In her landmark book, Love and Limerence, Dorothy Tennov describes how she finally formulated the concept of limerence on a long haul flight with her friend, Helen Payne.

They were on their way home from Paris, and Dorothy was expounding on her latest ideas about the nature of romantic love. To her surprise, Helen grew increasingly irritated and impatient with the conversation, and her attempts to define the characteristics of passionate love. Helen complained that some of her own past relationships had been ruined when her lovers started to act in the ridiculous, irrational, infatuated way that Dorothy was describing.

For the first time, Tennov understood that there were people who did not feel overwhelming, obsessive need for another person – that even in the heart of a love affair, they did not experience the intrusive thoughts and desperate craving for reciprocation that she had assumed everyone experienced during the early stages of romantic love. People seem to either immediately relate to the description of limerence, or shake their heads in wonder, sorting themselves into two tribes.

This discovery of non-limerents was one of those moments in research where the observation of the counter-example – the exception to the rule you thought you were writing – helps reveal the mechanics of the phenomenon you are investigating. The eureka moment that Helen Payne provided came to inform a lot of the analysis of limerence that Tennov subsequently carried out. What was it that distinguished limerents from non-limerents? Could people be non-limerent for most of their lives, but then unexpectedly experience it with the right LO? Could people be limerent for more than one person at a time, or more than one gender? What might be the evolutionary origin of limerence? (I’d argue that the existence of both limerents and non-limerents in a population is likely to be an evolutionarily stable scenario).

On reflection, it is perhaps not too surprising that the existence of non-limerents had gone unnoticed for so long. From the perspective of a limerent, popular culture makes perfect sense: all those pop songs and novels and films depicting soul-consuming love fit comfortably into the limerent’s life experience. Non-limerents, however, may be a bit more confused by the over-the-top nature of the artistic claims of exquisite agony.

Like any cultural phenomenon that others rave about, most likely the non-limerents just assumed people were exaggerating. When asked what they thought was going on in romantic comedies, non-limerents may reply that they treated it just like an action movie – an unreal but entertaining embellishment of what is actually possible for humans to experience.

The best personal analogy I can come up with, is my response to sport. As a kid I played football for my local team, even getting as far as the county championship and winning a few plastic-gold trophies. I also went to matches, and hoped that my team would win. But when I looked around me at the grown men and women who were obviously so much more emotionally invested that I was, I wondered why they were pretending to be so moved by deep emotions.

I can remember one night when I was at University wondering why the streets were so deserted, only to discover that every bar was filled with people anxiously watching England play in the European championship. I grasped then that a substantial fraction of the population genuinely and sincerely cared about the eleven strangers on the pitch kicking a ball around. Indeed, I’ve known people who cried when their team was knocked out of a tournament – shedding honest, heartfelt tears of loss.

I lack that trait. I just can’t muster the emotions. It’s some blokes kicking a ball around for massive salaries, and it has basically no bearing on my life. I kind of want my country to win, but actually, I also quite like it when they lose quickly and the national fervour subsides.

So, that seems a good way for me to grasp non-limerence – accepting that many other people really do feel these wild emotions, even though I don’t myself, and that that is part of the normal variation that makes us different and contributes to life’s rich pageant.

Tribal conflicts

Having had time to reflect further, and having recently run a survey to try and estimate the number of people in the population who have ever experienced limerence, it seems that Tennov’s intuition was right: there really are two tribes of people who experience romantic love in distinct ways. They also seem to be roughly equal in number, so whenever you find yourself falling in love, there’s about a 50:50 chance you’re connecting with someone from the other tribe.

Why does any of this matter? I would argue that it matters because our understanding of how to relate to other people depends critically on tribalism, our ability to predict how others will respond to our disclosure of limerence, how to moderate our own limerence, and whether it is possible to cultivate it in others. We could save ourselves a lot of heartache by understanding that limerents and non-limerents have profoundly mismatched expectations about how love should feel.

A good example of how this can affect relationships is the perspective held by various gurus that limerence is a manifestation of infantile or false love. Such obviously unbalanced behaviour as wanting to withdraw from the world and immerse yourself in mutual bliss, craving exclusivity, freaking out if the bond seems under threat, and generally trying to lose yourself into ecstatic union, must be evidence of some sort of mania.

From a non-limerent guru’s perspective, this argument makes perfect sense: there is no need to become so needy and obsessed, so obviously those people are less developed or liberated than I am. Monogamy is unnatural, and a product of jealousy. And jealousy is objectively bad, and so I am right. You should have sex with me.

