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.

One of the best ways of managing the emotional assault of limerence is to work on understanding yourself. Work to increase your self-awareness, and self-esteem. To find direction.

That process of self-discovery increases your resilience and your ability to resist unwelcome limerence and make better choices.

This principle is at the heart of purposeful living – doing things intentionally and not just following your instincts deeper into the limerence pit of doom.

One of the best places to start is to consider whether you are acting with integrity.

Integrity, n.

1 Moral uprightness; honesty. 2 wholeness; soundness.

Concise OED 

How does integrity relate to limerence? I think both meanings are relevant.

The first relates to leading a purposeful life, and the second comes from protecting oneself from external stressors (such as LOs).

Let me expand.

1. Living with integrity

When faced with difficult, confusing or conflicting desires, it is easy to become paralysed by indecision. One reliable shortcut for making the right decision is to choose the option that is maintains your integrity.

This might not be the easiest option.

For example: when trying to choose between setting up a business selling hyped-up “nutritional supplements” or one selling exercise training programmes, you choose the latter because it doesn’t involve misleading people.

If choosing between deepening an emotional affair or going no contact with LO, you choose no contact.

If both options are ethically neutral then choose the one that is more likely to allow you to feel pride in yourself.

The choice of integrity does not mean being a prude, or killjoy. Integrity is also not the same thing as obedience.

If your boss asks you to do something distasteful or unscrupulous, it is appropriate to say no. Similarly, if you are offered a job by a competitor employer, it is not a sign of integrity to refuse because of the commitment you made to your current employer. In a transactional relationship, moving on or renegotiating is legitimate.

Where integrity may be strained would be accepting the new job without intending to do it, so you can leverage the offer against your current employer. Not illegal – not even unethical – and certainly advocated by many, but not a choice of high integrity.

Similarly in personal relationships, doing someone a favour because they are a friend is a fine principle, but if the friend is asking you to cover for them (providing an alibi for an affair, for example) then choose not to do it. No need to lecture the friend, just a simple “I am not willing to do that.”

Prioritising integrity is a great way to get started on purposeful living.

First, you can live with the knowledge that you are a decent human being, and you should not underestimate the impact that has on your psychological wellbeing.

Second, if consistently applied, other people will come to think of you as a person of integrity. Again, it is easy to underestimate the impact this has on your life. Trust is a hugely important aspect of all interpersonal relationships of value. Once lost, it is very hard to regain.

Third, it draws other decent people to you. If you role model integrity (simply by exhibiting it) then people that value the trait will be attracted to you.

It is one of the most reliable ways of excluding dodgy people from your life: make it clear from your actions and opinions that you do not cut corners, blur ethics, push boundaries, or lie to get what you want. This also plays out in romantic relationships – avoid the game playing and you will make players uncomfortable, and so cleverly select out the decent people that are worth bonding with.

A helpful consequence of this approach to life is that shady LOs will also be put off by your straightforwardness and honesty, saving you from becoming limerent for a git.

2. Integrity of self

The second meaning of integrity is also apt for living with limerence and living with purpose. Integrity as wholeness, without division or fracture, is another protection against the danger of unworthy LOs.

An intact self-image, resilient to external forces, is a stable state to aspire to, and a good guard against attempts to break down your confidence or self-belief. How does one cultivate this sort of integrity? Well, curiously enough, from practicing the first form of integrity.

We all of us have wounds. Past experiences that have undermined our confidence in ourselves, shaken our self-esteem, and led us to make poor decisions that we regret – often for a long time. Sometimes, these wounds are very deep and profound, and can be astonishingly hard to overcome at an emotional level.

Living with integrity can help with this.

Most of us have a fairly clear ethical and moral framework – even if we can’t necessarily articulate it well or deal with clever-clever “what if?” scenarios that exercise the philosophers.

For everyday choices, most people have a clear view of right and wrong:

Do not take the £20 note that the person in front of you just dropped – return it to them, even if they are ungrateful about it.

Do not string along someone who is attracted to you if you are not attracted to them.

Do not trick someone who is confused into doing something in your interests and against theirs.

Simple stuff.

Choosing to do the right thing does not take a lot of emotional energy. There is no need to deliberate for long. If you become conflicted, short-circuit the emotional confusion by choosing the course of integrity. You may not always benefit financially, or always outwit the conman, or “win” in some perceived game of oneupmanship against the rest of the world, but you will know that you have integrity.

That sense of confidence, wholeness and satisfaction with who you are, comes from action – deliberate, purposeful action – not from words or thoughts. Or from other people.

This is a mistake that a lot of limerents make: if only they can fuse with LO then at last they will have purpose and self-confidence because at last they will have affirmation of their value – from their beloved LO. But it’s a fool’s errand, because if you rely on other people for your self-confidence they can undermine it just as easily as bolster it.

The only safe way to build self-confidence, to build integrity against emotional attack, is to consistently act in a way that your subconscious mind will know is the principled and morally-sound choice.

After adopting that method as a life choice, slowly but surely you will  program yourself to do it from habit, and the foundation of self-esteem (true self-esteem based on actually being someone admirable) is laid.

So, integrity. One meaning flows from the other, and both can protect you against the vagaries of an LO’s behaviour.

The post Integrity first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Some of my friends thought I was mad. Tenured positions in elite universities are highly sought after, I’d invested a lot of time and effort in securing one, and now I was planning to throw it away to become a writer – a comically precarious profession.

I liked research. I remain curious about how the brain works, and I like teaching enthusiastic students about what I’ve learned. So, why quit?

Well, the honest answer is that my heart wasn’t in it anymore. The reality of daily life as an academic had drifted a long way from the ideal version that had inspired and motivated me as a young man, and it was grinding me down.

As a side project, I’d created Living with Limerence, and that was taking up a lot of my creative energy and giving me more satisfaction than delivering another lecture on pharmacokinetics to bored medical students.

It took me a long time to finally make the decision, though.

I couldn’t shake off the nagging feeling that I was being a pretentious whiner:

Oh boo-hoo, are you not feeling satisfied enough with your agreeable job? Maybe if you stopped obsessing over your “purpose” you might have the time to apply yourself to solving the problems that are frustrating you? And make more progress in your career. Maybe that would make it more rewarding?

