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.

In the process of writing my book, I revisited a lot of the key ideas that I’ve been blogging about these last three years, and played a game that I find peculiarly satisfying: Organising Things. 

Regular readers may have spotted that I like lists. When it comes to limerence recovery, I’ve managed to refine the key concepts down to four major factors that need to be understood. These could be called the pillars of recovery.

They are:

1) Our brains. We’re wired for limerence, because the hardware of our brains has evolved over millennia to respond to reward and arousal in predictable ways. 

2) Our history. What we personally go through in life programs our brains to be responsive to specific people and specific stimuli.

3) Our behaviour. When we just follow our instincts and do what feels natural, we tend to reinforce limerence.

4) Our limerent object. We can be lucky or unlucky for who we become limerent for. Some LOs make it waaaayyyy harder to deal with.  

Having settled on this organisational scheme, I started sketching out a series of posts to expand on each idea. However, by coincidence, while planning it all out, I happened to receive a few emails (and noticed a few comments in the threads) from newbies asking for help navigating the growing site. I realised that instead of a blog series, I could indulge in a second-level meta-organisational game!

I’ve organised the ideas into a new email course called Fast Track to Freedom.

It’s free, anyone can sign up, and it works through the essential recovery philosophy that I advocate here at LwL. It’s a week long course, with a daily email that presents a new idea to ruminate on (as a substitute for ruminating about LO). 

You can sign up here. 

I’ll be putting prominent links on the homepage and sidebar too, and directing those who are looking for urgent help straight to the course, as a quick and efficient way of getting up to speed on the main LwL ideas. Then they can peruse the library of rambling thoughts and fruity opinions in the blog back catalogue at leisure.

Enjoy!

The post Fast track to freedom first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Many limerents get to the point of deciding that they need to take action, need to go no contact, need to get themselves out of the limerence pit and “get over” LO. At that point, uncertainty springs another trap – the belief that the best way to end things is to get “closure” from LO. That you can’t move on without finishing things properly.

On the surface the idea of closure seems logical and sensible – even responsible – and it feels right too. Nobody likes loose ends. Surely tying everything up neatly is desirable?

Actually it’s yet another invitation to uncertainty and frustration.

One potential cause of increased uncertainty is an LO who doesn’t want the best for you. They may like your adoration, or they may be limerent for you too. They could be an emotional basket case themselves and incapable of giving you a clear message. They could taunt you with the possibility of closure but then backslide and tempt you and keep you on edge.

But the sources of uncertainty go deeper than flaky LOs. Anxiety about disorderly endings is rooted in the fear of losing control, the fear of an unpredictable and dangerous world that is indifferent to our pain, and the desperate hope that by planning well and steering events properly, we can escape the random misfortunes of fate. It’s the emotional nagging voice that complains about unresolved dramas, and fears them as a potential threat.

To help clarify why closure is an unrealistic goal, there’s one simple, direct question you need to ask yourself: what are you hoping to achieve, exactly?

Reciprocation

OK, let’s get the big one out of the way first. Seeking closure could just be your sneaky limerent brain bargaining for more contact and more intimacy and increased odds of getting reciprocation. It’s like you are trying to hoodwink yourself. “I just need to make sure that LO understands the situation properly.” Of course: it’s a high-minded decision to behave like an adult and honestly articulate why you need to break contact.

Naturally, there is the chance you might just drop some big hints about the reason why you need to go no contact. Or maybe not even hints, maybe a direct admission that you are hopelessly infatuated with them and need them to stop tormenting you with their unbearable gorgeousness.

It’s like your limerent brain has thrown a last-minute hail-Mary pass. Risk everything on a declaration of love dressed up as a declaration of departure, and maybe, just maybe, LO will realise that this is their last chance to have you. They could even admit to their feelings too, now you’ve been all open and honest, and give you that sweet, sweet reciprocation…

Emotional relief

OK. Assuming that you genuinely do want the limerence to end, and aren’t just bargaining, there’s also a seductive idea that by meeting them one last time you will be able to settle your tumultuous emotions. That you will have a discussion that will somehow dissipate the pent-up frustrations and anxieties of uncertainty and unfinished business that are causing you such discomfort.

It’s worth thinking a bit more deeply about this idea. What would need to happen exactly, to give you the emotional peace you seek? What would they need to say to give you satisfaction, and emotional completeness? What is it that you want them to understand about you?

