dysfunctional identity, that of codependent or child of an alcoholic. For those involved in problematic relationships, 12-step groups and the disease theory often excuse their mates for their drinking and other misbehavior, since they have the "disease" of alcoholism. And, as a growing chorus of women in these groups and other observers have noted, sitting around reflecting on how life has left one debilitated prevents women from taking action to make their lives better. For example writer Elissa Schappell noted about Al-Anon and Women Who Love Too Much meetings she attended:

I don't know whether or not these women are truly love addicts. But I know it's unlikely any of them could ever be remotely changed—not to mention cured—by the experience of being here. And yet they are addicted to the group, or the idea of needing it; that much seems painfully clear.

And Phyllis Hobe declared in Lovebound (1990),

ACoAs aren't getting the kind of help they really need because most forms of treatment tend to reinforce their problems . . . We have always felt powerless to do anything about the condition of our lives; in recovery we are told that this is true—and it's not going to change. Instead of teaching us the skills of self-sufficiency, which we desperately need, we are urged to expect a "Higher Power" to look after us.

Simultaneously, Patrick Carnes popularized the notion of "sexual addiction" with his book of that name (published in 1983 and retitled Out of the Shadows in 1985). Sex addiction differs from love addiction mainly in that it afflicts men more than women, who then often join groups of "Sexaholics Anonymous." Here the 12-step tenets of powerlessness, loss of control, and lifelong abstinence are applied to sex exactly the way the temperance movement approached demon rum (and religious zealots attacked masturbation) in what amounts to a thinly disguised moralism. Carnes is intimately tied to the addiction treatment industry, and CompCare (one of the leading industry presses) has publicized his books alongside those for alcoholics, relatives of alcoholics, addicted overeaters and gamblers, victims of abuse, and so forth.

In 1987, love addiction of the mainly female variety took a new turn in its evolution with the runaway success of Melody Beattie's Codependent No More. Codependence, a term originally applied to the spouses of alcoholics and drug addicts, has become such an elastic characterization that it stretches to fit almost anyone. One often-quoted claim is that 96 percent of the population is codependent—the same percentage said to come from "dysfunctional families." According to Beattie, if you have any addictive habits yourself or any problems connected with your relationships with people, "chances are you're codependent, too." This imprecise formulation encompasses everyone as a potential subject, thereby expanding the market for books and treatment programs.