Addicted To You

I finally got a day to myself yesterday, and I drove up and spent time with Eben and then with Wren without Kevin around. Eben needed his computer diagnosed and fixed, and he bought me lunch in exchange for replacing the hard drive and upgrading the RAM. We also talked a whole lot, of course, since I hadn't seen him one-on-one since that horrible night of the group meeting between me, Kevin, Aiden, and Lily.

Over tuna melts with apple and tomato (better than they sound, I swear), he agreed with my tentative suggestion that Kevin has traits of the codependent personality. Alejandra had mentioned something about that topic to me years ago, but I didn't know much about it, and Eben was able to explain it a little more. When I looked it up on Wikipedia, it talked only about one person enabling another's dependency on a substance, which is obviously not my situation. When I looked up dependency, it redirected to addiction.

What Eben had to say still made a lot of sense, though, and just because Wikipedia didn't mention the case of being addicted to a person doesn't mean it doesn't happen. The way he explained it, one person gets addicted to something that the other provides (in Kevin's case, comfort, ego assurance, something along those lines) and holds on tighter and tighter and tries to control that person out of the fear of losing what they're being given. What they don't realize, of course, is that by holding on so hard they're working against their own best interests by pushing that person away.

As Eben said, "When you first begin a relationship, the puppy-love stage is great. But then you expect it go away, and for you to give each other a little more space. When that doesn't happen, you have something unhealthy."

Interestingly, this is exactly the same way that my last serious relationship crashed and burned. Both of us were doing this exact same thing to each other, except that I realized it before we broke up and she didn't. I wasn't able to break the pattern until I was away from her, but thankfully, I was successful (with significant effort) in doing so when we were finally away from each other.

Now that it's happened twice, I find myself developing a fear that this is going to keep happening to me, that there's something in that dependent personality that attracts me in the early stages of a relationship, and I don't recognize it until I'm way too far in. I never thought I would be that person who would start to push other people away because of past unfortunate experiences; I never understood those people, always thought that they were paranoid and stupid. It's amazing how suddenly and unexpectedly you can become that which you hate, and never see it coming.