All things limerence discussed and analysed.

Enjoy!

The post Limerence Q&A 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.

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.

Limerence is a great example of this principle.

For many of us, limerence as a concept has great explanatory power for our experience of the early stages of love – an altered mental state of profound infatuation that we fall into, which can progress to a debilitating addiction under the wrong circumstances.

For others, limerence is just a term that unnecessarily complicates a universal experience. The concept of limerence was dismissively described as “a semantic carving up of love” when Tennov’s book was first published. It can be argued that it’s forcing an artificial binary onto the wide range of intensities for passionate love.

Another example of this principle is the concept of maladaptive daydreaming.

The idea is that some people can become so absorbed in imaginary inner worlds, in daydreams and fantasy, that it affects their ability to interact with the real world.

Maladaptive daydreamers seek out time alone to indulge their habit, spending hours lost in thought, lost in imagination.

In extreme cases, some people can report feeling that they are in love with their imaginary characters, which obviously makes bonding with a real person challenging.

Maladaptive daydreaming is another attempt to identify an extreme form of an otherwise natural experience, and provide a conceptual framework for explaining it.

Overlaps

Understandably, given the definition, I’ve been asked about the overlap between maladaptive daydreaming and limerence many times.

Limerent reverie is the term I use (from Tennov) to describe the incessant daydreaming about a limerent object that many limerents indulge in. As well as providing a hit of second-hand euphoria, many limerents use reverie as a method for mood repair.

However, if you asked most limerents about whether they felt their daydreaming was “maladaptive” they would likely say “no”.

Yes, it makes it hard to concentrate on other things. Yes, they might have neglected some responsibilities. Yes, they could probably be using their time more productively, but overall, most limerents really enjoy their reverie in the early stages of limerence. It doesn’t feel unhealthy.

In fact, there is even scientific literature supporting this argument.

Later in the limerence experience, if healthy bonding is thwarted, and person addiction deepens, then reverie turns to rumination.

This has a different character – worrying about the strength of the bond, reliving old experiences, rehearsing future interactions. These thoughts are not a warm fantasy. They are intrusive, obsessive, pestering.

The highs give way to cravings.

Happy daydreaming is a part of the euphoric phase of limerence.

The transient nature of limerence

This last point highlights an important aspect of limerence: it is not a fixed experience.

Although people can stay trapped in limerence limbo for a very long time, more commonly limerence lasts for a few months to a couple of years, and it changes in character over that period.

Most of us feel that we are “in” limerence, when the symptoms have first captured us. It’s a different state of mind from everyday life. It’s unusual. We feel different. We behave differently. Our default settings are altered.

Limerence reverie could readily be described as maladaptive daydreaming, but it is a consequence of the specific circumstance of falling into limerence. It’s not a stable trait of the individual. Most limerents indulge in reverie while they are limerent, but not at other times in their lives.

I’ve made this argument before about anxious attachment.

There’s a lot of overlap in the description of an anxious attachment style and limerence, but there are also lots of limerents who only experience those symptoms when limerence is in full flow.

When they are out of the altered state of mind, their attachment style is secure or avoidant.

Pinning down a moving target

All these considerations show why these psychological labels come and go and are the subject of so much debate.

Can you pin down a changeable state as a definable condition? Are you describing the same phenomenon, but from different perspectives? Can you really take a natural experience and add a label to an extreme version of it and invent a new condition?

After all, (almost) everybody falls in love, daydreams, worries about their romantic bonds.

A lot of psychotherapy is about dealing with this phenomenon of “natural” behaviours that have deviated from the average and started to cause distress.

When is it helpful to add a label and when is it not? Does classifying people bring clarity and affinity or tribalism?

Individuality

Obviously these are questions without simple answers – otherwise we’d all have agreed on their usefulness long ago.

A final perspective is that overlap in symptoms doesn’t necessarily mean that two psychological states have the same origin.

Maladaptive daydreaming can happen independently of limerence, and limerence can happen independently of maladaptive daydreaming.

Our own individual identities will determine how these experiences play out.

If you are someone who is prone to maladaptive daydreaming, and you meet a limerent object… well, it’s pretty much guaranteed that reverie is going to be a major part of your limerence experience.

