The latest research on how “Chronic stress spreads cancer…”.

https://www.cshl.edu/chronic-stress-spreads-cancer-heres-how/

Here may lie an answer to whether (or how) my lymphoma’s formation and its rapid development were directly correlated with the limerence I was suffering from the early to middle stages, particularly after my biggest panic attack, triggered by LO’s apparent avoiding/ignoring me in public (which resembled one painful incident occurred with Mom at age of 4 or 5).

I thought it would be interesting to update with basically a repeat of what happened almost 9 months ago. LO and I have a friend-zoned each other, but I think we are still occasionally indulging in contact over text. Due to changes in circumstances, we see each other in social situation maybe once a month.

The last two times I saw him felt super horrible. Like we were both totally cut off emotionally from each other. I was guarded, he was guarded. His eyes were opaque to me, whereas I felt I could reach him before. The mood was awkward, conversation stilted. I didn’t feel the buzz or delight I normally get from his presence. This is good I suppose, from a getting rid of limerence point of view, but a part of me was wailing at the loss. I have lost him. Outwardly, to everyone, it looks the same. We are “friends”, as we always have been. But with no vulnerability or true exchange.

Furthermore, I find myself wondering and second-guessing the past. Wondering if I was deluded in thinking we had this amazing connection. How could it just disappear like that if it actually existed?

Also, I also recently found myself wondering if my charming LO was a player? That he’s just a charmer to everyone, not just me? Someone else we knew mutually said she had a crush on him too. Was I just charmed like everybody else? Was I just a typical, lonely woman, vulnerable to anyone who showed a little interest in her? I feel like a sad, pathetic person here. Ego in shreds.

I mentioned we were still in touch over text and social media. The obvious next step is go NC. I have never been more tempted.

Welcome Eric! You are not alone. Your limerence experience sounds fairly typical except it sounds like you don’t have a specific LO. Maybe I misunderstood. Anyway, my biggest concern for you is your lack of sleep. Please talk to your doctor about that. It is a very big problem and and shouldn’t be ignored. There are many treatments for insomnia and you would benefit from experimenting to find the best treatment for you.

Best wishes!

Wow, Dr. L, I’m in my late seventies and going through a bout of Limerence that’s driving me nuts. And it all started with a dream I had last May with a boy friend I had when I was 26! 50 years NC! I just found him and contacted him!!! Very emotional and at the same time very painful, a lot of regrets… My mind has been hijacked completely 24/7. I had never had a thing like this before . Thanks for this site which gives me comfort and hopes that it will pass… really?

Four years on, you probably won’t see this. But Vincent, I really appreciate your post. I have an LO, and I am also his LO. He constantly offers to do things for me, to help me, even gave me his phone number so I could request help at any time. I keep wondering why he does this, and I had settled on the idea that he doesn’t know how else to express his desire for me, since he’s married. But perhaps it is closer to what you describe

Hi Marcia, I went to check my journal … at the point I talked to SO, I don’t think I even knew what limerence was yet or that LO was a LO (it was three days before I found this site!) – all I knew was that suddenly, everything was super-charged – I think Tennov wrote of the glimmer stage as potentially having several glimmer givers to choose from, before crystallization? – I think LO was the catalyst, and I definitely was noticing (and fantasizing about) him specifically by then, but it wasn’t full-blown limerence by then yet, and I have had crushes on others before, and fantasized about them, and those eventually faded, so I didn’t really think this was anything different at that point (oh boy, it surely is; crushes don’t hold a candle to limerence).

It also felt like part of a larger change in my life at that point – I had been feeling more emotional than usual for months before that, but LO made that amorphous emotion take the form of desire. There was a noticeably distinct change in my energy, because I would just look at some guy in the eyes, and they would suddenly perk up and start flirting with me. Or I would hear some guy’s voice and be instantly switched on. Or I would notice how great a guy looked in jeans. The way I walked and talked was subtly different. It was weird. I am *totally* not like that usually (nor do people react to me that way usually). So, my experience of the early stages of glimmer is that I suddenly became aware of myself in a sensual way (and by extension lots of others did too!)

