All things limerence discussed and analysed.

Enjoy!

The post Limerence Q&A first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Normally, I’d kick things off with a topic for conversation, but this time, I’m just going to leave the discussion completely open.

Chat to your hearts’ content!

Here’s a cat contemplating his caffeine addiction.

The post Coffeehouse: open house first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Once the thrills of euphoria have given way to the lows of person addiction, you have all the negative consequences of cravings, intrusive thoughts, withdrawal pains, and the sense of being trapped in a compulsion you want to escape but don’t know how.

Eventually, with patience and determination, it is possible to get out of this state. However, even once we succeed in freeing ourselves from the mental state of limerence, it isn’t done serving us life lessons.

I recently had an email from a reader who has largely got over their limerent object but is still struggling to move on. Principally because of what they did while under the influence:

Are there exercises or ways to get over the shame and humiliation one feels when reminded of the things they did to get their LO’s attention especially after having been rejected?

It seems an especially mean phenomenon that intrusive thoughts about the LO can transform into intrusive thoughts about the humiliating behaviour we engaged in whilst limerence had dampened our judgement and self-respect.

The clarity of post-limerent thinking is welcome, but not if it comes with a huge dollop of guilt over what we did.

Is there a way to manage this, and recover some emotional harmony?

Guilt, shame and embarrassment

A good starting point is to recognise the difference between the closely aligned feelings of guilt, shame and embarrassment.

A quick summary would be:

• Guilt = I did something bad
• Shame = I am a bad person
• Embarrassment = I did something foolish

Guilt usually comes from doing or saying something that you know is in conflict with your internal moral code. It is typically focused on believing your actions have caused pain to someone else, and that you want to atone for your actions to try and make things right.

Guilt in this sense is useful, because it comes naturally from within, is focused on deeds not identity, and is more like a moral debt than a character flaw. It’s the prick of your own conscience, not an external judgement.

Shame is different.

Shame is the feeling of being a flawed or worthless person. Shame often comes when other people criticise you for your actions, or suggest you should feel guilty over something that you don’t naturally feel guilty about.

Shame is often deep rooted, psychologically, due to childhood programming by over-critical, self-centred or emotionally withholding parents.

Shame is much less useful than guilt. It doesn’t help you identify what behaviours to avoid in the future, learn from mistakes, or help you align your actions to your internal moral compass. It just makes you feel bad about yourself.

Finally, the simplest to deal with is embarrassment.

Embarrassment comes from doing something that opens you to social ridicule rather than something that is morally wrong. It’s more about those hot flushes of cringe, when you fear that people will be laughing at you or think you’re pathetic.

Managing shame and embarrassment

Shame is a problem of self-esteem. It is corrosive and has little value. Shame is difficult to deal with, and can be complicated to even identify, as it can be masked as other emotions, like anger, anxiety or depression.

Really, the solution is to try and understand the origin of why you feel unworthy or inferior. This is probably most usefully done with the help of a therapist or mental health professional who can get to the root of your internalised beliefs and help you make sense of them.

In the short-term, one exercise to try is to analyse the situation as though you were responsible for judging someone else’s conduct. Detach your emotions from the situation and question it dispassionately.

To take the reader’s situation above, you might ask:

1. Is it shameful to feel limerent desire for someone else?
2. Is it shameful to be rejected by them?
3. Is it shameful to try to get their attention in an embarrassing way?
4. Is it shameful to continue to pursue them after rejection?

For me, the answers would be

1. No
2. No
3. No, but it is embarrassing.
4. It’s inconsiderate, but it’s not shameful (unless you didn’t respect their boundaries)

The key distinction is whether your actions caused harm to anyone other than yourself.

If you just behaved foolishly – like clumsily flirting, or getting drunk and making an exhibition of yourself – then the only thing wounded is your pride. In these cases the best remedy is to just… laugh along at what a fool you were.

Embarrassment is largely a problem of mental framing.

I always remember a line by Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, when I embarrass myself:

For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

It helps remind me that everybody embarrasses themselves at some point. It’s just my turn.

Looked at from this perspective, embarrassment just means you’ve provided some free entertainment, and it’s really just a private pang of regret that you should have exercised more emotional continence.