Well, nobody likes being nagged, but I also sensed that my inner voice was driven more by fear of loss than prudent realism. A countervailing voice was gaining strength.

You get one life. You are halfway through it already. You know you don’t want to keep doing this. You’ll end up stuck, your research stalled, your best work behind you, a frustrated old man. Be brave and do something new while you can.

That vision of the future proved more motivating. My redundancy payment and book advance would give me enough to keep my family safe for a year.

It was time to jump.

How to choose a job

One of the true blessings of a free society is that those of us fortunate enough to live in them are able to choose from a wide range of occupations. We can decide where to focus our energies. We can succeed if we can find an undertaking that matches our skills.

Given this embarrassment of riches, it can feel like something of a personal failure if we struggle to find meaning. Given all the opportunities, surely we can find something that we care about? How can so many people be living lives of quiet desperation when they have the freedom to choose how to spend their time and energy?

Well, of course, the answer is that many of us don’t feel free to choose. We have to make compromises, have to take what work we can find, end up trapped in a job we don’t like, which doesn’t pay enough, and that leaves us without enough free time and energy to create the life we want.

The one limited, irredeemable resource in life is time. It is the one way in which we are truly equal. You cannot buy more, everyone has the same amount each day, so you need to use it wisely.

A first step in finding purposeful work is finding a way out of this trap – to stop feeling as though you are languishing. You need some sense of direction to work towards, which brings us back to the “given almost limitless choice, what do I pick?” problem.

Is there a way to narrow down the options a bit?

What gives you satisfaction?

The sweet spot for life satisfaction is to spend most of your time doing something that is lucrative enough to sustain a good lifestyle, while getting fulfilment from the labour itself.

Artists might be willing to starve for their art, bankers might be willing to neglect their families for money, but most people want to find a niche between those extremes. To get to that stage, you need to find work that aligns with your temperament, your intrinsic nature, but also helps other people solve their problems.

The way to know that you’ve found a promising avenue is when the main activities of the job give you energy, and/or allow you to slip into flow state – that wonderful sense of being so absorbed in the work that time passes, unnoticed, as you focus on the task at hand. Work that feels immersive will cause natural motivation (rather than just the indirect, artificial motivation of money).

As a guiding principle, there seem to be four areas of human endeavour that are able to reliably cause this internal motivation state. Which works best for you will depend on your personality.

1. Creation

Some people like to create things, to build things, to craft things. To make stuff that didn’t previously exist except in their imaginations.

Creativity takes a lot of forms. It could be artistic – visual arts, music, poetry, writing. Or, it could be practical – building houses, products, or businesses. Often, it’s a bit of both. There are plenty of creative businesses, and artistic designers, that fill the world with useful and beautiful creations.

I’d also put fixing things into this category. There is real satisfaction to be found in repairing and restoring – whether it’s a leaking plumbing system or antique furniture. Renewal is a form of creation.

2. Service

Helping other people feels good, if you have an empathetic and compassionate soul. Some of us are built to serve. That service can take a lot of forms. You could be a coach or therapist, a doctor, a teacher, a carer. Service is focused on helping others directly, and improving their lives.

Some also choose to serve in protective roles, such as fire-fighters, police, regulators, or the military.

Importantly, being of service doesn’t mean being a servant. It means getting satisfaction and motivation from helping others.

3. Community

A related category to service, but a bit more abstract, is the reward that comes from helping people form connections. Work that builds communities, brings people together to solve problems, or inspires collective action.

It appeals to those who find purpose in repairing relationships, facilitating understanding, or creating a sense of belonging.

Examples include charity workers, mediators, event planners, thought leaders, or even diplomats. These are life’s natural networkers. People who thrive on social connection.

4. Discovery

A final category is for the explorers. It suits those who are motivated by curiosity, problem-solving, or expanding the boundaries of understanding.

Examples include scientists, researchers, journalists, or travel writers. People who can get lost down rabbit-holes of investigation, and get excited by novelty, making sense of complex ideas, or making new connections between different fields.

Clearly, these four categories aren’t rigidly separate – plenty of professions involve elements of each – but they illustrate how different personality types can be excited by different intrinsic motivators.

Finding purposeful work starts with understanding what drives you, and how your own unique blend of openness, diligence, sociability, agreeableness, and resilience shapes your preferences. Some people want to do everything, others have a strong bias towards one category.

If you find yourself languishing in a job you don’t enjoy, ask yourself which of these fundamental motivators most speaks to your deep drives.

Then, start daydreaming about the sort of work within that category that you could potentially do.

I’m not saying that this will solve the problem of too little time and energy immediately, but it will help lead to a subtle mental shift – once you start thinking about alternative futures, you start to move from the emotional problem of feeling trapped and languishing, to the intellectual problem of how to actually achieve a change.

Transitioning into a new life becomes a technical problem to solve – how to get from A to B in stages that don’t jeopardise your wellbeing.

That’s purposeful. It’s action orientated. You’re taking charge.

Much better than quiet desperation.

The post Finding purposeful work first appeared on Living with Limerence.

The best cure for limerence is purposeful living.

That’s the philosophical foundation for recovery at LwL, but the benefits go well beyond just dealing with a limerence emergency. Purposeful living is an approach to life that fixes a lot of problems before they even start.

That’s quite a claim, so it needs some justification. An obvious starting point is what does “purposeful living” even mean?

What is purposeful living?

Finding life’s purpose has been a preoccupation of philosophers since the dawn of philosophers. There seems to be near universal agreement that a good life involves a search for meaning and purpose in the things you do, beyond simple self-gratification and pleasure seeking.

Even strikingly different philosophical traditions agree on this principle: its easy to recognise common ideas in the works of Aristotle and Confucius despite them being widely separated in geography, culture and time.

For me, the most interesting aspect of these philosophical ruminations lies in the different meanings of the word “purpose”.

In my edition of the Oxford English Dictionary three definitions are listed:

1. An object to be attained; a thing intended
2. The intention to act
3. Resolution, determination

The first meaning relates to a purpose as a goal, the other two are about human actions.

