There is a powerful and often quoted chapter on withdrawal in the SLAA basic text ..my experience of it has been a long and I have to say very painful process …but I can add the hope that it does slowly get better as each agonising minute turns into an agonising hour then day then week ..day by day  onward …my withdrawal from love addiction was forced upon me by my now ex wife announcing that  she was divorcing me and that it would be non negotiable ..that she did not want to try marriage guidance counselling or couples therapy or any attempts to save our 12 year marriage …quite simply she was closing a steel door on our relationship ..a relationship which also involved our two young children, a large family home ..and two cats! ..our relationship had been in trouble for a long time ..probably from the beginning …but this situation I later found out in meetings is a common way for codependent love addicted relationships to end. My partner was so afraid that I might leave her during any counselling period which would throw her into the intense pain of abandonment that she closed the door completely herself first …knowing either consciously or unconsciously that I would be thrown into abandonment ..which I was ….the pain was unbelievable …beyond anything imaginable …I wanted to chew off my own hands …claw the wallpaper from the walls ..I didn’t eat  for days on end …hardly worked or slept at all.I stopped smoking after 20 years of 20 cigarettes a day and didn’t feel a single craving for a cigarette ..the pain of withdrawal from love addiction obliterated every normal feeling I had.. could have ..or .. wanted to have... everything was sucked into the black hole of my utter emptiness and despair …an indescribable physical pain of yearning and emptiness inhabited the center of my chest...I prayed constantly to God to ease my pain …GIVE HER BACK TO ME …NOW!!! ……NOW !.. NOW!  almost as often I prayed to DIE! right then and there…but my higher power knew that giving me my drug would not be the love I needed so my withdrawal went on day after day…….I couldn’t face the idea of finding a stop gap fix in the form of some other relationship just to postpone my agony or even create a new and greater addiction I didn't want anyone else anayway i wanted HER!  I didn’t want to drink alcohol or take any other drug lest I ruin any chance of reconciliation ..I occasionally masturbated guiltily, I soon learned that this just increased the pain in the following days and in the end gave that up completely along with all other forms of fixing my feelings….I lived endlessly in the raw pain.. if I could have had her back even for a minute I would have caved in ..there was no noble struggle against my addiction ….no self loving abstinence from my drug …if I could have had her back I would have succumbed in a second!!!! …my addicted self like a caged animal snarling and biting at the unforgiving bars to my fix..i didn’t know at that time how lucky I was that she would be so strong  in her avoidance …she never gave me a jot of hope that she would relent…..and I would suffer many long months  in this state relying on scraps of hope and the lifeblood of meetings as well as calls to SlAA friends…after a year the pain seemed to ease a little and my higher power led me to the H.O.W programme and a sponsor ….and recovery began in earnest 8 months ago …..the withdrawal however is still going on and the pain was intense earlier today for several minutes ..but now I use the tools of the programme ..it gets better …always better ……but there are no quick fixes for love addiction.