Every Breath You Take: Obsession

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, love is in the air... or is it? All through February, we will be highlighting some of the substitutes that we, at times, have used interchangeably with love but are really just counterfeits. You can find these knock-off versions of love in your favorite movies, on the magazine racks, scrolling through social media and even in your favorite songs. And what’s worse, many of us have been strolling happy into new relationship after new relationship thinking that we had found love, only to realize later that we fell for an imposter. Join us all month long as we ask the question, “Do you give love a bad name?”

“Every Breath You Take” is a song by The Police from 1983. Written by bassist and lead singer, Sting, the single was the biggest US and Canadian hit of 1983, topping the Billboard singles chart for eight weeks. Ever since it came out, “Every Breath You Take” has been a staple love song for homecomings and proms, first dances at weddings and in May, 2019 was recognized as the most played song in radio history. The big irony is, “Every Breath You Take” is actually a song about obsession. “The song is very, very sinister,” Sting said to the BBC, “and ugly. And people have actually misinterpreted it as being a gentle little love song, when it’s quite the opposite.”

Obsession is the first counterfeit version of love that we are going to tackle this month. On the surface, it looks so much like love, doesn’t it? Just like the song by The Police, a million other people looking from the outside may think that this behavior is affectionate, caring or protective when it is really crossing boundaries, manipulative and controlling. Obsessive behavior can stem from many different types of situations, but often rooted in the lack of ability to form healthy attachments. An obsessive person may have a relational need that was unmet or have experienced abuse in their early life from relationships that should have been nurturing. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of causes for obsession, but very often unhealthy relationship experiences in our developmental stages can have a large impact on how we connect with people in the future.

Another type of romantic obsessive attraction is known as limerence. Limerence is characterized by the sudden onset of typically romantic infatuation in an otherwise stable person. According to the website livingwithlimerence.com, limerence is what happens when “infatuation moves beyond a simple crush and becomes an all-encompassing obsession” and “it feels like addiction to another person... Limerence is an altered mental state in which a romantic obsession becomes the central, inescapable, focus of life and causes a profound change in emotional stability.” - (https://livingwithlimerence.com/what-causes-obsession-with-another-person/) When limerence sets in, it can start with intense feelings of attraction and desire, but as it progresses it can become a debilitating feedback loop of dopamine and noradrenaline causing you to become obsessively fixated on the person who has become the object of your infatuation.

Infatuation in the early stages of a new relationship is a common experience. When that infatuation becomes an obsession, that doesn’t mean that you love the person. Love is not simply a feeling, it’s a choice. The infatuation will wane as your relationship continues to grow. Limerence and obsession aren’t love, but slavery to your emotions caused by neurohormonal imbalance. Losing the ability to choose to love makes what you’re thinking is love actually become the absence of it. These conditions are often romanticized in culture and made to look like a deep kind of love that no one except you can understand, but these are actually unhealthy counterfeits that end up making you a slave to emotion rather than having the freedom to live your life and choose whom, when, and how you will love.