- Nicotine, cocaine, alcohol, heroine, work, gambling, sex, food. Life is basically a gauntlet of substances and behaviors humans can become obsessed with and dependent on. But what about love? Not just sex, but the deep interpersonal attachment we call love. Can it be addictive? The notion of obsessive, all-consuming, even addictive love goes back literally thousands of years. The ancient Greek poet Sappho wrote about watching her lover marry someone else, and she describes being seized with trembling, drenched in cold sweat and feeling nearly dead. She might as well have been describing opium withdrawals or an Alanis Morissette song. Romantic love does have a lot of external features in common with drug addiction. Initial feelings of bliss and euphoria. Obsessive, fixated behavior. Often leading to poor, potentially life-ruining decisions. A 2010 paper from the New York Academy of Sciences points out that common criteria for diagnosing drug dependence include life interference, tolerance, withdrawal, and repeated attempts to quit. Sound anything like your relationship with your ex? But is there any more measurable basis for thinking love can be considered an addiction in the brain? Actually, yeah. Let's talk brain imaging. One way addiction hijacks the human brain is by taking advantage of mammalian reward and motivation systems, like the mesolimbic dopamine system, which includes the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens. This is a part of the nervous system that gives us internal rewards when we do something with an evolutionary benefit, like eating or having sex or unfortunately, snorting cocaine. Back in 2005, a study in the Journal of Neurophysiology used FMRI to look at the brains of test subjects who self-reported that they were intensely in love with someone else. When these lovebirds were shown pictures of the people they adored, there was activation in sections of that same mammalian reward and motivation system. For example, the right ventral tegmental area.

But it gets worse. A follow-up study in 2010 looked at what happened to the brains of men and women who had been rejected, but reported that they were still deeply in love. And it wasn't pretty. When heartbroken lovers were forced to look at pictures of their exes, there was elevated activity in our old friends, the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens. Researchers pointed out that the rejected lovers showed several neural correlates in common with the brain activity of cocaine addicts craving their drug. So at the level of brain chemistry, romantic love can be kind of like substance addiction. But there are reasons you might not want to refer to your latest crush as a full-on addiction just yet. The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" doesn't officially recognize love addiction. And while cravings for love can be devastating, when they're unrequited of self-destructive, they can also be deeply fulfilling in a way that no drug habit every could be. So what do you think? Would you consider true love as potentially addictive as gambling, cigarettes, or morphine? Tell us your most horrible breakup stories in the comments. And to find out the answers to more strange questions about the brain, subscribe to our channel.