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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s not an easy thing to abstain from bliss.

For limerents in a long-term relationship who are suddenly struck by limerence for someone new, the neurochemical high from early limerence is intoxicating. A common way that they cope with this temptation is to tell themselves some variation on the theme of:

It’s alright, I know nothing is really going to happen.

The “thinking” behind this is that you know there is a line that you won’t cross, and so it’s OK to indulge the flirting and fantasising a bit. Just a sip of liquor to give you a nice glow. Ride the wave for a while, to liven things up. Who knows, it might even invigorate your long-term relationship by boosting your libido a bit?

Another way this impulse can manifest is as a compartmentalisation of life. When you are with LO (at work, college, gym, etc.) then you are that version of yourself, but when you are at home, you are totally committed to the relationship and have left all those limerent indulgences behind. Bubble world. 

Laid out like this, it’s kind of obvious how self-serving and delusional this is. Under the mind-altering influence of limerence, however, your critical faculties are too busy rationalising why it’s fine to carry on, to notice the self-evident fact – you are playing with fire. 

In actual fact, it’s worse than that. You are playing with your psychological health. 

The limerence training regimen

I talk a lot about the power of habits, and how much of our lives is actually governed by them. Well, one important aspect of habits is that they form. They take time to develop, through repetitive actions, and we often don’t realise that it’s happening. Slowly, through our choices and actions, we are subconsciously programming ourselves.

When it comes to limerence, there is a master script being written: when I am with LO, or daydreaming about LO, I feel really good. LO is super rewarding. 

The neural circuits regulating reward are an ancient and deep seated part of our brains, and control one of the most powerful forms of motivated behaviour that we have: when we identify something rewarding we seek more of it. So, by indulging in even compartmentalised or demarcated access to LO, we are training our brains into a new habit. Seek LO. 

After a while, that reward-seeking habit becomes our default setting. The urge to seek LO kicks in before we are consciously aware of it, and before we even realise what we’ve done, we’re addicted. 

Habits are hard to break

That leads to the next big problem. You’ve been riding the wave for a while now, surfing the peak, trying not to wipe out, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the wave is more powerful than you are. That is when you learn that the line you were so sure you would not cross is rushing towards you.

So, time to break away from the current and paddle back to safety?

Turns out, you’ve left it too late.

For the vast majority of limerents, there is no simple off switch. The habit that you’ve trained yourself into is stubborn. Trying to detach will cause emotional pain. You will encounter profound psychological resistance whenever you make an attempt to distance yourself from LO. As with any other addiction, withdrawal is a struggle, and deprogramming yourself is slow and careful work.

You need to have a good understanding of the psychology of behavioural change, and you need to take strategic action to reverse the reward-training – just winging it and hoping that the limerence will just fade away is likely to go as well as your brilliant “playing with fire” plan.

All that time indulging in limerent thrills was building up a mental debt. It takes time and discipline to pay it off. 

Doubts creep in

Faced with the scenario of accidentally training yourself into infatuation with another person, most limerents also find that their previous confidence that nothing is really going to happen begins to falter. Old certainties about what kind of person you are, what future you want, and what love really means, begin to crumble. After all, it is true that when you are with LO you feel giddy and excited (even if that’s starting to be tainted with anxiety and compulsions), whereas when you are with your long-term partner you feel guilt-ridden, short-tempered and ashamed.

This is the risky point at which devaluation of the relationship begins, and the journey past the tipping points of a limerent affair speeds up.  

As the marriage therapist Joe Beam once observed: the old insult “you’re not the man I first met” at the end of a limerent affair can be literally true, if you have coped with the cognitive dissonance of breaking your promises by breaking your moral compass.   

Compartmentalisation is unhealthy

Finally, the mental gymnastics involved in segregating your mind into different personalities when you are with LO or with SO comes with another cost – the price of your self-identity and mental coherence. 

At an extreme end, this can lead to a dissociative disorder, but even just the everyday discomfort of pretending to be someone you are not erodes your sense of self and your self-esteem. Not many people can  go through life lying to themselves and others without some psychological harm. 

