When I was growing up and feeling lonely, I would sometimes hug a pillow and pretend it was my crush to feel comfort. When I became an adult, I stopped doing this, but my limerent tendencies remained. People who use limerence to feel better about their lives and themselves are effectively “pretending” in order to feel a sense of safety. Limerence isn’t really about our crushes. It’s about the ache of feeling unseen and misunderstood. For those of us prone to limerence, the crush becomes a stand-in for the warmth, safety, and connection we never fully received. Some people who didn’t get consistent love and attunement in childhood learn to soothe with fantasy. These daydreams offer the illusion of safety and connection when reality feels empty. The trouble is, if we don’t learn healthier ways to cope, those childhood fantasies become limerence in adulthood.

The Mirror of Erised shows the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts, and people go mad staring at it, unable to look away from the vision that makes them happy. In active limerence, a life with your LO (limerent object) is what you would see in that mirror. You imagine a future family with them, feeling warmth, security, and love reflected back. But just like with the Mirror of Erised, what you see isn’t real. It’s a projection. The dream is intoxicating because it soothes every wound, but the more you stare, the further you drift from reality…

Healing begins when you willfully let go of the fantasy and allow yourself to face the grief beneath it. That grief is the raw pain of unmet needs, the loneliness, and the longing that limerence was covering over. True healing means metabolizing that pain and emotional discomfort instead of numbing it with obsession. It takes courage to turn away from the illusion of what could be and face the truth of what is. In this phase, the work is about learning to hold yourself through grief. You must learn to cultivate the warmth, security, and love you once believed only others could provide.

Grieving What Never Was

There are really two kinds of grief we carry through life. The first is grieving what was—when something or someone we truly had is lost. The second is grieving what never was. It’s the sorrow of realizing that we didn’t get what we should have had in childhood: unconditional love, safety, and the sense of being deeply seen.

For most limerents, this second kind of grief is the hidden core. On the surface, it feels like you’re mourning the loss of a relationship, or the potential of one. But if you look closer, the pain runs deeper. You’re grieving the loss of an imagined life where you were chosen, safe, and cherished. The LO fills in the placeholder in your imagined “happy place”, playing the role of the person who finally makes up for what was missing all along.

This is why the grief feels so overwhelming when limerence ends. It’s not just about them—it’s about the collapse of a fantasy that carried the weight of your earliest wounds. Facing this kind of grief means letting yourself acknowledge that no one can rewrite the past. No one can give you the childhood you didn’t have. But what you can do now is give yourself the care, safety, and love that you’ve been chasing through fantasy.

Grieving what never was is tender work. You have to sit with feelings you may have avoided for years—loneliness, longing, anger, and shame. Instead of numbing them with fantasy which is your natural tendency, you will begin to feel them directly, but in doing so, you create a crucible for healing. Here are a few ways to approach this process:

1. Acknowledge the unmet need.

Say it out loud or write it down: “I should have had safety. I should have been loved without condition.” Naming the truth validates the child inside you who was overlooked.

2. Allow the emotions to surface.

Tears, sadness, or even rage may come up. Let them. This is grief doing its work. Suppressing it keeps you stuck; feeling it allows it to move through you.

3. Write to your younger self.

Tell your younger self what you never heard: “You are worthy. It wasn’t your fault. You deserve love.” This begins to re-parent the wounded parts of you.

4. Create ritual.

Grief needs shape. Light a candle, write a letter and burn it, or place a photo or object somewhere meaningful, etc.. Rituals mark the seriousness of what you’re letting yourself feel and helps create closure.

5. Seek safe witnesses.

Sometimes grief needs to be shared. Whether in therapy, with a trusted friend, or in a support group, being seen in your grief can be profoundly healing, especially when what you’re grieving is never having been seen or valued.

Grieving what never was doesn’t mean living in the past. It means letting go of the fantasy that someone else will arrive to repair what was missing and, instead, learning to offer yourself the love and care you once longed for. In making peace with what you didn’t receive, you create room for a present that is more grounded, authentic, and nourishing.

Your LO Isn’t As Special As You Think

Even after recognizing the fantasy, part of you still wants to believe your LO is different—that they really are the one, the missing piece who can finally make you whole. It feels impossible to let go of that belief because it’s tied to something much deeper than the person themselves.

That’s why, instead of asking, “How do I heal?” the limerent person asks, “How do I get him/her/them to love me?” or “How do I get him/her/them back?” These questions aren’t really about love… they’re coping strategies to avoid confronting the truth inside ourselves.

One of the hardest truths to accept in healing from limerence is this: it’s not really about how extraordinary your LO is. It feels that way—like they are the one person in the entire world who can make your life meaningful. But that feeling comes from you, not from them.

How do you know this? Think back to other times in your life when you were convinced someone else was “the one” or a “perfect match.” You felt the same rush, the same sense of destiny. And yet, those relationships either ended or never even began. What felt so unique at the time was actually a pattern repeating itself.

The truth is, if you had been born in a different city or at a different time, you would have projected those same feelings onto someone else. The passion, longing, and certainty don’t come from the LO—they come from your own psyche trying to soothe unmet needs. The LO is simply the canvas; you are the painter.

This doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t real. They are very real. But they are not proof that your LO is your soulmate. They are proof that you carry within you both a deep hunger for connection and the capacity to generate intensity and passion. Understanding this frees you from the illusion that your healing depends on getting that specific person.

What you are truly seeking is not them—it’s safety, love, and a sense of being chosen. And those things can never be permanently supplied by another person. They have to be cultivated within yourself.

Deep down, most limerents already know the truth: the LO isn’t really the answer, and the fantasy isn’t real. There’s a quiet awareness that what they’re clinging to is an illusion, but facing that truth feels unbearable. Letting go would mean sitting with the loneliness, emptiness, and unmet needs that the fantasy was protecting them from. And so the cycle continues because limerence offers temporary relief from deeper pain. To understand why it’s so hard to move on, we have to ask a more important question: what are people with limerence actually running from?

What Are People With Limerence Running From?

1. Unmet Emotional Needs

Limerence is a way of avoiding the ache of unmet needs for love, security, and validation. Instead of facing loneliness or self-doubt directly, the mind fixates on a fantasy person who seems to promise perfect safety, belonging, and recognition.

2. Vulnerability in Real Relationships

Actual relationships require negotiation, compromise, and rejection. Limerence provides the illusion of intimacy without real vulnerability. The other person is often kept at a distance or idealized, so the risk of disappointment is reduced and acute pain can be avoided.

3. The Pain of the Present

Limerence functions as an escape hatch from life circumstances: boredom, dissatisfaction with career, family problems, unhealthy relationships, low social status, or an amorphous sense of emptiness. The obsessive fantasy becomes a refuge from the pain of reality.

4. Unresolved Trauma or Inner Wounds

For most, limerence is a replay of childhood attachment wounds—longing for an unavailable or inconsistent caregiver. By fixating on someone who doesn’t fully reciprocate, the limerent person unconsciously repeats the pattern, while avoiding the deeper grief of what they lacked as children. As seen with Snape, trauma such as bullying can amplify the shame and feelings of inadequacy that fuel limerence.

5. Fear of the Self

Silence, stillness, or solitude is uncomfortable for a lot of limerents. Limerence fills that void with a cycle of obsession that keeps the limerent from confronting deeper questions of identity, purpose, self-worth, and psychological deficiencies.

Limerence is a coping mechanism of self-deception. It makes you believe that you are running toward love, connection, and purpose, while actually running from acute pain, self-discovery, and acceptance that no other person will ever complete you.

Thus, the healing begins when you stop running and allow yourself to feel the grief, loneliness, and shame undergirding the obsession. After grieving and letting go, you must learn to give yourself the care you believe only others can provide.

Limerence As “Person Addiction”

Limerence can be thought of as an addiction to a person where one specific individual becomes the key to unlocking everything, and thoughts of them become the only way to get your fix. Like any addiction, it hijacks the reward system, narrowing your world until all roads lead back to the same person. The “high” comes from fantasy, anticipation, and intermittent reinforcement, yet it leaves you emptier over time, because no real human being can live up to the intensity of the projection.

