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.

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.

This week, I’m going to kick off the conversation by continuing a topic that’s emerged over the last couple of posts: choosing a partner.

What’s on my mind at the moment is the difference between the way that a fully informed limerent looking for a partner would approach the issue, and how most of us just muddle along.

The usual trajectory of dating in my day was: meet someone, feel the glimmer, pursue them, and hope it works out.

But in my day (1990s) there were no dating apps.

You generally met people within your existing social circle, or at least your local community, and you generally knew what to expect of them in terms of beliefs and behaviour.

Sure, life was still rich with personal weirdness, but there was a sort of pre-selection going on – what the social psychologists call assortative mating.

We tend to pick people who are similar to ourselves, and that kind of happened automatically when we were dating locally. There was a bias towards the familiar.

Nowadays, technology handles the pre-selection process. Photos and bios and vibes predominate. There is still a proximity element, as the pool of candidates on a dating app is usually limited to a given area, but within that area there is a lot more scope for mixing among demographics, cultural backgrounds, and socioeconomic status.

I wonder how much that change means the “hope it works out” phase of dating is even more precarious than it used to be.

It seems like it would be more urgent than ever to try and establish early on whether you are compatible with the person you are dating. Otherwise there is a big old trap waiting: go on a few dates with someone you don’t really know, fall into limerence for them, and then discover that you have totally different expectations about dating etiquette, what you want out of a relationship, and what love should be like.

It’s a trap because you only hit the “what’s going on between us?” moment after you’re already addicted.

Choosing seems to be a much more urgent issue in the new dating world, but there is another big issue that complicates this principle. Choosing is kind of a luxury for many people.

Their swipe-to-match ratio is low. They aren’t fielding offers; they’re looking for hope.

Many limerents tell me that the start of the glimmer was thinking their LO liked them. The lingering gaze. The flirty joke. These were the initiating moments that made the limerent believe they had a chance, and started the cascade of reward reinforcement that led into person addiction.

The novelty of being desired was intoxicating.

In those cases, it’s not really about filtering through possible candidates to find the compatible mate, it’s more like finding a needle in a haystack. It often feels like our LOs choose us, rather than us choosing them.

Now, this isn’t meant as a counsel of despair. There are things that can be done to improve your appeal. Working on your health, wealth, appearance, personality, and charisma can increase your odds of attracting more people and, counterintuitively, being clear about what kind of person you are seeking can actually attract them towards you.

But, the point stands – holding off on giving into limerence is a good idea regardless of how rarely you encounter a potential LO. Don’t chase the dragon until you’re sure you want to catch it.

Anyway, just some talking points to start the conversation going. Perhaps someone who has been playing the dating game within the last couple of decades could chime in and let me know how things are going…

The post Coffeehouse: choosing a partner first appeared on Living with Limerence.

This week I just have a few announcements for the patrons before the conversations kick off.

First, thanks to everyone who has contributed to the post on your biggest limerence problems. Some gems in there, and some patterns and repeating themes are showing up. Exactly what I’d hoped for. Keep them coming!

Second, I have a new blog post over at Psychology Today, all about the effects of oxytocin and the surprising outcomes of human studies when people snorted oxytocin in controlled trials. Check it out here.

Third, the latest YouTube video is all about the neuroscience of Uncertainty and how it drives romantic obsession:

OK, that’s it for the news. Over to you folks for chats and shenanigans…

The post Coffeehouse: bonding first appeared on Living with Limerence.

This week, I have a specific topic on my mind.

I first started this blog after a bad limerence experience of my own. I had become limerent for someone I didn’t want to be limerent for, and so was dealing with the emotional storm of conflicting desires.

For me, the priority was how to get rid of limerence.

A lot of readers find themselves in a similar situation, and I kind of think by now that I’ve got them covered.

We have a load of free resources on how to make sense of limerence, overcome it, and find a path to freedom. We also have a paid course that focuses specifically on the problem of getting out of the altered state of mind of romantic obsession, quickly and efficiently.

However, not everyone who visits living with limerence is looking for such specific help in ending limerence. In fact, they don’t even necessarily want it to stop.