And where’s the discomfort really coming from? Is it that you want them to validate your own understanding of events – about how things played out between you? Do you want them to admit that they’ve been stringing you along? Are you trying to control the narrative so that you have an ending that you find fulfilling?

The key issue here is identifying where you think that emotional relief will come from? Is it really that you need to receive some sort of blessing from them before you can carry on with your life? Or are you trying to deliver some sort of message to them? Do you need to feel understood? Is it important that they properly grasp what you are going through and know the truth of your situation?

By really analysing this, you can spot the problem. None of these goals are within your control. You can’t get through to an LO that doesn’t want to listen. You can’t expect a thoughtful response from an LO that actually loves the narcissistic thrill of keeping you on the hook for them. If your limerence episode has involved uncertainty and mixed messages from LO, that will carry on, and you will just be trapped in a new cycle of endless frustration because you cannot force LO to behave in the way that you hope will give you relief.

Relief will not come from you saying just the right things in just the right way. It will come from within you.

Quieting the intrusive thoughts

One of the clearest indicators that limerence has spiralled out of control is the development of intrusive thoughts. This is the state where you cannot concentrate on anything else because thoughts about LO keep barging into your consciousness. Sometimes these are pleasant thoughts – daydreams and fantasies – but the experience can nevertheless be debilitating because there is no off switch. This phenomenon occupies the grey area of overlap with mental disorders that also include obsessive thinking (OCD being the obvious case).

So, another possible motive for seeking closure is the hope that it will quieten those intrusive thoughts. The danger here though, is that the urge to “settle things” with LO becomes a compulsive ritual that offers only fleeting relief from the mental intrusions. Even if a meeting goes well, it will almost certainly be followed by a return to ruminating about ways it could have gone better, small errors you made that need to be rectified, or new misunderstandings that you fear have been created. That leads to the desire for just one more meeting to be sure that everything is fully settled – which of course will be imperfect.

Satisfaction will never come from repeating the ritual.

Perception management

Another common impulse is that you want to walk away from the relationship with LO with them thinking well of you. This could be vanity, but more likely is about your self-esteem and the unbearable thought that LO exists in the world and holds a bad opinion of you.

It may feel awful that they could have misunderstood something about your motives or your behaviour. Do you feel an absolute need to explain to them what you really think and feel? Can you not stand the thought of them needing you as a friend and you being unavailable? Does it feel very important to you that they truly know how you felt about them? 

Again, this is a problem of the limits of communication. You simply cannot directly relay your internal emotional state into their consciousness.

You cannot control what they think of you. You cannot force someone to think well of you. Sometimes it isn’t that you haven’t explained yourself properly, it’s that they don’t care to listen. The best you can do is state your truth as clearly as you can and let their reaction play out as it will.

How to actually get closure

I’ve written before about the problems of trying to settle things with an LO. They won’t follow your script, it won’t play out as you expect, it may set back your recovery, and it may have even further reaching consequences if you really shouldn’t have been declaring your feelings anyway, because of social or professional impropriety.

The only reliable way to get closure is to accept that it is not a deal between you and LO; it is a settlement you are making with yourself. You have decided that this period of your romantic life is coming to an end and are going to take the necessary steps to make yourself well again. You make the decision to give up trying to control the narrative, and let go of the old relationship dynamic. You don’t need to make any grand declarations or issue any ultimatums (ultimata?) – just get started on a staged withdrawal process, or go no contact with a polite, bland explanation if it’s needed.

You don’t know how LO will respond to your withdrawal, and that’s OK. You don’t know what they will do next, and that’s OK. Learning to live with uncertainty makes you limerence-resistant. It’s a hobnail boot over your Achilles’ heel. 

If you can take responsibility for your own feelings of dissatisfaction and accept that you can’t control other people’s perception of you, you can free yourself of a lot of emotional stress. Once you accept that perfect endings don’t really exist, because perfection is impossible and there’s only actually one final ending in life (!), you can reconcile yourself to the fact that you deciding the end has come is sufficient closure. You’re not hanging on to an illusory hope that a complex, uncertain and uncontrollable circumstance can be neatly tied up with a bow.

As a final thought, that approach to disentanglement also makes it more likely that you can meet LO again in the future without it feeling weird and unfinished.

If you need to.

The post Closure is an illusion first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Anecdotally, this is familiar:

“I had a really bad day today, and texted LO as soon as I got home. That’s no contact wrecked.”