A limerent who lacks confidence or self-awareness can easily be drawn into the logic of such an argument, and try to deny their limerent tendencies in a bid for enlightenment. This could make sense if limerence existed on a spectrum and we could strive to minimise it as a goal, but it makes a lot less sense if limerence is a stable trait that nearly half the population have. In that case, limerence is not an attachment disorder or lifestyle choice that can be eliminated by willpower or therapy.

Similarly, limerents need to recognise that it’s futile to try to cultivate mutual limerence in someone who just does not slip into an altered mental state when they are falling in love. Their lack of limerent reciprocation is not evidence that they don’t love you enough, that they are cynically keeping their options open, that they have commitment issues, or that they just haven’t met The One. It just means they experience romance in a more balanced and stable way.

Ultimately, just being aware that the two tribes exist is beneficial when trying to make good decisions about love, whether you are just dating, or looking for a long-term relationship. Non-limerents are likely to always find the obsession of limerents tiresome. Limerents are likely to always find the lack of obsessive reciprocation from non-limerents distressing. If you can figure out fairly early on in a blossoming relationship whether your paramour is a limerent or non-limerent, you can adapt your expectations about how they will respond to your behaviour.

When limerence is a problem

A lot of heartache arises from these mismatched expectations. Perhaps the most obvious scenario is when a limerent and non-limerent begin to form an attachment. The driving forces for reinforcing limerence are hope and uncertainty, and “love across the tribes” would promote that fiercely.

The non-limerent would be sending lots of signs of hope – by showing they are attracted to the limerent and interested in a relationship. That gets the limerent all excited. However, the fact the the non-limerent is not mirroring back the signs of wild infatuation creates uncertainty. Often, the limerent can react by becoming even more irrational in their behaviour – perhaps trying to provoke jealousy, or playing hard to get because their pride has been wounded – largely because of the subconscious panic that the bond is not strong enough, and feels like it’s slipping.

In a tragedy of miscommunication. Both people are following their instinctive approach to love, but it results in both of them feeling uneasy and unsatisfied. Even worse, this tragicomic mismatch of instincts and behaviour can reinforce the limerence further. Too long in a state of indecision and uncertainty can drive the promising euphoria of early limerence into the toxicity of person addiction. The harder the limerent tries to force reciprocation, the more the non-limerent will pull back. Everything they do seems to make the situation worse, which sends them into a vicious cycle of obsessive rumination.

This sort of scenario might explain why half of all limerents have had a bout so bad that it was difficult to enjoy life, and why people like Helen Payne have had to abandon promising relationships because their partner suddenly seems to spiral out of control into an emotional mess.

Love across the tribes can work out, but planning ahead and anticipating that it might require some painful adjustments of expectations will be needed to head off some obvious problems. Alternatively, if you wish to avoid such drama, it could be simpler to only form attachments on the basis of tribal compatibility.

Like so many other aspects of life, making purposeful decisions is the best way to engineer the outcome that you want.

The post The two tribes first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Isn’t that just a crush?

To my regret, I have not yet come up with a concise, clear answer for this. 

If you’ve experienced limerence, it’s obvious that it stands out markedly from other romantic attractions. We recognise the appeal and sexiness of many people in the world, but the first time an LO hits us like a freight train, we know that This Is Different. Similarly, once you’ve immersed yourself in reading and thinking about the idea for long enough, you develop a kind of high-level view of how limerence differs from ordinary attraction, but it’s still hard to capture the essence of that difference in a simple way. 

When confronted with this question, I find myself talking about the importance of intrusive thoughts, or the involuntary nature of the obsession, or the extent of the emotional highs and lows, and trying to distinguish the severity of these experiences from puppy love or a crush.

Sometimes I get bogged down in the argument about whether a crush becomes limerence when it disrupts your life to such an extent that it degrades wellbeing, or causes psychological distress – but that seems inevitably to lead to the “so it’s a mental illness?” question. 

Part of the problem is that limerents and non-limerents make perfectly reasonable assumptions about the nature of romantic attraction, based on their own experiences. If you describe limerence to a limerent, they nod and say “yeah, that’s love.” Describe limerence to a non-limerent and they assume that you’re talking about an adult stuck in adolescent fantasies who needs to grow up.

Dorothy Tennov battled against this issue when she was trying to get more recognition for limerence in the psychological community. Later in her career she argued that limerence was best understood from the perspective of ethology, and argued that resistance from psychologists stemmed from a distaste for personal testimony as an approach to research:

My conclusions seem incapable of being communicated within the presently existing field of psychology, but may be acceptable to the field of human ethology.

What were those difficult to communicate conclusions?

