Limerence (Mad Love): Intro
What can cause people to go more mad than love?
Welcome to my series on limerence! I asked my best friend Johnny what he would be interested in having me write about and limerence was the first thing that came to mind. r/limerence is one of the fastest growing subreddits and just hit top 3% of largest subreddits last week! So what is limerence?
Limerence is a term introduced in Dorothy Tennov’s pioneering work Love and Limerence, written in the 1970s where she defines limerence as “an involuntary, inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a person involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors ranging from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation”. Even though we all conceptually understand this phenomenon, very few people have heard of the term limerence, fewer understand the full range of what it includes, and even fewer have experienced a full-blown limerent episode themselves.
“Limerence is characterized by intrusive thinking and pronounced sensitivity to external events that reflect the disposition of the limerent object (LO) towards the individual. It can be experienced as intense joy or as extreme despair, depending on whether the feelings are reciprocated. It is the state of being completely carried away by unreasoned passion or love, even to the point of addictive-type behavior. Usually, one is inspired with an intense passion or admiration for someone. Limerence can be difficult to understand for those who have never experienced it, and it is thus often dismissed by non-limerents as ridiculous fantasy or a construct of romantic fiction.”
What distinguishes limerence from romantic love or an adolescent crush? In my experience, limerence has been an inescapable state of adoration, hope, anxiety, despair, passion, love, compulsion, inspiration, obsession, confusion and delusion that revolves around one person. I’ve broken down limerent episodes (LEs) into 7 phases that I think are important to understand:
Phase 1: Self-regulation
Phase 2: Infatuation
Phase 3: Crystallization
Phase 4: Despair
Phase 5: Deterioration
Phase 6: Aftermath
Phase 7: Healing
Virtually everyone has experienced limerence to some extent, but the range of intensity varies from mild to extreme to debilitating to downright scary.
Some signs that you are experiencing limerence:
- You intensely fixate on whether your feelings are reciprocated and have anxiety about whether they will love you in the future
- You are obsessively preoccupied with their posts and everything reminds you of this person
- You think about what they would say or do if they were with you wherever you currently are or in various hypothetical situations
- You want to send them every funny meme, video or thing you think they’d like
- Their interests become your interests
- Every song lyric ties back to them in a way you feel is significant
- You admire them to an extent that is unwarranted
- You long to spend every waking moment with them
- You replay the past interactions you’ve had in your head long after they’ve happened
- You lack clarity into who they really are
- You fantasize about a path to getting them to love you as much as you love them
- You feel whole, complete, and adequate in your fantasies but not in real life
- You think this person is more special than anyone else and you exaggerate their positive qualities and your perceived compatibility by overlooking their negative qualities and your incompatibilities
- You are unwilling to integrate new information into your idea of who they are if it goes against who you want them to be
- You are starting to believe in metaphysical forces bringing you together (e.g. using “soulmate” / “fate” / “meant to be” language)
- You are nervous and self-conscious any time this person is around
- You find it difficult to be yourself when interacting with them and hope that they would like you “if they really knew you”
- You are consciously or subconsciously terrified of an explicit rejection
- You find it very difficult to have the same feelings for anyone else and always compare people to them
- You regularly dream about them
- Your romantic fixation serves as a replacement for true connection & intimacy and you prefer your fantasies over being fully present with yourself and others
- Your feelings become even more intense when obstacles prevent you from being together or when they start pulling away
- When the relationship is not working out, it shakes the core of your self-esteem and self-perception
- You continue to be hope that you could be together one day despite very little evidence that they care about you OR you’ve accepted that you’ll never be with them and spend your days bemoaning that OR if you are in an intimate relationship with this person, you allow them to treat you poorly and see this person and your relationship with rose-colored glasses
Most people don’t know how radically different limerence is from a typical love sickness because the media often frames limerent episodes as “real romantic love” (e.g. The Notebook) and because there are nuances to how we each experience love. Here is a comparison of Myers Briggs type representation in limerent populations vs. their representation in the general population:
https://neurosparkle.com/infatuation-mbti/
As you can see from the bar graph, certain MBTIs are way overrepresented when it comes to limerence.
Out of the 16 types, INFPs, INFJs, INTJs, INTPs and ENFPs are the most likely to experience intense limerence.
There also is a positive correlation with the anxious attachment style and with childhood trauma or neglect. Another leading indicator of limerence is loneliness. Low serotonin levels will make the obsessive-compulsive element of limerence worse. All of these factors combined would create a perfect storm for a soul-crushing limerent episode (LE).
