I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  When Vera first told me that I might be dabbling in love addiction, I scoffed. “But I haven’t dated anyone in like six months.” I had already proven her point by protesting too much because usually the more defensive I am about something, the more true it is. I also had been counting the months, which is a pretty addict-y thing to do.

  Look, I had no idea what love addiction was, and truthfully I still get very confused about it, because love addiction and the concept of true love are very easy to conflate. Regardless, I still didn’t believe I had it because, well, yuck. Vera explained to me that love addiction isn’t about how often you’re in love, it’s about what happens when you are.

  She outlined to me how love addiction works—or for that matter, doesn’t work. Since I’m obviously not a psychiatrist, I don’t want to generalize about all love addicts because I can’t speak to anyone’s experience but my own, so I’ll just tell you how mine specifically manifests.

  When in “love,” I overlook red flags and the other person’s shortcomings to justify staying in the relationship. This is a form of denial that has helped me justify dating people who follow thirty porn stars on Instagram and ask me to pay off their student loans. My brain is able to instantly turn red flags into green lights by twisting the negative into a positive: “He’s asking me to pay his student loans . . . I mean, look at the bright side! He went to college!”

  I would glorify the person instead of accepting the reality of who they have actually shown themselves to be. I put them on a pedestal and exaggerated their good qualities and minimized their negative ones. I’d give points for things that should be categorized under baseline basic respect—for example, “He called me! He’s such a class act!” To be clear, you don’t get points for making a phone call to a person you are dating.

  I tended to get in relationships with people before I actually knew them. I’d fill in the blanks with projections of what I hoped they were. I saw that as way more convenient than finding out the truth, because, well, the truth always ruins my love affair with dopamine. If I actually knew someone’s low credit score or history of incarceration, it would destroy my fantasy and mess up my to-do list, on which “being in a relationship” always seemed to be number one. I avoided asking questions I didn’t want to know the answers to under the guise of “it’s none of my business what happened before me.” Which is of course false, because if someone got herpes before me, it’s my business and my business’s business.

  I would fall in love with someone’s potential rather than with who they actually were. I’d walk in, find a guy who was smart and funny but a complete mess, and light up like a talent agent from the 1950s. I’d think to myself, “This kid’s gonna be a star!” I’d take on a guy the way Michelle Pfeiffer took on the punk-ass kids from Dangerous Minds, seeing the best in them and pushing them to be better. And also like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, I had to teach a couple of guys how to read. Of course, this dynamic caused my relationships to feel maternal, making my partner resent me and making sex feel like incest. To add insult to injury, I basically ended up coaching a guy to be the best he can be for the next girl who came along. To anyone dating my exes, you’re welcome for getting them together so you could have the perfect boyfriend. Love you, girl.

  If a friend disapproved of the relationship, I’d distance myself from the friend until the relationship was over the same way that I’ve seen drug addicts and alcoholics push away anyone who confronts them about their using and drinking. I made excuses and tried to protect the person when friends pointed out warning signs or bad behavior. I would actually end up projecting the criticism I should have used for the guy I was with onto my good-intentioned friends. For example: “Lindsay is just really judgmental and narrow-minded.” Instead of thinking clearly: “Lindsay’s right, it’s a total deal breaker that the guy I’m dating didn’t tell me about the kid he has with another girl.”

  I was constantly in an adrenalized state of fear and uncertainty, but it never occurred to me to leave the relationship. I mistook the ominous anxiety in the pit in my stomach for “passion” and “butterflies.” In some relationships I cried so much that I might as well have been dating an actual onion. Also, as a society can we stop confusing everyone by romanticizing that tingling feeling we get in our stomachs by calling it “butterflies”? Maybe we can use a less attractive bug that actually reflects the macabre nature of what our physiology is trying to tell us? Maybe, like, a flesh-eating maggot, or to stay on theme with this chapter, an earwig?

  I chose people who made me feel anxious and insecure and re-created my childhood circumstances of getting erratic attention. I gravitated toward people who were either physically or emotionally unavailable to subconsciously ensure I was getting a constant hit from my “internal drug cabinet.” Instead of heroin or cocaine, I used to be addicted to cortisol and adrenaline (which turns into dopamine! Yay!). That drove me to pick people who couldn’t give me safety or stability, which caused those chemicals to go buck wild on my brain. You live in London? Yes, please. You work until three A.M., and when you are available, you’re super tired, so every time we have the chance to connect, your eyes are half closed? Sure, let’s move in together. One day you tell me you’re in love with me, but then you disappear and go on a week-long bender on Long Island? Absolutely. You travel for four months at a time in places that have horrible cell service? Don’t mind if I do marry ya.

  I found myself in numerous relationships at once, out of fear that one would end or that I’d be abandoned. From what I understand, this is a classic addict move. We hoard our supply or always have a backup plan for how to get a hit of our drug. I mean, no self-respecting addict has only one drug dealer.