[The two main conclusions] are (1) the state is distinct; it occurs in exactly the same way whenever it occurs across personality and other categories, and (2) it is so unlike any other condition that those who have not experienced it have no experiential base from which to imagine it. Therefore, they tend not to believe in its existence except as romanticism or as pathology.

As I understand Tennov’s argument, it is that limerence is a universal experience once it has set in. All limerents report the same key phenomena: total cognitive capture by the LO, and intense craving for reciprocation to the exclusion of all other concerns. She argued that limerence is a binary state – you are either in limerence or not. There is no continuum of limerent feeling. 

Limerence is an either-or-matter. Either the algorithm is operative or it is not. Intensity depends on immediate conditions. Therefore, a “scale” is meaningless. Intensity changes from day to day, even from moment to moment.

This conclusion fits with reports from limerents – that it is a distinct mental state that you feel yourself to be “in”, and that it dominates life so much that it feels all encompassing. 

But it has problems too. Linking a binary state to the underlying neuroscience is tricky. Euphoria is a definable mental state, but it subsides fairly quickly, and you would still consider yourself “limerent” even in the moments of calm between LO contact. Similarly, addiction is a definable condition, but it takes time to develop. There isn’t a clean moment where you can state unequivocally that you have flipped from “not addicted” to “addicted”. Once the consequences become undeniable you concede that the behaviour (say, gambling or alcohol abuse) is destructive. Similarly, limerence is something that you recognise as being detrimental after the accumulated psychological stresses outweigh the early excitement. 

I think the only way you can square this is if limerence is a state where your baseline neurophysiology has been altered. Your sensitivity to arousal is heightened. Your motivational drive has been amplified. Your motivational salience is focused intensely on the dominant stimulus of LO. In principle, this might be detectable at the level of changes in gene expression and synaptic strength that reinforce particular neural circuits – just as for drug addiction. 

Tennov’s insistence that limerence is a universal experience for those that have it is a strong claim. Even in devising a quiz, it became clear from the comments that the scenarios I’d felt were representative of limerence clearly were not universal.

That suggests either that Tennov’s hypothesis is wrong, or that my quiz has too many questions and should be whittled down – perhaps to two. A third alternative is that many people are drawn to the description of limerence, but do have different experiences at some level – perhaps that could be conceptualised as limerence exists as a core neurophysiological phenomenon, but that the behavioural manifestations once “the algorithm is operative” can be more idiosyncratic. 

Having worked through all that, I think it’s fair to say that I’ve helped demonstrate that the concept of limerence is difficult to communicate.

Let’s try and get this back on track. I want to be prepared for the next time that I need to explain this to a sceptical journalist. Here’s another useful take from Allie in the comments:

For me, the key difference between a crush and limerence is the mind space it takes up. A crush can exist alongside my life without impacting it much. Limerence stands front and centre in my mind all the time, regardless of what else I am doing, making it hard to live life fully. 

I think that’s useful because it captures this idea that it is possible to be strongly attracted to someone (sexually, intellectually and/or emotionally) without being limerent. You can have a crush that adds excitement to life, as distinct from limerence that wholly takes over life. Maybe that’s the key:

Limerence is when a crush has taken over your life. Another person dominates your mind so completely that you feel like you are addicted to them. You swing from incredible highs to exhausting lows and desperate craving. Limerence makes it almost impossible to concentrate on anything other than how much you want them.

Well, I guess that’s progress. A bit pithier. But it could be better.

Let’s refine that raw material in the crucible of the comments…

Can you summarise the difference between limerence and a crush in three sentences or less?

The post Why limerence is not just a crush first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Limerence is not a widely known concept. In a not-entirely-scientific poll (I asked some people I know), 0.0% of my peer group had heard of the term. So, it’s good to give a clear definition.

Limerence was coined as a term and concept by Dorothy Tennov in her 1979 book “Love and Limerence”, and emerged from her study of romantic love.

This mostly took the form of interviews and questionnaires, in which Tennov noted a number of consistent traits among many individuals who described their experiences of being in love. She created the term limerence to classify this common experience.

The defining features are (paraphrasing and simplifying slightly):

• Frequent intrusive thoughts about the limerent object (LO), who is a potential sexual partner.
• An acute need for reciprocation of equally strong feeling.
• Exaggerated dependency of mood on LO’s actions: elation when sensing reciprocation, devastation when sensing disinterest.
• Inability to react limerently to more than one person at a time.
• Fleeting relief from unrequited feeling through vivid fantasy about reciprocation by the LO.
• Insecurity or shyness when in the presence of the LO, often manifesting in overt physical discomfort (sweating, stammering, racing heart).
• Intensification of feelings by adversity.
• An aching sensation in “the heart” when uncertainty is strong.
• A general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background.
• A remarkable ability to emphasise the positive features of the LO, and minimise, or empathise with, the negative.
• I would also add to Tennov’s list: a desire for exclusivity.