Similarly, if you are prone to limerence, and often in that mental state, it is more likely that you will develop a maladaptive daydreaming as part of your daily coping strategy.

The question “does [similar psychological condition] contribute to limerence?” comes up a lot. In fact, I made a video about this for other neurodivergent traits:

The overall message is that your own limerence experience will be unique, and shaped by your existing mental habits and proclivities.

If you daydream a lot, then reverie will have easy and immediate appeal. If you don’t tend to daydream, you’ll be more likely to seek contact than escape into a fantasy world.

Limerence can amplify our inherent traits, and that makes it even harder to disentangle whether it is a cause or consequence of those traits.

The post Limerence and maladaptive daydreaming 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.

I’ve never been in a relationship or really gone beyond the first couple of dates with a girl, and haven’t had any sexual experiences since I was 19 at university. Since I’ve learnt about limerence, with hindsight I can now probably say that I’ve had two previous LOs… both causing me to go into depressive and anxious spirals, but I probably never really admitted to even myself that this was such a big contributing factor to my problems.

Owen fell into limerence at university, and it was so deep and disruptive that his performance suffered, he self-medicated with other addictions (alcohol and marijuana), and he ended up leaving without completing his studies.

As a consequence, he:

…took the decision to completely cut out dating and the idea of having a relationship as I tried to get myself back on track with work and quitting my other vices.

Fast forward a few years, and Owen has met a new limerent object. He asked her out and they went on a couple of dates, but it didn’t work out – in part because Owen felt insecure and inexperienced. They are now just friends.

Owen now understands that his previous tendency to use limerence fantasies for mood regulation, had unintended consequences.

I don’t want to be beholden to the romantic fantasies in my head, but I have no idea how to progress and be confident to find something in real life without it going the same route again, and whilst I know comparing myself to others is foolish, I do feel like I’ve caused myself to be left behind in such a key area of life.

So, that’s the crux of it. He now sees that limerence has held him back in life, but does not feel confident about how to turn things around.

He seeks romantic connection, but feels like he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or how to progress a real relationship without falling into limerent fantasies.

Let’s try and help.

The positives

Starting with the positive aspects of Owen’s story, he is now very self-aware and able to see his situation clearly. That is a big first step towards purposeful living.

Many people who seem to have their lives together in their twenties end up crashing into a crisis at midlife, when they realise that the ambitions they pursued did not bring them happiness after all. Their dark night of self-evaluation comes later, when it is far more disruptive.

Cold comfort, but comparing yourself to friends who seem to have it all figured out is often an error – they can just be passively drifting too.

Second, Owen is just entering his prime. He may feel he is behind his peers, but he’s also on the threshold of the best part of adult life. There is time to capitalise on that opportunity.

Third, he is doing a lot right. He has got a stable job, even if his original ambitions from university were compromised, and he has a group of friends who can offer emotional support.

It seems to me that Owen is at the starting line of a purposeful future, and ready to go.

The negatives

OK, so, ready and raring to go, but… where?

How do you start a race when you feel unprepared, unfit, and unsure of the route?

How do you gain confidence? How do you deal with embarrassment during dating? How do you manage limerence when it overwhelms your efforts to be calm, cool and collected?

Well, rather like preparing for a race, you need to practice. To train.

Owen had the courage and purpose to ask his LO out, and they went on a couple of dates. He felt like an awkward teen and it didn’t work out, but he did it. That’s actually profoundly important.

The critical next step forwards is to understand that this wasn’t a failure. OK, maybe there isn’t a future with his current LO (who he might be advised to limit contact with), but there are other opportunities ahead.

Success rarely comes immediately. Much more commonly, it comes after trying repeatedly and incrementally improving your odds. Failure only really arrives when you give up for good.

When you put pressure on yourself, and treat dating as a high stakes situation, it inevitably feels like a disaster, rather than a setback, when it goes wrong.

The mental reframe needed is to move from:

Oh that was awful I felt like a fool and didn’t know what to do. I’m never doing that again.

to

I got some romantic training in today, but it was hard going. I need to work at it.