The way out of limerence isn’t just cutting off the “drug”—it’s broadening your sources of nourishment. When one person feels like your only lifeline, the pressure on that bond becomes unbearable. The healthier path is to progressively expand the domain of things that give you purpose and pleasure: friendships, creativity, learning, service, physical movement, spiritual practices, nature, play. By diversifying where you draw joy and meaning, you make your nervous system less dependent on a single outlet. Over time, the pull of limerence weakens, because your life has many wells to drink from, not just one.

Takeaway: Healing from limerence isn’t just about cutting ties with one person—it’s about building a life rich enough that no single source defines your worth or joy. The more you cultivate diverse wells of connection, meaning, and pleasure, the less power limerence has over you, and the more capacity you develop for real, grounded love.

Take Relationships Veryyyy Slow

One of the most common limerent urges is to sprint at the start of a relationship. When someone feels like “the one,” it’s easy to pedestal them and scramble to prove your worth before they slip away. That urgency comes from fear, not love. It’s the nervous system trying to secure safety by locking things down fast.

Love built in panic rarely lasts. When you rush, you don’t actually get to know the real person, you just cling to the fantasy version in your head. And when reality shows up, the disappointment can feel like betrayal.

The antidote is slowness. Let people reveal themselves over time. Watch how they treat you on boring Tuesdays, not just during fireworks moments. A healthy relationship doesn’t require you to audition for belonging—it grows step by step, with patience, reciprocity, and mutual choice.

Takeaway: If you feel the urge to speed up, that’s your cue to slow down. Lasting love isn’t secured quickly—it’s built steadily.

Limerence Is a “Religion” Revolving Around “LO”

One way to heal from limerence is to reclaim those “religion-like” functions by anchoring them in a higher purpose or spiritual practice, rather than in one flawed, imperfect person. This doesn’t have to mean formal religion (though it can). For some, it looks like daily meditation or prayer that brings certainty and calm where obsession once lived. For others, it’s volunteering or service work—pouring energy into causes that offer genuine meaning and connection. Creativity is also a spiritual discipline: writing, music, or art that transforms longing into beauty. And for many, time in nature—long hikes, gardening, or even mindful walks—reconnects them to something larger than themselves. By finding a purpose that transcends one individual, the same longing that fueled limerence can be rechanneled into a life of depth, service, and grounded joy.

Takeaway: Healing from limerence isn’t about suppressing desire. It’s about redirecting it toward something larger than one person. When you root your longing in purpose, service, creativity, or spirit, you don’t just weaken the grip of limerence, you discover a life wide enough to hold your hunger and rich enough to make you whole.

Learning to Choose the Right Person

You don’t actually choose who you’re attracted to. Attraction isn’t logical. In the beginning, you’re gonna find yourself drawn to people who light up whatever wound inside you needs to be dealt with. And until you face it, you’ll keep ending up in the same story over and over.

But once you start making the unconscious conscious, once you actually do the work and grow and heal, your type changes. Suddenly, the people who used to feel magnetic just… don’t. You stop chasing people just because they are beautiful or just because they remind you of your mom or your ex. You start noticing people who are actually good for you.

That’s the gift of failed relationships. They’re not wasted time, they’re learning opportunities. Every heartbreak can teach you what you shouldn’t put up with anymore from others and from yourself and what you actually need. And once you’ve worked through your own stuff, healed that inner kid who always felt unseen or unworthy, you stop being attracted to the same pain. You evolve, and so does your taste.

The #1 green flag is someone who clearly and consistently wants to be with you. Not someone who might once you become extraordinary. Not someone you have to decode. Someone who chooses you consistently even on boring days.

Untangling Limerence From Anxiety/Depression

It’s easy to blame all your sadness or restlessness on the crush who doesn’t text back, but often limerence is just borrowing fuel from deeper currents—baseline anxiety, shame, and depression. When early bonds are shaky, the nervous system goes hunting for outside regulators. For some people that means substances, for others it means toxic relationships, and for a lot of us it means fantasies about people. Limerence can feel like the fix, but really it’s your brain trying to soothe itself the only way it knows how.

That’s why healing isn’t just about abstaining from contact or fantasy. You also have to look at your whole mental health picture. If you’re carrying untreated anxiety or low-grade depression, limerence will be impossible to get over in the long-run. Getting support like therapy or medication (if it helps) helps untangle what’s limerence and what’s your baseline mood state.

And don’t underestimate the physical side either. I noticed that when my diet was garbage, or when I was barely moving my body, limerence got worse. Poor sleep, blood sugar swings, dehydration—these make your nervous system even more desperate for regulation, which means your brain will latch onto a person even harder. Physical health is the boring but crucial foundation that keeps limerence from running the show.

Takeaway: To heal limerence at the root, you can’t just focus on getting over the person. You need to assess your overall mental health, tend to anxiety and depression, and shore up your physical foundation. A calmer, steadier body and mind makes it a lot easier to see a crush for what they are: a fellow human being, not a savior.

Practical Tips for Healing Limerence

1. Use No Contact—but Pair It with Grief Work

Cutting off contact helps your brain reset, but it’s not enough on its own. What makes the change stick is grieving what the relationship meant to you without clinging to the story of “meant to be.” Reframe: “This mattered deeply, but it wasn’t destiny.”

2. Practice Reality-Testing

Catch yourself when you’re replaying “signs” or fantasies. Write down what actually happened versus what you imagined. This simple split helps you see when you’re in story mode instead of reality mode.

3. Meditate

Meditation won’t erase obsession, but it helps you regain control. With practice, you notice the spiral sooner and can redirect before it crashes into rumination. Even five minutes of breathwork a day builds this skill.

4. Normalize the Withdrawal

You’re not weird or broken—the craving, the cringe flashbacks, the blocking/unblocking cycle, they’re all part of the pattern. Reading or hearing others describe the same thing mitigates shame which is the main fuel for limerence.

5. Retrain Your Nervous System

Find new regulators: exercise, journaling, breathwork, creativity, or nature time. The more ways you have to soothe and recharge, the less one person feels like your only lifeline.

6. Broaden Sources of Joy and Meaning

Limerence narrows your focus to one person. Heal by expanding your life: deepen friendships, pursue creative projects, serve others, or learn something new. Multiple wells of purpose make obsession less sticky.

Professional Help

If you can afford it, this is one of the most powerful investments you can make.

• Attachment-informed therapy: Helps you trace how early bonding patterns play out in current relationships, and how to form secure ones as an adult.

• EMDR or somatic therapy: Useful for processing the body-level imprints of rejection, shame, or abandonment that fuel limerence.

• Group therapy or support spaces: These offer practice in truth-telling, being seen without performance, and repairing missteps—skills that translate directly into healthier intimacy.

Think of professional help not as “fixing what’s broken,” but as getting expert guidance on rewiring your nervous system and rewriting old relational scripts.

Sharing With Trusted Friends and Family

Limerence thrives in secrecy; shame loves the dark. Bringing trusted people into the loop breaks both patterns.

• Pick a safe circle: Choose friends or family who can listen without judgment and who won’t minimize your experience.

• Be specific: Instead of vague confessions (“I’m just obsessed”), share concrete examples (“I keep checking their social media 20 times a day and it makes me spiral”).

• Let them reality-check you: Ask them to gently challenge your interpretations when you start reading too much into crumbs or coincidences.

Three Pillars That Change Everything

1) Radical self-acceptance

Shame sits at the center of limerence. You believe that love will make you worthy of a happy life. The longer you chase, the more shame you will feel, and the more fantasy you need. Acceptance doesn’t mean “I’m perfect as I am.” It means “I have intrinsic worth independent of what people think.” Radical self-acceptance means owning that you are already enough, not because you’ve earned it, not because someone else validated it, but because worth isn’t conditional. From that place of peace, you’re free to choose relationships that are mutual and kind, instead of compulsively chasing the ones that keep you stuck.