Interestingly, when describing these traits to the same people that I queried about “limerence” as a term, the responses seemed to split into two general camps:

“That’s just love. You don’t need a special word for that.”

“Don’t be silly. Nobody really feels like that; it’s childish.”

This of course fits with Tennov’s core thesis: that people can be understood as fundamentally different in their experience of love. As limerents and non-limerents.

Surely that’s just a crush?

Many adolescents go through a period of over-romanticising other people as they develop their sexual identity. Bouts of puppy love come and go, and usually give way to a more realistic attitude towards actual romantic partners, superseding daydream fantasies about unattainable celebrities. Could limerence just be an adult crush?

While there are certainly elements in common, crushes tend to come and go with little lasting psychological impact. In contrast, limerence is distinguished by the involuntary and debilitating nature of the experience once it has taken hold.

I think this is most readily understood in the case of intrusive thoughts. “Oh I daydream all the time about him” doesn’t really get close to the invasive, relentless and compulsive nature of limerent rumination. You can’t turn it off. You can’t read a book, because every other sentence triggers a thought-bridge back to Them, and that’s it: concentration is impossible. You can’t listen to music, because all songs are about Them. You can’t seem to have a conversation with someone else without finding yourself mentioning Them in relation to… well, anything. They become the central force of gravity in your life. A black hole of attraction.

Urgh, sounds awful; but that’s the other weird feature: it isn’t. Certainly not at first. Mutual limerence experienced by two individuals free to express their feelings is surpassingly blissful – the “ecstatic union” described by Simone de Beauvoir and inspiration for uncountable numbers of poems and songs.

Even in times of uncertainty or adversity, the sensation of limerence can be highly pleasurable in itself. The rush of excitement at the perception of mutual attraction. The thrill of power and hope when you make LO laugh. The intoxicating sense of buoyancy when in the presence of a happy LO. It’s incredibly rewarding.

Person addiction

Intoxication really is the best word I can think of to capture the sensation overload that comes with limerence. Love intoxication. It’s as though you’ve become addicted to this other person.

And, like a junkie, limerents indulge themselves whenever they get a chance.

Oh good, a moment alone. I can have a nice fantasy about LO!

I normally take that route home, but if I take this small diversion in completely the opposite direction I may just happen to bump into LO…

I better just text LO about this important bit of trivia… Yes! They’ve responded! 

But like any other addiction, after a while the exquisite spike of pleasure can devolve into a habit, and then a craving, and then an impediment to the proper, healthy sources of happiness and fulfillment in life.

So, on the principle that the blissed-out mutual limerents are too distracted to bother with reading a site like this, I’m going to focus most of my posts on trying to understand limerence as a phenomenon, with the goal of devising means for enjoying it as an addictive stimulant to be indulged in at the appropriate times to the appropriate degree. I do believe that limerence can add vivid colour to life, without compromising the pursuit of meaningful happiness.

Further reading

How does limerence begin?

How long does limerence last?

What to do if you are married but limerent for someone else

How to get rid of limerence

The post What is limerence? first appeared on Living with Limerence.

The relationship between love and limerence is complex. More recently, those few psychologists who have researched the phenomenon have tended to focus on the pathological aspects of limerence – the intrusive thoughts, irrational behaviour, and distress caused by person addiction. They tend to contrast it unfavourably with healthy, mature love. I’ve commented on this before, but I just recently realised that two of the commonest dilemmas that people contact me about are actually linked by this ambiguity between limerence and love (although they don’t obviously seem so at first glance). This is quite a big topic, so I’m going to tackle it over two posts.

Here are the dilemmas, summarised by comments from two recent correspondents:

My problem is that I lose all romantic feelings and attraction for my partner after a year or 2. I completely lose interest no matter how much in love I was at the beginning.

The heart of the problem here is the strong mental association between limerence and love. When falling out of limerence, the conclusion is reached that they have fallen out of love, and that leads to the final conclusion: this romantic relationship is over.

For some people, this can be the truth of their lives: serial monogamy for one LO after another, but no longer-term relationships that have lasting romantic connection. In contrast, limerence can give way to lasting romantic love of a more stable but less exciting kind, which leads to long-term bonding.

