Obsessive Love in books.

[Torchout]

I'm currently down an ADHD hyperfocus rabbit hole. I've finally ended a relationship hyperfocus that lasted 40, yes 40 years before I allowed myself to end it. This made me think of stories like Wuthering Heights where a relationship hyperfocus would explain so much of Cathy's behaviour.

Am I reading too much into it in regard to my own experiences or could I be onto something?

What is relationship hyperfocus?

I also have ADHD and am prone to hyperfocus. When I hyperfocus on a relationship it feels like liminality - like a crush times a hundred.

You know the songs everything I do, and every breath you take. For me they are both indicative of relationship hyperfocus.

My friend's use the phrase besotted.

You can be besotted without ADHD Cathy wasn't hyperfocused, maybe Heathcliff was but he also had a lot of trauma in his childhood which would explain why he clung to the one person who he felt " got" him.

You can, but half the problem is that nobody knows how someone else perceives things. You might think non-ADHD besottedness is the same as hyperfocus, but unless you have been both ADHD and non-ADHD you can't really tell.

This is part of the difficulty with the human condition. Although, for what it's worth, I think Cathy was just obsessed, no ADHD necessary.

But the obsessive love between H and C is largely an invention of film adaptations which leave out the second generation and artificially inflate the H and C relationship, which takes up comparatively little of the novel and often doesn’t seem to be romantic/sexual at all.

Heathcliff spends far more of the novel plotting and carrying out revenge on two generations of inhabitants of WH and Thrushcross Grange than he does focusing on Cathy. Cathy in the novel appears perfectly happily married to Edgar, and while she’s delighted to see H when he returns, she has no desire to see him alone, actively wants him to be friends with her husband, voluntarily brings Isabella with her on walks, and is amused rather than possessive when Isabella is attracted to Heathcliff, describing him, bluntly, as a ‘fierce, pitiless, wolfish man’. They kiss once, on her deathbed, when she’s about to go into premature labour, because they both know she’s dying. And her ghost first appears to a silly total stranger, not H.

So no, I don’t think WH is any kind of depiction of relationship hyperfocus.

It sounds quite scary thb.

I think it would be a mistake to try and force an adhd reading (or any other diagnostic term, such as 'relationship hyperfocus') into novel-reading. Hopefully most novels are more open and fluid than that.

For me, the most obvious suggestion for novels along the lines you mention, OP, is Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.

Another one that comes to mind is Danial Deronda. That isn't really about the central characters obsessive love for Daniel (it is another character that her flawed relationship-seeking focusses on), but her long-term preoccupation with him as a friend and mentor is very, very much like the transference relationships that characterise psychotherapy, which often take the form of intense, love-like infatuation. I found it amazing that she wrote as she did before psychoanalysis was even a thing.

There is also Far From the Madding Crowd, in which at least one of Bathsheba's suitors has a rather obsessive and dysfunctional compulsion to seek marriage to her. Probably other Hardy novels, too.

How about Sydney Carlton(?) in A Tale of Two Cities: "You don't love me. Fine. I will just get myself executed and make sure that you know I do it out of love for you. Then hopefully you'll be compelled to think more about me than you really want to."

Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea is about an obsessive love (the central character abducts and locks up his teenage girlfriend when he meets her again in middle-age).

In a way, Wilde’s Dorian Gray is about obsession. Gray is obsessed with his own youth and beauty, and Lord Henry is kind of obsessed with Dorian, as is the painter Basil Hallward.

Maybe Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is as a novel about obsessive love too. Charles Ryder sort of falls in love with Sebastian and his family.

Yes, but Boldwood is written as insane, though — I mean, he shoots Troy, tries to shoot himself, and escapes the gallows because of an insanity plea, when his friends find an entire wardrobe of clothes in his house with Mrs Bathsheba Boldwood written on them, and the exact date when her missing husband can be presumed dead so she can marry him!

Hardy did write an astonishingly nutty novel, The Well-Beloved, about a sculptor trying to find the incarnation of some kind of ideal womanhood in different women of the same family over about forty years…

I think what you are describing as relationship hyperfocus is known as limerance in psychology, isn't it? Or are you talking about something else?

The problem with subjective terms is that you can never really be sure that someone else is using it in the same way, or whether it's even an identifiably distinct phenomenon. We can read all sorts of things into things e.g. I could quite confidently tell you whether I think somebody is a Hufflepuff or a Gryffindor, but those are not actual categories which are distinct, they are more observance of tendencies which sometimes seem to group together. Probably if anyone went to the trouble to do an actual psychological study of Hogwarts house personality types, they would find that they are not actually distinct archetypes after all, because they were just made up by an author to tell a story, no matter how good that author is at making observations about the tendencies of people (which I do think she is).

I have the feeling "ADHD relationship hyperfocus" is an observed idea which has built up a small following on social media, rather than being a topic of psychological research, but I don't actually know. I would be interested to hear more about where the term comes from.

Op did you post about your ex BF’s wife’s looks v your looks?

im assuming so from the tone and content of your post. for someone who says they are over their hyper focus you’re spending a lot of time on this.
Do you receive treatment for your ADHD? Perhaps you need to speak to them for a medication review.
ADHD does not preclude you from having/developing other mental health conditions which may well lie at the bottom of this behaviour.
but I would have thought the focus for you should be on treatment and seeking help. Never mind about why it’s happening. How are you going to get through this and what help do you need…

Nooooo that is not it at all.

It's not how Dickens presents it, no. But that's because of how he views women. He operates with an idealised version of how Carlton behaves, and with his usual saccharine idealisation of the 'good' young women in his stories. She just represents a version of perfect virtue, for Dickens.
Her perfection is the catalyst for Carlton to get the better of a lifetime of failures and become his best self (just like Dickens' alter ego David Copperfield uses the virtuous Agnes as a kind of moral lifeline when he is floundering around marrying the sexier stupid girl).
It feels horribly stalkerish that Carlton acts in a manner that leaves her feeling somehow responsible for his decisions. He manifestly doesn't care about her rather dull husband. He is doing it to achieve some connection with her. It is really creepy that Dickens validates that so unquestioningly.

How about Engleby by Sebastian Faulks?

I really dislike the idea of "diagnosing" fictional characters. I also dislike the notion that the sorts of obsessive, dysfunctional behaviour described on this thread should be thought of as "relationship hyperfocus" and an ADHD trait.

My cousin Rachel -Daphne du Maurier ,there is a strong element of obsessive love in that , it's a really good novel regardless.

It’s Carton

Are you saying you were in a relationship like that for 40 years?