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When you get home...

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“With the right music, you either forget everything or you remember everything.”

— Unknown

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I Read Medical Journals So You Don't Have To

I feel like I owe you a column. Sadly, my own love life refuses to be an entertaining bad example, so I turned to the scientific literature for a topic. When I wrote Love Addict: Sex, Romance and Other Dangerous Drugs in 2011, love addiction was considered by most professionals as something a few weirdos in the 12-step community made up in order to, I don’t know, give away bad coffee in church basements? Sell poker chips with a triangle logo on them at cost? In 2023, though, love addiction is a perfectly serious area of psychiatric study. There are tons of research papers I can share with you, and will.

Problem is, most of them kinda suck.

Here, for example, is a piece in PsyPost, a journal covering the latest in psychology and neuroscience. It’s titled New Psychology Research Indicates Love Addiction and Sex Addiction Are Related but Distinct Phenomena - and goes on to prove nothing of the sort. Turns out, the basis of the work is a study of 329 subjects, 310 of them women, all Italian. Oh, and all of them were in relationships of six months or more. 

If you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing did a spit-take on that “in relationships of six months or more.” I’m not saying sex and love addicts are never in medium-to-long-term relationships. I’m just saying that this study was peering at the skinniest end of the addiction bell curve. These folks are outliers. The kind of love addiction I am familiar with puts you on the floor in fetal position when a “relationship” of six daysgoes kaput. Fantasy love affairs — where only one person is aware that said love affair exists — can go on for years, of course, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue.

I also don’t believe that a women currently in a relationship is a great barometer of active sex addiction. If she were a practicing sex addict, odds are she would have been kicked out of the house within six weeks. This was just not a good sample on which to base any conclusions about the relationship of sex addiction to love addiction.

One thing I did like about the PsyPost article, though, is the way it compared sex and love addiction to substance and other behavioral addictions. It talks about the Components Model of Addiction, which holds that love addiction is characterized by six discrete dimensions: 

Salience: The person’s love interest is the most important thing in their life, and they think about it all the time.

Tolerance: They need to spend more and more time with or thinking about the person they love to get the same satisfaction.

Mood modification: Being with or thinking about the person they love makes them feel better when they’re upset or stressed.

Relapse: They find it hard to stop spending time with or thinking about the person they love, even if they try to.

Withdrawal: When they’re not with the person they love, they feel physical or emotional symptoms like frustration, anxiety, and nausea.

Conflict: Their love interest interferes with other parts of their life, like work, school, or friendships.

Here is a scholarly deep dive on the Component Model from the National Institutes for Health. Think of it as a “unified theory of addiction.” These six factors — salience, tolerance, mood modification, relapse, withdrawal and conflict — can be applied to addictions ranging from smoking to screentime; you just have to tweak the descriptions. “Salience: When you’re eating breakfast, you’re thinking about what you’re going to have for lunch.” “Tolerance: You find yourself spending more and more time doomscrolling, even though you don’t mean to.” “Withdrawal: Without a cigarette, you feel like someone peeled your skin off.” “Conflict: You gambled away your kid’s college fund and now she won’t speak to you.”

The other cool thing about the NIH piece is that it endorses what’s called the Transdiagnostic Treatment approach. Here’s a long piece on that from the National Library of Medicine . 

“Behavioral addictions such as gambling, video games, sex, and shopping share many clinical features with substance use addictions including etiology, course, and neurobiology. Yet, the treatment of behavioral and substance use addictions tends to be separated,” the abstract says, and argues that it would be more effective — and cheaper, and less of a strain on already limited psychology resources — to treat them all similarly. The article actually says, and this is something I did not expect to read in an NIH research paper, that the medical community would learn a lot by going to the meetings with the bad coffee and the poker chips:

“There exists a multitude of 12-step programs for distinct addictive behaviors such as alcohol (Alcoholics Anonymous), cocaine (Cocaine Anonymous), gambling (Gamblers Anonymous), sex (Sexaholics Anonymous), and eating (Overeaters Anonymous). 12-step programs largely operate independently and are disorder-specific, emphasizing each groups' need to embrace “singularity of purpose.” …However, regardless of which 12-step program an individual attends, the principles of the program and the 12-steps remain very similar. Implicitly then, the treatment of addictions may closely resemble a transdiagnostic approach in practice.”