For others, though, there is a less satisfactory compromise: a few limerent love affairs, until one results in legal and/or social commitment (perhaps precipitated by external circumstances), which then settles into a lasting relationship that has lost its romantic impetus, but persists because of duty and responsibilities.

That scenario commonly leads to the second dilemma:

I love my husband and he is a good man but we haven’t had sex for nearly two years (he just doesn’t want to, but refuses to talk about it). I’m now deep in an emotional affair with my boss and nearly going mad with lust!

So what links these two dilemmas? Well, even by just spelling out the different scenarios above, the basic issue is obvious: there are multiple different kinds of love.

This is not a novel observation.

The Greeks classified love into seven principal forms – eros, philia, pragma, storge, agape, ludus and philaupia – and since then there have been many other attempts to demarcate or classify love into different types (such as color wheels, triangles, languages and, indeed, limerence). 

There’s a good summary of the ancient model here, but very briefly, here’s how the forms break down:

• Eros – erotic, sexual love.
• Philia – emotionally deep, life-enriching friendship.
• Pragma – practical, co-operative commitment, for mutual benefit.
• Storge – affectional bonding of a familial, unconditional nature.
• Agape – spiritual or altruistic love that transcends (e.g. love of God).
• Ludus – playful, but casual love, without deep commitment.
• Philaupia – self-love (in the self-esteem, rather than masturbation, sense). 

One further type that some psychologists and philosophers include is mania – being a sort of obsessive, possessive, and jealous love of the insecurely attached. 

In reality, of course, most of our meaningful relationships are characterised by some blend of these various forms of love. That is the tension at the heart of much of the pain caused by limerence, including for my two correspondents. How much do the different forms of love matter, how do they change with time, and how does limerence relate to it all?

Well, as promised, I’m tackling this over two posts. Today is how limerence relates to these classical forms of love, and part two will cover what to do about it all.

Let’s jump in…

How does limerence map on to the different forms of love?

Oh my, it’s complicated. Only way through this is to take them one at a time.

Eros: obviously relevant, as limerence almost always involves sexual desire. Philia: commonly essential for deepening the emotional bond and for singling out an individual as a desirable LO rather than just an object of lust. Pragma: the least relevant form – practicality is rarely a consideration in limerence. Storge: of little relevance early on, but as limerence progresses the feeling of bonding becomes more and more important. Real storge takes time, though. Agape: many limerents report a feeling of selfless admiration, and a numinous, transcendent quality to their longing for LO. Complicated to disentangle this from idealisation, though. Ludus: more obviously a non-limerent form of casual romance, but playfulness and teasing is very attractive to many people, so could stimulate the glimmer. Philaupia: most relevant to how resilient limerents will be once they succumb. Those with low self-esteem are more vulnerable to predatory LOs. If we also include mania, then we can add the obsessive thinking and unstable moods of limerence too.

What a tangle! For me, the obvious conclusion is that limerence does not map simply onto any one of the long-established forms of love. So, limerence is not a separate form of love or a phenomenon that is only experienced by people who love in a particular way, it’s a combination of many of the different forms.

Limerence as a concept seems to fits much better with the three stage model of  romantic love proposed by Helen Fisher where a relationship progresses through lust, attraction and then attachment. Limerence colours (possibly even, determines) the experience in each of those stages, through a personal combination of the forms of love that we are all variously prone to.

As a final note, though, I can’t not comment on the killer combo of a LO with ludus and a limerent with an eros/philia blend.

So, what is limerence then?

If limerence isn’t a distinct form of love, what is it? Well my argument has always been that it’s best understood as an altered mental state – a change in psychological “affect” caused by the neurochemical response to a hyperstimulus (LO).  Limerence leads to an increase in libido, an increase in physiological arousal, an increase in motivational drive, and a general intensification of feelings that will impact on nearly all aspects of mood, and even cognition. 

It’s likely to be a volume control or amplifier for all aspects of love. Most immediately, eros will spike, but limerence will also ramp up desire and attraction, singling out LO as an object for philia – emotional as well as sexual connection. 

In fact, true philia or storge (and even pragma) takes time and experience to build to being meaningful, but limerence seems to intensify the promise of those forms of love. In the grip of limerence, the LO seems a source of emotional succour and thrillingly interesting and attractive. Someone you want to spend time with and bond with, someone who seems to offer the promise of lasting philia, coupled to eros. 

When limerence fades, what remains of that promise? That’s where my first correspondent finds herself: repeatedly disappointed by the residual feelings that remain once the limerence amplifier is unplugged.

