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.

We love cakes, but want to be lean and healthy. We like excitement and we also like security. We crave novelty, and seek the nostalgia of the familiar. We fear loss, but know we sometimes have to let things go. Wisdom is all about balancing these conflicting desires.

Instinctive living

One approach to balance is to let your mood take you where it will. When you feel a need that is unfulfilled, you meet it. Crave a cake? Off to the cafe! Miss your mum? Give her a call (if you can). Hear about someone in need? Donate to charity. Upset with your spouse? Argue with them, or go out with your friends.

Following an instinctive lifestyle like this will bring a sort of balance. Your mood will swing back and forth as you react to your emotions, but it will probably average out so that you generally don’t feel too deprived or too gluttonous. You basically trust to the wisdom of your feelings to lead you to what you need, and deal with the consequences as they come.

Many people live this way. They may say that they don’t, but looking at their behaviour will show that they actually do. These are the type of people who say things like “I don’t know what came over me,” or “I just wasn’t thinking.” Indeed, I think most people behave like this most of the time. It’s largely our default setting as humans.

The downside to this lifestyle is pretty obvious. Your choices are dictated by your emotions, which can be capricious, unpredictable and self-destructive. If you react in the moment without thinking ahead, the consequences of your actions can quickly spiral out of control.

Intellectual living

The opposite to an instinctive approach to life is to think and plan carefully before making any decision or taking any action. In this scenario, the goal is to resist unwelcome desires, resist temptation, and be strict about your conduct and your behaviour. From this perspective, emotions are a disruptive element that can derail you from the intellectual pursuit of rational goals. Indeed, for people who live in this more calculated way, feelings are treated with suspicion, or even disdained as weakness. 

This can also lead to a form of balance. Our intellects constrain our emotional fickleness, protecting us from disaster, but also limiting our prospects of triumph (especially romantic). Slow and steady, straight down the middle, rather than swinging between extremes.

The downside to this lifestyle is also pretty obvious. You end up living a rather bloodless, flat life – in the worst excess, a kind of monastic rigidity.

Also, we’re not actually all that good at making rational, intellectual decisions. Even by trying to optimise rationality, we can end up making bad decisions because of incomplete data, or the stubborn insistence that we do things that run against our true nature (and therefore make us unhappy).

So, which is better?

This dilemma of how to live well is of course a central preoccupation of art and philosophy. One of the most memorable and evocative examples for me is Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse. It follows two friends who meet as novices in a monastery, but end up living vastly different lives. Goldmund strays from the monastery into the outer world (which seems, conveniently for the plot, to be mostly populated by libidinous women) in which he immerses himself in sensual pleasure and creativity, living a spontaneous and instinctive life. Narcissus, meanwhile, remains within the cloister, living a life of thought and contemplation and rising to the position of Abbot. The friends are reunited as old men and reflect on how their two lives have led to enlightenment through different routes.

It’s one of those books that reflects your own prejudices back at you. Some read it as a exhortation to embrace nature and be fully alive to your artistic sensibility, others read it as a warning that a dissolute life leads inevitably to physical and spiritual decline. I read it as a bittersweet lesson that neither lifestyle leads to true fulfilment. Goldmund ends up aged and alone, no longer able to attract his latest limerent object (not Hesse’s words, obviously – my applied perspective), and facing execution with little to show for a life of selfish abandon. Narcissius has wisdom and status, but has not known love or passion in his calm and dutiful life. 

Getting the balance right

For me, the appropriate response to this dilemma is to be wary of the two lifestyle extremes. The way to find useful balance is to understand yourself and where your emotional centre lies between the instinctive and the intellectual. What weighting between rationality and passion do you favour? The correct balance will vary with time, experience, responsibilities and health too. We can afford to be more instinctive in youth as we open ourselves to new experiences, but then take a more calculated approach when we have children and careers to manage. Given all these potential options, we again come back to the starting problem: how do we deal with conflicting desires? This is where my enthusiasm for purposeful living comes in.

The heart of purposeful living is understanding yourself properly. What is the emotional foundation to your identity? Where did that come from? Can you build on that foundation to achieve the things that matter to you in life? Having an honest sense of who you are is the basis of emotional stability – the way to both predict and satisfy the “instinctive” drives in your life.

But then, the next stage of purposeful living is knowing who you want to be and what you want to achieve. What kind of person do you admire? What do you need to work on to improve yourself and move closer to that ideal? What habits and limiting beliefs are holding you back?

That combination of honest acceptance of your true nature, and an aspirational ideal life that you can steer towards, gives you the best chance of thriving. You are more attuned to your instinctive desires and aware of where they are coming from, and you can use your intellectual focus to decide when those instincts serve your purpose and when they threaten it. When presented with conflicting desires, having a clear purpose, a clear guiding principle, gives you a direction to follow.  