“I really missed her, and spent all afternoon stalking her on Facebook.”

“Everything was going wrong and then he called and I couldn’t resist…”

Why? Well, it’s easy to make an analogy with a smoker or alcoholic craving their poison of choice under the same circumstances, and I think that is a useful way in to understanding why we seek LO during times of sadness. Basically, we use limerence for mood regulation.

It’s an attempt to self-medicate. Limerent reward is a comforting mechanism that always used to work well, is readily available (especially in the case of reverie), and overpowers other thoughts and concerns. The impulse is pretty clear: when stressed, depressed or upset, our brains seek comfort. Negative mood is an aversive state, by definition. It feels awful. So we seek escapes, we seek relief, we seek ways to counteract the low mood. And as limerents, we have repeatedly trained ourselves that there is one particular habit that gives excitement, hope and reward – seeking LO. 

This is a very unsophisticated mood-regulating strategy, of course. It’s our lizard brains taking charge, and ignoring the fact that we now have a much more nuanced and wise understanding of the harms of limerence. We may have learned that those past pleasures are no longer effective, but that doesn’t stop us wanting them. In fact, we may even have a plan for limerence withdrawal, may have been methodically making progress with no contact, and have a very clear intellectual understanding of the fact that limerence will cause far more long-term harm to us than any short-term benefits from a mood boost. But when we’re struggling, expecting our lizard brains to carefully weigh all that nuance is somewhat naive.

This is a problem. Beyond the fact that it is obviously keeping us trapped in limerence, there is an even worse outcome: it’s a vicious cycle for wrecking your mood even further.

If you’ve reached the point where you have recognised that limerence is unhealthy for you, you are likely to come out of these relapse periods feeling worse than ever. Even if you managed to secure some fleeting and shallow relief from LO contact, once it passes, you have to face your recovery setback. This usually comes with some shame, anger, self-loathing, or just plain sadness and regret. Obviously, that can exacerbate the depressed mood that started the whole thing, and make you want to seek some relief…

It’s a horrible cycle: helplessly seeking comfort from a behaviour that is actually making things even worse.

What can be done?

One of the principles of this site is that even if we feel helpless, we aren’t. There is always action we can take, always options we can choose, even if the steps are modest and initially tentative. The first and most important step is to find better, healthier strategies for mood regulation. We all of us will hit rough patches in life. They are unavoidable. So we should experiment with other mood regulators that can give comfort when the “black dog” comes to visit. Some good examples:

• Walking
• Listening to uplifting music
• Watching films
• Dancing
• Singing
• Spending time with friends
• Spending time in nature
• Perpetrating bad art (especially if it gets better)
• Lifting weights
• Journaling
• Meditating
• Daydreaming about a better life

The second step can be linked to these alternate mood-enhancers: find new hobbies and interests. Novelty is rewarding, and arousing, and if you can find a new project that is fulfilling you are far less likely to fall back into old habits and routines. Distraction can seem like an evasion, but it certainly works to disrupt established patterns of behaviour that are keeping you trapped. You need to get out of the rut of circling back to LO when bored or sad, and throwing yourself into new hobbies and adventures is a good way to shake things up.

The third step is to be wise to your limitations. It is hardest to muster the willpower to resist the LO craving when you are depressed, so you have to plan for what you will do ahead of time when your mood is better. Try to identify the triggers that make you most vulnerable to LO-seeking. Is it loneliness? Is it abandonment anxiety? Is it insecurity? If you can spot the triggers you can anticipate times of vulnerability and protect yourself. Deploy your new tools.

If you frequently get lonely on a friday night, sitting at home with a box of chocolates and LO on speed dial, join a friday night Argentine tango club and step and pivot the loneliness away.

And that brings us to the final point. The universal solution. The panacea of LwL: purposeful living. 

There’s really only one lasting cure for low mood, and that’s finding something that makes you want to keep going even when you feel bad. Finding a purpose, a goal you care about, a vision of what your life could be like if you took control of your destiny. That shift in mindset moves you from a state of passive dependency to one of active motivation.

Living with purpose means you stop depending on LO for comfort, stop following their lead, stop letting their behaviour dictate your mood. When your energy is focused on achieving something worthwhile that you care about, the need for mood regulation decreases, along with the appeal of shallow gratification. When life has a solid foundation, you no longer lean on unhealthy crutches.  

Unshackle yourself from the false comfort of LO. Seek out new passions, new rewards, new directions to take your life in. Find a new northstar, and follow it to freedom.