The philosophers seem to diverge on these two meanings as well. Some see purpose as a specific goal that gives direction and coherence to life – like becoming a doctor to save lives, or a politician to solve societal problems.

This is purpose as a life mission, a calling.

Each of us must tend to the task for which his nature is best fitted.

Plato

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

Viktor Frankl

Other philosophers are wary of seeking meaning in a specific vocation, and see being purposeful as the primary goal of a good life. Their focus is on the actions that we take along the way, rather than on reaching a specific destination

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit… The good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, over a complete life.

Aristotle

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

Seneca

Of course, ideally, for life to reach its peak of happiness and fulfillment, we would achieve all meanings of purpose at the same time.

You ask what I seek from philosophy? To live every day with purpose, and in doing so, to find the task that nature has set for me… By striving well, I learn what I am fitted to achieve.

Seneca

By living with purpose you will begin to realise what you are suited to do, what tasks call to you, and what ideas and projects excite you. You can then use that new knowledge about yourself to pursue specific goals.

This, for me, is the essence of purposeful living. It’s living in a way that is intentional, conscious, determined. It means making decisions on the basis of what would improve your life – getting closer to the vision that you are creating about how you would like your life to be.

Being purposeful is the best way to find a purpose.

Why is it useful?

Philosophy often veers off into abstract notions of ideals and principles and maxims that seem far removed from the realities of everyday life. To be useful, purposeful living must provide concrete benefits.

Obviously, making life better is a benefit, but the reason purposeful living succeeds is that it helps you transcend the inbuilt instincts that control so much of our behaviour.

Despite their sophistication, our brains are not that good at complex decision making. I mean, compared to the average cat we’re masterful, but complex reasoning is demanding, slow and energetically costly.

Daniel Kahneman summed this up well in his book “Thinking, fast and slow”. The usual operational mode of the brain is automatic, low effort, and involuntary. Autopilot mode. The higher level mode is effortful and mentally taxing, and it’s only really engaged when the autopilot encounters problems that need a solution. This broadly maps onto the neuroscience of subcortical drives and instincts being overseen by an executive cortex that can modify decision making.

It’s a reality of human life that most of the time we run on autopilot. That means it is very important to know how our autopilot has been programmed.

Limerence is a great example of how our instincts are programmed to seek pleasure not happiness. It’s a supremely powerful drive to form a pair bond, and so anyone without a sense of purpose will instinctively follow the yearning even if the limerent object isn’t a good match. We learn that being with a limerent object makes us feel exhilarated – euphoric, even – and so we seek that feeling of reward. Unfortunately, that autopilot response operates even if they are married, mean, unreliable, unfaithful or bad for you in any of the many other ways that they might be.

Your subcortical drive is seeking the pleasure of limerent euphoria, and that drive can turn into an addiction that lasts even after the euphoria has long since faded away. You can stay fixated on a LO even if they make you unhappy.

In contrast, happiness comes from living in a harmonious state where your relationships, health and security are all good. But, that’s a high level concept that needs the executive brain to do some work. Your autopilot can’t learn where happiness comes from nearly as easily as it learns what gives your limbic system a squirt of bliss.

Purposeful living is a long-term strategy for reprogramming your autopilot to put happiness before pleasure.

How can you start?

It’s easy enough to persuade yourself that you would like your life to be better. Not exactly a hard sell. But, the obvious first concern is how to achieve it. How can someone start to live with purpose?

Well, a great starting point is to work on self-awareness. Start to monitor how your autopilot is performing. Don’t make any judgements or rationalisations, just observe.

• Hmm, I start every day by reaching for my phone.
• I often choose junk food for lunch because I just want something that I like.
• I’m irritated by John because he always seems so upbeat and I think he’s a fake.
• I feel better when I take a walk in the park.

This sort of second-level thinking raises your awareness about where your drives are pushing you. You start to spot the patterns of how your feelings bias you towards easy choices – often those that provide comfort and gratification.

It’s surprising how powerful it is to just dispassionately observe your own behaviour. Again, I’d encourage you not to start on recriminations or excuse making – don’t start telling yourself a story about how you have to check your phone for work, or that you are pathetic and weak because you know you should have a salad, but you’ve always lacked willpower.

Just observe. Just gather information. Get to know yourself. Find out how you really feel about things.

You’ve got to know where you are starting from before you can productively start examining your beliefs about yourself and about how life could be.

That foundation needs to be in place before you begin the next phase of purposeful living, where you start to experiment with new ideas, new experiences, new directions.

We’ll cover that in the next installment.

The post What does it mean to be purposeful? 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.

This year, I’ve been reflecting on how that view is too limited.

Purpose can take a wide variety of forms; it doesn’t need to mean grand personal ambitions.

Home is where the heart is

For those of us lucky enough to have a happy family life, Christmas and new year is a cherished time. We focus on domestic concerns, household tasks, and spending more time together. It’s a good reminder that home is important in the broadest sense, as somewhere we belong.

Building and maintaining a home is important work. I don’t mean this in the narrow sense of “household chores are valuable work” (even though that’s true), I mean it in the “home is the foundation of life” sense.

Having children really, well… brings this home.

One of the most valuable things that a parent can do for their children is to create a stable home – a secure base to explore the world from. This is not just about bricks and mortar, it’s about feeling safe, feeling loved, and being able to intrinsically trust that tomorrow will be much like today.

When parents don’t manage this, all sorts of issues arise that have long lasting consequences – most obviously attachment problems.

It is not trivial or easy to achieve this. As the famous opening of Anna Karenina puts it:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Disharmony is effortless, harmony requires skill and practice.

Purpose in domesticity

Dedicating effort to improving your home life is every bit as purposeful as undertaking a grand new project. This might mean a new approach to your relationship with your partner and/or children. It might mean breaking free of a “situationship” and finding someone who is willing and able to commit. It might mean decluttering a chaotic environment.

It will mean facing your own sources of unhappiness and addressing them, and that can be painful because it normally requires change on your part.

The essence of harmony is mixing your tune with others to create a pleasing composition. Bands aren’t just a group of soloists doing their own things side by side. You have to work together, experiment with different styles, and find complementary melodies, or you’ll make a discordant din and then break up due to irreconcilable musical differences.