This is basically the opposite of purposeful living. It’s faking life. At best you can try to retain your true self deep inside, while presenting an avatar to the world that says things you know to be untrue. For most people, though, keeping that up for long enough leads to a profound demoralisation and self-loathing.

It’s common that when affairs are finally revealed, the cheater expresses relief – even though their shameful secret is out and wrecking havoc on the people they betrayed, the lifting of the burden of their own dishonesty is a liberation. 

That tells you how big the burden of self-deception had become, and how misguided it was to believe you could play with fire and not get burned.

For those who are in the early stages of this fire-seeking temptation, pay heed to the painful lessons of those who’ve been burned, and put the matches away.

For those deep in the trap, there is help if you are ready to start the labour of deprogramming.

The post Playing with fire first appeared on Living with Limerence.

It breaks down the dilemma into three possibilities:

1. The marriage is good
2. The marriage has problems
3. The marriage is bad

Obviously, the action to take would differ in each of those cases, but the challenge faced by many limerents in the thick of this difficult situation is: which option applies? And if the marriage has problems (as all marriages do to a degree) how serious are they?

My starting point for the analysis is that you should get some distance from your LO before you stand any chance of making good decisions. Under the influence of limerent intoxication, your judgement is going to be screwy.

Once you feel you have found a moment of clarity, ask and answer these eight questions:

1. Have you experienced limerence before?

If so, you know what this is like. Limerence passes, and you are left with the same person after the fireworks have ended. Serially seeking new sparkles is not a sensible strategy if you are looking for a long-term relationship.

2. Were you limerent for your spouse?

If so, you know what happens next if you pursue your LO – the limerence will burn brightly, and then burn out. If you were not limerent for your spouse, it could feel as though this new, astonishing sensation is a sign of extra special love. For more on why the strength of limerence is not a predictor of the quality of a future relationship, see this post.

3. Have you had any life stresses lately?

Bereavement, redundancy, health problems, can all make you seek escape and transformation. If you’ve learned to use limerent fantasy for mood repair, you should be wary about whether your subconscious is seeking an LO for escape from the pain of real life trials.

4. Do you feel your life has purpose and meaning?

Discontent can grow slowly but surely in the background of an unexamined life. Benign neglect can leave you vulnerable to limerence as a shock of excitement in a life through which you had been drifting.

This sort of discontent is not really a marriage problem, it’s more of a purposeful living problem.

5. Were you unhappy before the limerence started?

Not now, compared to the imagined utopia of being with LO, but then.

If someone had asked you in the past whether you were happy in your marriage, how would you have responded?

The urge to rewrite history to make a story of “limerence as thwarted love” work is very powerful. Try to remain objective.

6. How do you rank in the objective measures of marriage quality?

There are some key indicators that all good marriages have in common. How many are in yours?

7. Are you proud of your conduct as a spouse?

Leaving aside the whole limerence for another person business for now, how would you otherwise rank yourself as a spouse?

Do you meet the standards you would want in a life partner? Does your spouse? If not, what could be improved?

8. If you knew for certain that your LO would reject you, would you still leave the marriage?

This is the big question because it cuts through all the fog of insincerity. If you knew beyond doubt that you didn’t have the LO to run off with, would you still want to leave your marriage?

If so, the marriage problems are clearly very serious.

If not, then that tells you something very important.

It might be that you are clinging to security, but more likely, you do value and love your spouse, but also want with an addictive, supernormal intensity to gratify your limerent urges.

Making decisions

I end the video with the exhortation to make a decision as the key next step. What that decision is will depend on the outcome of the questions.

If your analysis has been mostly positive, then it’s likely you fall into the first situation: your marriage is good, limerence is an unwelcome distraction, and you should begin the work of deprogramming yourself and recommitting to the marriage.

If the analysis is mixed, then your marriage has some problems to solve. Time to have some serious conversations with your spouse, and consider disclosing your limerence to them.

If the analysis is mostly negative, then it’s time to confront how seriously your marriage has deteriorated. Consider the signs that your partner doesn’t respect you, and focus on rebuilding, or ending, the marriage.

Regardless of which option turns out to best describe your own marriage, the next step to take doesn’t need to involve your LO.

Always start from the perspective that any marriage issues need to be addressed before you start looking beyond the marriage for solutions to your problems.

