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.

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.

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.

It’s a great sentiment, but it does highlight one of the difficulties of dating as a limerent.

Mostly, we respond to people who cause the glimmer for us, and then fall deeply into obsessive infatuation.

We don’t look around at the people in our social group and think: hmm, which of them like me? I’ll choose the best option from them.

Don’t get me wrong, I know people who have done that, but I guess the 90% of people who “make the mistake” of pursuing people who might not be into them are responding to their own romantic desires.

Then again, a lot of limerents who contact me say that thinking the LO was attracted to them was a massive trigger for their limerence. So, that would work well with this principle, assuming they aren’t overinterpreting the LO’s interest.

What do we think?

How feasible is it to limit your options to only those who show enthusiastic interest in you?

The post Choosing a partner wisely 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.

They are looking for a deeper understanding of what limerence means for their romantic life, and how to find healthy love as a limerent.

Somewhat predictably, once I started writing, I realised I had a book on my hands. There is so much to say about the topic that a “quickstart guide” really couldn’t cover everything.

So, I narrowed focus a bit onto the specific topic of how to know whether a potential limerent object is a promising bet for a long-term partner.

That first guide is now ready.

It’s called: Find Healthy Love as a Limerent, and it can be downloaded if you sign up to my newsletter.

Not sure if limerence is a blessing or a curse?

Tired of romantic heartache?

Keep getting caught up in limerence limbo?

How to find healthy love as a limerent:

Sign up below to download the guide.

The post A new guide on how to find love as a limerent first appeared on Living with Limerence.

I hit the 10K subs milestone on my YouTube channel this morning.

I’ve also hit the point where I need help.

I’m looking for a freelance video editor with experience of editing talking head educational videos.

I’ve had a look at the obvious places (Upwork, Fiverr, YT jobs) and am a bit surprised at how difficult they are to use. So, before I invest the time and effort of slogging through those listings, I thought it might be nice to see if anyone already in the LwL community is a freelance editor looking for a new project.

And hopefully already familiar with my vibe and wacky sense of humour.

I’m looking for a professional editor to take an annotated script and raw footage, and deliver an edited video in a similar style to my own work, but better. The vibe is clean, professional, educational content, so no flashy graphics, hyperkinetic cuts, or shaky cam effects. I like editing that doesn’t draw attention to itself.

Here’s an example of a typical video:

My goal is one video a week (typically, 10-20 minute final edit from a raw recording in the 20-40 minute range). I’d like to pay on a per video basis, and can offer rates in the $150-200 range depending on skills and experience.

If you are interested, or know someone who is interested and can direct them this way, please fill in the form below.

Many thanks!

Edited to add: Thanks to all who got in touch. I’ve closed the form now.

The post Youtube milestone and job opening first appeared on Living with Limerence.

The book can be pre-ordered from all the usual venues, and the North American edition can also be pre-ordered for the November 4th release date there.

Pre-order UK edition

Pre-order US edition

For those that buy ahead, I’ve produced five bonus chapters on some of the hardest limerence scenarios:

• Unrequited limerence
• Limerence for a mentor
• Limerence for a co-worker
• Limerence for a therapist
• Limerence for a married LO

To claim these bonuses, please complete the pre-order form:

I know I’ve been banging on about this for the last few weeks, but pre-orders really do make a huge difference to the success of a book.

They help bookshops decide how many copies they will order. They help distributors predict demand. Most important, healthy pre-orders help the author launch their book well and get follow-on book deals.

Which I would like.

So, to everyone who has already bought: my heartfelt thanks.

To anyone on the fence – just a few days to go if you want the bonuses (in the UK)!

To anyone who has got value from the blog over the years and would like to say thank you financially – this is the single best way you can help.

To celebrate the release, I’m going to be having a book launch event in Nottingham on Wednesday April 23rd. So, if any readers in the UK want to come along and say hello, please do!

Event details here:

Smitten, with Dr Tom Bellamy

OK, that’s it now. Promise.

Even I am tired of writing about Smitten!

Back to regular programming next week.

The post One last push first appeared on Living with Limerence.