That said, embarrassment can be more complicated if other people are affected.

It can, appropriately, lead to guilt if you caused pain or distress through your actions. Say, by harassing your LO after they made it clear they weren’t interested, or – in perhaps the commonest cause of limerence guilt – making romantic or sexual overtures to LO while in a committed relationship with someone else.

Managing guilt

Limerents do often act in an irresponsible way, for understandable reasons. In the throes of limerence, your self-control is compromised, but that isn’t any justification or mitigation for the harm done.

Guilt in this context is useful, because it correctly signals that you’ve done something at odds with your conscience. It comes with a big old rush of regret when you recover your senses and have to face what you’ve done.

You can’t undo or fix the past. It’s happened. That cold reality can be hard to accept, and regret can turn guilt toxic if it’s not managed well.

There are two big risks with mismanaging guilt.

First, it can transform into shame.

Second, it can get into a futile spiral of endlessly trying to make amends. People can get trapped in a process of seeking relief by repeatedly apologising, or confessing, or revisiting past mistakes.

Instead of finally dispelling their guilt, they just end up re-opening old wounds.

The imagined emotional closure from guilt-purging never comes. You just keep churning the silt.

So, how can you manage guilt effectively?

Well, the most important thing to do is figure out if there is a way to make amends, and the best way to do that is to try and put yourself into the shoes of the person that’s been wronged.

For example: if you feel guilty about coming on too strongly to an LO after they’d rejected you, the best way to make amends would probably be to leave them alone. Another in-person interaction to apologise or seek forgiveness would almost certainly just make them uncomfortable again, making the situation worse. An email or text with a short apology for your conduct might be OK, as long as you leave it at that and don’t take it as an opportunity to try and re-engage.

In the case of guilt about limerent behaviour that hurts someone other than the LO –say a spouse or long-term partner – making amends is about genuine contrition and rebuilding trust. In this case, there are some rules of thumb that can help:

1. Let them lead. They are the injured party and so should be able to express how they feel about the situation and if you can do anything to make it better.
2. Tell the truth. Now is not the time for reputation management. Being honest is the only hope of regaining trust.
3. Share consequential information. Lies of omission can damage trust too. Be sensitive, but share information that you know they would want to know. Your partner should be the best informed person about what happened.
4. Don’t try to offload the guilt. It’s not a burden they take on for you, by being a sounding board for all your regrets and anxieties.
5. Accept that you’ll probably never feel satisfied. Guilt doesn’t vanish through confession. The best you can hope for is that they feel better, and then you can be relieved that that’s some recompense.
6. Use it as an anchor memory for future limerence. Any time you are tempted to behave irresponsibility in the future, remember what guilt feels like and what it costs.

Limerence guilt can be productive if you use it to learn about your vulnerabilities, and to change the way you act in the future.

It’s a rare person that navigates through life without regrets.

Life humbles us, sometimes.

Take it with grace and do what you can to make amends.

The post Dealing with limerence guilt first appeared on Living with Limerence.

We talked about limerence, trauma bonding, narcissism, healthy love, and how they all fit together.

It’s out now:

An hour and a half, and it felt like we’d just got started!

The post Unmasking Narcissism first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Limerence upends life.

Whatever your situation when a new LO appears in your world, everything changes.

The disruption is probably most severe if the limerent is already in a long-term relationship and the limerence was unexpected.

A common lament for limerents in this situation is: 

I don’t know what I want!

To an outsider this can seem self-centred and indecisive – or at least that you are an ineffectual ditherer who needs to pull themselves together and commit. But, as I so often emphasise when thinking about recovery, limerence is happening inside your head, and just between you and me, things are a bit of a mess in there.

To get some clarity about what you want, you’ll need to try and tidy things up a bit.

Limerence scrambles your judgement

The first important point to note is that limerence is an altered mental state.

Your neurochemistry is in turbulence compared to the resting state of normal life, and this really does have a profound impact on your ability to process information.

Your perception is altered, your motivational drives are skewed (towards one gigantic centre of attraction), your mood is all over the place – all those subconscious drives and urges are turbocharged.

In contrast, your executive brain is half-asleep. It’s been dulled into submission by the relentless cry of “WANT”.

