Being loved and feeling lovable is essential to mental health. Recovery is really about learning to love oneself, and in that learning how to maturely love other people. Loving the self precedes learning how to love another. Most people only can love another when the other is being nice or making the other feel good. Often I say to myself, I love my partner in spite of himself.
Relationships are really a call to love.
The trouble is that we don't really know how to love ourselves unconditionally so we can't do it for others. I would not call a person a love addict until he or she has become a adult, at age 18. My answer is anecdotal. My experience is that there are more suicides over relationships in love addicts. Relapse is about going back to the fantasy in the face of another person showing flaws.