  There are many more elements to love addiction that I could mention, but I want this book to be able to fit into your carry-on bag. Also, I’m going to keep it specific to my deal because I can’t speak for anyone but myself in terms of how it manifests. At first I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept of love addiction, but it really helped to use the metaphor of drug or food addiction, since I was told by people way smarter than me that it’s all basically the same neurological reactions, even if we all pick different drugs. My excuses are all pretty congruous with how other addicts talk when they minimize their behavior to justify using substances: “I only do blow on the weekends”; or someone I know who just got a DUI saying, “But I’m only drinking beer now instead of whiskey”; or “But red wine is actually supposed to be good for you! So many antioxidants!” I employed those same types of rationalizations with guys who were terrible for me: “So what if he cheated before? His girlfriend was so mean to him!” “A little conflict is good for me. He calls me out on my shit!” “We’re going to see each other four times a week now instead of every night” as if making a schedule would magically change a person’s values.

  I once heard addiction being described in a way that resonated with me to a chilling degree: “It was great for a while. Then it stopped being fun, but I didn’t know how to stop.” That’s how I felt my romantic relationships were. They always started with Netflix and chill and ended in incriminating pix and being physically ill. I realized that after all the initial dopamine wore off in the first year, I wasn’t enjoying relationships, I was enduring them.

  My brain continued to fight the idea of having an addiction, which is apparently pretty typical of addictive brains, so to add insult to injury, on top of being an addict I was also unoriginal. I argued with Vera about how it’s a biological imperative to want to pair up with people and breed. “Maybe it’s just my biological clock . . . Without love we’d have no species. We’d be extinct!” I reasoned. I now understood why they call addiction “the disease that tells you that you don’t have a disease.”

  My brain would play emotional Twister all day long to avoid coming to terms with this diagnosis. I blamed Disney movies, romance novels, magazines, social constructs, the Beatles. They told me
all you need is love. Isn’t that what life is all about? Finding a soul mate? A partner? Jerry Maguire said “You complete me,” which means we’re incomplete without another person, right? ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE.

  “But all you need is love,” I said to Vera.

  It took saying that out loud to realize how unhealthy that song lyric is. The song doesn’t say, “All you need is love, but when you get it, you should still put yourself first, have boundaries, and keep your social life. You also need sleep, health insurance, and of course food and water. Also, don’t forget love isn’t supposed to cause you anxiety or stress! And when you’re in love with someone, you should also like them. And get a prenup!” I have a feeling if the song were written that way it wouldn’t be in the iTunes Top 100, but it would have set some more sane expectations about what we actually need. I was operating under the mentality that everything I did, made, and smeared on my face was in the name of current or future “love.”

  I can’t imagine hearing that you’re an addict or that you have a “disease” is ever fun, but once it sunk in for me, I actually felt a huge sense of relief and freedom. Since addiction isn’t a choice, it made me feel way better about my ridiculous behavior in the past. Running from guy to guy, thinking a breakup was the end of the world, staring at my phone—it was all part of a neural wiring system that science could explain. I didn’t actually believe that posting a photo of me having fun on social media would make an ex appreciate me more, my disease just tricked me into thinking it would. Whew.

  Again, how does this relate to Billy and my ear, which now looks like a melted candle? Well, I don’t want to anthropomorphize Billy too much because comparing him to a human is actually pretty degrading. Dogs are way cooler than people, but what I did with him was a microcosmic version of what I tended to do in relationships. Vera told me that love addicts tend to confuse love with pity, or in my case, a pitty. They also get into intense relationships with people they can “rescue.” Yup. As soon as I saw Billy suffering in a photo on Instagram, there was no turning back. My brain tells me that I’m the only person who can understand someone, save someone, that they need me. To be fair, Billy actually did need someone, because he’s voiceless, but other humans don’t need me unless they’re dying of blood loss during the apocalypse and I am the only person left on earth with their blood type.

  The more people warned me that Billy was dangerous, the more I wanted to protect him. Similarly, when people warned me about guys, it only made me want to commit to the guy more because I now had skin in the game in the form of my ego. In the past, any time I heard something negative about a guy I was dating, it strangely bonded me to him. We developed our “it’s us against the world” type of relationship where we adhered to each other based on the delusion that nobody understood us. I wanted that Romeo and Juliet/Eminem and Kim Mathers type of love. And yes, I realize this is the second time I’ve referenced Eminem in this chapter, which actually makes a lot of sense since he’s at the top of the list of people with whom I’d like to be in an addictive relationship. I’m clearly also addicted to referencing him.

  When I was a kid, I read Romeo and Juliet. I know Shakespeare is amazing and all, but I am very confused about why schools think it’s a good idea for kids to read this play while still formulating a blueprint about how relationships should look. But I guess for me the damage had already been done, because I remember reading that they committed suicide and thinking it was an excellent solution to their problem. As a teenager, I watched Sid and Nancy and thought it was the most romantic movie I’d ever seen. This is not a healthy reaction to either of these stories.

  I was an expert at ignoring negative information about romantic prospects. I used to see a red flag, and if it wasn’t congruous with my plans to date someone, I’d just paint it white. And Martha Stewart ain’t got nothin’ on me when it comes to redecorating reality, especially wallpapering over the writing on the wall.