In some cases this is understandable, because mutual limerence is a wonderful way to start a romantic relationship if you are free to do so, and self-aware enough to know the potential dangers.

In other cases, the motive is not quite so pure. Some limerents know that their person addiction isn’t good for them, but they also aren’t willing to abandon it completely. Like many other behavioural addictions of the modern age, we want to find a way to indulge a bit, but not let it take over our lives completely.

Instead of wanting to eliminate limerence, many people are just curious about what it means for them and their love lives.

They might be struggling to cope with the emotional onslaught, but want guidance on how to manage it, rather than taking the definite decision to end it.

They don’t want to be mentally deprogrammed, they want to know how limerence affects their judgement, why they struggle to regulate their emotions, and how to make good choices when seeking a romantic partner.

So, I have a plan to develop some tools to help limerents in that position, starting with a new “Quickstart Guide” on how to find love as a limerent.

Here are a few of things I’m planning to include:

• Love, lust and limerence – how are they different and how are they linked?
• How to spot the glimmer and what it means
• Figuring out what you want from love
• Finding healthy love as a limerent
• “Bottling the lightning” of limerence
• How dating culture affects limerents
• How to deal with game playing, ghosting and situationships
• How to find out if your date is a limerent or non-limerent
• Signs your obsession is getting out of control
• How to escape when you are in too deep

That’s the plan, so my questions for the coffeehouse are:

1. Would you find such a guide helpful?
2. If you have learned important lessons from your own limerence adventures, what would you add to the list of need-to-know info?
3. If you are in the target audience for this guide, what else would you like to know?

All feedback much appreciated!

The post Coffeehouse: what being a limerent means for your love life first appeared on Living with Limerence.

I’ve been away for most of this week, without much access to emails, so naturally that corresponded with a big burst of correspondence.

The cause was a new feature in the Observer magazine (which is part of the Guardian media group), all about my own experiences with limerence.

So, apologies for my slow response time to all the new readers who have been in touch with questions – I’m working through emails now and will be caught up soon. It seems to be a weirdly common phenomenon that stepping away from the desk for a while coincides with a sudden burst of publicity.

Anyway, while I catch up, the floor is open for all you lovely folks to chat.

As a conversational starting point: one thing on my mind at the moment is the value of therapy for limerence. Does anyone have any experience of therapy helping, and what form that help took?

I’ve been following some therapists on X lately, and am struck by the debate about AI agents replacing real people. To me, AI therapy feels like a really bad idea at an emotional level, but I can’t exactly articulate why.

The X therapists are united that the human connection between therapist and client is critical to success, and irreplaceable by AI by definition.

I have to confess that there also seems to be a bit of special pleading going on – “good therapists have an indefinable je ne sais quoi that is the difference between masking symptoms and a lasting cure”.

That argument often seems to prompt some status-hierarchy puffery too – “well maybe AI could replace some of the low-level behavioural stuff, but not True therapy with a gifted practitioner”.

There is also the perennial issue of a client responding to this ineffable human connection by becoming limerent for their therapist, somewhat spoiling the therapeutic relationship.

Then again, I have no difficulty in believing that people could become limerent for a personally tailored AI agent too, if it was sophisticated enough. Especially if you could design your own avatar to give the agent a face. Hell, in a nightmare scenario, you could even give your endlessly patient, always-available, non-judgmental, empathetic personal therapist your LO’s face.

As you can tell, I’m still trying to figure this all out, so any insights for the community about therapy for limerence are much appreciated!

Finally, a last reminder for anyone in the Nottingham UK area: my book launch event is happening next Weds (23rd April) at Five Leaves bookshop. Free entry, free drinks, free Q&A with me (led by my wife). Sign up if you’d like to come along:

The post Coffeehouse: the Observer first appeared on Living with Limerence.

As a thank you to everyone who pre-orders the book, I’m releasing some bonus chapters on some of the hardest, but commonest, limerence dilemmas.

These are:

• Unrequited limerence
• Limerence for a mentor
• Limerence for a co-worker
• Limerence for a therapist 
• Limerence for someone who is married

Anyone who buys the book ahead of the release date will get exclusive access to this additional material (including audio version).