The post Questions to ask if you are married but limerent for someone else first appeared on Living with Limerence.

That result suggest two conclusions: anxious attachment is not required for someone to experience limerence, but the two traits obviously correlate strongly.

That’s an interesting result that raises new questions. Which way does the correlation work – does anxious attachment make it more likely that someone will become limerent, or does limerence make it more likely that someone will have anxious attachments?

Is there a common neuroscience mechanism for both traits? Is there one cause, or do the two traits reinforce each other?

Let’s see if we can figure things out.

What causes anxious attachment?

The central principle of attachment theory is that bonding during infancy establishes an attachment style that lasts into adulthood and comes to define romantic relationships.

For people who received predictable, consistent, and loving care during infancy, a secure attachment style is predicted in adulthood. For those receiving unpredictable care, neglect, or abuse, insecure attachments can result.

There are a few different terms and classifications used in attachment research (avoidant, anxious, preoccupied, fearful, disorganised etc.), but a good summary of the theory is available here.

The definition I used for anxious attachment in my limerence survey was:

Some people feel anxious about their romantic relationships. They seek frequent reassurance that their partner still loves them. They spend a lot of time worrying about the security of their relationship. Small disagreements with their partner can feel like a big threat. They seek a lot of intimacy and want to spend as much time as they can with their partner.

It’s easy to understand how a lack of emotional support in infancy could lead to this outcome, and why inappropriate or untrustworthy parenting is the primary cause of anxious attachment.

It isn’t the whole story, though.

We vary dramatically in our intrinsic personality traits. Genes contribute a lot to our temperament at birth. Some infants are emotionally fragile and others are more naturally sanguine. Two children born to the same parents and raised in the same household can have profoundly different “factory settings” when it comes to their sensitivity to distress. Most parents do their best to adapt to this and adjust their parenting style, but with varying degrees of success.

While it is undoubtedly true that some parents are neglectful, incompetent, emotionally cold or narcissistic, it’s probably more common that anxious attachment arises from simple misalignment of child and parent. It’s not that the parent doesn’t care, they just don’t understand how to meet their child’s emotional needs.

Put another way, nature is as much a factor in setting emotional temperament as nurture. Even more importantly, the way that parents nurture their children will depend on the child’s nature – an anxious baby prone to frequent crying will experience a different relationship with their parents to a phlegmatic, even-tempered baby. In an ideal world, both children would get the bespoke care they need, but (as you might have noticed) our world is not ideal.

Finally, not all emotional wounds occur in childhood. Negative early romantic experiences during adolescence or adulthood (emotional betrayal, cheating, abusive behaviour) can cause psychological damage that shapes future attachments.

Anxiety around bonding is partly inherent nature, partly parental nurturing, and partly personal experience. It’s partly physiology and partly psychology. That’s a lot of influences to consider.

One way to make a start is to recognise that all behaviour ultimately starts in the brain.

The neuroscience of anxious attachment

Bonding is all about hormones. The two main players are oxytocin and vasopressin which are neuropeptides that play many roles in the body. For the purposes of early attachment, oxytocin is central to the mother-infant bond.

In adulthood, the neuropeptides directly regulate pro-social behaviour – both increasing trust and affection for others, and ramping up the fear and anxiety response to social rejection. It’s a complex story (of course), but to sum up the role of oxytocin in adults I’d say it’s a sort of amplifier of social rewards and threats.

The influence of these neuropeptides on the brain are not just limited to the short-term, however. Much more profound is their role in brain development, and this is the major factor when it comes to childhood experiences shaping adult attachment traits.

Brains are amazing machines. They are like computers that wire themselves. They are composed of systems that regulate key behaviours (like reward-seeking, bonding, and arousal), but these systems adapt to and are modified by the environment.

We are born with a basic neural architecture and a set of instinctive behaviours (= nature) but the systems are plastic and not fully developed. As we grow, our brain development is shaped by the experiences we have – literally, the size, connectivity and sensitivity of different brain regions change as we grow and mature, in response to the life we lead (= nurture).

