Thank you, Phoenix-
I feel fortunate that my LO was an excellent poet whose words (his poetry) guided me in such a way that I made some wise choices, even in my obsessive state. Now, post-limerence, I feel that old boundaries have dissolved and, creatively, I can take creative risks without fear of judgment.

Yes, Camilla George-Your point about closed-off feelings resonates with me. The emotional ceiling in my marriage was very low, and there was no value placed on authentic self-expression. My life, post-limerence, is also so much richer. I’d like to think I listen better, am more empathetic, less judgmental. Thank you for your observations!

Ahhh….it was the opening up that resulted in new Life experiences that broke my heart over and over. Not LO, LO causes other types of pain in my case. Rebuilding and getting wiser. Transformative experience, not cocooned.

CamillaGeorge,

I could resonate with you almost 90%, except that my heart was not broken into million pieces, since I was expecting little from the unavailable LO during my longest, most intense in LE.

Through the unrequited LE, my deep cptsd wounds got healed a great deal (not totally yet). After walking on the path of self-discovery and self-growth for a while, I become more curious, accepting, fearless and “authentic”, as you say.

Let’s keep walking in this beneficial direction, despite some commonly shared LE pains.

Deborah Nash Ott,

So encouraging to hear your firsthand experience of LE on its creativity side, Bravos!

That bursting and creative fire of LE energy is rare and very precious, happy to hear you wisely channeled it through poetry and fruited marvelously! Yes, LO is always a catalyst for something, be it legitimate creative or destructive….

I was/am on this creativity “spectrum” but has not materialized due to health and other issues.

Thank you for sharing your experience and hope more of your creativities and productivity, even if LE has receded.

Mine woke me up in my life. I had closed off my feelings, thinking I was protecting myself, to find out that it wasn’t true. Opening up, my life is so much richer, and I think I have become a nicer and more open and emphatic person. And revisiting fixed opinions and biases, and changing my mind and stance on many things. I find that having my heart broken into million pieces over and over again, with pain every single time, taught me something. And made me more …authentic?

Sammy, I missed your comment earlier, but commenting on it now (don’t know if you’ll notice it either).
“Social commentator Camille Paglia proposes gay men somehow get caught up in their mother’s Eros.” I hadn’t heard this theory before. And I might be out of line to get into this topic… But on first hearing I’m a little sceptical. Is she claiming “nurture” more than “nature”? I.e. the interaction between mother and son prevents him from “growing in a more masculine direction” (although the reasons for this are related to his genes)? Let me present a competing view. There are also boys/men who are sensitive or otherwise demonstrate “softer” characteristics, who are in fact not gay. Wouldn’t their mother have treated them in the same way in childhood? Also, it would be hard to compare how much attention they got from their mothers compared to other boys. And some/many/most? 😀 straight men are annoyingly close with their mothers, but I’ve found those are the men who make the best partners, because they’ve been raised to respect women. Just thinking out loud here. I sincerely hope you are able to make peace with yourself and your mother. 🙏🏻

@Trifles.

“Some people are just as uncomplicated as they say they are. Most of these people are straight men. 😆 Gotta love ’em.”

This is a very good point. Speaking strictly from experience, a gay man’s brain pumps out lots of dopamine in response to a seemingly eligible male suitor (the LO). Why the gay man’s brain does this no one knows because it’s not very logical from a mating point of view. (Usually, the purpose of mating is to pass on one’s genetic info).

Does the dopamine production in a gay man’s brain mimic the dopamine production in a heterosexual woman’s brain? I.e. is the same “response” happening in both the brains of gay men and heterosexual women? If we study the brains of one group, can we understand the brains of both groups due to significant overlap?

Social commentator Camille Paglia proposes gay men somehow get caught up in their mother’s Eros. When gay men are young children, there are often “blurred borderlands” between mother and son emotionally. Mother and son are like two different countries, but the border between these two countries is permanently open. Maybe half a dozen provinces are “jointly ruled” by both mother and son.

It’s hard for the son to grow in a masculine direction. It feels natural for the son to stay close to his mother. This might sound like a very cosy and pleasurable state of affairs, and it IS a very cosy and pleasurable state of affairs. However, it is also a painful situation for the son because he feels different from his male peers. Eventually, in adolescence, he’d project his nascent sexuality onto male peers – and, of course, that will lead to inevitable heartache aka rejection. I imagine most teenage boys and most teenage girls are going dopamine-crazy for each other i.e. falling in love with the opposite sex.

There’s this weird imaginative thing going on between mother and son in the boy’s early childhood. The son is his mother’s constant companion and he’s almost his mother’s consort, but in a non-sexual way. Mother and son are very close. Mother and son are very frequently closer than mother and father. The romantic relationship between mother and father has invariably broken down.

I feel the son gains a lot from his extreme closeness to his mother, but he also pays a high price for it. But the mother isn’t to blame for making the son the way he is. It’s the son’s pre-existing differences to other male children e.g. his gentleness, his charm, his softness, that ATTRACTS extra maternal interest and involvement.

There is this limerence-like thing happening between mother and son, and it’s mutual, but I don’t think either mother or son really choose it. To this day, I have a “trauma bond” with my mother, for want of a better term. If I create distance between us, she’ll attempt to pull me back into the super-tight emotional bond, which echoes a lot of people’s experience of limerence. My mother can sense almost telepathically whenever I’m pulling away from her. My mother expects me to tell her everything; of course, I tell her nothing. But even though I tell my mother nothing she knows everything. (She pretends not to know I’m gay. A gay son doesn’t fit her narrative).

It’s not clear whether this blurring of identities in mother and son is caused by heredity or environment. I.e. are gay men already different in terms of their brain structure by the time they come out of the womb? Or are the brains of gay men subtly shaped by early childhood influences, and specifically shaped by enmeshment with mother?

I think gay men are already different in terms of temperament by the time they come out of the womb and the mothers just fall in love with these slightly-different and often very attractive boy babies. The sad thing is these boy babies won’t grow up to be “normal men” aka men who will have romantic relationships with women. It is very painful not to be able to lead a normal life, or even to understand what it feels like to lead a normal life. Not that straight men are particularly big on documenting emotions. (Unless they’re wildly in love with a beautiful woman who’s sending them insane).

I have experienced both straight men and a small number of masculine gay men as uncomplicated, easy-going. I would categorise virtually all of these easy-going men as “non-limerent”. They’re lovely people, but … not what I was expecting. 😉