Most of the time, our executive is lazy. It lets things run on autopilot, with most of our life defined by habits and heuristics. It only gets involved with decision making when it absolutely has to. Otherwise high-level cognition is a waste of energy.

If the executive does intervene, it essentially holds a committee meeting, listening to all the various subconscious urges and making sense of the wider context.

To push this analogy to breaking point: when you are limerent, it is as though the executive committee has become wildly undisciplined. Half the time, limerent urges just completely subvert the whole system by acting unilaterally, and the other half of the time they hectoring the chairman about how critical it is to do exactly what they say, now! and offering rationalisations as to why it’s so imperative.

The chairman sits in the middle of this bedlam wondering how he or she lost control of what used to be an efficient, well-regulated management board.

The gulf between wanting and craving

One of the main reasons for this breakdown in orderly decision making is the overbearing dominance of limerent craving.

Normally, when we are trying to assess what we want, we do not have to accommodate a crushing, urgent craving in our deliberations. Even very important decisions (what job do I want, where do I want to live, do I want to have children?) are usually reached by a process of weighing multiple factors – some emotional, some practical, some intellectual.

In the service of making a good decision, we use our executive judgement to try and balance these factors out to the best of our ability.

I’m not saying it’s easy, but it is at least deliberate and considered.

That sort of composure is hard to maintain in the face of a limerence assault. When your reward system is in overdrive, and your body is responding to LO with visceral excitement, the rational factors (I’m married; they are a bad person; they have totally different goals from me; I don’t want to feel like this) offer flimsy resistance.

Even worse, the strength of limerent feeling is often mistaken for the importance of the LO for our own happiness. In reality, these factors are not obviously aligned, and can even be in direct opposition.

Love is happiness, limerence is pleasure

Similar to the gulf between wanting and craving, is the gulf between happiness and pleasure.

Happiness is the long-term sense of contentedness with life, that you are at peace in the world, pleased with your choices and the way your life is playing out. There will be sadness, of course, there will be ups and downs of the emotional landscape, but the basic, default, setting is one of harmony.

Pleasure is transient. Pleasure is the thrill of excitement and sensual gratification. It’s wonderful, and life is enriched by it, but pleasure-seeking is not a route to happiness. Hedonism does not have a good track record as a philosophical foundation for living well.

Limerence supplies pleasure, love supplies happiness. So, the best bet for a happy life is to prioritise love over limerence.  

So what do you want?

OK. So, that’s the root of the problem laid out – why it’s hard to make good decisions while limerent. How does that help answer the big question?

Well, it depends on where you are starting from. There are three obvious scenarios.

1. You were happy before the limerence started
2. You were unhappy before the limerence started
3. You were drifting through life before the limerence started

An important detail here when making an assessment is to remember principle number one: limerence scrambles your judgement.

The question is not “was I happy then, compared to how I feel in the midst of limerent euphoria?”, it’s “was I happy then, in the absence of limerence?”

For those in the first category (which was my situation), the answer is relatively straightforward. If you were happy before, then limerence has come as a disruption to that everyday contentment. You can learn a lot from the experience – that perhaps contentment had become complacency, or that you need to push yourself out of an emotional rut – but fundamentally you should not tear down your old life and start anew just because your brain’s gone cuckoo. What you want is to get your life back on course, which probably means resisting limerence and being more mindful of your blessings and everything you’ve built. 

For those in the second, unhappy category, limerence can also teach you something. It’s the shock that makes you confront long-neglected fears that you have been avoiding. Maybe LO has a role in the response, but maybe not. That depends on LO’s situation, your situation and all those other complicating factors that need to be weighed in sound decision making. But, you do need to take action to improve your life, because cruising on unhappily is no way to live. 

Finally, for those in the third category, it’s time to find your purpose. Living a reactive life, letting fate carry you passively through events, being pulled and pushed by inscrutable emotional impulses, or other people’s requests and demands, is a recipe for limerence and heartache.

Living in the moment is all very well, but a life of disconnected moments strung together by chance tends to result in a rough ride. 

When you live in a deliberate way, mindful of what you really want your life to be like, and what your larger goals are, the question “what do I really want?” becomes a lot easier to answer.  

The post On not knowing what you want first appeared on Living with Limerence.

