I’m not sure if it was the title, Keeping the Love you Find, or the cover picture of a single blue egg in a heart-shaped nest that taunted me until I had no choice but to hand it back to its owner, my soul sister. She promptly replaced it with another, Women who Love too Much. “Just read the back cover and tell me it’s not the book for you”, she said. The sight of me confirmed the accuracy of her choice. Hand clamped over my mouth, wide-eyed and dumbstruck, I delved right in … recognizing in an instant how emotionally unwell I was when I came out of my 18-year relationship, now becoming all too aware of where I went wrong in that relationship, the ones before, and the one way too soon afterwards … grateful now for the sheltering of such a long relationship but equally irked that it deprived me of the opportunity for the discovery sooner.

As a Woman Who Loves Too Much, I don’t understand love that comes without a knot in my stomach, a low self-esteem and a need to try really hard to gain the love of something unattainable; attempting to control the outcome and blaming myself when things go bad or people leave. I am a Love Addict and just because the affliction contains a beautiful word doesn’t, unfortunately, make it any better than your common or garden variety substance addiction.

Reeling from the end of my marriage, I jumped headfirst into a relationship with a man I thought would nurture and love me while allowing me to be me. I pushed him away at first – I didn’t want to get attached – and then I let him help me heal. He held my hand through my fears around letting go, being vulnerable and allowing myself to be loved for who I am, inadvertently feeding my addiction and, therefore, masking my true pathology. Attracted at first to his unavailability and later confused by the paradox that required my exclusivity – but willing to give anything to get his love – he left anyway and I was unable to prevent my emotional well-being from spiralling out of control. I had bonded; I had become obsessed … I had formed an addiction. And the withdrawals from love for a Love Addict are as hard as withdrawals from drugs for a drug addict.

I keep threatening myself with solitude – a state where I hope to gain all I need from the love I have within. I thought at first it was my psychological whip to get me out there to find an Adonis to ravish me … but knowing now how destructive my pathology can be, I’m terrified of jumping into another relationship that distorts my reality and blinds me to the damage I’m doing to myself. I need solitude to research and recover and I need solitude to gain self-acceptance and I need solitude to figure out how I can define love in a way that doesn’t require me to feel like I need to be medicated … because let’s face it, when you’re so addicted to someone that you’ll medicate yourself rather than give him up, it’s not the kind of relationship you should be in.

But of course, without rehab, the touching, smelling and tasting will always lead to indulging even when aware of the damage it’s causing. So I’m going into rehab for love … not to learn how to abstain from love, but from the triggers that turn it into a drug. Romeo and Juliet was a story of love addiction … and look how that turned out. Too much love certainly can kill you.