Limerence (Mad Love) Phase 1: Self-Regulation
Lack of emotional support will leave you susceptible to Cupid’s arrow
Hey! If you haven’t read the intro to this series yet, you’ll want to read it first: Limerence (Mad Love): Intro
A limerent episode really starts long before you meet the person you are going to fall for, especially if you had a difficult childhood or were deprived of a proper home life and family. Unmet childhood needs create hollow spaces in our psyche that we fill with fantasies of romantic love. We use these fantasies and narratives that we tell ourselves to self-soothe and to ward off uncomfortable feelings. When I was growing up and feeling lonely, I would hug a pillow and think about the girl I liked. I was only 7 years old when I first became limerent for someone and that crush lasted all the way from the beginning of 2nd grade to the end of 6th grade. Sometimes, I would just stare at her in class or during recesses. Even at 7 years old, I was already fantasizing about being with someone, even though she didn’t like me in that way. I’ve carried that coping mechanism with me into adulthood, having to meet my own emotional needs through fantasizing that someone could love me in the future. These types of behaviors temporarily soothe the yearning and help us feel less lost in the short-term, but hurt us in the long run. Unmet childhood needs and childhood trauma create in us hunger for attachment that can make us impatient when it comes to fostering real, authentic love. Instead, we attach to the idea we have of people, often people who we don’t really know or who are unavailable, either because they are in relationships already or because they are emotionally unavailable. Limerence is a mechanism that some of us have learned to use in order to self-regulate because we had parents who were stressed, volatile, absent or who did not know how to regulate in a healthy way themselves.
How limerence can be used to self-regulate:
You feel inadequate or lonely in the present due to unmet childhood needs and attachment wounds and feel stuck, wondering if you’re destined to live with this longing forever, never being able to secure true love and fulfillment, thus you feel alone and never fully understood.
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You imagine being in a relationship with someone whom you subconsciously hope can heal you and in this fantasy, you finally feel good about yourself and your life and have a safe place to express yourself. You have a hope of feeling more whole.
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You fixate on this vision to relieve the anxiety of perpetually feeling lost.
Alternatively if you are dating someone and in a relationship:
You have psychological needs that are not being met by your significant other.
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You create unrealistic expectations for them to meet your psychological needs.
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You romanticize your relationship and try to bridge the gap between your fantasy and the reality of the relationship by pulling any levers you can to change the situation.
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You have hope and the illusion of control, but ultimately get hit with disappointment:
Underlying these thought patterns is a core belief that you’re not good enough and that you’re vulnerable which causes you to settle for the fantasy of future love, instead of the difficulty and messiness of an actual relationship with true, real-time intimacy, where you honestly share exactly how you are experiencing the relationship with each other in the present.
People who grew up in a chaotic or unsafe environments prefer fantasies where they have a sense of stability and control. This behavior was adaptive in childhood, but is maladaptive in adulthood, because in adulthood, it becomes necessary to take control of our lives and move forward independently. We’ve been conditioned to feel unsafe bringing our true self before others and into relationships, because we’ve never been loved for who we are, only for what we could offer people. Maybe you have a mom who tells you that people won’t like you because you’re too chubby or because of some other flaw. This amplifies insecurity and reinforces the belief that people won’t love you for you, but only if you conform to conventional standards of beauty. This forges an even deeper subsconscious psychological need that you soothe by dreaming that some prince charming will come along and always love you and accept you exactly how you are. In this fantasy world, you have created a safe and happy place because you weren’t able to control the harmful things people around you were saying or doing.
If you continue to do this in adulthood though, you neglect your real need for authentic intimacy and companionship due to unrealistic expectations of yourself and of others. Unrealistic expectations lead to unmet needs and eventually, things reach a breaking point where you are forced to meet these needs in unhealthy ways. For instance, you might have sex with people who you shouldn’t have a sexual relationship with, because you hope that sex might translate to feeling desirable and good about yourself, but it won’t, because you’re not really trying to get sexual needs met, but rather self-esteem and authentic intimacy needs. The most likely way you’re going to get those needs met is by first going through a healing journey, not by Tinder flings or even marrying someone of high value.
