Relationship addiction: why some people cannot be alone

“I have never been single for longer than three weeks. Not because things go so well for me with men. Because I cannot stand it.” She said it calmly, almost apologetically, as if describing a feature of herself – her height, her hair colour. In the next hour we put together a list of her relationships. There were seven. Between them there was never a gap longer than a month. Each new relationship began before the old one had properly ended.

People like to call this “relationship addiction”. The phrase is useful because it captures the feeling immediately: without another person, the body behaves as though something were missing. It is also contested – and it is worth starting at exactly that contested point, because everything else reads differently once you have it.

There is no diagnosis, and that matters

Addiction to relationships, or to love, appears in neither ICD-11 nor DSM-5-TR. Among behavioural addictions only gambling disorder is recognised, and, in ICD-11, gaming disorder. Everything else that people in everyday language call an addiction is a description, not a diagnosis.

Why do I insist on this? Because the word “addiction” carries consequences. Once you name something an addiction, you have also written a story about what the solution must be: total abstinence, lifelong vigilance, the danger of relapse. With relationships that is almost never the right story. The aim is not to stop loving. I have written separately about what a diagnosis tells you and what it does not; here the question is even more tangled, because there is no name at all.

What people are actually describing

Once I set the word aside, a fairly consistent description remains. Anxiety that rises with silence on the other end. The sense that you are only whole beside someone. Relationships that start fast and intensely. Staying in connections that have long been empty, because a bad relationship still feels less frightening than none. And, characteristically: the intervals between relationships are not periods of peace but of searching.

This is not a character weakness and not a lack of self-esteem in the magazine sense. It is a pattern for regulating an inner state – only the substance being used is a person.

Two things often get fused here that are worth separating. Someone who cannot bear being alone is not the same as someone who takes on the rescuer’s role in a relationship and disappears into caring for the other – I have written about how that is assembled in the piece on codependency. Here I mean something simpler and barer: that solitude itself is unbearable, regardless of who fills it.

Why it works: the reward system does not distinguish

Falling in love is, neurobiologically, a very loud state. Imaging studies by Helen Fisher and colleagues showed that looking at a photograph of the person you are in love with activates dopamine-rich regions – the ventral tegmental area and part of the caudate nucleus. These are the same regions that respond to other strong rewards. And when the relationship breaks, people who have been rejected also activate regions linked to craving and to the perception of physical pain.

It does not follow that love is an addiction. What follows is more modest but more useful: the brain does not run a special system for people. It uses the same anticipation-and-reward machinery it uses for everything else. That is why relationships can be as effective a means of quieting an uncomfortable inner state as anything else – and why a cycle can be built around them.

A breakup is not withdrawal, though the body does not know that

When such a relationship ends, people often describe a state they themselves compare to withdrawal: sleeplessness, loss of appetite, obsessive checking of the phone, physical restlessness. I insist on the distinction, because it matters: this is not a withdrawal syndrome in the medical sense. With alcohol and sedatives, withdrawal is a bodily state that can be dangerous and requires medical supervision. Nobody dies of withdrawal after a breakup.

Which does not mean it is not severe. The pain after a separation is real and has its own neurobiology. If you cannot sleep during those weeks, what I have written about how insomnia latches onto the nervous system will probably be more use to you than any explanation.

A curve worth knowing

The most useful thing people take from therapy with this pattern is not insight into childhood. It is the experience that distress falls on its own if you do not interrupt it.

When the urge seizes you – to send a message, to call, to open a profile – distress rises quickly and reaches a peak. If you obey the urge, relief arrives instantly and the pattern is reinforced. If you do not, distress grows for a while and then falls, even if you do nothing at all. Each time you survive that, the next peak is a little lower. This cannot be understood in advance; it has to be lived through.

What happens to the person on the other side

This pattern is not private. A partner feels it, even if he usually cannot name it. He describes it as pressure: as if he had to be reachable at all times, as if every bad mood of his became a question about the relationship, as if two hours of silence demanded an explanation. Many people feel important inside that – for a while. Being someone’s whole world is intoxicating until it becomes a job without a break.

