$INTRIGUE ADDICT

Love is a game theory and we’re just betting on the odds

A woman reflects on what it means to be in the throes of limerence, New York City, spring 2022

Did you know that SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) hosts meetings on Zoom? I learned this in 2021 and immediately took advantage of it. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. I knew I wasn’t a “sex addict” (that would have been fun though) and my relationship with “love” was far too complicated and exhausting to be a proper addiction in itself. I fought off the nagging feeling that my particular malady was a much more complicated one and logged into a meeting based in Baton Rouge. Or was it Iowa City? I tried and tested several different meetings. The Midwest had the most handsome men. The West Coast had more certifiably insane women than anywhere else. I went to meetings based in Peoria or Kansas City (MO) when I needed to “feel something,” Los Angeles or Vancouver (WA) when I needed to feel better about myself.

Anonymous Participant 7 immediately caught my eye. He was boyishly handsome and blonde, which isn’t usually my thing but who am I to deny an unmistakable vibe? I wonder if he’d write long, romantic messages or short, decisive ones; whether he was the kind to make the first move or not. I got so lost running probabilities in my head that I missed my cue.

SLAA didn’t work for me because I couldn’t quite figure out how to not bring my delusion into the room. Why couldn’t I have just been an alcoholic instead?

“Addiction” is a term to which we assign both too much and too little gravitas. I remember how it felt when I learned that a friend died of a heroin overdose. I also remember that my great grandmother always had a half-eaten roll of Snackwell cookies in her bedside table. She swore she didn’t, but various family members had seen her sneaking some here or there. I’m sure they found it next to her Bible and a roll of stamps after she died. I’d say my vice is somewhere in-between. It’s more damaging to spirit than body, though I’m sure the argument could be made that I’ve defiled my corporeal form on its behalf on more than one occasion Addiction needs more than permission to flourish, it requires access, a supply.

I kept a supply, or rather, a “supplier” on call. Usually via text messages but we’d met up a couple times when our travel plans happened to align in the most unlikely of places. He was someone I had once and though I didn’t want him back, needed access to. It ended more than once, always in some illusion-shattering heartbreak, often quite messy and unrestrained. Even at its worst, there was room left to imagine; to fixate upon if not careful. When we did revisit each other, we did so not out of desperation or curiosity, but ritual. There was a rare stability to be found in the ambiguity of our periodic vague flirtations and I couldn’t get enough. Over time, there was less and less emotion involved as we enjoyed an intellectual spar now and again. I found it all to be more of a nervous system regulation exercise than romantic exploration.

Intrigue is one hell of a drug. It’s particularly potent in its ability to stabilize, and there’s a certain euphoria to be found when the dreamlike becomes the mundane and the mundane takes on the flavor of a dream. Where in most circumstances, the anticipation is the killer, intrigue rewards the in-between rather than the outcome. Something in me is hardwired to seek this like a rat will always find a source of water. I don’t believe that intrigue is inherently destructive or especially salacious. I’ve been careful to calculate desire; to make sure that it’s mutually calibrated, at least for a time. Intrigue is an undercurrent gently moving them towards a well-choreographed dance between reality and possibility, and for most people, it’s something you visit: briefly, as limerence, or later, as nostalgia. But for some of us, intrigue isn’t a place we pass through, it’s where we choose to set down roots.

I rarely experience intrigue as longing, for me, it’s more of an orientation or the legend on a map. I set my sights on an unsustainable kind of novelty, not because I needed excitement, but because it could hold my attention so well. I can remember the meet-cutes and first dates with every one of my past boyfriends with an uncanny attention to detail. The way my TOTEME mules left an indentation on the top of my foot, how it swelled into a bruise as I, dizzy and drunk, took ladylike bites of pizza despite being utterly famished. I remember not wanting him to know my foot was hurting me because I would have walked from Battery Park to Inwood with him if he’d asked me. I remember the scratchy wool of his blazer, dapper and darling despite the early June heat and humidity. The way my Le Labo Santal 33 met and lingered with his Creed Green Irish Tweed. I recall every beginning just like this. (At least the major relationships. In between those, I tried to capture the same lighting in a bottle feeling with various levels of failure.)

I like to imagine my muses noticing the tension in these moments and indulging in a Polymarketesque betting scandal for each and every one; running odds, placing bets, and covering the spread.

Fifty-seven percent he kisses her before her Uber arrives. If he doesn’t, ninety-six percent she texts him the moment she’s back at the hotel.

Thirty-three percent she tells that story about getting lost at the Harbin Ice Festival.

Forty-two percent she books the flight.

This was how I learned to stay present without being vulnerable. Turns out, it’s easier to just watch the line move than it is to ask for what you want.

Intrigue is a safe bet, the center always holds. It’s a hedge against a specific kind of uncertainty by celebrating it in a different form. It flips the discomfort of tension on its head, it makes tension a delightful indulgence. There are no decisions, there are no revelations, there are no disappointments. Just you, a person onto which you can project all your needs and desires, and a street corner in Brooklyn, or Venice Beach, or Bowness. Nothing is lost, nothing is found. You simply are. Attention is contained, affection diffused. Over time, the spark doesn’t cease to exist, it just stabilizes and becomes commonplace. Comfortable, but slow.

That pace worked for me longer than it worked for anyone else. I could stay suspended, attentive, oriented toward possibility while moving forward. What shifted wasn’t interest or desire so much as momentum. Rather than moving in lockstep, attention relaxed on their side first, their curiosity thinned, and I eventually found myself dancing to a different tempo altogether. After enough repetitions, the pattern becomes familiar and beginnings start to feel safer than continuity. I remember trying to explain it all to a boyfriend, rigid with apathy, our last day together many years ago.

“You love beginnings. You can find a new one.”

“I don’t want a new beginning, I want to go back to the one I had with you.”

I didn’t think that marriage could interrupt this pattern, I always thought it would be like forcing an addict into a harrowing cold turkey withdrawal, which has been known to backfire more often than it works. This beginning though, this first date, caused me to do something I’d never done before: I stopped wanting to be suspended in the moment and started living to experience the next. Even my muses had stopped running the numbers.

I didn’t meet him in the most remarkable way, which to me, felt special. There was no story I could tell that would explain what happened next. What mattered wasn’t circumstance, but recognition: the immediate sense that this was not something I could optimize, revisit, or hold at a distance. The pattern I’d relied on for years simply didn’t apply. He held my attention and captivated all of my sensibilities—artistic, sensual, domestic, feral—in a way that felt durable rather than charged. The feeling wasn’t one of urgency, but of depth. I had the strange, immediate sense that the rest of my life wouldn’t be enough time to know him fully, and that instead of frightening me, this felt like relief. To be able to wake up next to one person and long to spend the rest of the day with them, over and over, until death takes me.

They say “when you know, you know.” I knew, and I knew it was time to delete my “dealer’s” number as well.

xo, e.m.