2) Presence over potential

I used to live in future-tense: “When I get her, then I’ll start living my life.” Now I try to meet people and moments as they are. Everything that begins eventually ends: honeymoons, jobs, relationships. So practice being here. Enjoy cooking. Sit with your family without checking your phone. Take a walk without your phone and actually look up at your surroundings.

3) Letting go of the idealized life

I had to face the hardest truth: the story in my head isn’t the story I get to live. None of us do. The tighter you grip that imagined script—the perfect partner, the perfect arc—the more it slips through your fingers and leaves you miserable. So I stopped worshipping the fantasy and started chasing beauty itself. A line from a book that leaves me buzzing (the Watchmen graphic novel did that), a piece of music that cracks me open, a moment of kindness that makes the world feel less cruel. I let awe become my fuel. I study, I write, I pay attention. And in that shift, I’ve accepted something freeing: no single person will ever be the source of my meaning, and that’s okay, because meaning is everywhere if you’re willing to see it.

Questions to Ask Yourself

• What am I asking my LO to heal in me that predates them by decades?

• What part of me is terrified of living without this storyline?

• If I operated my life completely differently, what should change first?

• Which fears are really driving me (confronting myself, confronting my parents, dying alone, not being enough, giving up the dream, repeating my past)?

• If love is built, what habits would a loving life require today?

The Lies of Limerence

• “These feelings will last forever.” (Nothing does)

• “You complete me.” (You don’t need to be completed to be loved)

• “You’re all that matters.” (The world doesn’t revolve around any one person or even group of people)

• “I need closure to have peace.” (You need acceptance. Closure is optional)

Hope

Healing takes seasons, not days.
The goal is not to erase the past,
but to build a life strong enough
that old memories no longer sink us.

Grief is not weakness;
it is the passage to freedom.
Sensitivity is not the enemy;
it is a gift awaiting steadier hands.

No one person is the source of our meaning.
We drink from many wells—
friendship, creativity, service, spirit, nature.

We are not alone.
Others have walked this road of ache and return,
and their footprints remind us we can too.

We are worthy of love that is mutual, slow, and kind.
Fantasy may dazzle,
but reality is where healing takes root.

If we stumble, we rise again—
one honest, ordinary, human day at a time.

Share

Read the entire limerence series here:
https://danielyee.substack.com/s/limerence

Unlike love, which is built on a foundation of time, trust, and mutual understanding, limerence feeds on fantasy and uncertainty. Love is patient and grounded; limerence is urgent and all-consuming. Love sees a person clearly, flaws and all; limerence projects an idealized version onto someone, often ignoring who they actually are. It’s a psychological mirage and a story our brain spins to feel safe, chosen, and alive. It’s the irresistible illusion of perfect love that ultimately keeps us stuck, preventing us from living a meaningful, authentic life.

And yet, when you’re caught in the grip of limerence, it does not feel like a warning. It feels like destiny. It feels electric, overwhelming, and immune to reason. Your mind creates a story in which this connection is not just special, but the long-awaited answer to everything you have ever wanted. Every coincidence seems like a sign, and every challenge appears to be proof that the bond is rare and extraordinary. In truth, it is often not fate speaking, but rather the intoxication of possibility.

In my most recent extreme episode from 2020 to 2024, I spent between 6 and 17 hours a day lost in thoughts about a woman who barely knew me. At the peak of my mental illness, it was 15+ hours a day for practically every day for 2 years straight, from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep. She would be a background thread in my mind at all times, even at work. Imagine trying to write software while being consumed by thoughts of someone. It felt like a curse. I essentially “wasted” 15,000 hours of my life detached from reality. I was not enamored with the real person; I was trapped in a constructed dream that she was the only person I would ever feel that way about.

To be honest, she still crosses my mind every day, but now, it’s just in a way that is more grounded in reality where I recognize that I am just fond of certain aspects of her and recognize that she’s just a fellow human being trying to navigate this life. I simply hope she’s doing well, as one does for someone they care about.

This fixation is just a waste of life and emotional energy for most people, but when left unchecked, it becomes destructive and dangerous. It is the most common reason for affairs.

My husband was deep into limerence when he disclosed his affair six months ago. It was so painful. He told me she was his soul mate and how perfect she was for him. When I told him that he was free to leave and be with her permanently, he was ecstatic. Limerence blinded him; he didn’t consider the children he would abandon, the home he would lose, and the years we had spent building a life together. He found no fault with her during his limerence. Limerence and affair fog were by far the worst parts of the affair because they were so damaging to my psyche. – Jennifer

These men and women sometimes end up sticking with their new partners for many years, but usually, they just end up destroying their families and then realizing it was a big mistake a few months later, but the tragic part is that the gravity of limerence is so strong that it is nearly impossible to resist if the LO is also into you. On https://www.reddit.com/r/limerence/ you can read posts of people obsessively thinking about their co-workers for extended periods of time even though they themselves or their LOs are married. They are tortured and don’t know what to do. Everything they’ve built with their spouses over years instantly feels like it doesn’t even matter compared to some vague connection they recently formed at work.

In 2016, a man named Kevin James Loibl developed an obsessive parasocial fixation on singer Christina Grimmie, believing she was his soulmate and claiming he “saw God in her.” After consuming all of her online content, his obsession spiraled into delusion fueled by limerence. Today, this kind of fixation with celebrities and influencers is increasingly common. Social media amplifies limerent attachment because it provides the raw material that someone can use to construct their fantasy. Most influencers and celebrities, especially those who are attractive and charismatic, have followers who don’t just admire them—they become convinced they belong to them. After observing dozens of these cases, I’ve noticed a common thread: unresolved trauma, emotional neglect, and unfilled longing for intimacy and acceptance. For these people, life feels empty and meaningless without their LO—the one they will cherish forever and ever. The fantasy offers hope that reality could not afford them. Humans are naturally spiritual and we who experience limerence “deify'“ our LOs. We see something divine in them. We worship them. We would do anything for them.

Limerence is not exclusively formed in fantasy. It can bloom in brief, real relationships too. I’ve seen people fall into obsessive cycles after short flings or a few emotionally charged hookups. When the connection ends, they aren’t just heartbroken, they’re stuck in a state of limerent withdrawal, replaying every moment and clinging to the idea that the person they lost was “the one” or “the one that got away.” For most people, this just ends up being a lot of crying, writing posts/drunk texts, playing songs on repeat, staring at photos and gifts, plotting on how to get that person back, replaying memories for about a year and then they snap out of it, but for people who are psychologically inflexible, the desperation leads to breakdowns, stalking, and sometimes violence. In its most extreme forms, limerence can fuel murder-suicides. The projection causes them to get lost in their own little world, but in the back of their mind, they know it’s not real and feel stuck, so they off themselves. Some of these people are possessive and decide to take their LOs with them (as was the case with Christina Grimmie).

Extreme limerence is depressing and hopeless for anyone, but in rare cases, untreated limerence when coupled with mental illness, emotional instability, and delusional thinking becomes dangerous—not just to the sufferer, but to the object of their fixation (the LO).

Limerence often convinces the person that their feelings are fated or sacred. The LO becomes idealized, symbolic—something more than a flawed human being. The limerent person believes, “We were meant to be together,” or “No one else will ever love them like I do.” When that belief is challenged by rejection, distance, or indifference, it feels like a personal apocalypse. Usually the limerent sufferer is in denial that the relationship has ended (if there even was one to begin with).

For those with fragile self-esteem/underlying narcissism, rejection by their LO is ego annihilation. Their self-worth becomes so entangled with being loved back that when they’re denied, it triggers rage, humiliation, shame, despair and sometimes a violent desire to “reclaim” control. In this distorted mindset, harming the LO can feel like a way to end the unbearable emotional pain or protect the fantasy (e.g., “If I can’t have you, no one can”). Here are some examples out of hundreds online:

A jealous lover gunned down his former girlfriend’s new fiancé and then shot himself in the head in front of his horrified ex: https://theliberationnews.ng/2023/07/video-news-jealous-love-rival-murders-ex-girlfriends-new-fiance-shoots-self/

Dated for 3 months, stalked for 1 year, then jealousy murdered

Rejected by crush so attacks her in her home with a knife:

Secret obsession and then jealous murder of LO’s new fiancé

One of the more subtle tragedies of limerence is the way it robs you of opportunities for real connection. Looking back, there were a few genuinely kind and attractive women who showed interest in me—people I might’ve built something meaningful with—but I dismissed those opportunities. Not consciously or cruelly, but because they simply weren’t her. I’ve spent most of my life idealizing people from afar, constructing fantasies in my mind instead of engaging with what was right in front of me. Instead of dating real people, I was chasing someone I hoped would one day (years later) choose me. It made me feel that my love was more genuine, pure, and deep.