In the intro, I mentioned how a very common onset of limerence happens when a woman really falls for a guy after a sexual encounter. Maybe he’s a friend from class or maybe she met him through an app or at a bar. After a while, things don’t work out for whatever reason, but he still hits her up every now and then, mostly for sex. She thinks about him all year, hoping that if she can just give him better sex or devise some other strategy, then he’ll fall in love with her. She fantasizes about the moment that he finally realizes that “she’s the one”, despite no evidence that will ever happen. In this sense, she’s in a shallow relationship but living in a fantasy relationship in her head. She desires real intimacy, but she’s reserved herself for someone who only uses her for convenient sex or convenient friendship or as a backup plan. Here’s a real life story of that playing out:
‘How Do I Get Over Coming in Second Place?’ — Ask Polly
Why Do Nice People Choose the Wrong People to Date? | The Perks of Being a Wallflower
True. “We accept the love we think we deserve,” but when do we develop our sense of self-worth? In childhood. When does the limerence really start? It starts in moments in childhood where we don’t feel valued for who we truly are and when our emotional needs are not met. In episode 2 of the Defining Moments, we see how having an absent father and longing for an emotionally supportive mother led anon into falling in limerence for his calculus professor who was supportive in a way that his mother never was.
Who we presume to be our perfect partner is often someone who we see one of our parents in — usually the one of the opposite sex. At a subconscious level, we are trying to re-enact our failed relationships and interactions with our parents, hoping for a more successful outcome in our adulthood. Our parents, usually unintentionally, inflict emotional wounds on us and it’s these wounds that we are trying to heal, even if we don’t realize it. We move from one failed relationship to another, hoping for a better outcome. Since I have discovered limerence, I have met and talked with a few others who suffer from the same condition. Most of them had a parent who was narcissistic, abusive, or absent and that is paying dividends in their adulthood. When you are not healthy, limerent fantasies start to become real, because it is too painful to believe that they are not real.
Will’s Father Walks Out — Fresh Prince of Bel Air
Notice how Will copes in this moment by crystallizing a vision of his future. He says that one day, he will get married and love his kids in a way he never was loved. Later in life, people like this try to rewrite their past and redeem their lives by having life play out as it does in the idealized visions they hold onto in their minds and souls. What happens to people like this when they can’t “marry a beautiful hunny” or when they can’t “have a whole bunch of kids”, or when they can’t “be a better father than he ever was”? They have a crisis. For me, my goal in life was to love my wife as much as possible and to let my kids know how much I love their mother. Over the past two years though, I finally confronted the reality that what I wanted for my life would never happen. Now, I’m consciously wrestling with this fork in the road: stay in my fantasy world to self-regulate or seek out relationships in which I can engage in more co-regulation. Most of the time, I believe that limerence is all I’ll ever have.
Becoming disillusioned with reality, we might settle for limerence as a coping mechanism, essentially giving ourselves love and memories of being loved through a relationship that never really existed or perhaps used to exist. By doing this, we’re holding onto the idea that it will be external circumstances that will fix our lives, rather than taking responsibility of surrendering to deep internal healing, which is necessarily very painful. The cold reality is that we might never be loved for who we are, but if we never show up with who we really are, naked and vulnerable, it will be impossible to ever find people who will love us. Romantic fixation is often a replacement for true connection & intimacy. We are afraid to show our true selves, because we are afraid of losing control and we are deeply afraid of having our real selves rejected.
In our fear, we put out a different version of ourselves when interacting with our LO (limerent object) and then overcompensate for the intimacy gap by seeking approval and validation, instead of presenting our authentic self, which would mean being completely honest with how we really feel and why we’re doing what we’re doing.
