I hope you’re doing well.

I’ve just recently been going through the archives looking at your LC journey over the past three years, along with its ups and downs.

I too have been on the cusp of recovery at least three times, each time followed by a major backslide, mostly before finding this site. Right now, i am hoping to keep up my modest momentum.

I was very happy to see your last major post back in May, which had an optimistic tone.

I would like to hear more about your journey since then; what you said resonated so strongly.

Wishing you the best.

Hamlet,

I can see why this logic works. Often I desired a friendship with LF like the one she had with a married guy she hooked up with. I got along well with him and still do as a matter of fact. While there’s only been a mild jealousy of how he’s retained his friendship with her over time, I’ve never held it against him. Infact we never talk about her either, which is fine by me because I’m past all the drama anyway.

It’s her problem who she allows into her little world. If she’s supposedly happy with her SO now and still hooking up with the married guy, I wish them all nothing but the best. Yet a part of me also kinda hopes it all eventually blows up in her face.

Hi LaR and Deep Seek,
Thanks for the article. It was interesting. I’ll check out the video as well. INTJ is my type. I’m in a very good place right now, but this shows me that I’m just more prone to limerence than the average person so I have to take care to avoid any new LE in the future.

Thanks!

The relevant quote from DrL in that article:

“Two MBTI categories dominate the surveyed limerents: INFJ and INFP. These categories account for nearly half of all the self-selected limerents who read Lucy’s article, but represent only about 1.5% and 4.4% of the general population, respectively”

(The original research was done by Dr Lucy Bain of Neurosparkle)

It’s titled ”how common is limerence” — June 20, 2020

https://livingwithlimerence.com/how-common-is-limerence/

Hamlet,

I think you’re right – I don’t think that we could ever hope to pin down a definition of limerence that all this community agrees with. People’s experiences and ways of dealing with it are just too different.

The plurality of perspectives in this blog is one of its greatest strengths, I’ve found. Sometimes I can get half a dozen different replies to a dilemma, and then have to think which bits I want to take notice of and which just don’t apply to me. But it increases the scope of options or routes compared to what I’d think of on my own.

But I have come to a similar conclusion to you – even with the posters I’ve got on best with, there was/is always a need for checkbacks, clarifications, occasional apologies – such as it will always be when trying to talk about something as deep as the subject matter here using only the written word with no other cues.

DrL has made a video quite recently talking about co-occurrence of limerence with things like autism, ASD and OCD. I hope this is a fair representation but what I took from it was ‘they often but not always co-occur’. There was also a research based post on here years ago (I tried to find it just now but couldn’t) about how limerence is spread across the personality types from Myers Briggs. A few categories had nearly all the limerents – I think INFJ was top. So certain character types do end up clustering here … and that might help to explain the prevalence of certain views or communication styles.

(If anyone can find that post and drop a link under here, that would be good, as I may be misrepresenting based on my memory alone)

Hi LaR,
That is the problem with diagnosing based on symptoms alone. Different things all have the same outward appearance. Like diagnosing a person with a cough and a mild fever. Now that I know about limerence, I can see that my son with autism had a LE for an online scammer. Akin to the celebrity fantasy example that you cite because the scammer “looked” like his favorite actress. Autism (like anxiety in my case) takes LE to a whole other level. We just said that he fell victim to a scammer but now I say, yeah, but… Again this is why I see trying to communicate on this blog is more difficult than I naively thought at first.

Hamlet,

There is loads to learn and debate here for sure.

I’m probably pushing my luck now if I try to combine the philosophies – but why not? The Jungian side accounts for who is vulnerable to limerence and who they land on as an LO. Meanwhile the behavioural addiction side accounts for what then happens (a pattern of reinforcement, whether via the LO or alone via rumination, fantasy etc) and therefore why it sustains and needs to be ‘broken’ (but can’t without difficulty or attention to the origins, like other addictions).

I do find it harder to square with that, the idea of “limerence as love gone wrong or love frustrated”. I think a lot of limerents believe their LE is just that (not nec unrequited love, just love that can’t be acted on), but sometimes all that is part of the projection. But, real cases of frustrated love do produce feelings that, from experience, feel much like limerence. I then drive myself into a dead end trying to figure out if that and a total fantasy LE can reasonably be classified under the same term…

Hi LaR,
I was in fact partly referring to the different casual models of limerence that you mention (addiction, Jungian, others). I respect that this site is based on the addiction model while my own solution was more Jungian. For some here, Christianity and faith are important to their dealing with the LE. You also have some here who believe in taking action and actively resolving the LE whereas others try to resolve the LE and their relationship to the LO from afar. All these I see as competing philosophies in how to deal with limerence, life, love, etc. On an even more basic level, sometimes I read posts here that remind me of the movie Wall Street, except with Gordon Gecko saying, “Limerence, for lack of a better term, is good.” The difference between bad limerence and good limerence is just whether it goes unrequited or not. That feels a bit like the SNL skit, “It’s not sexual harassment if Tom Brady does it.” This isn’t the majority of posts by any means but it is a theme here that I’ve noticed. Even a minority opinion of say 20% is still 1 out of 5 people. Honestly I just find this all fascinating as I continue to find my way around this community.

Hi Hamlet,

Thanks for clearing that up. I do remember reading before when you said about metaphorically tearing up a photo of ‘LO’.

“There are so many different underlying philosophies regarding the LE on this site”

Hmm, I’m not so sure. I think most regular posters – while their LE’s differ widely – do coalesce on limerence as behavioural addiction and on LE being triggered by some kind of lacks or unresolved issues within themselves (though take time to get there). Limerents sort of project those onto LO (never a realistic version of the person behind the label) and use it to paper over whatever cracks there are. Others could explain that more theoretically via Jungian concepts, for example.
Almost the whole active LwL community have had a variation on that projection process.

Another point in common to most here is eventual acceptance of the need to (truly) kill hope, to end an LE. But people differ a lot on how they achieve that death of hope (cheery eh?!). DrL wrote a great post about it years ago.

Where I find the LwL community differs is in how much the LO is present in the person’s life. So for example you haven’t seen yours in 35 years, mine is in my life daily. But similar to you, I still ascribed her all sorts of qualities and statuses that aren’t anything like the same as the real person. I think ‘LO’ is kind of a figment of all limerents’ brains – so I’d argue the underlying philosophies aren’t as different as they might first seem.

It’s just that for some the person is more present and for some less so. Some latch limerence more onto a realistic relationship (and make it less realistic as a result – i.e. me), while for some it can be a complete fantasy, like limerence for a celebrity, or even a teacher from 50 years ago was once mentioned!