At the heart of limerence is a quiet desperation—an ache born from longing, insecurity, and the unbearable weight of unmet needs. It’s a one-way street: the object of our obsession is indifferent, oblivious, or just living their life, while we spiral deeper into daydreams and imagined conversations that we know will never even happen. Each subtle rejection, real or perceived, only fed the shame and sense of inadequacy I was already carrying. And in a way, the dream became a shelter. A soft place to land when the world felt too harsh since I am unlovable and unattractive.

That’s why I started this Substack, honestly. A part of me hoped she might stumble across it someday and see that I had changed, that I was growing, that I was healing. That maybe she’d see my intentions weren’t as creepy or unstable as they appeared. That she would understand that I was just a human who didn’t know better because of things that were out of my control. When the limerence gets intense, the only way to cope is to hold onto some improbable “what if”—some last-ditch, Hail Mary fantasy that maybe, just maybe, it could still end in true love, connection, or at least closure. It’s a coping mechanism more than a plan. I wanted her to know how special she is.

I didn’t get the help I needed when I was young and it essentially wrecked my life. It made me strange. Withdrawn. Lonely. Desperate. Sad. Cynical. I pushed people away because I was living in a world no one else could see. I made impulsive, self-sabotaging choices that isolated me even more and gave me even less options. I was mentally absent from my own life, emotionally unavailable to the people who did care about me. While others were building relationships, chasing dreams, building stable lives, and accumulating assets, I was stuck looping a story in my head and coping with limerent fantasies, porn, gambling, religious dogmatism, self-righteous piety, and codependence (I would help addicts, homeless, and mentally ill people).

As someone who’s neurodivergent (ADHD), the hyperfixation that comes with limerence can feel relentless. It’s not just emotional—it’s neurological. The intensity is hard to explain, and most people don’t understand. That misunderstanding adds a layer of loneliness and shame. You begin to feel broken, irrational, too much. It’s easy to spiral into self-loathing, especially when the very person you long for starts to pull away, or worse, ghosts you completely. You’re left obsessing over someone who probably doesn’t think of you at all and you realize that you’re fundamentally broken and will never have the companionship you’ve always dreamed of.

I thought that becoming self-aware and doing healing work and therapy would mean I was done with limerence for good, but the truth is that I still have those tendencies and they still prevent me from having healthy relationships with women who I really, really like. I can see the trap as I’m falling into it, but it is still painful. My limerent tendencies overwhelm me and cause me to get anxious, make bad decisions and act loopy, preventing me from having good relationships with people I love. At least now I know what it is and that other people experience the aimlessness, inadequacy, sadness, and hopelessness that I carry.

Questions to ask yourself if you’re experiencing limerence:

• did i actually fall for the person in front of me, or for a version of them i built in my mind?

• have i idealized this person beyond what I objectively know about them?

• do i really miss them, or do i miss the potential i saw?

• do i still feel connected because i’m in love, or because i want closure/validation?

• am i grieving them, or am i grieving the part of me that believed they were the one?

• if they reached out, would that actually make me feel good, or would it just momentarily soothe the part of me that still feels rejected or unseen?

• do i feel emotionally safe being fully myself around this person even when i’m not impressive?

• do i admire this person for who they actually are or for how they make me feel about myself?

• am i more focused on being chosen than on whether this person is actually a good fit for me?

• do i feel grounded or anxious most of the time when i think about them?

• can i name specific ways we’re compatible in values, life goals, and resonance or am i trying to change my values, goals, and energy to match theirs?

• would i still be interested in this person if they didn’t validate me, praise me, or show me attention?

• do i feel a mutual give-and-take, or does this relationship revolve around proving my worth?

• when i imagine our future together, does it feel based on shared reality or more like a dream I’m projecting?

• do i know how this person behaves when things aren’t going well (conflict, boredom, stress, distance)?

Becoming aware that there are others out there like me has made me feel less alone.

Final installment:

To read the entire series, start here:

Limerence is a fever dream obsession packaged as “true love.” It pulls you into madness, convincing you that your entire happiness hinges on one person. But how do you wake from the illusion?

The Forever Trap

The biggest lie limerence tells you is: "They're your only chance at happiness." It's an intoxicating delusion. I've felt it. Convinced beyond reason that I'd love them forever, that no one else could ever matter more, but it never lasts forever.

Dorothy Tennov, who coined "limerence," found these intense episodes typically last about 1.5 to 3 years. Yet, in the grip of limerence, forever feels plausible.

For my most recent episode, I was convinced for 4 years that without this one specific person, I'd never truly be happy and that loving anyone else would be a betrayal of the purity/sincerity of my love. Spoiler alert: I was wrong. But after years of longing for this person, it felt like it would never end. It felt like a beautiful curse.

Why does it feel like it will last forever? Because limerence distorts reality. It’s not love; it’s projection. You cast your unmet needs for love, purpose, and identity onto another person and call it fate. Like Éponine and Cosette, you build a castle in the clouds. Like Éponine, you ache for someone who doesn’t see you. Like Cosette, you build a fairy-tale future around someone you’ve barely begun to know. When someone attractive comes along, you believe it was always them who was meant to live in that castle with you.

When the fantasy collapses and the relationship fails to live up to impossible expectations, emotionally underdeveloped people find themselves paralyzed. They don’t know how to give themselves closure, because their entire identity has become entangled with the dream. They don’t know how to imagine a new future. They don’t know who they are without the overwhelming emotions tied to their limerent object.

As the illusion begins to shatter, the emotional volatility spikes. Limerent individuals, consumed by fear, grief, and desperation, say and do things that, from the outside, seem irrational or unhinged. It’s not because they’re inherently unstable. It’s because limerence hijacks the emotional brain and turns rejection and unrequited love into a catastrophe.

• Send dozens of texts, emails, or DMs even after being asked for space. (e.g. “I know you don’t love me, but I’ll wait for you forever,” “You’re my soulmate, can’t you see that??”)

• Call repeatedly, even late at night, under the pretense of “just wanting closure.”

• Make burner accounts or use friends’ phones to get around being blocked.

• Drive by their house or workplace “just to feel close.”

• Ask mutual friends for updates on their LO’s status or new relationships

• Monitor their social media obsessively, overanalyzing every like, comment, and story

• Show up unannounced to their house or work with gifts, letters, or emotional confessions

• Book surprise trips or propose even after the break-up

• Threaten to harm themselves if the person doesn’t respond or stay

• Move states or countries to follow their LO, hoping that they’ll get back together (if they were ever even together in the first place)

Limerence is maddening and I personally know people or their exes who did each one of these things. If they have close friends or family around, they’ll often say, “I’ve never seen them acting like this before.”

And when the end of the relationship inevitably comes, it brings not just heartbreak, but shame. A shame so heavy it convinces them they’re even less worthy of love than before. That pain often fuels a dangerous cycle: If even this wonderful person couldn’t love me completely, then no one else is ever going to love me either. Then, they double down, trying even harder to win back the person’s love.

Here's what I've learned: closure isn’t something you’re given by someone else, it’s something you choose to do for yourself. Emotional maturity means rewriting the narrative. It means finding a new purpose and dream for your life, not one that depends on being loved by them, but one that’s anchored in self-understanding. Because the truth is, limerence is never really about the other person. It’s about what you are projecting—your emotions, your hopes, your wounds, your love, your passion.