So, if you’d like to claim your bonus chapters, please fill in the Smitten pre-order bonuses form:

For anyone who hasn’t ordered yet, here are links to the UK and US editions on Amazon:

Preorder UK link

Preorder US link

The UK release is a few weeks away now, so excitement is mounting!

OK, that’s it from me this week – an unabashed advert.

The floor is yours, for chatting about all things limerence!

The post Coffeehouse: Preorder bonuses for Smitten first appeared on Living with Limerence.

This week’s YouTube video turned out to be a bit of an epic effort. It’s on the topic of the links between limerence and other mental health conditions, which is a question that I get asked surprisingly often.

The usual query is: is my limerence linked to my ADHD/OCD/borderline (etc.) condition? This is my best answer.

In the video, I go fairly deep into the neuroscience of OCD, ADHD and anxious attachment, and the similarities and differences to the neuroscience of limerence. That became quite an exercise in research, as I wanted to get the details as accurate as I could.

I might even have overdone it a little.

What’s missing, though, is a good account of what it feels like to experience limerence if you have any of these other conditions (or tendencies, if you haven’t had a formal diagnosis).

Because I lack that direct personal experience, it’s hard to go beyond comparisons of the clinical evidence and get to the really meaty reality of having limerence along with another neurodivergent trait.

So, to kick off discussions for this week, I’d like to invite anyone who has any form of neurodiversity or mental health condition to describe their experience of limerence as best as they can.

To stimulate discussion, here’s some things I’m wondering about:

• Does being limerent change the symptoms of your other condition?
• Are some limerence symptoms especially strong for you?
• Does the altered state of mind of limerence resemble the altered state of mind of the other condition?
• Did limerence set in about the same time as your other condition, or did they begin at different ages?
• If you do feel that limerence is linked to another condition, can you explain why you feel that way?

All insights are greatly appreciated!

A second question (boy, I’m being nosy this week) is about UK podcasts. The launch date for my book in the UK is fast approaching, and I’d love to get talking about it on podcasts in the relationship and self-development space.

So, this is a call for suggestions – any podcasts that LwL followers listen to, which might be a good fit for a chat about all things limerence?

Again, all recommendations welcomed!

Pre-order offer!

I’ve just found out that Waterstones in the UK is currently running a promotion for 25% off pre-ordered books. It runs from 22nd to 24th February. Use code PREORDER25 at the checkout. Link to Smitten here:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/smitten/dr-tom-bellamy/9781786789143

The post Coffeehouse: limerence and mental health first appeared on Living with Limerence.

I’ve been writing this blog since 2017, and in that time it has grown quite large. Consequently, when newcomers arrive these days it can be difficult for them to find their way around and locate the support that they need.

This post is an attempt to solve that problem.

Who am I?

OK, let’s start with introductions. My name is Tom Bellamy, and I’m a neuroscientist who worked for around 25 years in academic research in various places in the UK. I’m now a full time writer, but still an honorary Associate Professor at my last institution, the University of Nottingham.

When I first started writing this blog I didn’t admit to any of that, though. I blogged under the pseudonym “Dr L” (or “Dr Limerence”) as I wanted to preserve some anonymity while I figured out what I wanted to do with the blog and where it was going. So, if you see any posts or comments by Dr L, that’s why. It is still me.

Sorry for any confusion.

OK with introductions out of the way, where should you start when navigating the site?

The archive

A complete, chronological list of all blog posts since the start of the site is available here:

There are over 400 articles, now, though, so here is a list of the key articles that cover the most fundamental aspects of limerence:

For those who are looking for immediate support with managing limerence, or with dealing with a partner who has become limerent for someone else, the Resources page takes you straight to the guides, books and courses that are available.

The coffeehouse

You’ll notice that most of the posts have closed comments. This is because bots seem to turn up after a while and ruin the fun for everyone. Also, some of the regular commenters are incorrigible and can sometimes get distracted and ramble on about stuff that isn’t on message, disrupting the orderly operation of business. Tut tut.

I really want the site to be both a forum for discussion of specific topics, and a lively community of folks who support each other (and occasionally gossip). To try and manage this, new posts are open for comments for a month, but then shut down before the bots get out of hand.