It is only a tiny minority of people who have “natural confidence” (and even some of them turn out to have some underlying mental insecurity driving them).

Most of us have to put the reps in.

Dispelling embarrassment

On a date, men typically want to be as suave and worldly as James Bond, but feel closer to Mr Bean.

A lot of embarrassment comes from the mismatch between how insecure we feel and how confident we think we should feel. If we do something naive or awkward or clumsy, we get that hot flush of embarrassment as our dignity crumbles.

There is a secret, though, that all the dating gurus know and share, but no one really wants to believe. A way to sidestep the game playing and performing that can complicate dating.

Authenticity.

Confidence isn’t really the belief that you can handle anything, that you are in charge of the world and action-orientated. It’s more about being comfortable in your own identity, and at ease with yourself.

Purposeful living is all about building that sort of confidence naturally, by becoming more self-aware and pursuing meaningful work and building healthy relationships with the people you care for.

It’s surprising how effective that is at removing embarrassment too.

If you don’t pretend, you won’t feel embarrassed when the pretense wobbles.

To give a personal example: leaving an academic post where I was working on Important Neuroscience to go it alone as a writer talking about love and infatuation (including exposing my own personal dramas) was not generally seen as an enhancement of my professional status.

I was prepared to deal with the embarrassment of old colleagues teasing me, but it never happened.

Leaving was a purposeful choice. I simply explained myself straightforwardly and – almost universally – people responded with polite curiosity. Respect, even.

I don’t have extraordinary confidence or insensitivity to embarrassment.

I just behaved authentically and most people accepted it.

Self-development

Coming back to Owen’s case, the overall message is to keep going with developing self awareness, and understanding why you are how you are.

It takes time to reverse the limiting beliefs of the past and build new beliefs about the future. Rewriting those programs is going to involve some trial and error, and openness to risks and disappointments.

Your best chance of finding someone special who might be a long-term partner is to find someone who aligns with your values, goals and purpose.

That means you have to have a clear idea of what those values, goals and purpose are, and you have to anticipate that there are bound to be some false starts.

This contrasts with most people’s approach to dating:

She’s attractive, I’ll try to impress her, and hope she likes me.

Instead it’s:

She’s attractive, I’ll try and get to know her, and see if we’re compatible.

Approach dating with the same purposeful mindset as you approach the other areas of life, and you’ll get better outcomes.

All that said, it is a long time since I was dating, so while these universal principles are hopefully useful, if anyone has more timely observations, add them to the comments below.

Good luck Owen!

The post Case study: held back by limerence first appeared on Living with Limerence.

It’s also more complicated than it first seems.

There are a few posts scattered around the site about the difficulties and challenges around No Contact, but I thought it might be useful to summarise the key facts in a simple guide – a checklist of what to do and what to expect when you decide to break contact with a limerent object.

You can download the No Contact Checklist, by filling in the form below and joining my email list.

Freedom awaits!

Sign up and download the checklist

The post The No Contact checklist first appeared on Living with Limerence.

This time, I’m delighted to share a discussion I had with trauma specialist, limerence counsellor, and friend of the blog, Fenna van den Berg:

We talk about attachment wounds, inherited trauma, purposeful living, and how to find a therapist for limerence recovery.

One of the topics that came up was addiction – how to define it and how to treat it. I recently posted a blog post about this topic at Psychology Today, which goes into more detail about what behavioural addictions are and how they are assessed.

Enjoy!

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

Hope that a romantic relationship might be possible.

Hope that they might feel the same way about you.

Hope that you might get to experience the ecstatic union of mutual limerence.

Sadly, while hope springs eternal, it’s also easily clouded by wishful thinking.

Especially by men…

Help needed

Just before we get into the meat of the post, this is a quick call for help from readers of Smitten. The book’s been out for a couple of months now in the UK, but there haven’t been many reviews on Amazon yet.

So, if you have bought a copy, please do leave a review. It will really help increase the visibility and credibility of the work, and I’d really appreciate it.

Many thanks!

There’s a consistent body of research supporting the case that men overestimate women’s sexual interest in them, while women underestimate men’s interest.

There’s lots of arguments as to why this might occur.

