You can stop chasing someone while you still want them. Those are two separate things, and almost every article gets them backwards. Tonight, close the one channel you check most, and tell one person you closed it. The wanting will carry on for a while. The chasing doesn't have to.
Nobody has agreed what this is
There is no diagnosis called love addiction. It isn't in the DSM-5, it isn't in the ICD-11, and the research that exists is thinner than you'd expect from how confidently the internet talks about it.
A 2023 systematic review in *Health Psychology Research* screened 102 articles and included five. Five studies. Its own summary says "Although there is currently no official classification for this type of addiction, the continuing interests of clinical psychology open up new scenarios." A 2025 validation paper says the same of the wider category: these patterns are "not yet considered official diagnosis" in the DSM-5-TR or the ICD-11, and "researchers disagree on whether it should be defined narrowly or broadly." A [2026 review of 102 studies](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42029817/) in *Archives of Sexual Behavior* named the same problem: "pronounced conceptual heterogeneity in the literature."
That matters for one practical reason. Nobody can hand you a prognosis, a stage, or a cure rate. Anyone who does is guessing.
What does hold up is attachment
Here the evidence is better. A systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 15 studies covering 3,628 people and found that anxious attachment correlated with what the literature calls love addiction at r = 0.39, a large effect. Avoidant attachment came out at r = -0.09, which is close to nothing.
In plain English: the pattern tracks how you handle closeness and the fear of losing it. It behaves like an alarm system that fires too easily and won't switch off until it gets a signal back from one specific person.
The authors are honest about the weakness. "The main limitation concerns the different instruments used to assess LA," they write, and most samples were ordinary people rather than clinical ones. So hold it loosely. As a working frame it still beats a label, because it points at a question you can answer: what is this relationship regulating for me, and what happens when it stops?
The word limerence
Limerence is a word people use for a specific experience. It doesn't appear in the ICD-11 or the DSM-5, so treat it as vocabulary rather than a verdict.
The experience it describes is fairly consistent. Intrusive thoughts you didn't choose. Mood set by whether a message arrives. A background process scanning everything they do for evidence of hope. It spikes when the signals are inconsistent, which is why someone warm on Tuesday and cold on Thursday is harder to put down than someone who was simply unkind throughout.
Nobody can tell you reliably how long it lasts. What people who come out the other side tend to report is that it faded after the behaviour changed, not before.
Reading yourself without taking on a label
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous publishes a list of characteristics. It carries no clinical authority. It's a fellowship describing itself, and some of it is unusually good at helping people recognise their own pattern:
"We confuse love with neediness, physical and sexual attraction, pity and/or the need to rescue or be rescued."
"We feel empty and incomplete when we are alone."
"We sexualize stress, guilt, loneliness, anger, shame, fear and envy."
The same fellowship names the opposite pattern, which most writing on this skips entirely. It calls it anorexia, and describes it as "not doing something. Not trusting, not committing, not surrendering." If you recognised yourself in the withdrawal rather than the pursuit, you're still in the same territory.
One caution. You'll run into the word "codependent" fast, and the construct is contested. It has never been included in any edition of the DSM, there's no agreed definition, and the criteria are drawn so widely that almost anyone in any relationship could qualify. Critics also note that the label lands mostly on women and tends to add guilt. [Co-Dependents Anonymous UK](https://codauk.org/) describes itself as "a fellowship of people whose common purpose is to develop healthy relationships," and plenty of people find the rooms useful. Take the room without taking the diagnosis.
Five things you can do tonight
**Close one channel.** The one you check most. Not all of them, one. If that's their story feed, mute it now, before you finish reading this.
**Put twenty minutes between the feeling and the phone.** Set a timer when the urge lands, and decide in advance what you do while it runs. Cold water, or the washing up. It needs to be physical and dull.
**Write the message. Don't send it.** Open a note, write the whole thing including the part you'd never actually send, and leave it there. The urge is usually to be understood, and writing it takes about sixty percent of the pressure out.