Then comes the thing you fear most: he starts to withdraw. Not because he does not love you, but because he is looking for air. You register that as confirmation that he is leaving, and hold tighter. He needs still more air. The sequence is logical and nobody chooses it – each step is a reasonable response to the one before.

Which is worth saying out loud: this cycle is not proof that one person is jealous and the other cold. It is a two-person system that both of them maintain. And precisely for that reason it can be broken from one side alone – both do not have to change at once. It is enough that one of them stops answering according to the familiar script.

Where this is learnt

Most often in early experiences of closeness that was not reliable. Not necessarily neglect – unpredictability is enough: a parent sometimes available and sometimes not, with no visible rule. In such an environment a child learns that closeness has to be chased and is never truly guaranteed. That lesson is not stored as a memory but as a bodily readiness.

Still, be careful. The link between early attachment and adult relationships is moderate in the research, not iron. Plenty of people with very unstable childhoods have solid relationships, and the reverse is also true. Childhood is not an explanation that closes the case; it is one layer.

Where this explanation does not hold

Now the section that contradicts everything written so far. There is a real danger that “I cannot be alone” becomes a label a person sticks onto an entirely normal need for closeness. We are a species that functions badly in isolation – loneliness is associated with health outcomes comparable to well-established risk factors. Longing for a partner is not pathology, and self-sufficiency is not a higher stage of development.

Second: entering a new relationship quickly after a breakup is not in itself a sign of disorder. Part of the research suggests that people who move quickly into a new relationship often do better, not worse. Statistics, of course, say nothing about you.

And third, the most uncomfortable: the same picture sometimes conceals something else. Depression showing up as an inability to be alone with your own thoughts. Panic disorder. The aftermath of trauma. Or simply a life situation – single parenthood, precarious work, a flat you cannot afford alone. If the reason is money or fear of violence, a conversation about “relationship addiction” is not merely useless but harmful.

What actually happens in therapy

Nothing spectacular. First, discrimination: when is this a wish for contact, and when is it flight from something inside you. The two feel identical and end differently.

Then practice at tolerating emptiness in small doses – not a week of solitude, but one evening without filling it. Then a look at what you give up first inside relationships: usually your opinion, then your friends, then your schedule. And finally work with the inner critic, which in this pattern almost always says the same sentence: that you are not interesting enough on your own for anyone to stay.

Self-compassion helps too, and not in the sense of kind phrases. The point is that when you resist an urge, you do not then punish yourself for having had it – because punishment raises distress, and distress is the fuel of the cycle.

Three practical experiments

First: delay. When it grips you, you do not say “I won’t”, you say “not now, in twenty minutes”. An urge rarely survives twenty minutes untouched.

Second: a list written while calm. Not when you are in pain. Three things you always abandon inside relationships, and three you want to keep. Read that page at the start of the next relationship, not at the end.

Third: one evening a week that is not available. Not as punishment, but as practice that your schedule exists without another person in it. That sounds banal until you try it.

If none of the three works, that is not information about your willpower. More likely it means the distress underneath is bigger than one person can carry alone in a living room – and then it makes sense to have someone alongside you. Urges you try to bear without help tend to return in a form that is harder to recognise: a sudden decision to move, to marry, to throw everything away.

When to look for help

When relationships keep producing the same consequences – debts, lost friendships, an abandoned job. When you stay in something that humiliates you because the alternative is solitude. When every breakup becomes a state that lasts months and pushes you into something that is no longer sadness. And immediately, when there is violence in the relationship – then the question is not the pattern but safety.

What to remember

Relationship addiction is not a diagnosis, and the word can mislead, because it promises a solution shaped like abstinence. What is real is the pattern: closeness used to regulate an inner state, working fast and therefore teaching fast. The reward system does not distinguish between substances and people, so the cycle hardens by the same rules. Distress over the call you did not make falls on its own if you do not interrupt it – and that is an experience, not a theory. The need for closeness is not a fault; the problem begins only when solitude is so unbearable that it decides on your behalf.