Families are likewise full of compromise, conflicting demands, and sacrifices. Like a good band, everyone needs space to express themselves, while also recognising that they can’t always be centre stage.

Making the purposeful choice to be a better member of the family means finding that balance – making sure everyone has their time to shine, without hogging the limelight, in a mutually beneficial way.

Once you make the decision, you’ll realise that it’s not actually all that challenging or complicated. You’ll get 80% of the way there by spending more time together, taking interest in what everyone is doing, expressing love in a way that feels natural, and being patient with each others idiosyncrasies.

It’s worth it, not just for your own domestic harmony, but for the impact it has on the wider world.

Troubled lives

One of the most affecting books I read last year was Rob Henderson’s memoir, Troubled.

Rob grew up in the Californian care system. His first hand account of a life moving through a series of unstable (sometimes abusive) homes is sobering, to put it mildly.

Among the many insights, a few that stood out were his learned distrust of adults (a psychologist trying to assess his progress failed to realise that Rob was lying and uncooperative throughout – no adult had ever helped him, so why should he help them?), his fear of strange cars in the driveway (meaning someone had arrived to move him to the next foster home), and his amazement when arriving at Yale to discover that most of his classmates came from two-parent homes.

Intact families were basically a fairy tale in his life experience, and yet here was a whole social niche full of people who had benefited from them – but who were also, paradoxically, disdainful of marriage and heteronormativity.

That experience was a catalyst for his idea of “luxury beliefs” – opinions held by cultural elites, which communicate their educational status while inflicting social harms on others in a way that they themselves are insulated from.

Today, Rob is a psychologist and writer, working on the impact of family stability on life outcomes and community cohesion. From his own experience he knows how beneficial it is to have a critical mass of stable families in a neighbourhood:

Many people overlook this broader impact. They often frame the discussion as simply “married parents versus unmarried parents,” without recognizing the larger, community-wide “spillover” effects. It’s not just the children of those married parents who benefit—it’s the entire neighborhood that feels the ripple effects of that stability and trust.

Working on the foundations of your own family doesn’t just benefit you. Others notice – sometimes the most vulnerable among us – as they can be searching for role models of what healthy relationships look like.

We

That broadening of the concerns of family beyond the immediate nuclear unit highlights another concept that links nicely into Teika’s last post about the novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Who do we mean when we talk about “we”?

Zamyatin invented a totalitarian communist dystopia, where “we” was programmed into citizens from birth as universal devotion to the Benefactor. It was not an organic development of kindred affection, it was enforced. That is why limerence proves so destabilising in the story, as it is a personal bond of frightening power that separates the heroes from the synthetic, fake bonds to their community.

This question of how wide a feeling of “we” can grow was a key concern of the philosopher Roger Scruton. He coined the term “oikophilia” (same Greek root as “economics”) to denote the love of home that most people feel keenly. He wondered what it is that nurtures affinity between people.

There are some obvious candidates – family, religious congregation, village, parish – but once the population size starts to rise to the level of towns and cities there comes with it an anonymity that is alienating.

Scruton ultimately seemed to settle on the idea that the Nation was the largest level at which people could still feel a sense of “we”. Nations have shared history, heritage, landscape, culture, and customs that can unify people – even to the ultimate point of citizens being willing to die fighting for their nation if it comes under attack.

He argued that love of home could be scaled up from a household, to a community, and a nation, as long as people felt a sense of kinship and mutual inheritance, investment and gratitude. But, it must be organic, it cannot be imposed or insisted upon by a state apparatus.

Postscript

This long and rambling reflection began as a rather sentimental response to Christmas, but it’s taken on extra poignancy in the last few days as X.com has erupted with international scrutiny of the “grooming gangs” scandal that has plagued the UK for decades.

The girls who were targeted were from poor communities and often broken homes. The men who preyed on them came from a different cultural “we” and saw them as subhuman – “easy meat” for exploitation.

The institutions of state that should have protected the girls instead decided that community cohesion was best served by strictly controlling what could be said and by whom – apparently operating from an ethical framework that Islamophobia was a more serious moral hazard than the systematic rape and torture of thousands of children.

Even now, our media and politicians seem obsessed with why and how Elon Musk is talking about it, not why and how it happened – role-modelling in real time the same behaviours that concealed the crimes in the first place.

It’s been quite something to witness the total moral collapse of the British establishment.

In the face of such demoralisation (in every sense of the word), the mind fills with urgent questions – how can I protect my children, how do we stop this from happening again, how can the victims be helped?

I suspect that the answer to these questions lies in strengthening the bonds of family – asking how we can be better fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, neighbours and friends. Doing the purposeful work of self-development that enables us to build better relationships, and become more reliable, patient and compassionate with the people who depend on us.

It won’t undo the evils of the past, but it might help build a sense of unity around the idea that safeguarding children matters more than anything else in any civilisation worth the name.

That’s the only way to really feel secure, confident and free.

To feel at home.

The post Finding purpose at home first appeared on Living with Limerence.

This post is the 400th post on the Living with Limerence site. That’s a lot of typing.

I tend to use these milestones for myself – to reflect on what’s been, what’s underway, and what’s to come.

This one is no exception. After a quick review of recent milestones, I’m going to share the lessons I’ve learned about transitioning out of an academic job and into a new world of full time writing and career independence.

As a consequence, this post is less about limerence and more about purposeful living. Turns out there are some speed bumps on the road to personal freedom and I hit them.

So, if you fancy learning about all the naïve mistakes I’ve made, and how I’m going to try and respond to them, read on!

A big year

There were two major milestones for me this year. I wrote a book and used it to transition from pseudonymous blogger to public blogger. I’m out in the world as myself, and taking responsibility for my opinions and decisions.

So far, so good. I haven’t regretted that decision yet, and am still pretty stoked and motivated about the future.

But…

Time management

Academic life, for all its shortcomings, had a lot of structure. There was a literal timetable when it came to teaching, but research work was also regimented by funding application deadlines, PhD student deadlines, project planning, collaborative meetings, etc. etc. Not to mention the endless hours of administration.