The post Using limerence for mood regulation first appeared on Living with Limerence.

I’m still puzzling at the pair-bonding as the only source. It seems too narrow – especially for those of us well beyond reproductive years. (The thought of pair-bonding with my LO just makes me feel nauseous). Can it also be just needing/hoping for validation (as you mentioned somewhere) from a highly regarded person? Someone regarded as high status, as happens in other primate societies? Surely the need to belong in a society goes back a long way. If being ostracized, cast out from the tribe, is the worst that can happen to us because we can’t survive on our own, then the attentions of the (perceived) highest ranking tribe member ensures our security within the fold of the tribe. Those attentions need not be exclusive (thinking of bonobos). Or the deep-seated need for union? The union with our higher selves or with a higher entity that spiritual pursuits ultimately should provide? (Just co-opted by lower biological drives?)

It’s a great question, and it can be answered from a few angles. 

Why do we feel desire for certain people?

I do focus many of my posts on limerence being a very effective force for pair-bonding. Becoming utterly obsessed with a potential mate to the exclusion of all other people and concerns is a brilliant way (mathematically) of increasing the chance of making a baby and seeing them through their most vulnerable years. But it’s perfectly possible to think of other reasons why we might become infatuated to the point of limerence with another type of person.

The high status/highly regarded person is a good example. So is the mentor, or role model. So is the object of lust that you have no intention in a million years of trying to form a stable relationship with. In theory you could pair-bond with these people, but in practical terms it’s not a good prospect. 

Why we become limerent for particular people is a very rich topic for speculation. We’ve covered some ideas before but there is loads of scope to riff on these old themes and improvise some new directions.

Attachment theory has a lot to contribute, and what’s happening in your life at the moment. Your romantic history; what is missing from your emotional landscape; the choices you are making about how you behave. Bluntly, it’s likely to be as varied as human experience.

What is it that is rewarding about an LO?

Similarly broad is the notion of what you are getting out of the limerent experience. You may be seeking emotional or sexual validation, or seeking comfort, or seeking excitement, or seeking romance, or seeking a sense of the transcendent. The emotional urge that is making you want to connect, to get intimate, to somehow get subsumed into your LO’s life – that will also vary from limerent to limerent.

A mentor may make you feel valued and emotionally validated. A high status person may make you feel secure, safe, and freed from a desperate competition for resources. These may be the biggest pain points in your life and what your subconscious is craving relief from. Or, of course, you may want that romantic connection, that special intimacy, that sexual union.   

Ultimately, whatever your particular LO archetype is, the neuroscientific basis will be much the same. You feel a glimmer as your subconscious spots the LO pattern, you get a surge of dopamine if they give you a hint of reciprocation, and you seek more. High on dopamine-induced euphoria, you reinforce the reward-seeking behaviour, and – if you’re unlucky – uncertainty and barriers send the system into overdrive, and you run heedless into the crushing grip of limerence.

Is limerence always about reproduction?

This is where ideas get a bit slippery. Yes and no, would be my helpful answer. I think a useful way of looking at this is to ask the parallel question: is sex always about reproduction?

The answer, of course, is no. Contraception means recreational sex is possible. There are lots of positions and partner combinations that could not possibly result in conception. We masturbate. We have sex at non-fertile periods of the menstrual cycle, we have sex after the menopause, and with people we would never want to form a lasting bond with. Animals do all this too, so it’s not some unique quirk of us libidinously creative humans.

The basic point is that the motive drive for a behaviour is often decoupled from the outcome of the behaviour. Lust is very effective at causing conception, but it’s sort of an incidental consequence of the actual desire to… bump sexy bits. It’s perfectly possible to trigger lust by stimuli that will not lead to conception. Lust, after all, can even be triggered by a picture, or words on a page.

So, by the same reasoning, limerence can make us want to get emotionally close to someone just because it feels good, even if we don’t want to enter a monogamous relationship with them. It’s sort of a “person-lust” in the sense of making us crave the company, emotional closeness and special connection with an LO. 

That would be a very effective strategy for pair-bonding if the limerent and LO were young, fertile and sexually attracted to each other. But the neural circuits that start the limerence wagon rolling don’t know that in advance. They just recognise a certain pattern of feedback (LO’s behaviour, appearance, scent, mannerisms etc.), initiate reward signalling, and couple it to neurotransmitter and hormone storm that blisses you out. 

