Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly.

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist known for linking romantic attachment to brain chemistry, has often described romantic love in addiction-like terms in her public lectures and interviews about the neuroscience of love. The quote reflects her broader argument—popularized in the 2000s through TED talks, media appearances, and books—that early-stage romantic love activates dopamine-rich reward circuitry and can produce craving, obsession, and withdrawal-like distress after rejection. It is typically used to frame love as a powerful evolved drive rather than merely a cultural ideal, emphasizing both its euphoric highs and its destabilizing lows when bonds are threatened or broken.

The line treats romantic love not as a gentle sentiment but as a compulsive motivational state: it can focus attention, energize behavior, and make a beloved person feel like a “need.” Calling it an addiction highlights the way love can override judgment, intensify risk-taking, and create dependence on emotional “rewards” (attention, affection, reciprocation). The symmetry of “wonderful” versus “horrible” underscores that the same neural mechanisms that generate exhilaration and meaning in mutual love can, under loss or rejection, generate anguish, rumination, and desperation. Fisher’s framing also implicitly argues for compassion: heartbreak is not trivial weakness but a predictable consequence of powerful brain systems.