It’s a rehearsal, so not as slick or lively as the actual talk (and no Q&A of course).

I thought it might be interesting to see for those who couldn’t make it in person but are curious.

Enjoy!

The post A new way to look at love first appeared on Living with Limerence.

This week, I’d like to kick things off with a discussion about the menopause.

Now, obviously, this is not a topic from which I can draw personal experience. But, there was some really interesting discussion about how age affects limerent feelings—well romantic attraction generally, actually—in the last coffeehouse. That got me pondering about how important hormonal changes are in deciding who we find attractive, and how attractive we find them.

By coincidence, this chat amongst the LwL commentators happened at the same time as I was giving a talk on limerence, and one of the questions in the Q&A after was on how menopause affects limerence. I’d also had a couple of email enquiries earlier in the week about it.

The omens seemed clear.

It’s a topic whose time has come.

Also, given the confusing role of hormones in libido, limerence and love (especially the balance between oestrogen and testosterone), it’s a rich area for insight, full of unanswered questions.

Given all that, I’d like to start a targeted discussion in this thread and see if we can reach any tentative conclusions.

So, I have a few questions to ask of the post- and peri-menopausal ladies (and, I guess, the living-with-menopausal-ladies gentlemen):

1. How has menopause affected your libido?
2. How closely was libido tied to your limerence before (i.e. did limerence generally make you more lusty)?
3. Did going through menopause change the experience of limerence for you?
4. Did the strength of limerent feelings change?
5. If you were in a long-term relationship before menopause, did the transition affect your feelings towards your partner?

Any answers and insights are welcome.

For the guys too, feel free to weigh in with how age has affected your limerence experience, and whether you’ve noticed any changes in the ways that menopausal women in your life relate to you.

I appreciate that this isn’t in any way scientific, but I just want to try and get a sense of how menopause (and, by assumption, the hormonal changes involved) affect limerence, lust, attraction and attachment.

Gathering testimony was how Dorothy Tennov first discovered limerence, so that’s a good enough precedent for me.

Thanks in advance to all who contribute to the discussion!

The post Coffeehouse: postmenopausal limerence first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Romantic love is great, and there are obvious reasons why it exists.

What’s less obvious is why those giddy feelings of love can sometimes get a bit… unstable.

Why do some of us get so massively, comprehensively intoxicated with other people that it feels like an addiction?

Why do we apparently have a mechanism for runaway romantic obsession built into our brains?

In short: why does limerence exist?

What value does involuntary, obsessive desire for another person have?

Well, the answers lie in the way that our brains works, and in our evolutionary history.

Starting at the very beginning—limerence is obviously linked to reproduction, as most limerents want to, well… mate with their limerent objects.

It’s also been observed that the typical duration of a limerence episode that leads to a sexual relationship is in the 18-24 month range. That coincides with the time window for having a baby and raising it through the most vulnerable stage of infancy.

But, limerence clearly isn’t essential for reproduction.

People that never experience limerence have children successfully—in fact, you could make a very persuasive argument that they have an advantage. They don’t go completely loopy over their partner and so can make better choices.

So, if limerence isn’t necessary, why does it exist?

1. Love on the brain

The brain is a system of systems that’s been cobbled together and refined through evolutionary history. It isn’t engineered or rationally designed.

Several different brain systems are involved in romantic love—principally the arousal system, the reward system, the bonding system—and these systems certainly interact with one another,  but they can also act independently.

They create drives that contribute to love and limerence, but those drives just push as to behave in a certain way, they aren’t a well coordinated team.

The three main drives are lust, attraction and attachment.

Lust is primarily driven by activation of the hypothalamus and amygdala, linking erotic cues to arousal and reward. It’s a fundamental drive that can easily be triggered independently of any affection or desire to bond.

Attraction is more about desire and admiration for a particular person. It’s more discriminating than lust and it’s not just about animal desire.

Same-sex attraction and attraction to people past their reproductive age also shows that attraction is a desire that still operates even when baby-making is impossible.

Finally, attachment is about bonding. This is the sense of emotional intimacy, closeness, and affinity for another person. In romantic love bonding can follow lust and attraction, but it isn’t inevitable. We can feel deep bonds of affection for people we feel no sexual desire for.