Do I think most of these studies are restating the obvious in their diagnoses, and reinventing the wheel in their treatment models? Yes, yes I do. But we need the studies to validate the existence of something you and I both know damn well exists, so that they’ll teach the diagnosis in medical school and cover the treatment with insurance. So bring on the Italian girls, if that’s what it takes. And send them to a meeting.

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might I interest you in a Michael doodle today?

I’ll finish this soon, trust 🙏

IM ALWAYS INTERESTED IN A MICHAEL DOODLE…

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all the besties showing love for the 🩷URAVITY MERCH DROP🩷 !!

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If Dating is a Numbers Game, the House Always Wins

by Ethlie Ann Vare

Used to be, “courting distance” was how far a man could comfortably ride a horse, spend a little time visiting, and return home all in one day. It was about 12 miles, and boy howdy did that limit the dating pool — not to mention the gene pool. It made life pretty easy for matchmakers, though. Today, courting distance is throw-a-dart-at-the-globe… but are we better off with this paradox of choice? Who bothers to invest in a budding relationship when there’s always another one where that came from, and our electronic matchmakers remind us of that every day. “There’s plenty of fish in the sea,” say Tinder and Bumble and Hinge and, duh, Plenty of Fish.

But there’s a catch. It is not in the best interest of these electronic marvels of matchmaking to actually match you with anyone. As much as they claim to love love and want nothing more than to find you the love you seek, there is ample evidence that they are actually using their advanced algorithms to keep you single. After all, as soon as you find your true love, you will stop using their services. The apps cannot actually give you the very thing they are selling.

I believe economists call it a “perverse incentive.” I call it bullshit.

“People forget it’s an industry,” says tech reporter Lakshmi Rengarajan. “They know who’s behind Netflix or Amazon or Facebook, but they have no idea who’s behind Match.” Which, by the way, also owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, The League, Plenty of Fish, and whatever it is you’re surreptitiously swiping as you skim this essay. (Spoiler alert: It’s Barry Diller. The Match Group is the brainchild of the octogenarian media mogul who also invented the made-for-TV movie and launched the Fox network.)

Rengarajan and Sangeeta Singh Kurtz are co-hosts of Dating Games, the latest season from the techie podcast Land of the Giants. It’s a deep dive into the genesis, the business and the general dystopia of dating apps. 

And “Games” in an appropriate handle, as dating apps were designed from the gate to resemble casino games, and with the same goal: They want to keep you there as long as possible to extract as much money from you as possible. Only instead of bribing you with free cocktail service and seafood buffets, they tempt you with the promise of everlasting love.

Of course, these slot machines can’t actually give you everlasting love, because that would cause you to immediately exit the casino. So they do everything in their algorithmic power to serve you Mr. or Ms. Not-Quite-Right, to persuade you that Mr. or Ms. Right is behind the next curtain. Just keep swiping!

Here’s the thing: Mr. or Ms. Right could well be behind the curtain somewhere. Probably is. In 2023, just about every unpartnered (and plenty of partnered) people are on the apps. But the app has zero incentive to open the curtain. Its goal is to keep zapping you with the dopamine hit of expectation, over and over and over again. Because mammals will chase dopamine hits until they die. Ask any lab rat.

The apps are programmed to give us almost what we want, but not quite. They are designed to tantalize you. It is frustration on a mythic scale. Literally. Where do you think the word “tantalize” comes from? The current psych jargon for this phenomenon is the “ludic loop,” although the idea of “intermittent reward” has been around since before BF Skinner did his experiments with the actual lever-pressing lab rats.

As media analyst Jon Favreau put it, “You may go into the dating app thinking ‘I want to find someone,’ but the act of being on the app and swiping itself becomes an entertainment experience.” The average Bumble user spends 90 minutes a day on the app. Astonishing. I would shoot myself after spending 90 minutes on Bumble, period - although I do find it entertaining. Look at all the pictures of men holding up a fish!

I don’t get it. Do they think I will pick the man with the biggest fish? Is this a dick metaphor, or do I look hungry?

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Nights are the most painful

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if percy shelley were alive today, i know for a fact he would be a huge hit on tumblr dot com.

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Showing him off because I'm proud as hell

I think the doorwings are one of the best parts because guess what! I animated them

So basically the animations they have: Idle, walking, running, swimming, jumping, hurt

He was a pain to texture and at some point I got scared I'll have to start from scratch, mostly because I messed up the files and the textures wouldn't apply. Obviously in the end I fixed it because I simply can't stop winning.