We are more likely to do this when we are feeling lonely or when life is not going well. In the movie Passengers, Jim Preston becomes limerent for Aurora Lane immediately after almost committing suicide due to loneliness, purposelessness, hopelessness and despair. Hope for him takes the form of a woman that he doesn’t even know. He falls in love with her through her writing and video recordings.
In this scene, Jim and Aurora are trying to see if they can tell what people are like just by looking at them and reading their job title. Aurora says that she likes one of the women and that they would be friends if she were awake. Jim asks her if she can really tell that they’re compatible just by looking at her. Aurora asks Jim, “Don’t you think that’s true?”. He looks at her and says, “I do,” because he was right about her and how much he would love her. Sometimes we are right about people we are limerent for and sometimes we are wrong. When we are right, our limerence may last for a couple of years. When we are wrong though, this will shortcut us to Phase 5: Deterioration, where we are confronted with the truth that either the person is not who we made them out to be or the relationship dynamics are not what we wanted them to be. If Jim never woke Aurora up though, he never would have known what she was actually was like. In most cases of limerence, the limerence is allowed to persist because we never actually get to be in a relationship with the person or the relationship is so short and shallow that we never see the ugly sides and the messy sides of the relationship. It often isn’t until you live with someone for a couple of years AND go through hard times that you know more of who someone actually is. Until then, there is usually enough ambiguity to uphold an idealized version of who they are. Letting go of that idealized version would mean letting go of your hopes which your mind will fight against. You’ll continue to use the idea of that person and what your relationship could be to self-regulate.
For a whole year, Jim is too afraid to tell Aurora the truth — that he was the one who woke her up. Way too many people do this (obscure the full truth). In our insecurity, we are tempted to only present our best selves and true intentions until after we have the security of marriage. When we do this, then it’s no longer love, it’s about us trying to fit that person into the particular shape of our needs and desires. Most of this happens on the subconscious level, so we might not even be aware that this is what we’re doing, deceiving ourselves into believing that passion is a substitute for real love. If we’re not careful, our hopes can consume us and turn into disappointment or potentially even despair. This inner child, longing for love and acceptance, is the real you that will be groveling at her feet as she’s on the way out the door in Phase 4: Despair.
The other feeling that limerence is used to regulate, other than loneliness, is toxic shame. In Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, Éponine grows up with abusive parents who swindle people and only value them for money. She watches them abuse Cosette and her brother unless they do an excessive amount of dirty work and is taught that they suffer because they’re not “good children”. Éponine learns that love and security are dependent on being the right kind of person. She doesn’t have a model for being loved for who she is. Later, her parents go bankrupt and make her do degrading work for money. They are living in poverty and the malnourishment, excessive drinking and stress cause her to lose her beauty. Unlike in the movie and musical, in the novel, she’s emaciated, ugly, mentally ill and her voice is hoarse. When she meets Marius, she’s ashamed of her appearance and of her moral character, as she has to be an accomplice in her parents’ schemes and it’s implied that she also was pimped out by her father for money. She believes that Marius won’t accept her as she is, because she’s been conditioned to believe that she’s only as good as her utility. The truth is that she is right. He is creeped out by her, and would never be attracted to her, but at least he pities her and remembers her name. Her life, which was devoid of affection or compassion, latched onto Marius as a coping mechanism to combat the crushing weight of her shameful existence. The comforting daydream of Marius’ affection became the lone flickering candle in the desolation of her world. From then on, her preferred world, only lived in her mind, revolved around this fantasy “forever” relationship with Marius. On My Own is even more powerful when you realize that she was experiencing mental illness.
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The fantasies she sang of were very real to her in those moments. After she took a bullet for Marius and gave him the whereabouts of Cosette, her last words were, “And then, do you know, Monsieur, I believe I was a little in love with you.” Shame, like loneliness, is an uncomfortable feeling and limerence has the power to alleviate it temporarily. We spin up a narrative that goes something like this: “If he loves me, then I must be worthy of love.”
“She wants to know if I love her, that’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close