PhronesisLove addiction — the compulsive, obsessive pursuit of romantic intensity and merger, in which relationship becomes the primary regulator of affect, identity, and existential stability — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_LA in the landscape of interdependent love. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as interdependent love: genuine attachment and intimacy combined with retained selfhood — the capacity to love fully without dissolving into the relationship or requiring it for basic self-regulation.
W_LA is rigorously distinguished from anxious attachment style, healthy romantic passion, and borderline personality disorder relational patterns. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: relationship as primary regulator (the love-addicted individual has organized their affect-regulation system around romantic relationship; in the partner's presence they feel calm and coherent; in their absence they feel fragmented and empty — this is not desire but regulatory dependency), intensity-as-love confusion (the neurochemical surge of early romantic merger is experienced as the definition of love; when intensity naturally diminishes it is experienced as loss of love, compelling escalation through conflict and drama or abandonment to find the high elsewhere), and the abandonment-merger oscillation (desperate merger produces the suffocating enmeshment that generates the withdrawal feared, which produces more desperate pursuit — the cycle accelerates until rupture).
The Love Paradox is central: love addiction reliably destroys the love it is organized to secure — compulsive merger produces the abandonment it is designed to prevent. Nine formal propositions characterize the interdependent love ground state, the merger-compulsion wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the love paradox, developmental roots in attachment disruption and abandonment trauma, and return paths through SLAA, attachment-focused therapy, and internal regulatory development.