Ambivalent Love Addicts

Ambivalent Love Addicts do the following:

1. They crave love, but they also fear it.
2. They avoid intimacy altogether by obsessing about love through romantic fantasies about unavailable people.
3. They get involved with and obsess about people who are emotionally unavailable.
4. They become addicted through romantic affairs rather than committed relationships.
5. They sabotage the relationships when their fear of intimacy comes up.
6. They initiate relationships with more than one person at the same time in order to avoid moving to a deeper level with any one person and then become addicted to the whole group.
7. They break up and make up over and over again in the same relationship and become addicted to this pattern.
8. They sexualize relationships to such a degree that emotional intimacy is non-existent and then become addicted to the sex and the relationship.
9. No matter how addicted they are, they cannot commit to the future. They live in the moment.
10. They can love, commit, obsess and even become addicted, but this will go hand in hand with avoidance tactics like a difficulty with affection and opening up emotionally.
11. They are there, and they are not there. They come close and then move away. They are seductive withholders.
12. They let other things outside of the relationships get in the way, i.e. hobbies, work, friends, lovers, addictions—anything. They just cannot open up to a deeper level of emotional intimacy and yet they are unable to let go of the relationship.

ALA’s are ambivalent for different reasons and to different degrees. Treatment is the same as that for the love addict—self-awareness, a support network, change, and the 12-Steps of LAA.