People tend to think that when someone says, “I have a crush on this girl” or “I have a crush on this boy” or “I’m in love with him” that they probably feel similarly to how you would in the same situation, but in reality, there is a wide range of how people experience crushes and romantic love for flings, unrequited love and committed relationships. Even though we’re using the same language, we actually mean different things because our experience is always relative to our prior experiences. For instance, “Thinking about someone all of the time” might mean 3 hours a day for you, but for others, “thinking about someone all of the time” can mean 14 hours a day for years in a row. Even the word “love” can mean very different things depending on someone’s family of origin and culture. If you read the posts on r/limerence, you’ll see that people who experience limerence desperately want connection, but find it hard to connect vulnerably with people who do not experience limerence due to its extreme and embarrassing nature and because most of the population can’t exactly relate.
Limerence is not simply love sickness or puppy love. Limerence is one of the leading causes of wrecked marriages, unwanted pregnancies, crazy behavior, stalking, suicides, murders and carries comorbidity with anxiety, depression and mental illness. It can lead to toxic relationships, get you entangled with narcissistic people, make you question your religion/switch your religion, make you question your marriage, or make you betray your family. It causes much pain for both limerent sufferers and their romantic interests. Since I became aware of this condition in early 2022, I’ve seen it play out for people who I personally know. A young guy I knew from church started to harass a girl at our church and followed her one time. Another person from church started claiming that a guy who I met a couple of times was her husband publicly on Facebook even though he was engaged to someone else and she showed up at his work. He had to get a restraining order. Limerence is no joke.
You can listen to a similar story in episode 2 of Defining Moments. Anonymous has been obsessed with his former calculus professor for 8 years, checking her social media for updates ~every hour, desperate for any form of connection. No matter how pathetic his attempts are and despite how incompatible they are or how negative her sentiment towards him, his dream is to be able to see her one last time before he dies. She even warned him that she would contact the police if he ever contacted her again.
This is how insane limerence can make you. Limerents have an intense admiration for their limerent object, almost to the point of deifying them. It isn’t until Phase 5: Deterioration that this “halo effect” wears off.
In chapter 3 of “Unrequited” by Lisa A Phillips, Lisa goes over how unrequited limerence can turn people who are otherwise normal, rational people into lunatics, narcissists, masochists and stalkers:
Amanda Trenfield wrote a memoir called, “When A Soulmate Says No” after leaving her husband of 14 years (they also had kids), after seeing this guy just one time at a dinner party. She became convinced that he was her soulmate from one brief interaction and believes that this random guy was her soulmate even years later: https://www.amandatrenfield.com/soulmate. What she feels to be true is delulu. Limerence is why people say, “love is blind.”
Even though limerence has destroyed lives, limerence is also responsible for some of the greatest works of all time, such as The Divine Comedy, The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina and The Notebook — just kidding w/ the Notebook, even though I love The Notebook. We love artwork like this, because some of the best human experiences come from irrational, transcendent love. My friend’s now-boyfriend told her that she was his soulmate after just 1 encounter. Limerence does an excellent job of bringing people together, but it has a very low success rate of keeping people together, especially in this new era of widely available contraception and transactional relationships. We’ll explore why limerence fails to keep couples together later in this series. Speaking of which, after I started studying limerence in early 2022, I started coming across a lot of “soulmate” language. I myself experienced this phenomenon briefly for the first time at the end of 2021. It’s this high that you get that makes you believe that you’re meant to be together.
There are 3 categories of limerence:
Unrequited limerence:
Timmy Turner getting rejected by Trixie Tang
One-sided limerence:
Mutual limerence
Limerence is a state of mind and body and soul. One common sign of limerence is that the person is usually enraptured BEFORE significant lived experience with the object of affection. This then can branch out into many different forms depending on how things play out from there. Here are examples in media or literature:
Unrequited limerence for someone who you are/were close friends with:
Éponine for Marius, Levin for Kitty, Severus for Lily!, Jorah for Daenerys, Jim for Pam, Jacob for Bella, Forrest for Jenny
Unrequited limerence for someone who was significant to you:
Fiona Frost for Loid Forger**, Hinata for Naruto**
Unrequited limerence for someone who doesn’t care about you:
George for Meredith, Bowser for Peach, Sakura for Sasuke, Timmy Turner for Trixie Tang
Limerence for someone who you don’t even know (extreme love-at-first-sight):
Wall-E for Eve*, Ariel for Eric*, Orpheus for Eurydice*
Limerence for someone who you’ve just met or have a vague idea of:
Anna for Hans**, Tom for Summer**, Megamind (and Hal) for Roxanne Ritchi, Anakin for Padme*, Rose for Jack**, Jim Preston for Aurora Lane
Mutual limerence:
Romeo and Juliet*, Anna Karenina and Vronsky*, Edward and Bella, Cosette and Marius*, Doc Brown and Clara Clayton*
One-way limerence within a relationship:
Rue for Jules, Tom for Summer**, Anakin for Padme* (though eventually reciprocated)
Limerence for an ex:
James Gatz for Daisy**, Joel for Clementine**, Rick Blaine for Ilsa Lund, and Noah Calhoun for Allie*, Ted Mosby for Robin, Tom for Summer**
Limerence + Cluster-B:
Phantom of the Opera, Joe Goldberg, Anakin Skywalker, Minister Frollo
Limerence for someone who you hooked up/had a fling with:
Julie for David (Vanilla Sky)
Limerence + psychopathy:
Obsessed (2009) ← has Beyoncé!!, Damon for Katherine
* = love/limerence at first sight
** = love/limerence after 1 or more meaningful encounters
Notice how some characters were more susceptible to limerence due to being lonely or because of childhood trauma. As you can see from the list above, limerence can exist in many different contexts, because it is more about the state of mind of the limerent sufferer than it is about the actual reality of the situation. One of my best friends met this woman through a dating app and after a couple of dates, she already was using “When we get married…”/ “When we have kids…” language. That’s limerence. It causes people to lose track of where they are in the relationship and what to expect from it. People become grounded in their anxiety and hopes and dreams and extrapolations more than the present reality.