But, to be sure that there is always a discussion thread open, we now have monthly “coffeehouse“ posts, which are open for any topic of discussion. This endless thread is the heart of the community at LwL. The coffeehouse is a relaxed place to natter about whatever is on your mind, and a reliable place to seek help.

That brings us to the next topic…

Commenting policy

I like debate. I like to hear different views. I think it’s healthy and vital for making sense of the world. So, the commenting policy at LwL is laissez faire, within a few guardrails.

Here are the principles:

• This is a support site, so the point is to be constructive and helpful
• It is fine to disagree, but if you find yourself attacking another commenter, you’ve gone wrong
• Occasional fruity language is fine, but being too sweary is off-putting and will probably be censored
• No sexually explicit content thank you
• Feel free to drop me a line through the contact form if you are concerned about any comments
• I censor anything that I think violates these principles

As a last note, occasionally people worry about comments they’ve made might make them identifiable. All comments in the site are public, but you can use whatever username you like and gravatars are blocked, so it’s easy to be anonymous if you want to be.

Also, if there’s one thing I’m sure of after seven years of learning about limerence, it’s that our situations are not as unique as we think…

Other resources

Hopefully that helps with navigating your way around the site. I am also now posting weekly content on my YouTube channel, and occasional content on X.

And, the best summary of everything that I’ve learned about limerence over the years is my book, Smitten.

If you’ll forgive the boast, I’m really proud of it – I really tried to pack it with all the key wisdom I’ve gleaned about limerence, with as little fluff as possible. So, if you want the best summary that I can muster, that’s it.

Join the party

So, with all that preamble out of the way, head over to the Coffee house, which is the place to say hello and join the community.

Welcome again!

The post Welcome to new readers first appeared on Living with Limerence.

It’s been a busy few weeks, so I’ll kick things off with another update on progress with LwL business.

YouTube

Just before Christmas I launched my YouTube channel. I’m now into a weekly schedule for posting videos, and am working my way through the fundamentals of limerence (but with 7 years extra knowledge compared to when I started the blog).

I’m still having fun (although editing is much more work than I expected), and am happy with progress, so… pretty much a success!

I’ve had a few queries about subscribing, because people are naturally cautious about privacy when it comes to limerence. As far as I know it is not possible for other people to view your YouTube subscriptions, and it is possible to make your profile private – so that even the channel owner cannot see that you have subscribed.

So, if you do want to keep up to date, you can safely *leans in for emphasis* like and subscribe.

You can tell I’m a proper YouTuber now.

Book

Another big moment this week – I got a hard copy of the book.

It was more special than I expected. It’s a really lovely hardback, and just feels… nice to hold. I also got to decide this week on the audiobook narrator, which was an interesting experience – hearing my words in someone else’s voice is weird.

Milestones of progress.

Now, it’s just waiting for the launch dates.

Pirate Monk podcast

I had a good chat just before Christmas with the guys at the Pirate Monk podcast, about all things limerence. It’s out now! You can listen here:

https://samsonsociety.podbean.com/e/445-tom-bellamy/

Welcome page

Last bit of news was a suggestion from Limerent Emeritus about the perennial challenge of making the comments threads useful for both new arrivals and old friends.

To welcome newcomers more effectively, he’s suggested a “welcome to newcomers” post to help orient people and explain all the ins and outs of the community. That seems like a very good plan, but it might have to end up being a separate carefully managed page to avoid the problems of spambots.

Over the last couple of months the numbers have gone through the roof (literally tens of thousands of spam comments) to the extent that Akismet is telling me off for too many API requests. I think I’ve come up with a fix, but it also means the policy of turning off comments on posts after 30 days is definitely staying in place.

Spamming really seems like a pointless waste of time and resources nowadays. It’s not as if any of the comments get through. Hard to believe they actually achieve anything with their antics, but they are certainly persistent.

Once all those issues are sorted, I’ll post the welcome page and let everyone know so they can go and say hello to the newbies.

Anyway, that’s the news from me.

How about for an icebreaker, people share any new year wins they’ve already enjoyed in 2025…?

The post Coffeehouse: busy busy busy first appeared on Living with Limerence.