Similarly, when the blog was a side-project, there was a nice, simple structure: one post a week, Saturday 9 am, come what may.

Turns out, independent life is not like that.

I’m sure the freelancers reading this are already cracking a wry smile, but I started my new life with the assumption that given an extra 8 hours a day to work on limerence, I’d be like a powerhouse of creation and industry. I’d be ticking off projects left and right, completing long-neglected tasks, and finishing the day in a flush of achievement and satisfaction.

In practice, I’m all over the place.

I’m going to be honest. My actual intention for this 400th post was not to ramble about “my journey” or try and make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, it was to formally launch my YouTube channel.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet recorded a single frame.

I’ve written some scripts, because I like writing, but I’ve been dithering for so long about getting a studio set up, sorting out kit, software, lighting, and deciding on backdrops (bookcase? plain wall? shadowy depths? or classic spare bedroom?), that I haven’t actually sat down in front of the camera and recorded anything.

In part this is just my naïvety about how much is involved in making YouTube videos, but it’s also obviously partly procrastination. As further evidence, I signed up for a couple of online courses about how to make YouTube videos, which has splendidly burned through hours of what seems like productive time without actually getting any recording done.

Projects, projects, projects

I’m wise enough to procrastination’s tricks to know its root cause is not laziness, but avoiding discomfort. It’s all about emotional resistance.

Like many people, I don’t relish the idea of performing on camera, and also feel inhibited about being subject to scrutiny, but if I’m honest, those aren’t really the barriers that I’m facing. My problem is indecision.

Here is a list of live projects I have on my to do list:

• Complete last proofreading and edits before the book goes into production
• Reach out to podcasts and other blogs to help promote the book
• Engage with social media to start building a new audience – please follow me on X!
• Reinvigorate my long-neglected newsletter
• Create an online course and community for betrayed spouses who have been hurt by limerence
• Update and improve the Emergency deprogramming course for people struggling with limerence
• Create an online course for professional therapists and coaches on the neuroscience of limerence, attachment, and behavioural addiction
• Launch the YouTube channel

Now, a sensible person might look at that list and prioritise – working through the projects in order of importance. Less sensible, more indecisive people might start all of them at once and then bounce back and forth from task to task, as daily indecision keeps them switching priorities. Of course, you then end up making what feels like inadequate progress on all of them.

Guess which one I did?

What have I learned?

It’s only been a couple of months since I quit my job, so I’m not going to be too hard on myself about an inefficient transition period. That said, it also can’t go on like this.

The fundamental problem is that I want to get all of these projects done, but I can’t do everything at once. I need a system for prioritisation and making consistent progress.

My assumption that I’d be able to just instinctively feel my way into a productive schedule is the same classic mistake that leads into limerence – going with what feels right in the moment, rather than engaging the executive brain to check on the origin of those feelings.

In my case, this played out as launching into one project with enthusiasm, hitting resistance that turns the enthusiasm into doubt, avoiding that discomfort by getting enthusiastic about a different project, and switching focus before anything got completed.

Embarrassing.

One of the biggest draws to the independent life was being able to do what I want when I want. I love the fact that I can spend time with my kids when they get home from school, and want to preserve that sort of freedom, but I don’t love the fact that emotional resistance to decision-making is stopping me from completing projects.

A quote from Leila Hormozi helped clarify the solution:

To avoid procrastination, match your actions to your goals not to your feelings

For me, my purposeful goal is to turn running Living with Limerence into a full time career, and that involves a consistent schedule of creating new resources, new information and new products that help people who are suffering because of limerence make sense of what’s happening to them.

My actions need to match the goal of building a sustainable and productive system for helping people solve their problems, and that’s unlikely to happen if I’m just led by my daily feelings and inclinations.

The starting point is prioritisation – choose a lead project, make a master task list, and get started on doing the work.

Match actions to purpose, not feelings.

See you next week, with my first YouTube video.

The post Navel gazing at 400 first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Limerence is enlivening, exciting, enriching, and exhilarating (and that’s just the words beginning with the letter e). It’s a spectacular life experience, and when it’s directed towards someone good, who you can form a healthy bond with, then it’s fab. I wouldn’t have wanted to do without it when I was young and fancy free.

Like many powerful forces, though, limerence can also be destructive, and that’s why I spend so much time talking about the downsides.

A recent conversation brought this topic to mind. After chatting about limerence and its impacts for a while, the guy I was talking to asked me:

“So, is limerence always a sign that something is wrong in life?”

It struck me as a profound question.

For some people the answer is a simple “yes”. For others, the answer is “not always, but often”, for still others the answer is more like “not usually”, and, of course, the general answer that applies in most cases is “it depends”.

That’s an annoyingly imprecise answer, so let’s go through the cases.

When limerence is not a problem

Limerence is an intrinsic part of who we are – it is hardwired into our brains because it emerges from key neural systems that regulate reward, arousal and bonding. It’s not an inherently problematic phenomenon. In fact, there are lots of reasons to think that it is an advantage for pair-bonding and reproductive success, as well as being the source of a great deal of pleasure.

Many of us can thank limerence for our very existence.

Limerence emerges when we meet someone who causes the glimmer for us, at a time when we are emotionally open to seeking romantic rewards. If both you and the person who gives you the glimmer are single and looking for love, then limerence is not necessarily a problem. In fact, it can be fantastic.

An important factor in determining whether limerence is a sign that something is wrong is our awareness of what the emergence of limerence means. At it’s simplest, limerence just means we have met someone who matches our subconscious template for a desirable mate. If we can capitalise on that good fortune, then we should.

However, even in such times when we can safely and mindfully pursue limerence, there are a couple of risks to be anticipated.

When limerence might be a sign of trouble

The first risk to limerent indulgence, is that it’s very possible that the person you are becoming infatuated with is not themselves a limerent. There are big mismatches in expectations between the two tribes of limerents and non-limerents about what love should feel like.

If you are looking for mutual limerence as your ideal vision of an ecstatic union, you are not going to be able to provoke it in a non-limerent. It’s not a personal failing of yours, or a sign of a substandard relationship, that they don’t go gaga over you in the way you want (and the way you are experiencing) – they are just wired differently. It’s like dating an introvert and hoping they’ll want to party every night. Not gonna happen.