This could be due to a mismatch between people who stimulate eros/ludus excitement and people that stimulate philia. Or, it could be due to a very close psychological association between limerence and libido, as I’ve speculated before, meaning that sexual desire only lasts as long as limerence lasts. But, it could also be due to a mismatch between expectations and reality when it comes to long-term bonding.

And that leads us to the end of part one. Next week: how to respond purposefully to our twin dilemmas.

The post Love and limerence (part one) first appeared on Living with Limerence.

We have a fairly well-established list of common symptoms, and so limerence is most easily defined as “having enough of those symptoms to qualify”. But there are deeper questions that aren’t really captured by that kind of categorisation. Questions such as: is limerence a psychological state that is entered, or a personality trait? Is it abnormal or extraordinary? Are certain people “limerents” or could anyone in principle have a limerent experience under the right (or wrong) set of circumstances? Should limerence be classified as a mental disorder, or is it the way that a significant number of people experience romantic love?

In the spirit of limerence, I’m going to ruminate about these issues. But, you know, out loud.

The Tennov model

The obvious starting point for refining our definition is to go back to the original creation of the term. Dorothy Tennov conceptualised limerence as a form of romantic love that many people experience (especially in the early stages), and she was prompted to name it by the “discovery” of non-limerents. She had implicitly assumed that all people experience infatuation as a feature of romantic love and was surprised to find through conversation with friends that not everyone does. Through a combination of personal interviews, her own clinical practice, and literature review, she formulated the idea of a distinct aspect of the love experience defined by a specific list of symptoms. She viewed limerents as people who had a propensity for a profound depth of infatuation that marginalised all other concerns in life, and non-limerents as people that experienced love without this overwhelming early infatuation.

Tennov has been reasonably criticised for the lack of scientific rigour with which she founded her ideas (and the opaque etymology of the word limerence), although this interview-based approach remains commonplace in the social sciences, and has obvious utility for hypothesis generation. It’s fair to say, however, that the hypothesis that humanity can be sorted into “limerents” and “non-limerents” has never been tested in any meaningful way.

The Wakin-Vo model

More recently, a more systematic definition of limerence has been proposed. Albert Wakin was a colleague of Tennov’s for a short period, and is one of the few investigators who has made a deliberate effort to advance understanding of the condition. He conceptualises limerence as a state of psychological distress, and has described it anecdotally as “a cross between addiction and OCD”. Within the paper in which he and his co-author Duyen Vo present their model, they provide this clarification of how they see limerence and love differing:

In a love relationship, one often experiences initial intense feelings and reactions, and absorption in another person that tend to moderate over time, allowing for a more stable, intimate, trusting, and committed relationship to flourish. However, in limerence, said initial feelings and reactions somehow fail to subside, becoming increasingly intense, pervasive, and disruptive, ultimately rendering difficulty in controlling one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Wakin therefore criticises Tennov for equating love and limerence. Although not stated, there seems in this view an implicit suggestion that “intense feelings and reactions, and absorption in another person” is a universal experience for people falling in love – and that it is only the intensity that varies between individuals. I may be reading too much into this, but it seems to imply that people fall on a spectrum of infatuation intensity, with limerents being at the extreme end, and defined as those that experience Wakin’s “initiating force” of an intense need for emotional reciprocation.

The progression of limerent feelings

I’m not sure these models are necessarily incompatible. Tennov classifies limerents as people who have a propensity for a particular kind of romantic love. Wakin defines limerents as people who have fallen into a state of psychological distress as a consequence of dysregulated infatuation. To try and rationalise this, I’ve organised the progression of limerence into a flow chart:

The key thing for me is that the emotional and psychological experience of limerence is the same, up until the point at which reciprocation is actively sought. If the infatuation is reciprocated, then… hallelujah. If the feelings are emphatically not reciprocated, then a period of personal agony is inevitable. In both these scenarios, however, the intense feelings of infatuation fade with time (with the speed varying notably between individuals). In contrast, if reciprocation is uncertain, then the emotional limbo of not knowing how LO feels drives the limerent into an intermittent reinforcement schedule that deepens the infatuation into full blown person addiction.

In this framework, the Tennov model is the whole diagram. Limerents are the subset of people in the world who can enter the funnel at the top. The Wakin-Vo model is the red pathway. Limerents are the subset of people who end up in the trap of emotional limbo and reinforcing psychological distress.

The existence of good limerence

For me, my first trip down the red path was the time I realised I was a limerent. It’s just that all my previous limerence experiences had followed the green or black paths – but the progression of the emotional phenomenon felt identical up until that point. As I’ve said before, my wife and I were mutually limerent and it was amazing – the most exhilarating and euphoric experience of my life. The fact that a repeat episode years later when it wasn’t welcome went wrong, is not an indication that the phenomenon itself is a mental disorder.