**Tell one person, in one sentence.** "I keep going back to someone who hurts me and I'm trying to stop." That's the whole sentence. Secrecy is doing more work here than the other person is.
**Write down what you get from it.** Not what's wrong with them. What the contact does for you in the ten seconds after it lands. Relief, proof you exist, an end to the silence, a moment of being chosen. That's the thing you'll need to replace.
None of these require you to stop caring about them, which is the point. Every plan that starts with "just let go" fails on a Tuesday night at eleven.
For the mechanics of the pull itself, [intermittent reward](/guides/love_relationship/intermittent-reward-and-why-you-cant-let-go) explains why unpredictable warmth binds harder than steady warmth. When the urge is live right now, [getting through the urge to text them](/guides/love_relationship/getting-through-the-urge-to-text-them) is the ten-minute version. When you're ready for the full channel sweep, [no contact and how to actually do it](/guides/love_relationship/no-contact-how-to-actually-do-it) is next.
If it isn't only emotional
Some of what gets called a trauma bond is abuse. If they hurt you physically, control your money, track your phone, or you find yourself managing their temper to stay safe, that needs a different kind of help than an article.
**National Domestic Abuse Helpline** (run by Refuge): 0808 2000 247, 24 hours a day, every day.
**Men's Advice Line**, for male victims including trans and non-binary people: 0808 801 0327, Monday to Friday, 10am to 5pm.
**Galop**, for LGBT+ people: 0800 999 5428, Monday and Tuesday 9.15am to 8pm, Wednesday to Friday 9.15am to 4.30pm.
**Samaritans**, if you're struggling to keep yourself safe: 116 123, any time.
In an emergency, 999.
For a secular option rather than a twelve step one, SMART Recovery UK runs meetings on 0330 053 6022.
Renovyn can hold the practical side of this, the blocks and the record of what set you off. It doesn't replace therapy or a doctor, and it isn't treatment.
Common questions
**Does limerence go away?** For most people it fades, though there's no reliable timetable and anyone quoting you one is inventing it. What tends to shorten it is cutting the supply of new information about them, because each fresh signal restarts the loop.
**Am I in limerence or is this love?** A useful test is what happens when things are calm. Steady affection survives boredom and tolerates the other person being ordinary. The limerent version needs uncertainty, and often goes flat the moment the person becomes fully available.
**Why can't I stop thinking about him after he ghosted me?** Silence gives your mind nothing to close on, so it keeps generating explanations to fill the gap. That's a normal response to an unfinished story rather than evidence that he was right for you.
**How do I stop obsessing over someone I see every day?** Full no contact isn't available, so aim at the extras: no messages beyond what the shared context requires, no checking their profiles, no debriefing with mutual friends. Expect it to take longer than it would otherwise.
**Do I have a love addiction?** There's no diagnosis to have, so the honest answer is that nobody can tell you. A better question is whether the pattern is costing you sleep, money, work, or safety, because that's what decides whether it's worth getting help for.
Sources
[Love Addiction, Current Diagnostic and Therapeutic Paradigms in Clinical Psychology (Health Psychol Res, 2023)](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37139461/). No official classification exists; 102 articles screened, five included.
[Addicted to love? Validity evidence for the Love Addiction Inventory, Brazilian version (2025)](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12044147/). Not an official diagnosis in DSM-5-TR or ICD-11, and researchers disagree on the definition.
[Love addiction and attachment styles: a systematic review and meta-analysis](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12284683/). 15 studies, 3,628 participants, anxious attachment r = 0.39, avoidant r = -0.09.
[Characteristics of Sex and Love Addiction, S.L.A.A. UK](https://slaauk.org/characteristics-of-sex-and-love-addiction/). The self-recognition quotes and the [anorexia pattern](https://slaauk.org/anorexia-sexual-social-and-emotional/).
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