I’ve seen this pattern again and again. Some people are serial limerents and they use limerence as the sail for their life. They make themselves love-drunk just to survive the monotony of life. They often keep an object that reminds them of their obsession on their desk to remind themselves why they are trying so hard and suffering so much. Limerence becomes a substitute for meaning. But there’s a better way. One that doesn’t require you to lose yourself just to feel alive.

Why Passion Isn't Enough

Limerence doesn’t last forever. On average, it fades within 18 months. Biologically, that makes sense. Those powerful neurochemicals weren’t designed to sustain a lifetime of obsession; they were meant to spark connection, fuel bonding, and from an evolutionary standpoint, encourage reproduction. After that, nature expects us to pivot from infatuation to stability, from fantasy to partnership, from intensity to responsibility.

Limerence was never meant to take over your life. If people stayed in that heightened, love-drunk state indefinitely, they wouldn’t be able to function—let alone build a meaningful or productive life. The irrationality of limerence may bring two people together, but it can’t keep them there. It thrives on projection, intensity, and unrealistic ideals and is not the grounded reality that long-term love requires.

Once the magic fades, reality rushes in. You start questioning everything:

• "Why don’t I love them anymore?"

• "Was our true love connection ever real?"

• "Have they changed, or have I just opened my eyes?"

What Is Limerence Deterioration?

Limerence deterioration is the moment when the rose-colored glasses start to slip. For couples, this often looks like the end of the honeymoon phase. But for those caught in unrequited limerence, it’s the slow, sometimes painful, realization that the person you obsessed over isn’t who you imagined them to be.

Suddenly, they don’t seem as beautiful or sexy or magnetic as they once did. Their quirks start to feel more irritating than endearing. You begin to see their flaws not as forgivable imperfections, but as signs that they may not be what your soul truly needs after all. Yes, they might still be unique. But they’re no longer everything.

This process typically unfolds in one of four ways:

1. Time breaks the spell.

   As months pass (usually 18 to 36), the hormonal intensity naturally fades. The neurochemical cocktail that fueled the obsession starts to wear off.

2. Limerence transfers to someone else.

   A new person enters the picture, someone more available or desirable, so the fixation shifts.

3. Reciprocation leads to a genuine relationship.

   The limerent object returns the feelings, and the relationship transitions into something deeper and more stable. Idealization gives way to true intimacy.

4. The illusion gets shattered.

   The limerent object does something wildly inconsistent with the fantasy you’ve created, something so jarring it breaks the spell.

   (For example: Robert Pattinson once took an obsessed fan to dinner, complained about his life the entire time, and bored her so much that she never came back. i.e. he wasn’t actually Edward Cullen)
   https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/crazy-way-robert-pattinson-dealt-with-obsessed-fan)

Rose and Jack: Love Frozen in Time

There are rare cases where the deterioration phase never arrives, typically because the fantasy is never disrupted. Take Titanic, for example. Rose and Jack never had to face the sobering reality of daily life together. Jack’s tragic death preserved their whirlwind romance in a state of eternal perfection, sealed in Rose’s memories, untouched by poverty, boredom, or the grind of real partnership. Would their love have survived homelessness, hardship and family ostracization? Probably not.

That’s why romance movies end at the first kiss, the reunion, or the wedding before reality has a chance to settle in. The fantasy remains intact and that’s what we as viewers want. We don’t want reality. We want fantasy.

In real life, some people get stuck in limerence for the same reason Rose did: they never get closure. They’re ghosted, left on read, or the relationship ends before the illusion is ever challenged. Their idealized version of the person remains frozen in time—never corrected, never tested. And so, the fantasy lives on in their hearts and minds, long after the connection has died.

For Dante Alighieri, his limerence for Beatrice was frozen because she tragically died and he kept feeding his deification of Beatrice through his art.
https://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/the-unrequited-love-of-dante-and-beatrice

Choosing Reality Over Fantasy

Limerence feels like love, but it’s really a mirror to yourself. You see your wounds, your hunger for meaning, your forgotten dreams, all dressed up in the illusion of them and what you guys could be.

But here’s the truth that saved me: you don’t need to be chosen to be worthy.

You don’t need to chase someone to prove that you’re lovable.

You don’t need to suffer to feel alive.

You don’t need another person to give your life significance.

Closure doesn’t come from them. It comes from you. It’s not easy. But it’s how you reclaim your power, your story, your future.

Real love isn’t built in the clouds. It’s built in the present, with two people choosing each other not because they need saving, but because they want to grow together.

The person who awakens you isn’t always the one meant to walk beside you.

If you’re struggling, know this: You're not alone, and healing is possible. You deserve more than obsession. Real, sustainable love awaits on the other side of illusion.

Need support? Reach out. The chat is always open.

Next chapter:

When the dreams of a limerent person are shattered, they plunge into an existential abyss. The confrontation with reality—that their idealized love will forever remain unrealized—isn’t just heartbreak; it’s the collapse of an entire world they’ve constructed. Like despondent Noah ready to sell the only dream he ever had, they face the unbearable weight of losing the only future that they have ever cared about.

Why do some, when faced with this collapse, turn to self-destruction or even violence? The answer lies in the nature of limerence itself. These individuals don’t just daydream about their crush—they’ve made their limerent fantasies their home. They’ve abandoned the solid ground of reality for the intoxicating heights of what could be. Their emotional home exists in a place that never was and never will be.

During my most recent limerent episode, time itself became warped around her gravity. For two years, she occupied my thoughts between 12 and 16 hours every day and occasionally in dreams as well. My thoughts were no longer my own—they were fixated on her and the pain of knowing that I could never be with her or know her intricacies. The tragedy of my situation was that I knew this wasn't temporary insanity. I knew the feeling wouldn't fade. I knew that I was in for a lifetime of painful longing and unfulfillment.

There’s a special kind of despair reserved for us who can see our prison but cannot escape it. We recognize the irrationality of our obsession and understand that what we’re experiencing is a biochemical storm that has hijacked our brain, yet this intellectual conceptualization provides no relief. Some people imprint on your soul in a way that no time, rationalization, or consolation can ever erase.

In limerent despair, you don’t just mourn the person you can’t have—you mourn your lost autonomy and the loss of whatever potential life you could have had. You become a passenger in your own life, watching helplessly as your thoughts circle endlessly around a person who may never even think of you.

You’re always sad and your heart aches, but the most devastating aspect is the recognition that recovery might be impossible. While others speak of “moving on” as if it were simply a matter of decision and willpower, you know the truth: some fires cannot be extinguished; they can only burn until they’ve consumed everything.

When a limerent person faces rejection, they don’t just experience disappointment—they undergo a full-fledged grieving process that mirrors the five stages of grief: Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. The sad thing is that many limerents experience this profound mourning for a relationship that may have never actually existed.

But dig deeper, and you’ll find this isn’t really about the limerent object. The intensity of limerent despair reveals a deeper wound. What we’re actually grieving isn’t the person—it’s the childhood we never had and the safe harbor we never found. For those of us susceptible to limerence, that painful void at our center has been with us since long before we met our limerent object and somewhere along the way—through cultural narratives or media—we were conditioned to believe that this emptiness could only be filled by the magical elixir of “true love.” If we could just find that one person who would see us completely, all our fragmented pieces would finally fuse into wholeness.

This is why rejection in limerence feels like dying. It’s not just the loss of a potential partner; it’s the collapse of our last, best hope for healing childhood wounds that have shaped our deepest sense of self. The despair comes from confronting an unbearable truth: nothing in this world can heal our fundamental brokenness.

The limerent experience is a recursive loop of shame. We already carry the weight of feeling fundamentally flawed—then, when desperation drives us to actions our normal/healthy selves would never take (stupid late-night messages, obsessive profile checking, elaborate fantasies, awkward encounters), we spiral further into shame and self-loathing. Each shameful act confirms what we've always feared: we are too broken to be loved.

For “serial limerents,” this pattern repeats with helpless predictability. We oscillate between moments of premature optimism and periods of desolate certainty that we will never find someone who we love that will also love us for who we truly are. The sad reality is that for many people, this is an accurate assessment of reality—they will never be loved for who they are.