One is that all of us tend to project our own mental state onto others and assume that they think the same way. So, men, being more mentally primed for seeking sexual opportunities, will incorrectly assume that women feel the same.

Another is that men need to take every reproductive opportunity that they can, and so evolution would favour them having a “hair trigger” for spotting female interest – a false positive is preferable to a missed mating opportunity, from the perspective of gene propagation.

Others suggest it’s just social conditioning.

Regardless of the “whys”, it is a reproducible phenomenon, and one made even worse by limerence.

If evolution has built in a bias, limerence-brain is a double whammy.

While limerent women might become prone to the same misperception bias as ordinary men, limerent men are in danger of going right off the rails.

Impaired judgement

Limerence is an altered state of mind – and it’s one defined by arousal, reward-seeking and desire. Hardly the best state for a sober assessment of reality.

From the perspective of a limerent, the stakes are astonishingly high. Bliss beckons.

That means that the already weighted perception is loaded even further with exaggerated hope.

The slimmest of evidence is used to make a case.

She smiled at me.

There’s something between us. I can sense it.

Her refusal was so polite it’s obvious she cares about me. I’ll just be patient.

Hopes are so high that limerents become hopeless at reading signs of attraction fairly.

Any positive interaction with the LO will leave them high on life and feeling like something wonderful just happened. It feels like a cosmic connection.

For the LO, the same encounter could just be a case of a friendly sociability.

This disastrous combination of men already being over-sensitive to cues, and being desperate to find any cause for hope, makes them read too much into every interaction.

Motivated misperception

Things can go even further. When the limerence is especially wild, people can border on the delusional. This leads to what might be called motivated misperception.

The idea of failure is so aversive, the limerent can’t bear to acknowledge the reality of disinterest. They instead convince themselves that they just need a better strategy, just need to transform themselves into the LO’s ideal man, just need to crack the code of what they want.

Such determination is impervious to hints, brush-offs, and polite refusals. Anything less than a clear “No, I am not interested” is psychologically finessed into A Chance.

Bad interactions or blunt refusals by the LO are closeted away in the memory, avoided like traumatic punishments.

Happy interactions, in contrast, get revisited again and again as anchor memories from a time of joy. They get taken out and polished like the family silver whenever hope is fading.

This can become a bit toxic.

Despite being one-sided and unasked for, the limerent feels that they’ve made so much effort in their devotions that they deserve some recognition. They are entitled to consideration. They are owed attention.

They feel like they’ve been played for a fool, when in fact, they’ve been playing the fool.

That leads to resentment and ill-feeling all round.

So how can you tell?

For all the limerence-addled readers out there, who do not want to be a fool or a pest, but also don’t want to give up on hope, what’s the best way forward?

Well, like so much in limerence, you have to make decisions in the moments of clarity that occasionally break through the emotional storms.

You need to find objective ways to assess interest from your LO, and then be decisive one way or the other.

Declare yourself, or accept disinterest with grace.

Because us menfolk need the help more, statistically speaking, here is a checklist of signs that a woman may be interested in you:

• She actively seeks contact with you
• She is engaged and enthusiastic in conversation
• She is interested in your personal life
• She holds eye contact
• She “mirrors” your body language
• She shows signs of arousal: blushing, stammering, clumsiness, rapid breathing
• She laughs at your jokes (even the bad ones)
• She flirts
• She plays with her hair
• She wets her lips
• She touches you spontaneously
• She is watchful when you are interacting with other women

Obviously none of these signs are foolproof, and none of them are enough evidence, individually. The list is most useful for noting if any of those signs are clearly missing (especially the first three). If so, then… she’s definitely not limerent and probably not interested.

On the flip side, here are some clues that you need to pull your neck in and stop being a pest:

• She carries on with other tasks while you are talking
• She avoids eye contact
• She smiles politely but with no warmth
• She moves back if you get closer
• She leaves long silences, or uses conversation breakers: “Anyway”, “Oh well”, “OK then”
• She is reluctant to talk about personal matters
• She chooses not to sit next to you in group settings
• She has “closed” body language when you interact (crossed arms and legs, leaning back or away, impatient fidgeting, slumped posture)

Again, none of this is definitive, but it’s a pretty clear sign that they are not “lighting up” when you are near. Which is what you would hope for.