It’s perfectly feasible that this process of infatuation can be caused by an LO that is completely implausible as a potential mate. Just as lust can be caused by someone you would never want to have a baby with. The drives can lead very effectively to the “evolutionarily useful” outcome under the right circumstances, but are actually independent of the outcome.

In summary, then, it’s definitely the case that we can become limerent for people that we don’t want to mate with, that it makes no sense for us to attempt to mate with, but who nevertheless trigger our “desperate desire for closeness” circuitry.    

People are, after all, weird and marvellous.

The post Is limerence always about pair-bonding? first appeared on Living with Limerence.

It’s a good point. As I responded, it’s bittersweet for those of us left behind to watch our friends “graduate” and move on to new, healthy, purposeful goals – but it’s also a cause for hope and comfort to know that it’s possible. 

So, in this post, I thought I’d think about what freedom from limerence looks like. I’ve asserted many times that I don’t think limerence is something that goes away, I think it fades into the background of everyday life but is always there as part of who we are, able to burst up if the conditions are right (or wrong). Given that, when would someone be truly free? What are the milestones of recovery that lead to freedom?

1. The intrusive thoughts have quietened

One of the most debilitating symptoms of limerence is the intrusive thoughts. The constant invasion of your mind by LO and the shaping of your experience of the world as something that has meaning primarily in relation to them. Their good opinion is the primary measure of value. It’s impossible to concentrate on anything except them. Everything you do makes you wonder what LO would think of it – maybe even to the point of feeling they are somehow always with you in some weird, ghostly way.

A major milestone in recovery is when those thoughts quieten. One benefit of studying limerence is that it can help you shift your thoughts through a progression: from constant rumination about Them and how much you crave them, to thoughts about Them and how your limerence is hurting you, to thoughts about limerence itself and what it means about you and how you can protect yourself against it. Eventually, thoughts about LO become linked to the negative consequences of limerence, rather than the fantasy daydreams of the past. For me, that was when the intrusive thoughts began to fade, presumably because they were no longer giving me any pleasure – it was mostly punishment. Getting to the point where the urgency and strength of intrusive thoughts calm, and then fade to background, is a huge relief. 

2. Emotions have stabilised

The next milestone is emotional. In the depths of limerence, thinking about LO – or even more so, being with them – sends your emotions all over the place.

Limerence is characterised by extremes of emotion – euphoria when LO is happy and reciprocating, devastation when they are cold or dismissive – and it gets exhausting. Most of us will be familiar with the jolt of electric anxiety when we hear their voice behind us, or see them enter the room, or when we are anticipating a meeting. A sort of mixture of elation and dread. It seems absurd that someone should have such extraordinary control over our mood, but it’s a defining feature of limerence. 

So, another milestone of recovery is freedom from that emotional agitation. I’m not sure an LO ever loses their power to emotionally affect you, but the stomach-churning maelstrom can and does fade to a much more tolerable low level of tension. Again, studying limerence can help with this, by helping you understand why your emotions are so volatile, what the root of the psychological turmoil is, and what tactics you can use to help neutralise the potency of LO. Just naming and kind of mentally grasping the phenomenon into an ordered pattern can give relief. 

3. New goals begin to look attractive

When caught in the monomania of limerence, there’s only one goal that matters – reciprocation from your LO. Other goals exist of course, but as distant secondary concerns. You can function in autopilot mode, pursuing the usual everyday goals just enough to keep life moving, but there is one, dominant and overriding objective: LO.

The next milestone for recovery is when this changes, and you start to care about other things too. It’s a strong indicator of independence. Once other ideas catch hold of your imagination, and other projects and possibilities attract your attention, you can start to mentally detach from LO. These new goals become a different source of pleasure and satisfaction. Your motivation is driven by other fuels, which don’t depend on LO.

There is a useful little hack here for using limerence against itself. With careful goal selection, you can exploit the desire to impress LO as a motivation for gaining new skills and achievements. An obvious one is health and fitness. Many of us limerents become far more concerned about our appearance once limerence kicks in. Suddenly, the middle-aged belly and baggy tracksuit bottoms of complacency stand in stark contrast to the image we would like LO to see. So, we hit the gym and tart ourselves up a bit, and basically make more of an effort. 

It’s a shallow impulse, but it leads to a good outcome. A goal of losing weight, getting healthier, and looking after yourself is a keystone good. It makes life better in every way.