Attachment also takes time to develop. It’s built through closeness, unlike the more instinctive effects of lust and attraction.

What’s obvious from these details is that evolution has gifted us with parallel drives that contribute different benefits for reproduction. Lust makes us want to mate, attraction helps us select desirable partners, and attachment helps us form lasting pair bonds.

Sometimes these drives work together harmoniously, but… not always.

Sometimes things can go wrong.

2. System instabilities

In limerence, a specific combination of drives leads to a state of intense infatuation.

Co-activation of the reward and bonding systems in the brain imprints a specific person as the primary source of reward—and usually it’s a heady brew of erotic, euphoric and emotional reward.

That’s a very powerful association, and under the wrong conditions it can become a little too powerful. The reward system can be driven into an overactive state.

The “wanting” urge encoded by dopamine becomes sensitized. At the same time, feedback control from the executive brain, the orbitofrontal cortex, is weakened—it becomes desensitized.

This is a state of addiction. One reward becomes the dominant force in life. Other rewards pale in comparison.

You feel an irresistible desire for your limerent object, and in fact you don’t even want to resist.

This capacity for some rewards to tip over into addiction is well documented. There are other behavioural addictions that have the same basis—gambling being the best validated, but addiction to pornography, shopping, gaming, and many others have been proposed.

Beyond addiction, there are actually lots of other examples of how the systems of the brain can be driven into unstable states.

Scientists have long known about the existence of “supernormal stimuli”—artificial stimuli that can drive brains into overactive states. Classic examples are gull chicks pecking furiously at painted sticks, birds neglecting their own eggs to brood gaudy porcelain eggs, or male butterflies mating urgently with paper decoys rather than female butterflies.

Unfortunately, evolved systems can have instabilities, imperfections and inefficiencies. They can go haywire if they are driven too strongly by a supernormal stimulus.

A limerent object could be seen as a romantic supernormal stimulus. They can drive your romantic reward response into a state of person addiction.

3. Pair bonding

OK, so that’s the how of limerence when it comes to the mechanics of the brain, but that still leaves the question unanswered about *why* that instability exists. Is it just a curious defect or vulnerability, or might it have some reproductive value?

Well, fundamentally, limerence is a drive that promotes pair-bonding. It’s a desire to form a special connection with one other person. It excludes others.

Humans are unusual amongst primates in using pair-bonding as a reproductive strategy. Why humans have this tendency remains a contentious debate, but social monogamy is an effective way of linking reproduction to child survival. It promotes what’s been termed “fitness interdependence” where mutual support improves the odds of offspring surviving and thriving. It also improves the odds of reproduction occurring.

We have this idea that men will sow their wild oats indiscriminately because it maximises their chance of reproduction, but that’s not actually true in practice.

Women do not broadcast their fertility in the same way as say female chimps in oestrus do with their engorged genitalia. Random, opportunistic mating in humans is not very likely to result in conception. Two partners staying together and mating regularly has much higher odds of success.

Pair-bonding is advantageous from the perspective of conception and child development. It makes sense that it would be a stable trait, and limerence promotes pair-bonding. It’s useful.

As a last note on this point, it’s worth mentioning that none of these evolutionary arguments mean that opportunistic mating outside of the pair-bond isn’t an even more effective strategy.

Infidelity is commonly observed in socially monogamous species.

It’s those independent drives of lust and attachment causing trouble again.

4. Evolutionary extravagance

A final thought about limerence from the perspective of evolution is that sexual selection is another important force and can lead to all sorts of wacky outcomes.

Any time lots of males compete to impress females, things can get a bit out of hand.

Perhaps the most famous example of this principle is the peacock’s tail.

Peahens select for males who are able to demonstrate their fitness with a wildly extravagant display.

This squandering of effort is often explained by what’s known as the handicap principle— showcasing an absurd burden is proof of superior health or genetic quality.

Alternatively, it could just be another example of a runaway system instability—females respond to impressive displays, and that leads to an evolutionary arms race that runs out of control.

Regardless of the true selection mechanism, I think limerence could fit into this framework.

Limerence is an extreme drive to pair-bond. It is an extravagant devotion to another person, an ostentatious commitment. A peacock’s tail of loyalty.