This risk can easily be mitigated just by understanding the fact that people experience the early stages of love differently and managing your expectations accordingly. Knowing ahead of time that your paramour experiences love in a non-limerent way will allay a lot of fears and misunderstandings.

Alternatively, if mutual limerence really matters to you, then you could take a purist attitude and make a conscious effort to only seek limerents as your dating matches. There are ways to spot the signs.

The second risk for single limerents is if you become limerent for people who are troubled or troublesome. If you find yourself repeatedly succumbing to dodgy limerent objects then it might be a sign that there is something in your past – a formative experienced that distorted your perceptions of romantic appeal – which has made you attracted to people who cannot provide a stable, healthy bond.

In these cases, limerence (or at least the glimmer) is a warning sign of emotional risk, not an exciting romantic possibility.

A pattern of becoming limerent for poor matches does suggest that something is wrong in the process of integrating romantic attachments for you, which may reflect unmet needs from your past.

Vulnerable periods in life

Even if you are not one of those unlucky souls who only feels limerence for difficult people, there are still times in life when the emergence of limerence is likely to be a sign of something being wrong. One of the simplest, and commonest, is becoming complacent about your existing relationship.

A long-term relationship shouldn’t require a lot of work. One of the biggest benefits of stable love is the deep trust that can be cultivated over time as you bond with a partner – a sense that you are a team, on each other’s side, and that your mutual love and security can be taken for granted. You shouldn’t have to be constantly vigilant about mate poaching or infidelity or risks to your family’s harmony.

However, the flip side of contentment is being too laissez-faire and slipping into complacency. Like so much in life, balancing opposing forces is the secret to success. Comfort needs to be balanced by challenge – you need both security and stimulation to keep a relationship satisfying. Too much comfort and it becomes dull, too much drama and it breaks apart.

Limerence increases in midlife. A reasonable hypothesis as to why, is that it’s a period when people start to seriously examine their decisions, their life choices, their future. It can be a time of strain, when domestic responsibilities and limitations can start to feel more like a burden than a blessing. If a new limerent object appears and ignites the long-dormant romantic furnace, it can be a fire hazard.

Although midlife is a common period for these sorts of emotional eruptions, identity crises can come at many other times – triggered by bereavement, divorce, unemployment, or any of the other practical or emotional disasters that life can deliver.

If you have developed the habit of using limerence for mood regulation, then stress can prime your subconscious to seek limerent intoxication as a source of reward – a diversion from your suffering. It’s a crap strategy, but the subconscious is lousy at long term planning. That’s what our executive brains are for.

It can be wise and beneficial to launch a life audit when limerence flares up. It may reveal an escape into fantasy as a way to avoid important but difficult decisions.

How to avoid the risks

All these signs of limerence as a symptom of something else being wrong in life have a common theme: being caught by surprise by an emotional vulnerability you were blind to.

This vulnerability may have deep roots – from childhood attachment problems, or formative experiences that made untrustworthy people subconsciously attractive – or maybe just everyday circumstances that make the thrills of limerence seem extra appealing.

The best way to avoid these risks is to spend more time and effort towards understanding your subconscious motives and drives, and where they come from. That’s when therapy for limerence is most valuable – in gaining self-awareness about the forces that have shaped your personality.

Self-knowledge is one of the elements of purposeful living, and one of the best protections there is against destructive limerence. If you can identify the things that are wrong in life, and correct them, then the emotional vulnerabilities that make limerence more desirable will be neutralised.

Limerence is most often a sign that something is wrong in life when it catches you out, disrupts your plans, and makes you reassess everything you believed. It’s most often embraced when it’s a tantalising alternative to an unhappy status quo.

Someone who is living a life of purpose and fulfilment would have no need for limerence as escape, nor welcome its disruptive effects.

But if they are free to act, and wise to the risks, they can choose to embrace it for the glorious elation it can bring.

The post Is limerence a sign that something is wrong in life? first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Many people related to that experience. It really is a peculiar sensation of feeling like a different person with suspended impulse control. A quiet, distant intellectual voice urges you to stop acting so recklessly, but in the moment you just, fundamentally, don’t care. You just want.

As some of the commenters put it:

“…there is a right old flood of the brain chemicals in these situations that has us acting almost outside of ourselves.” Lim-a-rant

“I think very rationally and take a long time to weigh decisions. So I do that and decide there is something I have to say no to, for a host of excellent reasons. I go to my LO, she asks me about it, and I say yes. It’s especially annoying that she doesn’t have to insist at all, and no amount of convincing myself before seems to help.” Anon

It’s as though the executive authority of the brain has been suspended.

As I mentioned in that post, I’ve struggled a bit to come up with a way of describing this phenomenon. With more reflection, I think that the authority isn’t so much suspended as sidestepped. So, I’ve decided on a new term to describe this state of mind: Appetite Supremacy.

Appetite supremacy is at the heart of much of the ridiculous behaviour that limerents exhibit. Sending fruity texts and emails. Outrageous flirting. Oversharing intimate hopes and secrets. Exaggerated praise for LO. Paying for lavish gifts. Jumping into action whenever LO calls – those actions that limerents look back on with queasy embarrassment after they’ve come to their senses, knowing that duty, shame, pride or plain good sense should have stopped them. 

So, why do we do it? What’s happening in the brain of limerents that makes doing something stupid and disruptive feel irresistible?

Too much wanting

I’m a big advocate for the concept of limerence as addiction to another person, and the phenomenon of appetite supremacy is obviously relevant to addictive behaviour.

All self-aware addicts report a moment of realisation when they recognise that they can’t resist temptation through simple willpower – that having an opportunity to indulge their addiction will inevitably trigger drug use, regardless of the negative consequences for their lives. 

One of the leading theories for addiction is known as “incentive salience“. I’ve written about some of the implications before, principally that wanting and liking are distinct systems in the brain and can become uncoupled.

During addiction, the wanting system (driven by dopamine) becomes highly sensitized to the addictive stimulus. The dopamine system initiates reward-seeking behaviour and so being exposed to cues that remind you of your addiction causes a massive motivational drive.

