Intensity will not tell you, because intensity is present in both. There is no test and no diagnosis to score yourself against. What separates them is what the relationship costs the rest of your life, and what it does when things go calm. Those two questions you can actually answer about yourself tonight.
There is no test, and that is not a gap in your knowledge
Nobody has agreed what this is. Love addiction is not in the DSM-5 and not in the ICD-11, and the research is thinner than the confidence of the internet suggests.
A 2023 systematic review in *Health Psychology Research* screened 102 articles and included five. Five. 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"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37139461/). A 2025 validation paper says the same about the wider category: these patterns are ["not yet considered official diagnosis"](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12044147/) 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 in *Archives of Sexual Behavior* found ["pronounced conceptual heterogeneity in the literature"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42029817/).
So when a quiz online tells you that you scored 34 and therefore have love addiction, it is not reading from an instrument anyone has agreed on. Nobody can hand you a diagnosis, a stage or a prognosis, and anybody who does is guessing.
Which is why the useful questions are about your own week rather than about a category.
The wrong question: how much do I feel
"But I love him" and "but I can't stop thinking about him" are the same sentence in different clothes, and neither one settles anything. Strong feeling is present in early love, in grief, in obsession, and in relationships that are actively harming somebody.
Intensity tells you the alarm is loud. It does not tell you what set it off.
Five differences you can actually observe
**What happens when things are calm.** This is the sharpest one. Steady affection tolerates boredom and survives the other person being ordinary. The compulsive version needs uncertainty, and often goes flat within days of somebody becoming fully available. If interest returns precisely when they pull back, that is worth noticing.
**What it costs.** Sleep, money, work, other friendships, your own safety. Not "does it hurt", because most relationships hurt sometimes. What is being spent, and would you have agreed to spend it if somebody had told you the price in advance?
**Whether you are relating to them or to the uncertainty.** Watch what occupies your attention. If most of your thinking is spent decoding, predicting and preparing for their next move rather than on the person themselves, the relationship you are in is with the ambiguity.
**Whether the rest of your life is still running.** Not "have I made sacrifices", which everybody has. Has anything else survived? Friendships, work, the things you used to do on a Saturday.
**Whether you can describe them accurately.** Including the boring parts, the ways they annoy you, and what they are actually like rather than what they might become. Difficulty doing that is common when someone has become a symbol rather than a person.
None of these produces a verdict. Together they produce a picture, and it is usually one you already recognise.
Attachment is a better frame than a label
Here the evidence is better than anywhere else in this subject. 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, while avoidant attachment came out at r = -0.09](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12284683/), which is close to nothing.
In plain terms, the pattern tracks how you handle closeness and the fear of losing it. It behaves like an alarm system that fires too easily and will not switch off until it gets a signal back from one specific person.
Hold it loosely. The authors flag their own weakness: "The main limitation concerns the different instruments used to assess LA", and most samples were ordinary people rather than clinical ones. As a working frame it still beats a label, because it points at a question you can answer, which is what this relationship is regulating for you. [What you are actually reaching for](/guides/love_relationship/what-you-are-actually-reaching-for) is the piece that works through that.
The fork that matters more than any of this
Some people arrive at this question from a relationship they are compulsively attached to. Others arrive from a relationship that is harming them. Those are different problems with different answers, and treating the second as an attachment pattern is how people stay in danger.
It is not attachment if they control your money, track your phone or your location, isolate you from people, threaten you, hurt you, or if you find yourself managing their temper to keep yourself safe. In that case the question is not whether your feelings are proportionate. Your feelings can be entirely proportionate to something that should not be happening.
- **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 are struggling to keep yourself safe: 116 123, any time.
- In an emergency, 999.
One more thing about guilt
The ICD-11 attaches a note to a neighbouring condition that is worth borrowing here: "Distress that is entirely related to moral judgments and disapproval about sexual impulses, urges, or behaviours is not sufficient" to meet the requirement for a disorder.
The principle transfers. If the distress you feel about this relationship comes entirely from somebody else's disapproval of it, from a family, a community or a forum, then what you have is a conflict with them, not a compulsion. Those need different things.
Common questions
**Do I have a love addiction?** There is no diagnosis to have, so the honest answer is that nobody can tell you. The better question is whether the pattern is costing you sleep, money, work or safety, because that is what decides whether it is worth getting help for.
**Can you be addicted to a person?** Not in any recognised sense. The research that exists is small and inconsistent, and the term is used very differently by different authors. What is better supported is that these patterns track anxious attachment.
**Is it love if it hurts this much?** Pain is not evidence either way. Grief hurts and it is love. Coercion hurts and it is not. Look at the cost columns rather than at the intensity.
**How do I know if it is a trauma bond?** That phrase is popular vocabulary rather than a clinical category, and it appears in no diagnostic manual. If what is underneath it is fear, use the numbers above rather than the term.
**If it is a compulsion, does that mean I should leave?** It does not follow automatically. Plenty of people change the pattern without ending the relationship, and [what you are actually reaching for](/guides/love_relationship/what-you-are-actually-reaching-for) is usually a better first move than a decision about staying. If you have already decided to step away, [no contact and how to actually do it](/guides/love_relationship/no-contact-how-to-actually-do-it) is the practical version.
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.
- [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.
- [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.
- [National Domestic Abuse Helpline, Refuge](https://www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk/). 0808 2000 247, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
