In this article, I show that the experience of addictive desires, which I also refer to as cravings, is similar to the experience of the state of being in love or of limerence. In other words, I argue that some part of the experience of addiction resembles some part of the experience of romantic love. Many in the literature have tried to show that one can be addicted to love in the way that love constitutes an addiction. Yet, none seem (...) to have taken the opposite route, which takes love not as an object of addiction, nor as something that can be reduced to it, but rather as a model from which we can understand addiction. This is odd, as such a perspective is warranted by first-person accounts of addiction. Therefore, in my view, addiction is like love, and not the other way around. Nevertheless, it is not addiction as a whole that is similar to love; love in itself cannot be compared to addiction: it is precisely the experience of addictive cravings in addiction that is like limerence. In order to put forward the similarities between experiences of cravings and experiences of limerence, I go through the basic components of limerence as described by Dorothy Tennov (1979), and prove that they are found in the experience of cravings. This comparison between the two phenomena allows me to introduce the notion of reciprocation in the addiction literature. (shrink)

We love people because of who they are, but can the idea of “who they are” be explained through a property that everyone has, such as agency? David Velleman believes this to be the case, and argues that love is an appraisal of a person’s incomparable value, which disarms the lover’s emotional defences. Modelling love on Kantian respect, Velleman claims that love is a response to a person’s rational nature, indirectly perceived though her empirical persona—her observable traits and behaviours, which (...) are imperfect representations of the value of rational nature. An important problem for Velleman’s account is that it seems incompatible with two widely shared assumptions about love: that love is personal (so it cannot be analogous to impersonal respect) and that love is selective (so it cannot be based on a property shared by all individuals). Here, I propose a re-formulation of Velleman’s view that avoids those objections while preserving the idea that love is an evaluation of the loved person’s agency. Specifically, love is an evaluation of a person’s inner narrator, which is also a person’s capacity to act for reasons—to make actions intelligible to herself. The inner narrator is perceived through that person’s observable narrative: her actions and interpretations in interaction, which are a product, and not an imperfect representation, of the inner narrator. In the re-formulated view, love is both personal and selective, but still an agential process that involves both the lover and the loved person’s capacities to make sense of the world. (shrink)