The Wakin-Vo model identifies the people who need psychological support, but the Tennov model suggests something intrinsic about the way that people differ in their experience of romantic love. The reason that mithering about these definitions is important in my view is that it shapes how we respond to limerents in distress. If limerence is a psychological disorder by definition then it misses the possibility that there is a common psychological substrate for good and bad (red and green) limerence. That said, the broader definition misses the possibility that some people may have a propensity to take the red path. When the drive to pair bond consistently fails to properly establish that bond, things go wrong. That failure could come from a flaky LO who is inconsistent or unreliable, but it could also come from the limerent having an attachment disorder meaning the bond never stabilises, or they never feel secure enough in the reciprocation, so uncertainty is a constant feature of their relationships regardless of LO’s behaviour.

Overall, I prefer the Tennov model, but we certainly need more evidence as to whether the limerent/non-limerent binary is meaningful. Whether limerents are suffering a mental illness, or whether it is an inherent feature of their personality, will surely colour what the appropriate response to distress should be: treat the limerence, or treat the circumstances that have steered it onto the red path.

Well, I guess that’s what I think about that. More research needed.

The post The definition of limerence first appeared on Living with Limerence.

What if you end up having Limerence for your therapist? Specifically a trauma therapist who is supposedly trained in attachment issues? Is attachment to a therapist needed to heal from childhood trauma? If there is a strong connection there and trust is built, it seems hard to give up on the work with this person. Lots of new current thinking and models in trauma therapy about how to break barriers between client and therapist. Is it “transference” or limerence?

Any thoughts on this minefield would be appreciated!!

It is a minefield, so I’m going to tread carefully. Trauma has deep, tangled and long-lasting impacts on psychology, and no one school of therapeutic thought has all the answers to how best to approach treatment. In the spirit of that complexity and uncertainty, I’m not going to offer advice to Amy – but I thought it could be useful to think through some of the implications of the psychoanalytic concept of transference from the perspective of limerence.

Dorothy Tennov devoted a section of her book to limerence and therapy, and it is fair to say that she was sceptical to the point of hostility about psychoanalysis and its impact on limerents:

Now that the haze is being lifted from both of these phenomena, it is evident that limerence and psychotherapy have combined to produce untold suffering…

It is essential that the profession be called to task for irresponsibility

Before Love and Limerence she published Psychotherapy: The Hazardous Cure, detailing the damage done by erotic transference to the wellbeing of many female patients. Indeed she credits this previous work as contributing to her understanding of the three conditions for limerence: 1) A person who meets your criteria for an LO, 2) A sign of hope that the person may reciprocate, and 3) Uncertainty. It’s obvious that for psychotherapy as practiced in the 1960s:

…all three conditions were more than admirably met.

In fairness, therapeutic practice has moved on substantially since 1979. Transference is not so widely viewed as a positive and necessary part of therapy, but the nature of the “talking cures” still presents difficulties for limerents.

Misinterpretation of limerence as transference

One of the major reasons why Freudian analysis has become discredited in recent years is the fixation on sexual repression as the root cause, or manifestation of, all neuroses. In that context, erotic feelings on the part of the patient towards the therapist are seen as a positive outcome, as they are evidence of transference – the process of a patient transferring the unresolved emotional pain from their childhood onto the therapist as a surrogate authority figure. This is usually viewed as necessary for healing, as it gives the patient the opportunity to relive the old painful behaviours in a controlled setting, and work through their limiting psychological beliefs with a supportive helper.

For those of us that do not see limerence as a manifestation of disordered bonding, but as an element of romantic love that some people experience, the dangers are obvious. The therapist thinks one thing is happening (transference), but the limerent is actually just succumbing to limerence. The therapist may even encourage the connection, dooming the limerent to a life-altering obsession.

How genuine is the patient-therapist bond? 

Therapists can obviously form deep bonds with their patients, being entrusted with secrets and intimacies that the patient may never have shared with anyone else. But, there is an unavoidable transactional component to the relationship too. The sessions are paid for, and the therapist’s living depends on the sessions continuing. Don’t get me wrong – I am sure that the majority of therapists are honest people with a genuine desire to help others, but there has to be a professional boundary in place, and payment is an element of that boundary. So, blurring that boundary by encouraging limerence as tranference is bound to be problematic. The presence of this boundary will also act as a barrier – and we all know what barriers do to the progression of limerence.