Unfortunately for addicts, the sensitization of these “wanting circuits” is robust and long-lasting. Even worse, it correlates with a suppression of the cortical feedback pathways that moderate reward-seeking – the executive system that governs impulse control.

Addiction deranges our wanting circuits, so that the gas pedal is floored at the same time as the brakes are released.

Importantly, this isn’t a generalised hyperactivity of the wanting system. It is triggered by cues that are associated with the addiction – and for limerents, being in the company of the LO is clearly going to be the most powerful cue.

In moments of calm, away from the stimulus, it is perfectly possible for addicts to rationally analyse their behaviour, agree it is destructive, and express a purposeful intention to break the addiction and recover.

That determination lasts right up until the next exposure kicks them back into the mental state of appetite supremacy.

What can be done?

If appetite supremacy in limerence comes from hyperactive wanting plus suppressed impulse control, and it’s predictably triggered by exposure to LO, then there are some constructive steps that can be taken to tackle the problem.

1. Hit the emergency brake

One ray of light in this rather bleak picture of deranged wanting is that the “suspension of executive authority” is imperfect. There does seem to be a higher, ultimate authority that can step in at the last moment and pull the limerent back from the brink.

To take the common scenario of a married limerent who has become infatuated with a co-worker, appetite supremacy may drive them to flirtation, inappropriate intimacy, even an emotional affair, but many limerents stop themselves before crossing the tipping point of starting a physical affair.

Appetite supremacy can encourage wild boundary-testing, but many people do seem to have a psychological emergency stop that averts disaster.

We can argue about the origin of this emergency stop (obligation, guilt, fear, integrity), but it proves that the situation isn’t hopeless. Willpower can triumph over temptation.

Indeed, the emergency stop can kick in sooner. That was my saving grace. I was aware enough even in the face of appetite supremacy to erect a kind of final executive barrier – a last line of self-control that prevented me from disclosing or crossing any red-lines of impropriety. Even in the haze of wilful recklessness, I knew deep down that I didn’t want to do anything, I just selfishly wanted to play. To get some delicious limerence liquor, consequence free.

Of course, it wasn’t consequence free. I was training myself into a habit of secrecy and deceit. Even if I thought I could handle it, every time I was in that state of wilful recklessness I was playing with fire and reinforcing the limerence.

2. Stop reinforcing the limerence

The obvious next step is to avoid the circumstances that you know will trigger your wanting circuits.

No contact is the most consequential choice you can make, but there are other, subtler tactics. For one thing, you can modify your environment to try and eliminate cues that make you think of LO. This can be hard when limerence is well advanced and everything reminds you of LO, but changing your living space and introducing novelty, can be a potent force for rebooting your mindset.

One of the confounding factors in the study of addiction neuroscience is that the context of a test has a big impact on the results. By putting addicts into labs and MRI scanners, researchers developed lots of ideas about the mechanisms of addiction, only to later find out that the neural systems they were studying behaved differently in the home environment (or in another environment associated with drug taking).

Context matters.

Other tactics for breaking reinforcement are getting rid of gifts, getting rid of photos, blocking LO on social media – anything that disrupts the daily habits that keep LO in mind.

Habits kick in during moments of inattention. Like the smoker who has a lit cigarette in their mouth before they consciously realise what they’ve done, the impulse to contact LO is a reward-seeking habit loop that is running on autopilot in the background.

Become attentive to when your LO-seeking habits kick in and devise ways to disrupt the behavioural loop.

3. Deprogram the wanting circuits

The next stage is trying to desensitize your hyperactive wanting system. This is what I call “emergency deprogramming”, and what my online course is designed to achieve.

The idea is to use psychological tricks to overwrite the old association between LO and reward, and introduce a new association linking LO to discomfort. By deliberately spoiling limerent reverie and LO contact, you can accelerate “extinction” of the reward memories and undermine the wanting impulse.

Done in isolation, this approach can be demoralising, so it should also be coupled to finding new rewards and new sources of emotional nourishment.

One of the best strategies for gaining that positive outcome is to focus on self-improvement.

4. Exercise the executive feedback circuits

The ideal scenario for beating appetite supremacy would be to simultaneously weaken wanting and strengthen impulse control. Happily, purposeful living achieves both outcomes.

Self-discipline is the ability to do what you know you should do, even if you don’t want to do it. That skill can be learned and strengthened through practice.

The neuroscience of self-discipline is complex, and there are arguments to be made about whether addicts suffer more because of the strength of wanting versus the weakness of impulse control, but it’s undeniable that practicing discipline in one area of life has benefits in all areas of life.

This is most obviously true for the so-called keystone habits, of diet, exercise and sleep. Get those right and a lot of gains follow. If your core habits are purposeful, life quickly becomes more enjoyable and manageable.

Appetite supremacy is a destructive state to experience, but like most psychological trials, it can be overcome. There’s a philosophical debate to be had about whether addiction is a disease, a failure of character, or (as most people intuit) something in between. Regardless, if you do fall into that state of impaired self-control you are going to have to develop coping strategies to manage it.

All of us have some quirks and instabilities in our brains that need to be adapted to and compensated for. I’ve stated before that I wouldn’t want to lose my capacity for limerence, as it provided unparalleled joy when I experienced it in the context of a open, honest relationship. But, it is a handicap when it arrives unexpectedly.

The purposeful choice is always to accept your fundamental nature as it is, recognise that your limitations will make some trials difficult for you, but strive to be the best version of yourself that you can be.

The post Why limerents behave irresponsibly first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Help! I don’t know what to do! My girlfriend dumped me about a month ago but she has made it clear she still wants me to be her best friend.

Even that brief summary triggered a lot of emotions in me. Here’s how my thoughts raced:

• That’s an unbelievably selfish request
• But… maybe she has just realised that she loves Andrew in a non-romantic way, which is sad but not necessarily selfish
• It’s possible she’s trying to let him down gently from the breakup
• Or that she’s trying to assuage her guilt for dumping him
• Whatever. He should still just walk away
• That will be really hard if he’s still in love with her
• But it’s got to beat hanging around in agonising limbo

After working through those rapid-fire mental zigzags, I read on.