So, limerence can be used to leverage some good goals, but there is a risk. If your primary motivation for pursuing the goal was seeking LO’s good opinion, you risk the fact that it taints the goal after limerence fades. The risk is small when the goal makes life much better, but use with caution. 

Why new goals are so important

For attaining freedom, pursuing new goals is the most important milestone. That’s because it doesn’t depend on the other milestones, and it can also help you reach them faster. To mix metaphorical stones, it’s a foundation stone as well as a milestone. 

Limerence is an indication that your subconscious is seeking something. You may think: well, duh, yes, it’s seeking an attractive mate, obviously, because that’s what human beings do. And a good thing too or none of us would be here. While that’s true, we don’t all seek mates all the time. Once a stable pair-bond is formed, other potential mates become decidedly unattractive for a while. If limerence emerges unexpectedly in an otherwise stable life, it is an indication that your subconscious is seeking something that you were not even aware was missing.

It could be something as trivial as sexual novelty. It could be more profound, like emotional intimacy, or personal fulfilment, or relief from the pent-up resentments of life. But the implication is that there is some unresolved need that you should pay attention to and try to identify – because, if you don’t, you may recover from one limerence episode but then slip straight into another. Unless you resolve the source of discontent, your subconscious will keep trying to solve it for you by shoving new LOs into your mind’s eye (because it thinks in its simplicity that that will work).

Really, the only way out of that cycle is to feed your subconscious with nourishing, new goals. Find new sources of reward that are linked to healthier pursuits. Personal growth. Creativity. Education. Art. Doing good in the world. You could even – to pick an idea entirely at random – start a blog that helps other people, as a way of channeling your “must save damsels in distress” energy into a positive outcome, rather than a family-risking crisis. 

Find something that nourishes you and pursue it with purpose. It’s the big win. 

Time to move on?

So given all those indicators of freedom, when is it a good time to move on? To stop circling back to limerence and ruminating about it? Let’s be honest, I’m not the best person to ask. 

Sharnhorst mentioned the fact that he now needs to “call LO to mind” to revisit the emotions and lessons of limerence. That could be a good yardstick. If your attention is captured by new goals, your life is moving forwards in a positive and purposeful way, and thinking about limerence compromises those goals, then it’s no longer serving a purpose for you. Take a break and give yourself space to forget. 

I’m now at a point where I can think about limerence without thinking about my LO. I find limerence fascinating in and of itself as a phenomenon, and that new focus has superceded the old association with LO. In some respects, I can even be grateful for the experience, as it’s opened this new frontier in my life.

And that brings us again to purposeful living as the ultimate solution. Once you know what you are doing and why, it’s a lot easier to make these judgements about what to prioritise and when to change tack. I’ll keep that lesson in mind – and for the veterans who have emerged from the limerence trenches, I’ll write more posts on purposeful living and the future triumphs that can lie beyond limerence. 

That never gets old. 

The post Freedom from limerence first appeared on Living with Limerence.

I wish I could give an answer.

The reality, of course, is that it will be different for every limerent, and different for every circumstance, and different for every LO. Not terribly helpful. To judge from my inbox, it’s somewhere between a couple of weeks and five decades.

Leaving aside the poor soul who has checked in with his LO once a year for the entire duration of his adult life (so far), thereby keeping an annual flame alive, most cases are clustered more tightly.

Tennov set a typical range of 18 months to 3 years (likening this to the period needed for conceiving and giving birth to a child), and most other commentators follow that lead, but I think another interesting question is where the variance comes from. It seems obvious that there must be a difference between passively waiting for the madness to fade, and actively deciding to take action to resolve things. Similarly, an LO who is uninterested or hostile should surely be easier and quicker to get over than an enabling narcissist LO.

The slow decline

Probably the commonest experience for the resolution of limerence is a slow decline towards a more emotionally stable baseline. No grandiose change in emotion, just a gradual cooling until one day you suddenly realise “I don’t feel infatuated any more”. Which is an end of sorts.

If the limerent formed a relationship with LO, this is also the period in which the mind clears and the limerent learns whether a lasting, stable love remains; or if instead, the limerence has been papering over an incompatibility too big to ignore.

The slow decline is the slow way to get over limerence. The long defeat. Ageing your way out of the problem. Usually, limerents hope for quicker.

The Off switch

Some limerents do report an abrupt stop to their limerence. An off switch.

