What You Think is Love is Actually Emotional Dependency: These Signs Are Proof, Warn Psychologists

What You Think is Love is Actually Emotional Dependency: These Signs Are Proof, Warn Psychologists

Victims of their success in bookstores, on social media, or at the coffee machine, "emotional dependents" seem to be legion. But are they more numerous than before? Where is the line with romantic fusion? Some clarifications are necessary so that attachment does not turn into a prison.

This is the new trendy concept, entered into the pantheon of misused psychological terms, alongside "narcissistic perverts," "hypersensitivity," and "resilience"... All notions gradually emptied of their meaning, especially by life coaches and other "emotional healing experts" on TikTok and Instagram, who indiscriminately offer to help you end "emotional dependency," "toxic relationships," "anxious attachment," and other "abandonment traumas." They make sweeping diagnoses, leaving the vague impression that we are all somewhat affected by an epidemic.

Love and Confusions

"There have always been people suffering from dependency in their romantic, friendly, familial, and professional relationships. There are not more today than before, and it is rarely a pathological form," reassures psychoanalyst Saverio Tomasella, who has just dedicated a book to "fusion love." However, the diagnosis is flourishing online, particularly among a young, anxious female population and their new mentors who sow doubt and confusion about all strong emotional ties, especially of course romantic relationships, as long as they are intense, fusion-like, and passionate.

Should we love (our partner, our children, our parents, our friends) without anything ever overflowing? Fall in love without experiencing lack, the irrepressible desire to be together, without the anxiety of separation...? Should we love without attachment? "One being is missing, and everything is depopulated," wrote Lamartine in 1820. We have long known that the je-ne-sais-quoi that irresistibly draws us to each other also "binds" us.

But at a time when individual freedom, personal fulfillment, and the protection of the small "self" have become cardinal values, the laws of attachment have a bad reputation. Never have independence and autonomy (emotional) had so many defenders, while we live in relational infusion, continuously plugged into social networks, phone grafted to our ear. Never have we feared the ravages of loneliness so much and waved the banner "Need no one" so high.

Faced with this tangle of contradictions, we are all left quite helpless, and necessarily suspicious in our own eyes. What if a certain link in our life was "borderline"? "Toxic"? Is this story that devours us (still) love or a true dependency, one that imprisons, quietly destroys, and from which one rarely finds a way out alone?

Passion or Addiction?

It is surprising that this cult of extreme autonomy, of being well alone, without otherness, continues to develop, while psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists keep insisting on the virtues of interdependence, notes Saverio Tomasella. Independence, in reality, does not exist. We are always interdependent, including with our neighbors.

Not all dependency is pathological. In "reasonable" doses, it is even an integral part of any emotional bond. But there are degrees, from exquisite, consensual, and reciprocal dependencies to truly maladaptive attachments (see our interview p. 40). "Dependency is part of our humanity and our existential journey," summarizes the therapist. It becomes problematic when it is excessive and manifests in a way that causes suffering to one or both partners, when it transforms into manipulation, exclusivity, permanent jealousy, control... to the detriment of the relationship. But sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between "crazy" love, which we all dream of and savor in books or on the big screen, and true emotional dependency, where it is more about vital need and lack than about giving and surrendering.

In fact, passion "transports" us, continues Saverio Tomasella. It shows us how we are not "masters in our own house." However, we never merge into the other; we do not lose ourselves. Fusion occurs within oneself: in that something that releases, that inner fire that flows within us and suddenly takes up all the space. It is a limit experience, situated on the side of expanded consciousness, not pathology. A wonderful state, if we accept it.

A state of expansion very different from this reduction of self that consists of no longer living/thinking/breathing except through another, of merging, forgetting oneself, and gradually extinguishing, ultimately unable to love and be loved. In the end, incapable of saying "I."

Signs That Don't Lie

There are many signs to alert us when we cross the red line. Each has their own, depending on their temperament more or less fusion-like, their ability to merge without losing themselves, their vision of love, and the nature of the relationship... But some "symptoms" speak for themselves: as soon as the relationship becomes suffocating and destroys more than it nurtures, when love or friendship is less or not at all in question but rather control, addiction, prison... When we start to feel that we are losing ourselves.

Dependency has a thousand and one faces and a whole gradation, from the sweet need to be together to devouring, to "devastation." The first step, when doubt sets in, is to recognize it, to identify at what stage we are. And even if the idea is difficult to accept, to admit that the bond is sick, and that one is suffering enough not to hesitate to call for help, and in all cases, to seek the best ways to (re)act.

1. Fusion love, making the intensity of feelings last (Eyrolles, 2026).

2. Expression of Freud when he first speaks of the "unconscious."

3. Lacan's term to describe certain mother-daughter relationships without symbolic limits, doomed to destruction.