There is increasing evidence from animal studies that oxytocin signalling during infancy has a major influence over brain organization during development. Broadly, if young mammals are raised in a socially enriched environment their neural systems become efficiently attuned to social rewards and social threats. They are better able to regulate social grooming, aggression, mating and maternal behaviours.

In human imaging studies there is evidence for changes in volume and connectivity in numerous brain regions involved in emotional processing, empathy and social bonding in people with anxious attachments compared to people with secure attachments.

The connectivity and sensitivity of the limbic system (the broad collection of brain structures involved in emotional regulation) determines how brains integrate social cues into emotional responses. The relative strength of reward seeking, threat detection, anxiety threshold, and motivational drive will be determined by the structure and function of our limbic systems and the regulation of those drives are controlled by connections to the cortical “executive” regions.

Our genes give us a starting point and a basic set of developmental rules, but the social and physical environment directs the development of our brain organization as we grow.

System instabilities

How might this all relate to limerence? Well, limerence is an altered mental state founded in the hyperactivation of reward, arousal and bonding systems, akin to addiction to another person. At it’s heart, limerence is about associating a particular person to spectacular, euphoric reward. Fear of loss for that reward becomes a persistent source of anxiety.

Limerence can be understood as a sort of instability in the reward system (specifically the reward associated with pair bonding), just like many other forms of addiction. Motivation and reward-seeking is natural and healthy, but once a reward becomes so powerful and desirable that the whole neural network becomes sensitized, and cortical feedback systems become inhibited, you end up addicted.

Emotional regulation isn’t just about reward, though. The limbic system integrates reward, fear, anxiety, memory, desire, and more. It is not hard to see how instabilities in this system could also underpin anxious attachment, even if the instabilities manifest more as excessive threat sensitivity rather than excessive craving for reward.

It might be that “limbic sensitivity” is genetic, and hardwired in. Alternatively, disruption of the development of reward, bonding and anxiety systems during critical early life stages could lead both to anxious attachment behaviours and an increased chance of limerence.

Whether it is nature or nurture that most determines development of the social reward/anxiety network hypersensitivity and instability, the combination of both seems guaranteed to result in both person addiction and anxious attachment.

Reinforcement

Instabilities in the limbic system caused by genes and development can also be exacerbated by behavioural reinforcement.

Attachment disorders have been found to correlate with addictive behaviours more generally, suggesting that maladaptive reward-seeking can be used for mood regulation.

For limerents, reverie about the limerent object is often used for mood repair. Daydreams can give fleeting relief from relationship anxiety, but end up reinforcing the behaviours that strengthen limerence.

Given the commonalities between attachment, pair-bonding, romantic desire and relationship anxiety, it’s inevitable that the instinctive behaviours of limerence and anxious attachment would reinforce each other. The ideal of an ecstatic union would be even more appealing. The desire for intimacy more acute. The fear of rejection more distressing.

If limerence is also focused on a person who has avoidant attachment tendencies, then the reinforcement would be even more powerful.

In summary

We’ve covered a lot of ground, some of it quite speculative, so let’s end with a summary:

• Anxious attachment can arise from multiple sources – genetic predisposition, the effects of infant bonding on brain development, and the impact of early romantic experiences – and these factors can reinforce each other.

• There are obvious overlaps in the neural systems that regulate bonding and limerence, so it’s perfectly plausible that disrupted early childhood bonding experiences that lead to anxious attachment also affect brain development in a way that makes limerence more likely.

• While it’s plausible, it’s not yet tested. The fact that people with secure or avoidant attachment styles can also experience limerence proves that anxious attachment is not necessary or sufficient to explain limerence.

• Disruption of infant bonding will cause changes in the emotional regulatory systems of the brain that make romantic attachments more prone to instability, which is likely to promote behaviours that reinforce limerence.

It really is a double whammy.

The post The links between limerence and anxious attachment first appeared on Living with Limerence.

I could forgive my wife much easier for an emotional affair than a sexual one, even if it was only one time. Emotional affairs are easier to fall into and before you know it you’re in deeper than that kid’s horse in Neverending Story. A physical affair is a cold and calculated decision.

