Romantic obsession seems to be connected less with love and more with deeper unmet psychological needs: the need to feel that we are worthy, the repetition of earlier experiences of emotional deprivation and the desire to complete them, or the need to avoid loneliness. Often, what we call love functions as an escape from inner emptiness rather than as a genuine encounter with the other.
My favorite Irvin Yalom writes in Love’s Executioner: “I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy—I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love’s executioner.”
Love feeds on mystery, distance, and fantasy. The other person suddenly becomes extremely important, without being entirely clear how or why. Open and unfulfilled needs from the past are projected onto a particular person without us being fully aware of what these needs carry from the past. The image of the other person becomes charged with meaning that is disproportionate to our actual present experience with them.
A little further on he continues: “I was sure that he suffered not from love but from a rare variant that he mistook for love.”
People who have formed an anxious attachment bond with a parental figure did not experience care only as inconsistent — sometimes present, sometimes absent. They experienced the relationship as a whole as unpredictable. Contact was not a given; it had to be earned and anticipated. In this way, they learned to hyperfocus on the other person, to notice small changes in mood, to scan emotional signals, because their sense of safety depended on them.
Within this framework, the child does not learn to regulate their emotions on their own. They learn that relief, calmness, and a sense of stability come from outside — from how available the other person is. Love becomes associated with intensity, closeness with anxiety, and safety with uncertainty. One’s sense of self-worth is not experienced as inherent but as something confirmed each time the other person is present.
This pattern is often carried into romantic relationships, especially when it is the only model of connection we have known. The emotionally unavailable partner is not chosen randomly. They feel familiar. They activate old internal patterns in which contact is never guaranteed and closeness must constantly be proven.
The person does not “attach” randomly. They attach where something was missing, where a need was not fulfilled and remained open.
In this context, obsession is not pathology. It is the persistent attempt of the organism to complete an experience of contact that was once interrupted. It concerns not so much the person themselves as their availability and the sense of safety associated with it. It is not only about the loss of the other, but about the fear of losing contact that was once a matter of survival.
Overanalysis functions here as a substitute for contact: a continuous cognitive loop that replaces direct emotional experience. In the international literature, obsession is not described as excessive love, but as dysregulation when a perceived threat of abandonment is activated.
Perhaps, in the end, what we often call love at first sight is not about the meeting of two people, but about the meeting of the present with something old that still seeks completion. Perhaps the therapeutic movement is not to stop falling in love, but to dare to tolerate the loneliness that lies behind love. To allow ourselves to exist without having to prove our worth, without chasing the availability of the other, without needing to earn contact.
Because only then can love stop being an escape and become an authentic encounter.
References:
Yalom, I. D. (1995). The Executioner of Love. In Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Basic Books.
Yalom, I. D. (2003). Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Athens: Agra Publications.
Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511–524.
Tennov, D. (1979). Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Stein & Day.