  Once I got Billy, I overlooked all the red flags that warned me to take things slow: he had a year’s worth of history I knew nothing about; he was untrained; he had a mouth full of tiny razors. I gave him credit for things he shouldn’t get credit for—for example, “He was so good with my dogs!” Like a guy calling you on the phone, this is something to file under THINGS YOU DON’T GET POINTS FOR. I did the same thing with men. I constantly gave points to men for things that should be filed under “the least you can do.” My girlfriends forced smiles when I announced, “He didn’t yell at me for checking luggage! Isn’t he amazing!?” Having a low bar is a lovely place to be for a while because everything that happens is a dazzling delight. Every day is like a surprise party. He didn’t cheat on me today? He’s the one. He’s not addicted to gang-bang porn? My knight in shining armor!

  The engine of my addictive behavior for sure involved an adrenaline addiction, but also an intense fear of abandonment. I didn’t see the madness in this fearful thinking until one day Vera realized what was going on and dropped a bomb on me: “Adults can’t be abandoned, Whitney. You have a car. You have a house. Adults can only abandon themselves.”

  Bang. Tweet it, blog it. Retweet it, screen-grab it.

  A big part of addiction involves managing your supply. This means that basically you go apeshit when your “supply” is threatened. Managing my supply manifested itself in some really sad and expensive ways: not traveling too far from home and/or going with the guy I was dating wherever he went. I mean, he did invite me, I didn’t just follow him like a crazy stalker, but I often found myself sitting alone in a hotel room watching cat videos when I could have been way happier sitting alone in my room watching cat videos. I spent countless parties and weddings distracted and paranoid, on my phone, getting my hits of the guy I was dating instead of enjoying the present company. I remember spending an entire bachelorette party buried in my phone texting with my drug of choice when I could have been having way more fun doing actual drugs with my friends.

  When love addiction takes hold, my world gets very small. When Billy came into my life, he became my primary focus. I sent my other dogs to be boarded so I could focus solely on him and make him feel special. I was so worried about him feeling alone that I rushed home from work early to see him, speeding through stoplights, texting and driving, weaving in and out of cars. If active alcoholics drink and drive, perhaps love addicts text and drive. This is the behavior driven by the engine of an addictive brain: when in order to get our perceived emotional needs met, we put our physical selves in danger.

  After working with Vera, I now understand love should not be urgent or stressful. It should not make my life harder, and I should not be risking my health or safety when I’m in a relationship. If I can’t keep my priorities straight when I’m with a person, I’m gonna have to face it, I’m addicted to love.

  Love addiction is about being addicted to a person and all the neurochemicals being with that person triggers, and before I had a game plan to manage it, I can’t even describe how scary it was. Obsession is a word that’s thrown around a lot about things like froyo, binge-worthy TV shows, and a perfume I wore in the nineties, but when you have an addictive brain, obsession can be crippling. And my addiction doesn’t discriminate; it doesn’t have standards or good taste. In fact, usually the more damaging the person in my life is, the stronger my addiction can be. The stronger the heroin, the higher a person’s tolerance can get and the more addicted they become. I never got addicted to a relationship with a nice college grad who did charity work because that was too safe; it wouldn’t provide the adrenaline that fed my addiction. I never particularly liked or respected any of the relationships I was addicted to, yet my brain told me I couldn’t live without them. One guy was a clinical narcissist with a cocaine habit, one was a nightclub promoter, one was super into drag racing . . . so the truth is, I’d probably have died with them.

  A week or so after the incident, I took Billy to get an aggression test from Brandon McMillan,
a very badass dog trainer and animal behaviorist, to find out if Billy had aggression issues that were insurmountable. I was terrified. If it had not been for the painkillers I was taking for my ear, I never could have handled the anxiety of possibly finding out that he attacked me on purpose. To ascertain if Billy was aggressive, I watched Brandon do a series of exercises to test Billy. With a foam arm contraption, Brandon put Billy in situations where even nonaggressive dogs would have retaliated, cornering him against a wall, causing him stress on purpose to see if he would react in a maladaptive way. Billy didn’t bite or even growl, even when his life seemed to be at stake. I beamed with pride. Turns out he wasn’t inherently violent, he just had the tricky combination of no impulse control and big giant teeth, which I can relate to. I was relieved to learn that he wasn’t the asshole, I was. The good news is I wasn’t totally delusional about Billy, but per usual, I was delusional about who to let into my bed on the first night we met.

  Since the Billy debacle, I’ve learned a lot about what happened that day and why. A lot of it was my fault. I know now that I should never have let him in the bed with me or lie on top of me all night because that’s actually a dominant behavior that I conflated with us being soul mates. It was selfish of me to cave in and allow adorable selfie-worthy behavior to eclipse what was best for Billy and our relationship. What he needed was discipline and clear boundaries. I got so swept up in “loving” him that I forgot to actually love him. This was not fair to Billy because it set him up to fail. He had no training or coping mechanisms yet, so he made an honest mistake. The problem is that when small dogs make mistakes, you might get a scratch on your ankle, but when pit bulls make mistakes, you end up looking like a cubist painting.