Adam

That struck me. I would feel the same. As a limerent, it’s easy to understand how you can slide deeper into an emotional connection through naivety – simple ignorance of the fire you’re playing with, and the dangers of person addiction. A physical affair is much more of a clear, plain line. You can’t unwittingly have sex with someone. No one is that naïve.

That brings us back to the perennial issues of culpability, blame, betrayal, forgiveness, and morality. I may be wrong, but I think most people do consider motive as important for determining guilt – foolishly underestimating your vulnerability does seem less of a betrayal than impulsively throwing away fidelity for a hook up. 

Clearly, though, there is more to it. In counterpoint:

I was talking about a physical affair that doesn’t get emotional. I’d prefer that. Than an SO be obsessed with someone else for years on end.

Marcia

An emotional affair might be easier to fall into more innocently, but if it carries on, it could end up causing more damage to a relationship than a one-night stand.

Would you rather have a partner succumb to a moment of lust or to months of limerence?

Not an easy question to answer . If the limerence is being battled as a emotional trial by the limerent, then it’s like being married to an addict. If the desire to recover is there, it’s easier to be supportive. But, if the limerence is being minimised or secretly indulged, it’s a different matter. Most complex of all might be limerence that manifests as a chaste admiration for the LO.

Imagine being married to someone who has a “Lancelot complex” for an idealised LO – the Guinevere they serve with undying devotion. OK, there’s no sexual contact, but how would it feel to know that they have elevated someone else to such exalted status? Even if it isn’t overt adoration, having a partner who drops everything to rush off and rescue their LO whenever they are in trouble would be psychologically taxing – especially if they are less responsive when you need help.

Alternatively, perhaps the limerence isn’t so noble. Maybe your partner would like to have formed a full relationship with the LO, but they were unavailable or rejected your partner. In some cases, the limerent obsession can precede a marriage, leaving the spouse to discover the secret after the wedding, and leaving them plagued by the thought that the limerent married them but wanted LO.

For others, the idea that their partner might be pining for an old flame is not nearly as over-arousing as the thought of them being physically intimate with someone else. Imagining their partner enjoying an act of sexual infidelity makes them almost physically sick, and taints their feelings about the relationship irrevocably.

The individual nature of betrayal

The obvious conclusion from all this “what if?” rumination is that people differ in what distresses them the most.

This banal observation does nevertheless hide some wisdom about how to manage unwanted limerence, and how to recover if it has damaged your relationship. What it reveals is that our insecurities determine our vulnerabilities, and so the forms of betrayal that affect us most powerfully reveal our deepest fears.

Some of these insecurities will be hardwired in – sexual jealousy and fear of abandonment have obvious evolutionary significance – but others will be more personal. The awful first love affair that left you paranoid about your attractiveness. The free-love advocate who made you ashamed of your jealous feelings. The strict parent who punished any hints of sexual behaviour. The discovery of pornography at too young an age. The neglectful parent who was indifferent about what you were up to.

Our subconscious attitudes to love and sex are formed by these haphazard influences, and so our psychological vulnerabilities around betrayal will be idiosyncratic, and largely irrational. It’s likely we won’t understand them ourselves – we will just discover them when the awful hot rush of adrenaline and cortisol overwhelms us in a moment of betrayal (even if imagined).

A key part of purposeful living is learning to spot your own triggers. It might take years of therapy to get to the bottom of how those triggers developed, but it is enough of a step forwards to simply recognise that they exist. “Ah, I get really triggered when my husband flirts with other people.” “I get really triggered when my wife works late without telling me.” Building that self-awareness about your particular hot button issues allows you to anticipate the circumstances in which you will be overstressed.

Communication versus rumination

Another big advantage of developing self-awareness about your vulnerabilities is that you can communicate them. Even if your partner doesn’t relate to the emotions – because they have different personal triggers – they should be able to grasp the principle that certain things they do can aggravate your raw nerves.

Again, cultivating honest communication skills is a keystone habit for purposeful living. There isn’t a right or wrong opinion about betrayal. It’s not enough to convince yourself that emotional or physical affairs are worse, you need to understand your partner’s position too. That’s how partnerships work.

Being open about what triggers you, listening carefully to what triggers them, and then working together to get over the irrational fears (“I don’t like it when you are smiley and friendly with other men at parties”) and to respect the reasonable boundaries (“Your texts with her are much too intimate for a co-worker”) is the best way forward.