Once my mind “settled” on LO though, I (interestingly enough) self-censored so if I caught someone’s eye, I immediately averted my eyes and ignored them, and the glimmer is snuffed out instantly (good for future reference). It was like being faithful to an LO (stranger and stranger). When I reflect on how I fell into infatuation with LO though, I think I was a little unlucky – it wasn’t the lock-eye experience I was describing with others, which is clearly an attraction-between-the-sexes thing from the start – so I wasn’t quite aware things were developing until it was too late. We bonded over a group thing (upon later reflection, the start of the glimmer, though I did not particularly note it at the time, apart from thinking, that’s a nice guy), we ran into each other suddenly very often and it was nice to see a friendly face, we crossed paths by accident and ended up sharing a meal and a chat – that chat was the killer I think, because he was showing a lot of interest, a crucial ingredient for developing limerence when there is a glimmer. I remember feeling flattered. I remember thinking, if I was free I would definitely date this guy and see where this would go. When I knew something was seriously up (for me) and different in this case was when sometime in the next few days he sat next to me (six feet apart, this is a pandemic after all), and I felt desire so strong I nearly threw up! Literally. I had to take the rest of the day off to recover. After that was when I noticed just how absolutely and utterly irresistible/sexy/gorgeous/brilliant/riveting/etc. LO was! Haha, totally objective of course. Then because of our work and study, we were thrown together a lot, sometimes alone, late at night … and the feelings just escalated from there on and I was deep in the middle of it before I knew I was even in it! It was when the euphoria stage was over (this is when crushes usually end and one forgets it and moves on with life) and the obsessive stage started that I knew *this* was different, this was not good.

I have not talked to SO about this fixation on LO – maybe I should now that I know about limerence, for total disclosure, but I don’t know that my SO needs the level of detail (and frankly, I am scared of disclosing the madness which is LE – it scares ME and I am still a little ashamed of it, even as I am coming to accept it is a normal part of the human experience). What is important, I think, is that SO is put on notice that something is up, he knows the nature of it (sexual attraction and emotional perturbation), and he knows I am trying to handle it. He knows my sexual energy is up, he knows it is external to him, but he also knows he’s the only one to benefit from it. Also, that we are BOTH focusing on our relationship right now. To be honest, we also had lots of other things to talk about (like why we were not having sex) and also longer term issues that had been festering for years … maybe it is a sign that our slightly “hands off” approach to our relationship carries risks, maybe we do need to be more open and proactive in our communication (this is hard for me, generally, I am very self-contained and very private of my deepest feelings, and so is my SO – I actually think we each found ourselves a partner who needed a certain amount of distance to feel comfortable – see attachment styles). I might add at this point that I have not “overshared” with LO about my relationship with SO – THAT I think would be a huge betrayal of SO, who I know would hate it. Possibly even worse than a physical betrayal.

Emily,
“We’ve discussed opening the marriage at various points (SO and I have been together a long time), so it isn’t quite so left field as all that. Sometime he’s asked, sometimes I’ve asked, and we have never actually done it.”
Oh, ok.
“When your child confides in you, you don’t want to react too strongly, or push too hard, because it will stop them from confiding in you. ”
But it isn’t a parent-child relationship. It’s a romantic/sexual relationship with another adult and asking to open it up is changing the entire dynamic and the rules/boundaries. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, but I’d be asking questions. Now, that’s me.
“When I say difficult conversations, I told him I was noticing others, flirting, being turned-on by other guys … basically being more hyper-aroused than usual by other people (limerence does that). ”
I guess I experience limerence very differently. When I was limerent, I wanted one very specific person — my LO. There were other people I flirted with, and I enjoyed the attention, but I did not take them seriously at all. It was sport. So not disclosing an LO would be disingenuous. I’d want to open things up to have sex with the LO.

Actually, another observation, Marcia: I never asked my SO who he had in mind when he was asking to open the marriage, and he never asked me either! I just assumed there must have been someone he was attracted to at the time, but in a way, it didn’t matter to me. What mattered is that he asked me. And it’s a delicate thing … I’ll use an analogy. When your child confides in you, you don’t want to react too strongly, or push too hard, because it will stop them from confiding in you. So, I think SO and I have a fine-tuned sense of how much we want to pry into the other person’s head or feelings, we (at least I) don’t want to make it uncomfortable, or embarrassing, or basically stop him from asking me. When I say difficult conversations, I told him I was noticing others, flirting, being turned-on by other guys … basically being more hyper-aroused than usual by other people (limerence does that). He said it was somewhat disconcerting to hear that, but he accepted it, and I think he trusts me not to cross certain lines, while accepting that I am currently having reactions that are a bit beyond my control. This might be a little strange, but it’s the way our relationship is (and now that I have actually written it out, it makes me realize that is actually quite special, in its own way).