What we’re mourning goes deeper than unrequited love. We grieve the experiences we never had and the years of life lost to mental illness. Many people experience learned helplessness and which leads them to double down on using limerent fantasies to find relief from their sad lot. I knew someone who would call a psychic hotline, paying exorbitant fees just to hear strangers on the phone tell her that a guy she hooked up with years ago would eventually return to her when deep down, she knew that was a lie.

This is the true nature of limerent despair: not that we’ve lost someone we loved, but that we’ve lost the possibility of ever being whole. Each rejection or abandonment reconfirms what our life experience taught us—that we are fundamentally unlovable and that the emptiness we carry will never be filled.

If you are experiencing limerence and want someone to talk to:

Next part:

Go back to the beginning of the series for those who missed it:

There's a moment in The Notebook when Noah stands in front of the house he built—the one that Allie described, after which Noah crystallized it in his mind to represent their future life together, the one they were destined to live in for the rest of their days. In this photo though, he's getting ready to sell it. The agony of holding onto Allie was often unbearable, but he always found an excuse not to sell it. He couldn’t let it go, because it was all he had—a hypothetical life that never came to fruition. In the movies, it’s “true love”, but in real life, it’s unhealthy obsession.

In the modern era, the only dream that many people have is being loved unconditionally in a romance. In order to give themselves concrete hope of happiness and meaning, this dream begins to revolve around a particular person. When the dream can be made concrete around a person’s particulars, it feels more real. Noah needs a vision of the house and because of Allie, it’s white with blue shutters, overlooking the river with a room where she can paint. When you’re limerent, the person you fixate on becomes your everything. You would give everything, your peace, your dignity, even your sense of reality just for the chance that they might love you back. They’re no longer just a person; they are the axis around which your entire world now spins.

From chapter 2 of Love and Limerence:

“Once I fall, really fall, everything about her becomes wonderful, even things that would otherwise mean nothing at all are suddenly capable of evoking curiously positive reactions. I love her clothes, her walk, her handwriting (its illegibility would seem charming, or if it were clear and readable, that would be equally admirable), her car, her cat, her mother. Anything that she liked, I liked; anything that belonged to her acquired a certain magic. Her handbag, her notebook, her pencil. I abhor the sight of toothmarks on a pencil; they disgust me. But not her toothmarks. Hers were sacred; her wonderful mouth had been there. Did I worship the ground on which the woman I loved walked? You know, it’s almost that bad!”

In this stage, objectivity starts to matter less and less. For instance, let’s say that the girl you like is good, but not great, at singing. Even though you know that, objectively, there are many other girls who sing better, you might only want to listen to her singing. The same applies to her artwork, her comedy, her dancing, her laugh, etc. When I was in high school, I was in love with a friend and even in a crowded room, I could hear her sweet voice through the noise of the crowd. That’s what happens when you are limerent—everything else becomes noise and every other face just becomes another “not her”. During this phase, you begin to feel like the sole reason why you exist is to love this person whether or not they reciprocate—although some people do experience limerence deterioration/dissipation upon explicit rejection.

The Fantasy Fortress

Some people build fantasy lives because reality was never safe for them. They weren't seen. They were told—subtly or loudly— that they weren't worth it, so they create worlds where they are worth it to someone. People who experience limerence are hoping for a life that is neither real nor possible.

In many cases, a person who is limerent will avoid getting close to their limerent object because reality would just get in the way of the pre-written script. Out of fear of living out a vulnerable, authentic life, they stay in fantasies where they are in control of the script. They bend reality to give themselves concrete hope of happiness and meaning and that is projected onto people they may or may not be in relationships with. This may become dangerous because they place all of their hope into one vision with one person and if their ability to control their emotions is not strong, they will violate all sorts of boundaries in their desperation. The more unhealthy someone suffering from limerence becomes, the more deluded they will become and the more lines they will cross. In people with mental illness or personality disorders, this may result in stalking since the separation from the limerent object causes agony, despair, and unresolvable cognitive dissonance and their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality sharply diminishes. This is depicted in the Netflix show Baby Reindeer.

Noah Calhoun, Jay Gatsby, Severus Snape, Ted Mosby, Eponine—they all spend years of their lives living in dreams of alternate realities. In the case of The Notebook, because it’s a movie, Allie just so happens to see Noah’s photo in front of the house in the newspaper and eventually calls off her engagement with James Marsden to move in with Noah. Tragically, in the real world, we who experience limerence spend years, sometimes decades, of our lives daydreaming about our limerent objects, never fully present in our lives. Noah thinks about Allie even when he is in bed with Martha, a beautiful, kind woman who loves him.

@kim_jeannette05I know her heart sank in that moment. She just wanted to be loved. ❤️‍🩹 #thenotebook #marthashaw #netflix

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Even though we are not happy here, we hope that somewhere out there in the multiverse, we are happily together with our LOs. You can read thousands of cases here: https://www.reddit.com/r/limerence.

Because life is not a movie, it’s important for limerents to realize that their limerence is not about their love object, but it’s about something inside of them. Here Russell Brand realizes that this pattern of limerence in his life was actually about him and his longing and not the women he was obsessing over.

Notice how he says “deify”. In the crystallization phase, the love interest is put on a pedestal, deified and worshipped. He mistakenly believes that it is a ubiquitous and universal tendency for people to make love interests sacred, but this is not exactly true when you account for the wide range of magnitude. Most people do not experience person-deification to this degree, but because it’s hard to understand the subjective experience of others’, people incorrectly assume that the experience of “having a crush on someone” or “being in love” is universal.

Limerence grows in the gaps between fantasy and reality. The crystallized vision, whether it's Noah's house or our own precious dream future, starts as a refuge, but very soon becomes an inescapable prison. We build these visions because they offer certainty in an uncertain life and because they promise fulfillment when reality has often disappointed us, but a life spent in dreams is a life unlived. The irony of limerence is that in trying to create perfect love, we make ourselves incapable of experiencing real love—the kind that embraces imperfection, that grows through disagreement, that chooses commitment in the suffering and messiness of life over idealization and escapism.

Recovery begins with the painful recognition that we must never burden another with the weight of our salvation. The path forward isn't about letting go of our capacity for ideal love, but about distributing it more widely—across friendships, family, meaningful work, strangers, and the world. We must grieve the loss of our innocence and courageously embrace a new identity as people who can love ourselves and our lives.

If you find yourself trapped in a world that is only real for you and not others, there is hope. Limerence may feel like a curse, but it means you have great potential for love, imagination and devotion that is waiting to be channeled toward connections that can actually sustain you.

If you are struggling with limerence or know someone suffering from limerence and would like to talk about it, send me an email at danielyee517@gmail.com.

Continue to:

Previous installments:

Tom Cruise in limerent mania for Katie Holmes

In 2005, Oprah did an interview with Tom Cruise where he was acting like he never has before after becoming limerent for Katie Holmes. He said that he’s never felt this way about anyone before. After he jumped on the couch, Oprah said, “The boy is gone.” The interview went viral, creating one of the very first celebrity memes. It was parodied on Family Guy, Scary Movie 4 and even The Muppets! The most popular meme was one where he “force lightnings” Oprah.

When the gears of limerence start turning and the feelings are reciprocated, limerents are on Cloud 9! It may not manifest like Tom Cruise’s extreme extroverted charisma, but that same giddy feeling is what’s going on on the inside for people who are limerent. Read about all of the things Tom Cruise did to impress Katie Holmes. A true fairytale romance? We say, “isn’t this true love?” If it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, is it a duck? What distinguishes infatuation from love here? The difference between love and infatuation is that people who are infatuated are doing these things because they subconsciously want to secure the person’s affection in order to feel more secure. Do they also want to make the other person happy? Yes, but there’s a deeper subconscious need that overrides that. It drives the limerent to love bomb which is never sustainable. The limerent sufferer is also operating under a false presupposition because it is actually impossible to “secure” love. Real love will always remain a choice that has to be made daily and thus can never be secured once and for all.