Open communication can also protect against escalation of fears. When we aren’t so aware of our personal sore-spots it’s easy to torture ourselves with a subconscious narrative crafted from our worst fears.

• He’s working late again
• I bet she’s there with him
• They’re probably laughing about me sitting at home like a chump
• In fact, they’re probably at it right now
• His hands are on her body…

If fear leads you straight to the worst case scenario, your partner becomes the enemy. You don’t collaborate with enemies. You protect yourself against them. You keep your intel close to your chest. You set traps for them.

This leads, somewhat inevitably, to more alienation.

Don’t keep fears secret in the mistaken belief you are biding your time or being cautious. Communicate.

Moving forward

There is no objective answer to the question of whether an emotional or physical affair is more damaging for a relationship, or easier to forgive. Affairs are always bad. A long running physical and emotional affair is obviously the worst case scenario, but aside from that we all have our own personal red lines.

Partnerships are all about cooperation, and so the key principle when making sense of your own feelings about betrayal, and assessing the quality of the relationship, is honesty. If your partner is not willing to discuss their views on fidelity openly, tries to argue about how you should feel about any indiscretions, or says one thing and does another, you have problems that go beyond their behaviour towards other people. An unwillingness to work together is a sign of emotional detachment.

Cultivating self-awareness and honest communication will also, ironically, protect you against the scenario that opened this post. It’s far harder to naively wander into the swamp of sadness and get sucked under by limerence if you are aware of your emotional vulnerabilities. If you don’t habitually keep secrets from your spouse, it’s far less likely that either of you will be blindsided by infidelity.

Purposeful living really does liberate you from both subconscious desires and subconscious fears.

You’ll still feel them, but you can at least make sense of them.

The post Emotional versus physical affairs first appeared on Living with Limerence.

It’s been sobering to read accounts of the effect of limerence on the spouse of the limerent. Even in the best case scenario, it is a massive blow to confidence, in the worst case scenario the spouse is aggressively devalued by the limerent who rewrites the history of the marriage to justify their behaviour.

Life is complicated, though. Often there are problems in a marriage at the time that a new limerence episode erupts. Understandably, the spouse can start to doubt their memory, and worry about what they might have done to contribute to the situation.

That can lead to attempts to change their behaviour – or even themselves – in a bid to improve the relationship and help their limerent spouse overcome the infatuation and recommit to the marriage.

Unfortunately, while this goal is noble, it can often be misdirected. Limerence isn’t caused by a long-term relationship becoming stale or neglected. It might be a symptom of a larger problem, but trying to “freshen things up” or be more attentive to each others needs isn’t going to reverse the altered state of mind of limerence once it’s set in.

In the attempt to regain some control over the situation, the spouse looks to themselves as the one factor they can control, especially if they can’t seem to get through to their limerent husband or wife anymore.

This is admirable, and falls within the psychology of an internal locus of control, but it also needs to be directed purposefully and effectively. Taking any action isn’t enough, you have to know what action is going to actually improve the situation.

I’ve been writing about this issue for some time, because it is obviously an unmet need to judge from my email inbox. Now that I’m (mostly) done with the book writing, it frees me up for new projects, and this is the first one I have in mind.

I’ve created a survey to gather more detailed information about what help and support would be most valuable to the spouse of a limerent.

This is step 1: gather information, to understand the situation better.

Step 2 is coming up with a plan for how to direct the restless energy and desire to fix the problem in the most productive and effective way.

Step 3 will be creating a resource that implements that plan.

If we succeed in this goal, it will help both the spouse of limerents and the limerents themselves. This might seem implausible, but think about it: often the limerent doesn’t know what they want or need either. They can be just as befuddled by their emotional overwhelm and loss of self-control as their spouse.

To maximise the wins, both the spouse and the limerent need to understand what is going on, break through any communication barriers, and make smart decisions about what to do next.

Winging it on improvisation doesn’t work for anyone. The only hope is to work together to identify the best future outcome and how to get to it.