Even within a long-term relationship, one person can be in a limerent state where they are dreaming of a future with their partner and idealizing them, while everyone else around them can tell that their partner is not as committed as the limerent sufferer hopes for. In episode 1 of Defining Moments, Angel shares how he has been thinking about his ex somewhat nonstop for 12 years. He still dreams about his ex every night, bar one condition: he smokes weed that day. Every once in a while, he elects not to smoke, so that he can see her again in his dreams. Hear him elaborate at 1:09:11:
If your love isn’t crazy, is it really love? The best parts of humanity seem totally irrational.
One reason why limerence and love are often confused is because the same genes are activated in both and there is a lot of overlap between the two. When we fall in love with someone, they activate dormant parts of us. Epigenetics is the study of how our environment and behaviors change our gene expression. One example to understand epigenetics is the phenomenon of the phantom pregnancy. When women really want to get pregnant and believe that they are pregnant, they may exhibit the same signs of an actual pregnancy. Just believing you are pregnant will make you gain weight, grow a belly, produce breast milk and have labor contractions. This is the power of belief. It literally changes who you are. Limerence is like a phantom pregnancy in that the power of belief releases all of the chemicals that you normally associate with passionate love whether there is a reciprocal relationship or not. This is especially problematic when the person undergoing the change is immature or unhealthy. In a phantom pregnancy, a mother becomes attached to a baby that does not exist. In limerence, you become hopelessly attached to a phantom relationship. Limerent sufferers want a relationship with their LO so badly that the genes that are normally turned on during dating, courtship, sex, marriage, and divorce are experienced by the limerent sufferer without the actual reality of the relationship. Many people who suffer from limerence get stuck in a cycle where their beliefs cause the release of love chemicals, which then create “feelings” which reinforce the beliefs, resulting in a limbo that can last for many years.
While a non-existent relationship serves as a good example to show the true mechanism driving limerence, limerence is more often mixed in with an actual relationship. A very common occurrence is when a woman really falls for a guy after a sexual encounter, maybe he’s a friend 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. This will go on for a long time and she’ll fantasize about the moment that he finally realizes that “she’s the one”, despite no signs that will ever happen. In this sense, she’s still living in a “phantom relationship”. She desires real intimacy, but she’s reserved herself for someone who only uses her for convenient sex.
Pros of limerence:
- Increases our capacity to comprehend how beautiful a soul can be
- Can motivate us to reach our potential or create art
- Inspires us to believe in something outside of ourselves
- Teaches us new things because the interests of our love become our interests
- Can elicit euphoria upon reciprocation
Cons of limerence:
- Makes 1 person way more important than they should be which means you won’t be as responsible with your life, taking care of yourself, or helping other people
- Makes focusing on work and moving forward in life extremely difficult
- Makes you depressed upon rejection
- Gives you anxiety, insecurity, and low self-esteem
- Creates unrealistic expectations and disappointment
- Distorts perception of reality
Typical duration:
18–36 months if you reach crystallization, but can last much longer, even a lifetime
For Jacob, it was 7 years (14 actually if you know the story). In fact, the nation of Israel itself began due to a bout of limerence:
So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her. — Genesis 29:20
Dante was limerent for Beatrice for his entire life and used his limerence for Beatrice to write The Divine Comedy:
https://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/the-unrequited-love-of-dante-and-beatrice
Those who fully surrender themselves to the powerful grip of limerence spend their entire lives believing, “There’s nobody else for me and I don’t want anybody else.”
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