Katie was sucked into Tom’s madness when she was just a naive 26 year old girl. She was seduced into quite literally her teenage dream by a 43 year old narcissist. This interview with W magazine is telling of her state of mind during that time, just a few months after meeting Tom Cruise, she also was in the delusion of limerence:

Katie: “From the moment I met him, it just felt like I'd known him forever.”
…

Katie: “I’ve never met anyone like Tom,”
Interviewer: “Do you ever wonder whether this is just a honeymoon phase?”
Katie: “Tom and I will always be in our honeymoon phase.”

Limerence causes you to extrapolate way too far into the future way too quickly. She converted to Scientology just 3 days after meeting Tom Cruise and moved in with him just 1 month after their first date. Limerents fall into the fallacy that their intense feelings are going to last a lifetime because it feels like they will. Their story ended in terrible drama, trauma, and a messy divorce. Like I said in the intro to this series, “limerence does a superb job of bringing people together, but it is not what keeps people together.”

A limerent episode usually begins in one of five ways:

1. A rapid onset “love-at-first-sight”

2. A gradual increase of feelings through pleasant or exciting interactions

3. A significant moment or conversation that triggers a “Wow I feel something for this person that I never felt before,” usually due to deep connection

4. Physical intimacy/a sexual encounter

5. Someone reminds us of one of our caregivers/parents, typically subconsciously

With limerence:

Without limerence:

Some people are prone to falling into limerence extremely fast because they are starving for love. Like someone who hasn’t had water in 3 days, these people can’t stop themselves from over-drinking once they reach the oasis of love, or even a mirage of love. The absolute best depiction of a limerent onset is WALL-E’s first encounter with EVE after wandering the earth alone for 700 years. WALL-E is an INFP and I believe he represents the most archetypal form of pure limerence.

WALL-E mesmerized by EVE

The closest analogy to what limerence feels like is imprinting from the Twilight saga.

Why infatuation initiates relationships

• People need activation energy to pursue relationships which are a lot of work

• People want excitement in their lives

• People want meaning in their lives

• People want to feel special

• People need hope in something greater than themselves as individuals

• People want what has been framed as true happiness by media and culture

Why infatuation ruins relationships

• People want to be known and loved for who they are, not objectified or put on a pedestal. Infatuation causes you to avoid actually getting to know the person.

• People are disappointed when the infatuation ends and the excessive affirmations and excitement stops

• People’s inhibitions, rationale and sensibility are diminished when infatuated, blinding them to red flags and compatibility issues and causing them to make poor decisions and say stupid things

• People’s emotions are heightened which leads to self-absorption

• People eventually experience negative emotions, such as fear, anxiety, sadness and grief which leads to self-consciousness and desperation and desperation = bad news

• It’s uncommon for both people to be infatuated at the same time or with the same intensity which leads to imbalance and one-sided relationships

• People are flooded with dopamine, and thus neglect their regular responsibilities which eventually leads to chaos

• People who are infatuated don’t act like their true self, but their true self will inevitably come out

• Infatuation leads to simping for validation and reassurance which overwhelms the other person

• People who are infatuated want to rush things too quickly

• People who are infatuated are living in a fantasy bubble which detracts from talking about less interesting things such as daily routines, work, problems, responsibility, etc.

• Infatuation begets unrealistic expectations that are unsustainable

• People who are infatuated become complacent after the infatuation ends, which is typically 6 months - 3 years later

• People who are infatuated place too much weight on future dreams.

• If one person is more infatuated than the other, this will breed distrust because the infatuated person will feel that the other is less committed or less “in love”

• People who are infatuated are vulnerable to AND complicit in toxic or abusive relationships

Why do we do this?
Part of it is natural and biological. Infatuation brings people together to procreate and that’s obvious. The less obvious truth is that people who experience intense infatuation often feel unworthy, undeserving, or not good enough for real love. We have deep-seated insecurity, shame and guilt which is why we prefer idealized fantasies over real intimacy. Out of a fear of being vulnerable, we prefer the comfort and control of fantasies and abstract ideas over the chaos and messiness of real intimacy. This creates a chicken and the egg problem because without real love and intimacy, it’s nearly impossible to heal and without the courage to be vulnerable, it’s impossible to experience real love. ¡Ay caramba! Going through extended periods of time without vulnerability in the context of a safe relationship perpetuates the pain of feeling unknown, misunderstood, alone, and unloved which may increase reliance on limerence to self-regulate. Moreover, even when there is reciprocation, we may prematurely sabotage the relationship due to subconscious rejection of self, especially if we’ve put the other person on a pedestal.

Solutions

• Mindfulness to be fully present without judging yourself or your situation

• Positive self-talk and affirmations to remind you that you deserve real love, even if it can only ever be self-love

  • “You are good enough to be loved just as you are today.”

  • “You don’t need to earn love”

  • “Love cannot be earned, it can only be freely given”

  • “God is love and God is a god of grace not merit”

• Self-respect to only accept what you actually deserve

• Peace by reminding yourself that you are safe where you are in the present moment

• Patience to know that things will be okay in the long run

• Faith to believe that what has happened in the past won’t necessarily repeat

• Humility to let go of the pain of the past in order to “reset” the narrative of your life and your current perceived identity

• Humility to love someone else not for what they can give you but what you can gift to them

• Humility to admit that you are the one that needs to change

• Humility in accepting that most things in life are out of your control

• Humility to accept that healing necessarily means pain and suffering in the short-term for the delayed gratification of a healthier life in the long-term

• Courage to open yourself up to inevitable pain by trusting others

• Balancing the pros and cons of romanticism and realism

• Validating your feelings/emotions, but then promptly letting them go

• Taking life less seriously. The greatest danger of limerence is that you make your life about “winning x’s heart”. If you look at life this way, you cannot truly love anyone. Why? Trying to win, obtain, or possess hearts comes from narcissism not love. Our goal in life needs to be healing hearts, not winning hearts.

What do you do if someone is limerent for you and you want to dispel it?

Use the Robert Pattinson method. The fastest way to dispel limerence is to be so entirely different from the model that the limerent person has built up of you in their mind that it would be absolutely impossible for their mind to bridge the gap. In love, you learn to love the person for who they are. In limerence, you want a person to conform to a particular model in order to make you feel more secure. In this instance, that model was most likely built around the character of Edward Cullen. She wanted what Bella had and thought Robert Pattinson was like the character of Edward Cullen.

Infatuation is about loving the concept of people and what they could add to your life and not actually about loving these people themselves for who they are in the present. This is why it is the intuitive types, not the sensing types, that are prone to limerence. They think of everything, include people, in terms of models and patterns. Any person they meet is sorted into a model and if this model is what they’ve been so desperately craving, any perceived connection with this person will feed into the confirmation bias of “this could be the one”. This is why Dorothy Tennov aptly coined the term “limerent object”. In limerence, we are not objectifying people sexually, but rather conceptually.

What we are often doing when we are limerent is projecting our idealized view of the opposite sex onto the person whom we are attracted to. In the age of social media, this problem is even worse, since there is a plethora of data to cherry-pick from to supply our confirmation bias.

What can intuitive types do to combat limerence?

They will have to let go of the way they are used to navigating the world which is by gathering data, recognizing patterns, categorizing, extrapolating, and then strategizing based on extrapolations. One benefit of extrapolating is that intuitives can prune branches early, e.g. “I can already see after one date that this is not going to work out in the long run,” which ends up saving the intuitives’ potentially wasted time. The downside happens when intuitives are overconfident in their ability to project and infer. The world is incredibly complex and moreover, constantly changing, so overly relying on intuition means that you will do less exploring and therefore will get less concrete learned experience and data points in the long-run. The result of this is often a life lived more in the head than in the real world. People with limerent tendencies may “wake up” later in life and realize that much of life has passed them by.

Instead of relying on intuition, they need to balance practicing the way that sensors navigate the world which is by using the concrete data coming in real-time and taking an action based on that with minimal abstraction and minimal extrapolation. Instead of relying on their intuition and gut feelings, they need to not presume that patterns will necessarily repeat themselves. Instead of thinking about implications, they should just focus on the evidence at hand that is relevant for the immediate next step. They need to fall in love with things in their lives that are tangible and not theoretical. This translates to loving people and life in the present. In a practical sense, it’s also important for people experiencing limerence to focus on the needs of the day instead of spending time thinking about theoretical possibilities or how to obtain idealistic dreams. The practices of mindfulness, meditation, or prayer will help with this.