So, for those who are currently dealing with a spouse whose limerence is threatening the relationship, and who would like to contribute to the project, please do fill in the survey here:

The post New project: dealing with limerence in marriage first appeared on Living with Limerence.

The impact on the unwitting spouse is even worse, of course. The limerent struggles with containing their feelings of elation and excitement at their guilty source of pleasure. For the spouse, they face a potential existential threat to the life they have built. Their past and their future are also caught up in the bonfire of the present. Infidelity can destroy lives. 

Martial limerence is a high stakes problem. Naturally, limerents try to find creative solutions to reconcile the cognitive dissonance caused by loving their spouse but also being infatuated with someone else. From the perspective of the limerent, they want to stay married and keep all the joint investment in their stable relationship, but also pursue their limerent object. Often that leads to a simple conclusion: monogamy is the problem.

How realistic is it that moving from monogamy to polyamory will solve the problem of limerence in marriage? Is new limerence a sign that we are built to love more than one person at a time, or is this a rationalisation – what could be called polyamory of convenience – to try and meet conflicting desires?

Let’s dive into the cauldron of doom.

Ethical non-monogamy

Ethical non-monogamy as a lifestyle has gained a lot of advocates in the last few decades. Of course, non-monogamy has been around since, well, the emergence of sexual reproduction, and people have always experimented with alternative lifestyles, but the promotion of a theoretical and practical basis for living a polyamorous life has really taken off since the 1990s.

Two of the landmark books that spearheaded this transformation were “The Ethical Slut” and “Sex before Dawn”. These books respectively outlined the principles for enjoying and managing multiple sexual relationships at once, and made an anthropological case that promiscuity and non-monogamy was the default mode of interpersonal relationships in hunter-gatherer tribes before the onset of agriculture. The argument is that the transition to static communities and the development of rules about private ownership of resources, led to the imposition of “enforced monogamy” as a new constraint in human societies.  

These ideas have gained a lot of attention and been highly influential. Such mainstream publications as Time magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan (and many others) have run enthusiastic articles about polyamorous lifestyles. Amongst young adults, surveys suggest wide-ranging support for polyamory.

This philosophy is founded on the idea that monogamy is primarily a social phenomenon. It minimises evolutionary arguments for the origins of monogamy being based in sexual competition or mate selection, and instead places it in the category of cultural programming – often argued as serving a patriarchal goal of controlling women’s sexuality. Jealousy, from this perspective, is a learned rather than innate behaviour, and a sign of emotional immaturity.

Despite it’s popularity, the evidence for this proposition is actually quite weak, and seems to mostly be based on analogy to bonobo behaviour. Critics of the “Sex at dawn” perspective point out that it is founded on inaccuracies in both anthropology and primatology. Furthermore, contemporary hunter-gatherers practice monogamy and have marriage rituals, suggesting it doesn’t arise from the resource hoarding of agriculture, and there is evidence from analysis of genetic inheritance patterns that ancient societies had only low levels of polygamy.

In fact, hunter-gatherers ruthlessly enforce monogamy. An irony of the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer communities means that men are especially focused on status and fidelity, and enforce strict behavioural standards among their peer group through violence. To quote the psychologist Rob Henderson:

The most common cause of murder in hunter-gatherer communities involves matters of sex, adultery, or jealousy. [Anthropologist Christopher Boehm] states that “competition for females is the leading cause of hunter-gatherer homicide.”

Enforced monogamy certainly restricts individual freedom, but it also makes men more cooperative and less competitive. That seems to be necessary for human communities to build affinity beyond small kin groups.

Ultimately, attempts to identify the “natural” mating arrangement for humans quickly prove futile. We have evolutionary drives built into us that want contradictory things – familiarity and novelty, fidelity and promiscuity, security and excitement. Cultural conventions develop to try and mitigate our worst impulses, and these determine the sort of society we live in.

Search long enough and you can find almost every kind of social setup for managing sexual and family relationships somewhere in history. There was no idyllic Rosseauian state of mankind that we have fallen from. All social systems are culturally contrived and have to accommodate our conflicting drives. 

Polyamory and limerence

With that digression out of the way, what does this mean for our intrepid limerent trying to reconcile the contradictory drives of commitment to long-term bonding versus thrills for a new limerent object?