The other problem is that the limerent patient is not likely to be behaving genuinely either. Once limerence kicks in, the desire to impress LO becomes overwhelming. This can cause the limerent to fret about their physical appearance, and how their thoughts and opinions are perceived by LO, to an obsessive degree. They are hypervigilant for signs of approval and will present the best possible version of themselves that they can, to persuade LO of their appeal. Hardly the best circumstances to be helped according to their actual needs and problems.

Uncertainty will heighten the limerence

Following on from the issue of barriers, limerence thrives on uncertainty. It’s the rocket fuel. Your typical limerent, presented with someone who is willingly bonding with them, supporting them, maybe occasionally sharing insights into their own personal lives, but also closing down the conversation after a fixed period of time, occupying a position of authority and aloofness, and doing the same thing with all their other clients, is going to suffer uncertainty overload. Especially if the therapist actually is sexually attracted to them, and not as adept at hiding it as they should be.

Combine that with a therapist whose professional community thinks that the manifestations of limerence are evidence of transference that should be encouraged, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

It’s the perfect cover for indulging limerence

My general attitude to limerence is that it is a problem if the limerent or LO are not available for a relationship – which they certainly shouldn’t be in a therapeutic context. The purposeful thing to do under those circumstances is work to lessen the bond with LO, work on understanding your psychological triggers, and use what methods are available to “deprogram” yourself from the limerence obsession. The main obstacle to success, is that the limerent really, really wants to fail.

The resistance from your limerent brain is spectacular, for all the reasons I’ve outlined before. So, what if the limerent was offered a socially-sanctioned way to spend time with LO? Indeed, what if they were encouraged that opening up to LO was a healthy and desirable thing? What if they were told that romantic feelings were a good sign that the treatment was working? What if they had the perfect cover for getting limerence highs? Well, all those leading questions illustrate that it’s exactly what the psychotherapeutic environment offers.

Early on, the limerent would be pursuing therapy with the speed and enthusiasm of a rat up a drainpipe. A guilt-free limerence experience! But limerence unresolved is awful. That’s when the emotional pain really starts, which is why I advocate for acting purposefully to prevent the ambiguous bond persisting. If you persist in the limerent connection after the early euphoria has passed and the debilitating obsession kicks in, you’re trapped.

Limerence and attachment

I’ve opined before that the association of limerence with attachment disorders concerns me. The main disconfirming evidence, of course, is people that have otherwise stable attachments and no notable childhood traumas, but still become limerent in the early stages of romantic love. However, if someone does have attachment problems, and is also a limerent, then they have to cope with a double whammy when a romantic bond starts to form. So the question is: is limerence evidence for unhealthy bonding, or is it a confounding variable that some people have to cope with? And – as Amy asks – is attachment to the therapist necessary for recovery? Tennov would have given an emphatic “no”. Seeking a therapist who does not trigger limerence seems a much safer strategy.

Looking to the positives

That’s quite a lot of words devoted to picking apart the problems with transference for limerents. What about the positives? Well, I would say that it does make some sort of intellectual sense to think that re-enacting an attachment style with the therapist as a vehicle for transference could be a route to recovery. Transference is not always erotic (or limerent) so forming a quasi-parental bond with a trustworthy therapist could be valuable.

One option would be to seek out a therapist who is not your limerence match in terms of sex/gender (but tough luck on the bi-limerents). Transference in the sense of caregiver or authority figure roles shouldn’t be as risky for limerents as erotic transference.

Ultimately, this all adds up to a bunch of uncertainty. Therapy is not a science, and so intuition and emotional response do need to be considered when deciding whether to continue with a specific therapist or a particular approach. As ever, using purposeful living as a principle should help. If therapy is not helping you understand yourself better, and not leading you to develop more resilience, security, and self-sufficiency, there is cause to doubt its value. I’m not sure there is a hard and fast rule as to when you should continue with a painful process that may help, or abandon it to try something new, but if limerence for your therapist adds to the distress, then it should probably be confronted (most obviously by disclosure to spouse or therapist, or by ending the therapy and going no contact).

Anyway: enough of the inconclusive speculation. If anyone in the community has experience of this situation either as patient or therapist, please chip in and share your wisdom in the comments.

Best wishes, Amy, and hope you find a purposeful path through this.

The post Case study: Limerence for a therapist first appeared on Living with Limerence.

As I’ve said before, I’m not convinced of the value of rebranding limerence as a disorder, as it is a normal part of many people’s experience of love. Tennov certainly didn’t intend this meaning. It will be interesting to see how the field develops.

The post Article on limerence as pathology first appeared on Living with Limerence.