As with all generalisations and rules of thumb, there are going to be exceptions. Neurodivergent folks will be different. Naturally friendly women will give false positives. Naturally shy women will seem guarded. Some women will use these signs deliberately to test how you respond, so that they can assess whether you might make a promising “back up mate“.

The only universal method of finding out how someone feels about you is to ask directly.

But having some benchmarks that you can use to cut through the limerent and evolutionary biases before you take that decisive step will help you avoid lost causes and unnecessary heartache.

Good luck fellas.

The post Misperception of romantic interest first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Obviously mating behaviour will have a big bearing on limerence, and I’ve argued before that limerence is a drive to form a powerful pair bond – a sort of all-in, exclusive commitment strategy that’s like a metaphorical peacock’s tail.

While this makes sense as a mechanism for securing fitness interdependence, the emotional storm limerence doesn’t usually last much longer than the time taken to, well, produce a little gene carrier.

That means that long-term pair bonding would not predicted by the course of a typical limerence episode. Once the initial fireworks have burned out, affectional bonding takes over. That leaves us vulnerable to new limerence arriving as a disruptive force.

In other words, serial monogamy would tend to be the pattern of mating behaviour predicted by the features of limerence.

From an evolutionary perspective this isn’t a problem for gene propagation, but it can obviously have emotional costs. This is the point where biology and ethics collide – how do we develop frameworks for behaviour to balance our instinctive drives with social stability? Strict marriage laws around monogamy is one solution, advocating for personal freedom and ethical non-monogamy is another.

Evolutionary psychology seeks to understand mating behaviour from the perspective of how strategies advance reproductive success – they are amoral. Rape and pillage “works”. Committed pair-bonding “works”. There isn’t a single optimal strategy, because there are always alternative strategies, always ways to subvert, always gaps to exploit.

Unfortunately, limerents can get caught in those gaps.

For individual people trying to navigate their way through life, there are a lot of difficulties presented by the strategies that other people are pursuing – consciously or unconsciously.

Let’s look at some of the pitfalls.

Wild oat sowing

For men, impregnating as many women as possible is their best strategy for reproductive success. To achieve this, they need to either be highly desirable as a mate, and/or able to stop other men out-competing them.

Traditionally, this could be called the Genghis Khan approach. Nowadays, it’s that small percentage of male Tinder super users who get a lot of matches.

For a limerent, these people are a risk, because trying to form a mutual bond with them will be confusing and uncertain. They will obviously show interest – sexually if nothing else – and that gives hope that they are romantically attracted to you. But, they will also be evasive and unlikely to commit, as they have access to a lot of alternative mates.

You get limerence-reinforcing intimacy – reward combined with bonding – but then get the run-around if you try to deepen the relationship beyond the physical.

Hope and uncertainty are the killer combo for driving you into limerence limbo.

The “back up” mate

When I was at university, I was limerent for one woman, but close friends with a another. My friend had a boyfriend at a different university, but I was single and pining for LO.

In those days, I was naive about relationships (see this post for evidence about how I tried to impress my LO at the time), but when I finally gave up on LO and started dating a third woman I was amazed by how upset my friend became.

She expressed this in terms of feeling betrayed that I had never shared my feelings about the woman I was dating, and because she had found out about it from a third party (rather than me) she felt foolish.

Even with my impoverished male faculties I could tell that her emotional response was way beyond that. She was properly upset.

I’m sure it wasn’t conscious, I’m sure she had no romantic designs on me, but looking back now I suspect I was a “back up” mate.

The idea here is that some women have men in their lives who are a friend that could maybe be more. A reserve. An insurance option.

To be clear: she was a good friend, and I didn’t feel at all manipulated. I was getting a lot out of the friendship, and remember it fondly.

The only reason I think there was more behind it was that I was genuinely surprised by the strength of her reaction, and I think she was too. I’m pretty sure she had no deliberate plan to string me along, but I do think she was gaining a sense of security in knowing I liked her and cared about her.

If I had been limerent for her, though, it would have been torture.