His animations also got a bit messed up. I planned for it to be possible to run and jump without the jumping animation interrupting the running one but oh well.(Not sure what went wrong I adjusted the priorities correctly)

Also I'm thinking of adjusting the hurt animation to be faster because it's not as clear

Annndddd also have a regular skin of him I made. He's very bald though

It's just that I got too hungry and bit his doorwings off. Whoopsies!

Anyway 👋

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billford yaoi billford yuri i love them all

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i feel like i never draw tim smiling but bb robin tim smiles a lot! (in between angst and tragedy)

brought to you by my continued attempts at figuring out tim’s early robin hair

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ADDICTIVE LOVE IS... (notes found in a drawer)

I was Swedish Death Cleaning my file cabinets the other day and came across a page I had written in 2003. An actual page, printed on actual paper, like we did in 2003. It might have been a pitch document for a script or a book. It might have been an inventory I was going to share with a sponsor. It might have been a journal entry, but I doubt that because I am hopeless at journaling, much to my chagrin. 

Whatever it was, I share it with you now because it feels real and raw and you just might relate. 

ADDICTIVE LOVE IS…

…curling up on the couch in fetal position, nauseous, because he didn’t call.

…a red haze misting over your eyeballs and the top of your head about to explode because he walks into the room.

…your heart lurching into your throat because you see a car the same make and model as his.

…looking at every girl in the room and imagining that he’s with her.

…getting an overwhelming feeling of calm simply imagining the hug, the kiss, the kind word.

…rehearsing phone conversations that never happened, letters never sent, over and over until perfect.

…re-reading emails until they’re memorized.

…tears welling up for no good reason.

Nothing tastes good - nothing tastes at all - except sugary sweets and salty snacks.

You can’t fall asleep, then can’t stay asleep... you wake up at 3am but don’t get out of bed until 9.

The bribes and the bait. Taking back the bribes and the bait. 

The grief comes in waves.

These are men I have felt exactly this way about:

Ted, who was tall and dark and a diplomat’s son 

Martin, who was short and grey and made cartoons

John, who was chubby and a rocket scientist 

Pat, who was blonde and insane and wanted to act

Chuck, who was smart and sophisticated and a junkie

Bill, who was rangy and rich and an adventurer 

Lonnie, who had black curls and lived in a group home

Pete, who played the guitar and was married to someone else

There was David from high school and Charles from college and a few Stevens and a Michael or three… I felt exactly the same way about each of them and they had nothing in common other than that feeling. That, and that I knew they wouldn’t stay.

The terror sets in waiting for them to leave. Knowing from the very beginning that this is someone who will leave, because otherwise it doesn’t work. Once, I reveled in that exquisite torture. Called it that aloud: “exquisite torture.” So numb, I suppose, that feeling anything was better than feeling nothing. This, at least, was intense enough for me to feel, like curry on a cold. But now it’s just torture. It’s quivering, all-consuming fear. Maybe not all-consuming. Like the grief, the fear comes in waves.

The writing trails off there. I imagine I was too unhappy to continue. It’s funny looking back now on the list of men — tall, short, thick, thin, fair, dark, smart, dumb, young, old, rich, poor — and I realize I never had a type in the classic sense. My type was “unavailable.” No wonder I was sad. 

Well, it did all become a book in the end, which I suppose is the good news. And if you relate to those feelings, I commend you to it. It might help. Because the better news is this: I don’t feel like that any more. Ever. I mean, never say never but I think I don’t ever have to feel that way again. Because wanting to leave is no longer an attractive feature on a man, and I no longer find exquisite torture exquisite. Change happens.

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cutting myself getting a scratch

accidently

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Just thin king about one piece yaoi real hard...

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Dear ChatGPT: This week, Ethlie replaces herself with a computer

I am fascinated by Artificial Intelligence (and please take note of my admiration, Dear Future Robot Overlord.) You may recall I illustrated my recent children’s picture book, WOOF!, using AI art generators. In only the few months since I completed the project, it became possible write the entire book with AI.

Mind you, the writing wouldn't have been as good. The cool thing about AI is that it draws on all (digitally) existing human knowledge to deliver an answer. I thought it worked well with illustrations — an artist might disagree — but with prose it has a tendency to flatten everything. You end up with lowest-common-denominator text, and good writing is all about being surprising, and quirky, and humane. Robots are bad at humane. For now. 