I have a long history of limerence and I fear my old habits are coming back. She has a history of people in her past abandoning her and I don’t want to be like everyone else, but I don’t know if I can do this again.

That triggered another avalanche of thoughts:

• If his limerence wasn’t resolved by the time of the breakup, it will flare up again with a vengeance
• If his limerence trigger is the rescue fantasy it will be even worse
• But, it will be hard for her to cope if he does distance himself
• Dammit! That’s my White Knight syndrome kicking in

I’ve come to learn that such rapid, varied and emotionally powerful responses to a limerence story means it’s tapping into something important. In this case, I suspect it’s the question of what a romantic relationship should be like.

The two tribes

I’ve written before about the different experiences of limerents and non-limerents when it comes to early love, and how they cause a tragedy of misunderstandings and mismatched expectations.

For a limerent, Andrew’s scenario is agony. The prospect of being emotionally intimate with an LO, but not in a romantic relationship, would be slow torture. You crave ecstatic union, they want to be your best friend. The more time you spend with them, the deeper the limerence will get. The more you give, the more they’ll affirm their affection for you, and the more you’ll want them. It’s not going to work.

From the perspective of a non-limerent, proposing a platonic friendship is much more rational. They were attracted to you, felt affection and affinity, and so tried out a relationship to see if it would develop into a stronger romantic attachment. Unfortunately, it didn’t. From this perspective, it’s sensible and honest to admit that the lack of spark means the best future is a close friendship that keeps the good connection alive.

Of course, we don’t know if Andrew’s ex is a non-limerent, but if she is, she won’t understand the implications of what she’s asking for from Andrew. She could be thinking “let’s keep the affectional bond, but look for romance elsewhere” with no notion that this would trap Andrew in limerence limbo.

Alternatively, there is a possibility that she is a limerent, and felt the glimmer and euphoria for Andrew early in the relationship, but the limerence high has now passed. With reciprocation and time the sparkles faded, and so she’s come to the conclusion that she is no longer in love with Andrew (because she’s no longer limerent for him).

In that case, her behaviour will doom her to serial limerence, as every relationship loses its early fireworks through the inevitable fading of limerent feelings.

Is it a reasonable request?

These mismatched expectations might explain the desire to remain best friends after breaking up with an ex, but is it a reasonable request? Ultimately, only the individuals involved can decide on that, but it is also useful to look at it from the perspective of a dispassionate observer. What would the average person on the street think of this scenario?

While received wisdom can sometimes be wrong, I’m sure most people would say that an emotionally intimate friendship between (heterosexual) men and women is a high risk scenario. This is especially true when there is an asymmetry in desire.

Even without the emotional hazards of their own complicated new relationship, if either Andrew or his ex want to have a new romantic relationship in the future, the new partner is bound to be suspicious of the old bond. “Why is your ex still around so much?” is an obvious and perfectly reasonable question for anyone to ask.

That reality means either having an argument about the new romantic partner’s suspicions, or finally breaking the bond between Andrew and his ex/LO if a new relationship starts. If that is actually the plan that she is working on, then it clearly isn’t reasonable. Not wanting to lose Andrew’s emotional support until she finds a new partner, at which point he would become expendable, is blatantly selfish.

Abandonment anxieties

OK, so I think it’s fair to assume that the average person on the street would counsel Andrew against remaining best friends with his ex, but Andrew knows her better than them. She has a history of abandonment anxiety and that adds an extra dimension to the situation.

No one compassionate wants to cause pain to someone they love. Knowing that your choice to detach would re-open old wounds for them, as well as damaging your own emotional stability, makes it harder to be decisive about taking action. It’s a natural impulse to protect the people you care about from distress.

Another complication is that limerence is wily, and the idea that you are staying connected to protect her from pain feeds into the rationalisation instinct that there are tangible, legitimate reasons for staying close to your LO. Maybe, subconsciously, your limerent brain is bargaining that you still have hope. Don’t give it all up yet.

Bundled all together, that’s a heavy weight in the scales. The desire to still be near LO, the secret hope that there might still be a chance to reignite the romance if you are patient enough, and the guilt that “abandoning” them will cause them trauma, is a hefty collective burden.

For someone who is used to expressing love through giving, it takes some steel to consciously put your own emotional needs ahead of theirs. 

What is the purposeful way forward?

So, we’ve worked through a lot of speculation and problem-identification, but what can Andrew practically do?

Well, a simple truth is that suppressing his romantic feelings to accommodate her abandonment anxieties would be psychologically harmful for him. It will trap him in a limbo of uncertainty and pain, and delay his chance of finding a new partner who is more romantically compatible. It will stifle his personal growth.

At the fundamental level, Andrew’s ex knows that he wants a romantic relationship because that is what they had. She might have now realised it isn’t working for her, but she can’t be naive about his feelings. They find themselves at a point where their needs are a mirror image of each other:

• She cannot give him romantic reciprocation, but wants to retain the platonic bond.
• He cannot give her a platonic bond, because he wants romantic reciprocation.

It’s sad. Life often is, regrettably. The purposeful response is to face this key incompatibility and accept it. Looking into the future, if Andrew (and his ex) want to have a significant romantic relationship they will have to find it with other people, and retaining the intimate “best friends” set up will work against that goal.

Given that reality, perhaps the most pressing issue for Andrew is: how can I move forward without causing her harm?

Well, given that they do have a history of emotional intimacy, it could be possible to discuss all of this openly – to try and understand what she is going through and communicate what he is going through. Try and figure out if she has ever experienced limerence and therefore which of the scenarios above (falling out of limerence or never having it at all) is most likely to explain her decision to end the romantic relationship .

Explain that your limerence pain would cause the same turmoil for you as her past abandonment pain has caused her. Be open about why you are making the choices you make. Self-awareness and honesty are at the heart of purposeful living, and give you the best chance of moving on without gaining psychological baggage that you’ll carry forwards into the next relationship.

You want to look back on this relationship as a noble failure, not as unfinished business or a source of regret.

Trying to suppress your desire and carry on the facade of a best friend works against that goal, and is ultimately bad for you both.

The post Case study: LO wants to be my best friend first appeared on Living with Limerence.