Once the milkmaid is limerent for the farmboy, no prince could sway her. Once the billionaire playboy is limerent for the waitress, not even a supermodel would turn his head.

Adoration that profound signals a mate who can be relied upon to commit for long enough to secure the safety of your offspring—of your genes.

It’s only one strategy for securing reproduction in a complex world with both limerents and non-limerents looking for love, but it does make sense.

Limerence is a supernormal reward, a hypersensitive drive for bonding, signaling a commitment so fierce it defies reason.

It’s not just a crush.

The post Obsessive love explained first appeared on Living with Limerence.

This thursday Sep 11^th, I’ll be giving a talk on limerence at the Berwin’s North Salon in Harrogate, UK.

These events are a great concept – an old-school approach to sharing new knowledge, by getting interested and interesting people together to discuss ideas.

Each speaker gives a TED-style talk, takes questions from the audience, and then we all have a chat in the intervals.

I’m chuffed to have been invited, and will be talking about limerence from a neuroscientist’s perspective, and how it explains our apparently irrational behaviour when falling in love. I’ll also be signing copies of my book Smitten, in case that is an additional incentive.

There may still be tickets available, so if anyone is in the Harrogate area next week and interested in coming along, you can check out the details here:

Maybe see some of you there…

The post Big ideas in intimate spaces first appeared on Living with Limerence.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/everyday-neuroscience/202508/are-you-left-brained-or-right-brained

The main point of the article was to argue that the notion of individual people being left-brained or right-brained, and that determining their personality type, is a myth.

But, it’s a myth built on something real.

Despite being symmetrical, the two halves of brains don’t just operate as two parallel units, there is uneven distribution of tasks and allocation of resources across the two sides.

This distribution of tasks is not absolute, though. It is a bias, not a complete segregation. A task like language processing shows more activity in the left side than the right, but there is still lots of crosstalk and communication between the hemispheres.

When it comes to limerence, lateralization is most relevant for the reward and bonding systems, given the underlying neuroscience that explains the experience of person addiction.

I talked about reward in the Psychology Today article, but didn’t touch on bonding. That’s really interesting too, because there’s a body of work that suggests that lateralization depends on a crucial period in the early life of newborns, when the interaction between baby and mother is shaping a huge amount of brain development.

Cradling instincts

Cross-culturally, both men and women have a bias towards left-cradling of babies.

This means the baby is orientated to see more with the left eye and hear more with the left ear, and that promotes development of the structures in the right hemisphere of the brain (because each hemisphere regulates function in the opposite side of the body).

Because emotional development is dependent on the baby sensing and learning the mother’s facial expressions, and using them to synchronise levels of arousal, it’s inevitable that those functions of the brain will develop most quickly and efficiently in the right hemisphere. There’ll be a bias towards using the right-hand structures for emotional processing.

You can really go down a rabbit hole of speculation here.

Do we have a left-cradling bias because most of us are right-handed (and instinctively leave our dominant hand free), or are most of us right-handed because we have been left-cradled?

Is the left-cradling bias conserved because it’s useful or because it reproduces itself?

Is the right hemisphere bias for emotion useful, and therefore babies that were left-cradled survived and reproduced more successfully, meaning we all inherited the trait?

Regardless of all these questions about how the bias developed, it’s a great example of how a weird little behavioural quirk that most of us would never notice can have really consequential outcomes that last into adulthood.

Don’t despair

Just in case anyone is reading this and thinking “oh no, I cradled my babies on the right!” or “oh no, my mother didn’t cradle me correctly, I’m doomed to a life of bonding frustrations!” don’t despair.

Brain lateralization is not an unalterable feature, nor an essential feature. Most people with atypical laterlization patterns have happy and successful lives. People who suffer damage to one side of the brain can learn to use the opposite side instead.

Brains can adapt and re-organise their activity to compensate for deficits or damage.

We can learn to overcome attachment problems. We can learn to better regulate our emotions. We can learn new ways of relating to others that improves our future relationships.

Lateralization isn’t fate.

It’s just another interesting aspect of the brain that shows how complex the interplay between our genes, environment, family and childhood experiences really is in shaping our personalities and temperaments.

Humans are complicated.

The post Biased brains and bonding first appeared on Living with Limerence.