But I was curious, and I have access to OpenAI and the latest large language model, google’s Bard, so I gave each of them my job. This is what I entered into the generative engine:

You think you may be a love addict. Write a letter to an advice column asking for help figuring it out.

Then I asked it to respond to the questioner. This is what OpenAI’s ChatGPT returned:

Dear Advice Column,

I am writing to you because I think I may be a love addict, and I don't know what to do about it. I have been in and out of relationships for as long as I can remember, and I always seem to find myself obsessing over my partners and putting their needs before my own.

I have been told by friends and family that I have a pattern of falling for partners who are emotionally unavailable or who are not a good fit for me, but I can't seem to break the cycle. Even when I am not in a relationship, I find myself constantly searching for love and validation from others, and I feel like I can't be happy without it.

I have read about love addiction and the symptoms seem to describe my behavior perfectly. I am constantly seeking out attention and affection from others, and I feel empty and anxious when I am not in a relationship. I am also prone to jealousy and controlling behavior, and I find myself obsessing over my partner's every move.

I am reaching out to you because I don't know how to break this pattern and get help. I am worried that my behavior is affecting my relationships and my ability to be happy on my own. Do you have any advice or resources that can help me figure out if I am a love addict, and if so, how to get help?

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

[Name]

Dear [Your Name],

Thank you for reaching out and sharing your concerns about your behavior and relationship patterns. It takes a lot of courage to admit that you may have a problem, and it is the first step towards healing and making positive changes.

Based on your description, it does sound like you may be struggling with love addiction. Love addiction is a real and serious issue that can have a negative impact on your relationships and your overall well-being. It's important to understand that love addiction is not about being in love or having a strong connection with someone. Instead, it's an unhealthy and compulsive need for love and validation that can lead to obsessive and destructive behavior.

The good news is that there is help available for those who are struggling with love addiction. I recommend seeking the help of a licensed therapist or counselor who specializes in addiction and relationship issues. They can provide you with a safe and supportive environment to explore your feelings, behaviors, and patterns, and help you develop healthier coping mechanisms and strategies for breaking the cycle of love addiction.

In addition to therapy, there are also support groups and resources available for those struggling with love addiction, such as Love Addicts Anonymous and Co-Dependents Anonymous. These groups provide a community of individuals who are going through similar experiences and can offer support, guidance, and accountability.

Remember that healing and recovery take time and effort, but it is possible. Be kind and patient with yourself, and don't hesitate to reach out for help when you need it.

Best of luck to you on your journey towards healing and growth.

Sincerely, 

[Advice Column]

Bard was a little more succinct: 

Dear Advice Column,

I'm writing to you because I think I may be a love addict. I've been in and out of relationships for as long as I can remember, and I always seem to be chasing the next high. I'm never satisfied with the current relationship, and I'm always looking for something better.

I know this is a problem, but I don't know how to fix it. I've tried therapy, but it doesn't seem to be helping. I'm starting to feel like I'm going to be alone forever.

Can you help me figure out if I'm a love addict? And if I am, how can I get help?

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

A Concerned Reader

Dear Concerned Reader,

Thank you for your letter. It sounds like you're going through a difficult time, and I want to help.

It's important to remember that love addiction is a real addiction, just like any other addiction. It can be just as difficult to overcome, and it requires just as much treatment.

If you think you may be a love addict, the first step is to get help from a qualified professional. There are many different types of therapy that can be helpful for love addiction, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and 12-step programs.

It's also important to remember that you're not alone. There are many people who struggle with love addiction, and there is help available. With the right treatment, you can overcome this addiction and find healthy, fulfilling relationships.

I encourage you to reach out to a therapist or counselor who specializes in love addiction. They can help you understand your addiction and develop a treatment plan that's right for you.

You can also find support groups and online resources for love addicts. These can provide you with the support and understanding you need to overcome your addiction.

Remember, you're not alone in this. There is help available, and you can overcome love addiction.

Sincerely,

Advice Column

Well, how do you think they did? I’m impressed. Yes, it’s one-size-fits all, but the question was pretty general. I’m delighted that Future Robot Overload recognizes the existence of love addiction as an addiction. And I’m delighted that it recommends 12-step groups as well as therapy. I’m not planning on offloading your queries to the internet — I love hearing from you guys — but I do wonder who will be reading Dear Abby’s mail a year from now. 

And yes, this column is illustrated with an AI generated drawing.

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I'm tired of everything

But not you