It could be caused by something that LO does that is so objectionable that it overwhelms even a determined limerent’s best efforts at idealisation. Or maybe it’s a flat out row with LO that is so explosive you can’t forgive them. Or, something changes that abruptly removes the uncertainty that fuels limerence reverie.

We recently had an interesting thread of comments on this phenomenon after this post, with a few examples. One surprising one for me was an off switch after disclosure by LO of mutual limerence. Normally, you would expect that to strengthen the connection – after all reciprocation is what the limerent craves more than anything. But instead, for commenter Vincent at least, once the uncertainty was finally over, the limerence was too.

The opposite phenomenon was reported by catcity. Their LO partnering up was the cause of the uncertainty dissipating, and that triggered the “off switch”. So, it certainly seems that some limerents can experience an abrupt change in emotional state as a consequence of the loss of uncertainty. That said, catcity’s LO later admitted to reciprocation, and the limerence came back with a vengeance. So, maybe it’s more of a toggle switch than an off switch.

How off is off?

That does lead to the next complication. Can limerence for an LO really be turned off for good? I’ve speculated before that probably the only surefire way of eliminating limerence is to have a fully consummated romantic and sexual relationship with LO. That way there is no uncertainty, and you get to know them fully and properly, and all that limerence energy can be properly discharged. But, you know, even that’s no guarantee.

If LO is an unreliable partner they can keep you guessing. If LO is a non-limerent, they are not going to respond to your cues in the same way as a mutual limerent would, so you’ll always be wondering a bit about the strength of connection. Uncertainty can persist even after a relationship starts, if you are unlucky in the partner you become limerent for. And, stories abound about people who hook up again with their exes years later, with just as much insane passion as first time around. Time is a great healer, so maybe it can heal what you thought was worn-out limerence too.

Are there ways to turn it off?

That leads us to the big question: are there ways that individuals can actively, decisively, turn off limerence? I’m going to offer a cautious “no”, but tempered by the slightly more optimistic “you can turn it down to manageable levels”. I think that the drives that underlie limerence are so deep, so woven into our psychology and personality and evolutionary inheritance, that they can’t be eliminated. But they can definitely be constrained.

While the general principle of purposeful living obviously rests upon this foundation, there are some specific steps that could be taken. First up is self-knowledge. In the case of those that experience the limerence “off switch”, I think the circumstances leading up to the precipitating event will tell the limerent something profound about what they were seeking. If reciprocation kills the limerence, it does suggest that it was the desire to be desired that was most important drive. Once that is confirmed, the craving dies. If LO becoming unavailable kills the limerence, then it’s more likely that the limerent actually wanted a relationship, was actually drawn to the potential of being with LO.

Doing the deep work of understanding what the limerence is telling you about your subconscious cravings, and where they might have arisen from, will be very useful for decreasing your psychological openness in the future.

Another strategy is to embark on a “deprogramming” campaign. I’ve touched on this before and am currently putting the finishing touches on an online course designed specifically to address this, as it’s the method that worked for me. The idea is to understand the quirks of neuroscience and psychology that lead to limerence, and use them against themselves to overwrite the old script (that LO = wonderful reward). Reprogram your subconscious, and you can dial down the mania.

Finally, a few limerents have been in touch with me to say that medications they have been prescribed to deal with anxiety or depression or other mood disorders have also been effective at blunting their limerence symptoms. I’m not advocating this as a first line response, just to be clear. There is no quality data on pharmacological treatment of limerence, simply because it is not recognised as a condition to be treated. There have definitely not been any controlled trials. But, it’s also not too surprising that drugs designed to regulate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying mood, motivation and arousal would also have an impact on limerence. But, you know, don’t experiment with that stuff without proper medical supervision.

So, to return to the original question: how long does limerence last? It lasts as long as the conditions that sustain it last, and that depends on the combustible confluence of LO’s behaviour and your behaviour. The only certain thing that you can control in that scenario is your behaviour. If you act with purpose, you can turn the volume down.

The post How long does limerence last? first appeared on Living with Limerence.

To an extent, this is true. Many people go through a period in adolescence where they get obsessed with a celebrity of some sort – actor or musician or model – and develop such strong feelings of attraction for that celebrity that they become a fan in the “fanatical” sense. This teenage crush phase could be seen as a sort of proto-limerence, as though the development of new romantic and sexual drives has a practice run for later limerence for a potential mate. It’s also a good way to exercise the rumination muscles; spending hours fantasising about what it would be like if you got together with your famous crush and all the good feelings that process can give. It’s the period in life where you start to process all the new blessings that hormones bestow.

