The other day, I taught a lesson about an article titled "In The Brain, Romantic Love Is Basically An Addiction," in which the author, Helen Fisher challenges the perception that addiction is only from drugs like alcohol, opioids, cocaine, and amphetamines. The scientific definition of addiction goes as follows, from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

"a strong and harmful need to regularly have something (such as a drug) or do something (such as gamble)"

An addiction is defined as being harmful, but does that mean it's not possible for love addiction to be a good thing? We know the stories of a partner who is too possessive, a boyfriend that doesn't let his girlfriend talk to other guys, or a partner who is very demanding or consuming of the other partner's time. Love might be an addiction, but love in some forms is not.

If love is an addiction, it's a problem for us.

Fisher's article describes love addiction as "just as real as any other addiction, in terms of its behavior patterns and brain mechanisms. Moreover, it's often a positive addiction." Fisher uses the long-standing history of romantic love as a supernatural entity. "Around the world, men and women pine for love, live for love, kill for love, and die for love,"

Neuroscience has also supported the notion that romantic love is an addiction, since fMRI shows that romantic love engages the brain's reward system, associating dopamine pathways with energy, despair, and cravings. Fisher and her colleagues all found activity in the nucleus accumbens, the core of the reward system, increased.

For me, love does all these things, and it's no secret that it does.

The four basic symptoms of addiction, according to Fisher, include the four basic traits of addiction: craving, tolerance, withdrawal, and relapse. We crave our partners so much that we think about them all the time. Tolerance sets in that when we're around our partners, we want more of them. Withdrawal sets in when we break up or break off the relationship, we only want more of our partners, and relapse comes in when we get back together with our partners.

But love being an addiction isn't a good thing to me, like it is for Fisher in this article. When love is an addiction, we are in trouble.

As a Christian, I believe that when you elevate a person to the point of them being a God, they are an idol. "Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry," Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:14. A relationship will not save us, and someone we love cannot solve all our problems or needs. Only we can do that for ourselves, and it's unfair to someone else to look to all of life's solutions for.

We can look to our partners for support, and we can look to romantic love for fun and reward in our dopamine system, but to have an addiction to love means putting another person higher than we'd put ourselves or whatever God we believe in. Of course, we're all entitled to have fun, and we all miss the people in our lives we love that we haven't seen in a while. But few people will tell you that getting back together with your ex is a good idea, and fewer people will tell you that it's a good idea to not have any alone time and spend all your waking moments with your partner.

You need your own space and you need boundaries, too. In an addiction, those boundaries can be nonexistent. Yes, we need love to survive, whether it's romantic or not, but romantic love cannot be our end all be all.

Right now, we are reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in my eighth grade class. In the play, obsessive and addictive love has the dark side of overthrowing the social order and making the characters in the play act out of character. All of the play's problems would have been assuaged if love were mitigated, and the dream would never have happened.

I am not saying that love is a bad thing, nor am I saying that it's unhuman to love. We're biologically and emotionally attracted to those we spend the most time around, as per the psychological mere exposure effect.

But if love were an addiction, I'd argue that it isn't a good addiction. We need space. We need boundaries. We need to prioritize ourselves over love, and these are things I didn't realize a year ago but that I do realize now after being in a long-term, committed relationship for the past eight months.

If love is an addiction, it's a bad one.