Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have had a crush. And for most of us, let’s face it, it probably sucked: wanting someone you couldn’t have, or maybe couldn’t even work up the courage to talk to; thinking about them all the time; wishing, just wishing, that they would realize how perfect you were for each other.
It’s upsetting. It’s distressing. Sometimes it’s literally painful.
But eventually, most of us got over it – those crushes either resolved into healthy relationships, or else fizzled out into anxiety over finals. It all worked out.
So here’s a question: what happens when it doesn’t?
Limerence: not love, but something like it
It was in the mid-1960s that Dorothy Tennov, then a newly minted Professor of Psychology at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, had her moment of realization. Over the course of three weeks, she had seen multiple students admit to losing themselves to seemingly romantic obsession: unable to concentrate on work or study, sometimes struggling to even get out of bed, these young people were overcome with intrusive thoughts of a love interest who wanted nothing to do with them.
Of course, unrequited love is nothing new. But Tennov saw something important in her tortured students’ stories: “After Marilyn left, I sat in my office for a long time, just thinking,” she recalled in her seminal Love And Limerence: The Experience Of Being In Love. “I turned over in my mind the prospect of conducting research myself on the subject of romantic love.”
“It was an exciting idea,” she wrote. “The subject was both unexplored and important.”
Ultimately, more than 500 people agreed to be interviewed about their experience of love, and falling into it – and all seemed to follow the same patterns.
“So many people who differed greatly from each other described such similar subjective states, that I was more and more inclined [to conclude] that the state of being in love could happen to anyone regardless of other aspects of their situations or personalities,” Tennov recalled.
It took a chance conversation with a long-time friend to convince her she was wrong.
“This person whom I had known for many years and with whom I had had many conversations on topics of common interest, had never experienced a reaction that resembled what I had been describing,” Tennov explained. “She said that she had always found puzzling what appeared to her as extravagant exaggeration in the media portrayal of romantic love.”
It was a revelation. Her friend had been married twice, enjoyed an active sex life, and was a mother to several children. She clearly felt love, and friendship, and affection – but the complex emotional rollercoaster of “falling in love”? “Describing [that],” Tennov wrote, “was like trying to describe the color red to one blind from birth.”
In fact, now that she was aware of the possibility that some people never felt the experience she had been researching, Tennov started finding more and more interviewees who said the same.
“That they had not [appeared] before was the joint result of my having been blinded by my expectations and the problem of terminology,” she admitted. Tennov had been asking about love – but “[n]ever having fallen in love is not at all a matter of not loving, if loving is defined as caring” she discovered. “Furthermore, this state of ‘being in love’ included feelings that do not properly fit with love defined as concern.”
What was needed was a new, more exact term: a word that could describe being “in love”, but not necessarily love itself. The part of romance before the “happily ever after” – the obsessive, mystical, butterflies-in-your-stomach part that’s more than a crush, but less than capital-L Love.
And so, Tennov wrote, “I coined the word ‘limerence’.”
To be in limerence
When limerence hits you, it’s often subtle.
Perhaps a new person enters your orbit – someone with a magnetic smile you can’t stop thinking about after they’re gone. It could be the opposite: a teacher or colleague whom you suddenly realize means more to you, maybe has done for a long time already, than you previously thought.
Or perhaps you get the true fairytale experience, your eyes meeting across a crowded room, a spark of chemistry jumping from one to the other as you find your way together.
“The beginning [of limerence] is a transformation that is sometimes so distinct that the French use the term coup de foudre, or thunderbolt,” Tennov wrote. “[It is] the beginning of a state of consciousness that, if experienced for the first time, is utterly unlike anything else that has ever happened.”
At this point, it’s pretty indistinguishable from what many people would term “falling in love”: there’s an attraction; a level of obsession; idealization; the overwhelming wish for it all to be reciprocated.
But with limerence, these feelings don’t develop in a healthy way. Rather than growing into a secure attachment, or fading with time, as love would, limerence lingers: “it remains suspended in uncertainty, sustained by hope and doubt,” explained Orly Miller, a psychologist and author of Limerence: The Psychopathology of Loving Too Much, in a Psychology Today article last week. “[Mean]while the individual becomes increasingly consumed by obsessive thoughts and emotional dependency.”
For those in the thrall of the experience, limerence can be far more than just a preoccupation. Tennov suggested – and many more modern experts have come to agree – that the feeling is akin to conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, depression, substance abuse disorders, or trauma responses.
In other words: it’s a genuinely troubling experience that interferes with your everyday life and stops you from forming and maintaining healthy relationships with others.
“Limerence is not defined by butterflies, infatuation, or the excitement of falling in love,” Miller pointed out. “It is characterized by persistent intrusive thoughts, emotional volatility, significant distress, and disruption to important areas of functioning.”
“These are […] features that warrant clinical attention.”
Releasing the butterflies
For those who have never experienced limerence – or, perhaps, have, but not to such an extreme degree – all this might sound rather dramatic. Love, and falling in love, are just parts of being human, you may argue – not worthy of being pathologized in a doctor’s office.
So too is the act of, let’s say, checking up on people, even very regularly, without their knowledge or consent – behavior that might have set off alarm bells for stalking just 30 years ago, but now is as easy as tapping the Instagram icon on your phone. It’s normal.
It’s an attitude that’s likely familiar to those who have sought help for limerent feelings. “[Some have] told me that when they sought professional help, their therapist had never heard of limerence and advised them to ‘just let go’ or ‘focus on something else’,” recalled Miller. “While these suggestions are well intentioned, they are rarely helpful.”
“Just as someone with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder cannot simply stop having intrusive thoughts, people experiencing limerence cannot simply decide to stop thinking about the person they are obsessing over,” she wrote. “If they could, believe me, they would.”
But there is good news. If limerence truly does share characteristics with better-known conditions such as OCD or anxiety, then – theoretically, at least – it should respond to some of the same therapies. And the first spots of evidence seem to be bearing that out.
In 2021, a case study reported positive results from cognitive behavioral therapy on a patient’s limerence. Just last year, a team of UK psychologists developed a questionnaire designed to help diagnose it. It may be slow, but things are changing.
Until then, there are a handful of strategies that might help a limerent person let go.
The hardest but most effective strategy is probably to cut off all contact entirely with the object of your desire, Tom Bellamy, a neuroscientist at the University of Nottingham, told the New York Times last month – to just remove the intermittent pleasure signals that we might get from the drops of attention sent our way.
It’s like going cold turkey off a drug or other addiction: difficult as hell, but quicker and potentially more effective than any other solution.
Mindfulness is also valuable, he suggested: trying to notice and label liminal compulsions as and when they arise, rather than just accepting and acting upon them. If you’re aware of them, you can maybe even begin to resist them. Just naming the feeling out loud – a “hello, limerence” whenever it hits – might be enough to jolt you out of it.
Most of all, be kind to yourself. The person you’re obsessing over? They’re not perfect – and if you try, you can probably list off a few of their flaws that prove it. They may well not be compatible with you. And that’s okay – just as they’re not perfect, neither are you somehow deficient or unworthy of love.
“Whether limerence is eventually recognized as a distinct mental health condition will ultimately be determined by further research,” wrote Miller. “What should not be overlooked, however, is the reality of the suffering experienced by those living with it.”
“Greater awareness of limerence is […] not about diminishing the richness of romantic love,” she concluded, “but ensuring that those whose lives have become consumed by obsessive longing are understood, supported, and offered appropriate care.”
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