Most people do “grow out” of that phase, to the extent that their limerence transfers to LOs that they actually know and interact with; or at least they learn to hide the fact that they are still fixated on a celebrity because of the social stigma of adult fandom. But some limerents continue in this groove, remaining infatuated with public figures through most of their lives.

So what’s going on here? Is celebrity limerence a special case of the same basic phenomenon, or something totally different? Why should celebrities be appealing LOs?

1) They are archetypes

I’ve talked before about the archetypal nature of LOs. Many celebrities become celebrities because they have some sort of near-universal appeal. They represent some highly desirable aspect of human identity, they have transcendent beauty or talent – or at least enough of it to earn fame. Some celebrities can also embody a sort of highly-concentrated version of womanhood or manhood, elevated to an exaggerated extent.

Given that, it’s not too surprising that such celebrities are promising LOs. You don’t have to work too hard to idealise someone who’s already an archetypal ideal. It makes sense that celebrities would be a common object of fascination, and limerence.  

2) Some limerents are drawn to unattainable LOs

Another aspect of the archetypal nature of celebrities is that they are unattainable. At first analysis this should seem to count against the development of limerence, as there is no chance of reciprocation to deepen the connection, and also very little uncertainty (you’d have to be pretty delusional – or extraordinary yourself – to hold out much hope of landing a celebrity LO). However, many limerents report repeated episodes of limerence for LOs that are unattainable – that, in fact, the unattainability adds significantly to the attraction. The desire for the forbidden fruit, for wanting what you know you can’t have, can be perversely powerful. Becoming limerent for someone who is married, lives far away, or does not reciprocate your feelings happens routinely. Celebrities are just a heightened example of that syndrome, and if you have a tendency to develop limerence for the unattainable LO, then a celebrity is, again, an exaggerated ideal.

3) It’s “safer”

One part of the appeal of unattainable LOs is that they are not a threat to your current life. Having a crush on a celebrity could be embarrassing if discovered, but not nearly as troublesome as having a crush on John from Accounts.

So in one respect it’s a safe way to partake of the limerence drug without risking existing relationships.

A recent correspondent (who we’ll call CelebLim) proposed exactly this:

I think it’s a safe way for me to experience the limerence I don’t feel for my husband in a way that won’t disturb my marriage.

But there’s a problem with limerence, and that’s that it can become an addiction, and addictions are toxic for any healthy relationship. CelebLim recognises this too. After blogging about her celebrity LO for a while:

My husband discovered my blog and basically had a nervous breakdown. I think he realizes I don’t feel that spark for him, and he’s fine with it unless I feel a spark towards someone else.

At what point does a personal fantasy become a self-indulgence that hurts other people you care about? And how much responsibility should you take for it?

4) It’s all in your head

Another feature of celebrity limerence is that it’s a really good illustration of the “it’s all in your head” principle. Without reciprocation, encouragement – or really any feedback at all from LO – there’s no way to deny that all of the nucleation, reinforcement and rumination is generated internally. Only one person is involved in the progression of this particular limerence episode. It’s sort of a “pure limerence” scenario, and the celebrity is a pure limerence object.

But the modern world is a complex place. To return to CelebLim, she recently developed limerence for a new LO, a podcaster and comedian who has started to recognise her at public appearances and is a tactile and affectionate person who is free with his hugs for fans. He also shares a lot of his personal life on his podcast. At first, this was pretty cool for CelebLim…

But the limerance always becomes dark for me; I experience a lot of jealousy, I’m sad if he doesn’t respond to my tweets

There’s a dictum about being careful about living out your fantasies. Social media is making celebrities more accessible than ever before. Boundaries between real life and fantasy are not as firm as they once were.

Fantasy life versus purposeful life

I’m not anti-fantasy. I appreciate the value of daydreaming and romance, but like all indulgences, moderation is a good idea. Using fantasy to imagine a better future or a new life that would be more fulfilling and worthwhile is great. Using fantasy to evade the things you know are wrong with your current life, but are too scared to fix, is not so good. It’s natural enough to try and use limerence for stress relief, but as with all potentially destructive addictions, there are dangers to flirting with the edge of obsession. Better to exercise your imagination to shape a purposeful life, and then get to work building it.

The post Limerence for celebrities first appeared on Living with Limerence.