There are a couple of key scenarios.

First, and perhaps most commonly, the limerent had not really contemplated polyamory before the arrival of a new LO. Previously, the glimmer led to euphoria, and then may or may not have resulted in the transition into a long-term relationship, but limerence was essentially just the way early love felt and was the prelude to a monogamous union. This is the scenario where the limerent tries to resolve their cognitive dissonance (I love my partner, but I’m infatuated with LO) by reframing their attitude to monogamy. 

The second scenario is that the limerent has already adopted the poly life and meets a new LO who could potentially be integrated into their existing relationships. There are several types of poly lifestyle, with varying degrees of emotional and practical investment in the different relationships, but all are based on open communication, consensus and consent.

In both cases, limerence can be hard to accommodate. For those who are exploring polyamory for the first time, there are obvious pain points ahead. Their spouse is put in a very difficult position. You have to have world class communication skills to be able to negotiate a change in the fundamental status of a relationship without them feeling coerced, criticised, or sidelined. Commonly, even floating the conversation irreparably damages trust, security and self-esteem.

You also can’t predict the outcomes if you do decide to give it a try. It might seem like a logical and pragmatic solution to be in love with two people at once, but limerence is an altered state of mind that addles your judgement. Think of it like a drunk making decisions about risk taking.

Many limerents find that instead of a pleasing compromise, the attempt to open the marriage to include LO results in the deterioration of all bonds. Their feelings don’t align with their intentions. They cannot balance everyone’s needs. People get jealous and their emotions don’t do what they expected.

But the damage that my foolish stint thinking my LE meant polyamory was the right choice did to our relationship is immense and we really, REALLY could have done without my flailing attempts to fix things leading me there. Limerence describes the horrible, heady experience SO much more accurately and I’m sitting here feeling real damn regretful I didn’t learn THIS terminology a decade ago.

FnFn

Even when an already poly limerent meets a new LO, the sailing is not always smooth. The best case scenario is that the LO is happy to be included into the existing relationship network in a way that suits everyone involved. That should work well. However if the LO is not interested in this option, it can create new heartache for the poly limerent. Just like a monogamous union, the only ethical option is to forsake the LO, or torture yourself with trying to keep a friends with benefits set up going with someone you are emotionally craving with limerent intensity. 

Finally, the other issue just from a logical perspective is how often you can integrate new LOs. Limerence is typically resolved over a period of a few months if it is reciprocated and you are able to consummate romantic and sexual desire. After that time, in classic polyamory, you would have two long-term commitments. If you meet a third LO, are they incorporated too? There must be a limit to the process. At some point you will have to accept that you cannot continue to bond with new LOs.

What limerence means

A lot of these difficulties, a lot of these unintended consequences, are due to the fundamental nature of limerence. It is a deep, powerful drive to pair bond. The euphoric reward of limerence is focused on a specific person, who becomes supernaturally desirable. During the intensity of early limerence, the giddy intoxication is so powerful that other relationships are lacklustre in comparison. The love you still feel for a partner is so profoundly different from the exhilaration of limerence that it takes intellectual discipline to try and balance the two drives.

Limerence is a force for prioritising one romantic partner over all other opportunities. Trying to hold an existing bond in stasis while you forge a new one is an implicit admission that you have spare capacity to take on a new commitment. By definition, you are no longer “all in” on the original relationship.

When your spouse feels insecure and wants you to cancel your date with LO and provide them with emotional support, you may think “yes, that is what we agreed and I must honour that commitment”, but your limerent brain will be screaming “No! I want LO! I was looking forward to LO! I don’t want to disappoint LO! LO might leave me!”

Which is more likely to result – a calm conversation about how to compromise and a laugh about how tricky poly life can be, or an argument?

The emotional assault of limerence is bubbling up from the same part of the brain that throws men into a murderous rage of jealousy when they fear their mate is fraternising with a competitor. Adopting polyamory to try and solve limerence is intellectualising a reason why the primitive drive of limerence should be affirmed, while all the other primitive drives in everyone else involved should be held in check.

Not many people can pull that off.

The post Is polyamory a solution for limerence? first appeared on Living with Limerence.