For people who had tougher childhoods, this is hard because thinking about theoretical possibilities serves as a form of escapism. Similarly to how people escape into a different world when they read a book or watch a movie, someone who is experiencing limerence is typically escaping into a movie, except in this case, they are the main character in a romance. In this romance, they are being saved from their boring and/or difficult life.

When limerence becomes toxic

In The Notebook (2004), Noah Calhoun experiences love-at-first-sight limerence for Allie. She rejects him on two separate attempts and he asks her why both times and she replies, “Because I don’t want to,” which is a completely sufficient answer. His response is to coerce her with, “Go out with me or I’ll kill myself,” as he hangs off the ferris wheel. He does this mostly as a ruse, but obviously this would be absurd and toxic in real life. For people who experience limerence, winning the heart of their crush can feel like life and death—the stakes become infinitely high because all they have ever wanted is to love and be loved. It’s anxiety-inducing and causes irrational behavior. The person will not be acting like their typical self.

So why does she eventually go out with him?
1. It’s a movie.
2. He’s Ryan effin’ Gosling

She thinks that this is just part of his pick-up game, but this is legitimately how limerence feels. Limerence makes you want to “become anything” and “do whatever it takes” just to “be next to” your LO. The problem is that if the feelings aren’t mutual, the extreme craziness would just be creepy. If you don’t have that Ryan Gosling rizz, you’re most likely going on that first date by yourself.

Someone who is at peak limerence will essentially do anything to secure a relationship with their LO, whether that be compromising on their religious beliefs or putting out. In Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), Jessica (17) is babysitting for Cal and Emily, friends of her parents. She becomes limerent for Cal who is a dad in his forties. In a last-ditch effort to try to get Cal to notice her, she tries sending him nudes.

Women who are limerent for guys are often taken advantage of for sex. Men who are limerent for women are often taken advantage of for money. Our mind has an amazing ability to filter out data that we don’t want to believe is true. The heart wants what it wants and when you are limerent for someone, you see the flaws and incompatibilities or the fact that the other party is not interested, but none of this matters. You will do anything to be with them anyway. If you look at people’s checklists of the kind of people they claim they want to be with and compare them to the people they actually date, there is often a huge discrepancy. Love chemicals are powerful enough to change one’s entire worldview in the blink of an eye. This is why it’s important to take relationships very slow, especially if you have complex PTSD. Limerence can lead to marriage, but it often leads to toxic relationships or relationships that just aren’t sustainable for more than a few years. When you hear people say at weddings, “I knew from the moment I saw her that she was the one” or “I knew from the moment we met that we were going to be together,” that person is likely predisposed to limerence. It sounds like destiny, but you just don’t hear about the majority of times that it didn’t work out for that person or all the people who thought that would be true for them, but it wasn’t, and you especially don’t think about the 40% that ended in divorces after the fact. In most cases, infatuation is unrequited and no relationship will ever be established, which is why it’s important to move on from unrequited infatuation quickly to find something reciprocal.

Conclusion
Infatuation is great at bringing people together into high energy, exciting new relationships, but it is not a predictor of long-term relationship health. In addition, it leaves you susceptible to toxic relationships and self-sabotage. When we are infatuated, we are not engaging in real-time intimacy, but rather escaping into fantasies based on an abstract conceptualization of a person which is not fair to them or us. While infatuation can be the catalyst for the foundation of a new relationship, it is important to promptly move past infatuation to a more mature form of love which is messier and more chaotic than infatuation and also a lot more work. Even though real love is a lot more work, it’s worth it, because it leads to healing, meaning, responsibility and fulfillment.

Continue to:

Previous parts to this series:

Hey! If you haven’t read the intro to this series yet, you’ll want to read it first:

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 or to avoid integrating painful truths. When I was growing up and feeling lonely, I would hug a pillow and imagine that I was with my crush. 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 something that some of us 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.
→
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.
→
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.
→
You create unrealistic expectations for them to meet your psychological needs.
→
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.
→
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 precisely how you are experiencing the relationship with someone else 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 selves before others and into relationships, because we’ve never been loved for who we are, only for what we could offer people. For instance, maybe you had a mom who told you that people won’t like you because you’re too chubby or some other flaw or maybe you grew up in a religious environment where you were shamed for things that were natural. This amplified insecurities and reinforced the belief that people won’t love you for you, but only if you conform to conventional standards of beauty. This forges a subconscious 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 a very attractive person.

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 or a party. 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:

Ask Polly

‘How Do I Get Over Coming in Second Place?’

Light Path (1959) by Helen Lundeberg Dear Polly, I’ve always dated pretty nice, normal guys. For years I never really related when other women would talk about how horrible the men in their lives treated them. I’ve also never really been rejected before. In my limited dating experience, I’ve always chosen men that I felt confident liked me back. What can…

Read more

3 years ago · 274 likes · 29 comments · Heather Havrilesky

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 abusive 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.

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 making life play out as it does in the idealized visions they cherish in their minds and souls, but 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 love my kids by letting them 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.

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 obscure the full truth out of insecurity and fear. Because of our fear, 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 about love, but 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. If we’re not careful, our hopes can consume us and turn into disappointment or despair. Our inner child, longing for love and acceptance will grovel at their feet as they are 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. Unlike in the movie and musical, in the novel, excessive drinking and stress cause her to lose her beauty. She becomes emaciated, gaunt, 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. Her mental illness might explain the vivid imagery she sings of in On My Own and why she lived on the border between fantasy and reality.

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. The narrative goes something like this: “If he loves me, then I must be worthy of love.”

Continue to:

A Heart Full of Love — Marius and Cosette

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.

From Wikipedia:

“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? Limerence is an inescapable state of adoration, hope, anxiety, despair, passion, love, compulsion, inspiration, obsession, confusion and delusion that revolves around one person. Most people have 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

• Every song lyric ties back to them in a way you feel is significant

• You admire them to an extent that is unwarranted

• You lost your sense of self in pursuit of them. You care about what they care about, you like everything that they like, etc., for the sake of gaining their attention or approval

• 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 believe that your fate, potentially for the rest of your life, has been decided to hinge on how much this person loves you—bliss if things go well or perpetual misery if things are hopeless

• You believe that your main purpose in life is to love this person—whether they care about you or not

• 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 (such as parental disapproval) 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 can be from a typical love sickness because the media often frames limerent episodes as “real romantic love” (e.g. The Notebook) and because we each experience love and limerence differently. 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. WALL-E’s experience of limerence for Eve is archetypal (he is an INFP). The depiction of his Phase 2: Infatuation is my absolute favorite!

Along with these MBTI types, there is 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 susceptible to romance scams, make you question your religion/switch your religion, make you question your marriage, or even drive you to 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. She showed up at his work and 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 still frames this random guy who rejected her as 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 a superb job of bringing people together, but it is not what keeps people together, especially in this new era of widely available contraceptives and consumeristic, transactional dating 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

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!, 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 know at all (extreme love-at-first-sight):
Wall-E for Eve*, Ariel for Eric*, Orpheus for Eurydice*, Emi Igawa for Kosei Arima, Becky for Loid
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, Mr. Darcy for Lizzie (* in movie adaptation)
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 Salvatore for Katherine (The Vampire Diaries)

* = 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, just so he can see her again in his dreams. Hear him elaborate on this 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 party or 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 someone’s soul can be
- Reinforces the truth that individuals are precious, unique, and irreplaceable (i.e. rejects the transactional “I’ll just find someone better” / “there are plenty of fish in the sea” mentality)
- 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
- Can make you depressed upon rejection
- Gives you anxiety, insecurity, and low self-esteem
- Creates unrealistic expectations and disappointment
- Distorts perception of reality
- Can drive addictive, unsafe or embarrassing behavior

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.”

Continue to:

Share