Trying to stay friends with an LO is like an alcoholic trying to drink socially. If your drinking buddy also has subconsciously slipped you into the “back up mate” category, limerence limbo is your fate.

You will sense that they like you a bit more than a strictly platonic friendship, but a bit less than their primary mate. You’re in a half-bonded state – neither authentic, unadulterated friendship, nor a romantic bond.

A quantum-entangled state of uncertainty.

The “mate switching” hypothesis

The idea of a back up mate is an aspect of a larger idea known as the “mate switching” hypothesis. It’s an attempt to explain the asymmetry in infidelity between men and women.

For men, opportunistic mating with someone outside a primary relationship is almost cost-free. Just sow your wild oats, and leave. A potential bonus child that adds to your genetic legacy without costing much in terms of investment.

For women, the costs are much higher. Opportunistic mating with other attractive men might result in a child to bear, and the additional risk that the primary mate might catch on about the paternity and withdraw support when it’s most needed. Surely, that seems a much riskier prospect? Why would women risk it, even for [insert male heartthrob of choice]?

Well, there is a theory called the dual-mating hypothesis – or the “cad and dad” hypothesis – that women bond with providers, but have opportunistic sex with highly attractive (highly masculine) men. This idea had some support around women’s sexual preferences changing during ovulation towards more masculine traits, but that has turned out to not be very reproducible in larger studies.

In it’s place, the “mate switching” hypothesis has emerged. This is based around the evidence that women typically report greater dissatisfaction with the primary relationship before an affair begins, and a greater propensity for falling in love with the affair partner. (See this paper for a full explanation).

Female affairs, according to this hypothesis, are an attempt to either directly transfer to a better mate, or to leave an unsatisfactory situation and re-enter the mating pool.

Of course, these arguments about mate value and “trading up” also apply to men; it’s just far more common for men to stick with an existing relationship and seek commitment-free extramarital sex.

The big risk for limerents in mate-switching is in mistaking a new limerent object for a better mate. Many limerents subconsciously believe that the strength of their limerence is a measure of the desirability of a mate. Or, the reproductive fitness of a mate.

Limerence is a factor in many affairs, but it doesn’t require the new mate to be “superior” in any meaningful sense. The fireworks of limerence might be spectacular, but they are just empty explosions at the end of the day.

Lots of limerents have wrecked good relationships, good families, by chasing a new limerent object.

And that’s before we even get to the impact on the people left behind.

Mate poaching

Another consequence of mate-switching as a reproductive strategy is that mate-poaching becomes a viable way of securing a new partner.

Some predatory people seek out sexual partners from among the already committed. This might be about ego – as a way of demonstrating superior attractiveness – or it might be taking the target’s coupled status as external validation of their value.

Elizabeth Gilbert provided one of the most compelling recent accounts on mate poaching in her personal essay Confessions of a Seduction Addict. For her, seduction was:

…like a heist, adrenalizing and urgent. I would plan the heist for months, scouting out the target, looking for unguarded entries. Then I would break into his deepest vault, steal all his emotional currency and spend it on myself.

If the man was already involved in a committed relationship, I knew that I didn’t need to be prettier or better than his existing girlfriend; I just needed to be different. (The novel doesn’t always win out over the familiar, mind you, but it often does.) The trick was to study the other woman and to become her opposite, thereby positioning myself to this man as a sparkling alternative to his regular life.

This is the worst case scenario for a limerent in an existing relationship – a predator who will adapt their strategy until they find your limerence triggers and then pull on them again and again, until you are captured. Their specific intent is to poach you from your existing relationship.

It goes without saying that the goal of such poachers is not to secure themselves a committed relationship. Once the heist is complete, the treasure loses it’s appeal.

It’s a reality of evolution that many different strategies can work to find reproductive success. We are all of us buffeted by these forces – drives and impulses that we don’t really understand but have immense emotional weight, coming into conflict with principles and ideals about how a good life should be lived.

For limerents, there are many snags and pitfalls in the evolutionary undergrowth, that can easily trip us up.

Becoming aware of how evolved drives, personal experience, and ethical principles all interact is your best hope of avoiding them.

The post Evolutionary traps for limerents first appeared on Living with Limerence.