To move from the abstract to the concrete: I am an introvert that likes to help people. My instinctive response led me into limerence for a woman that I wanted to rescue (whether she needed it or not), because my wiring and life history meant she glimmered for me. Following that instinct led to bad consequences for me and my family.

In contrast, after I had done the work of understanding why I had such a profound emotional response to my LO, I realised that I could help others in the same situation by blogging about the experience. Albeit pseudonymously.

So, taking that emotional impulse to help others and passing it through the intellectual filter of my values and goals, allowed me to find a purposeful outlet for the emotions. I get to feel good about helping people, without jeopardising the relationships I care most about. That’s what purposeful means for me: doing something worthwhile, that is emotionally fulfilling, and aligns with my core values and principles. 

Letting go

The real skill when confronted with conflicting desires, of course, is to let go of the ones that conflict with your purpose. Developing the ability to accept that you can’t have everything, and focus on deciding what you really want, is the surest way of finding peace.

Again, purposeful living helps. If you are generally working towards a goal you value highly, and living in a way that leaves you feeling fulfilled, able to respect yourself, and in healthy relationships with others, it’s a lot easier to cope with emotional conflict when it arrives.

If your life is purposeful, the fear of missing out on other opportunities, different lives, new people, new sensations, decreases. It’s when we feel lost that we most desperately seek a new direction.

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but the wise response is to remember that the fence is there for a good reason, and if you tend your own lawn with care, it will grow verdant and lush.

The post Dealing with conflicting desires first appeared on Living with Limerence.

LifeIsTricky puts it well:

Ok so here’s the thing that I do not understand, why are you, and others, Dr. L, so bent against the idea that there is something significant, and perhaps spiritual or energetic guiding these attractions. That the glimmer and subsequent developments from that couldn’t be a very powerful and important piece for self development?

But honestly you only meet so many people in this life who truly light your world up like the Fourth of July, it seems foolish to stick with a SO and not follow the LO to the natural end of that LE. It would seem to me that this obsession with the idea that limerance is something to be controlled is a fear based, kind of puritanical and archaic way of looking at relationships. Living a life without wonder and magic feels sad, hollow and disappointing to me. And really I very sincerely believe that there is some significant reason why that person glimmers.

So, why am I so down on limerence?

Well, first off, I am definitely not anti-limerence. I’ve posted before about how it can be excellent. I am glad that I am a limerent, and the period of mutual limerence after my wife and I met is a highlight of my life. It does feel amazing. It’s no wonder that people seek it out as a spectacular natural high, use it as an energising boost, and enjoy immersing themselves into adoration of another person that makes life thrilling. No judgement from me if you want to live a life of serial limerence, learning from each episode and expanding your life experience and refining your understanding of your romantic temperament. The key issue, though, is whether limerence is mostly a gift or mostly a burden.

It would be a straw man to attack the arguments that limerence is always a blessing, or always a curse, but LifeIsTricky clearly sees it as a source of life-enrichment to be welcomed, whereas I treat it as an volatile force to be governed. Although these positions are not mutually exclusive (fire is both useful and dangerous), they are fundamentally different ways to approach limerence as a phenomenon.

I suspect that the heart of this disagreement is about how to interpret the very strong positive feelings that limerence brings, and that comes down to a philosophical difference about how trustworthy you think feelings are for making good decisions. Are you mostly a hedonist or mostly a stoic?

A pure hedonist would see limerence as a force for emotional expansion. Life is made better, deeper, richer by throwing yourself into extraordinary experiences. Romance should be embraced with abandon, as passions so powerful and invigorating are obviously transformative. The way to a fulfilled life is through opening yourself up to its most sensational (in every sense of the word) aspects.

A pure stoic would take the opposite view. The passions and emotions and sensations that grip us during limerence are a derangement of our faculties. Our judgement is impaired, our decision-making is poor, and the mania leads us into short-term pleasure but long-term pain. The way to a fulfilled life is through taming your animal urges and asserting your wisdom.

Most of us aim for the middle ground – neither wild abandon nor austere denial. We are equally wary of debauchery and piety. So, really, this debate is about which philosophical approach to life you lean closest to, and where balance lies for you.

I’ll set out my stall below, but just before I do, I’d like to try and fairly articulate LifeIsTricky’s position. My impression is that they think limerence is a golden opportunity to seize the day. That by opening themselves up to the force of limerence, their life will become richer, more exciting, more meaningful and that generally, they will be more alive to the world. In contrast, LifeIsTricky thinks that when limerents resist the intoxication, it is because fear has made us timid. Fear of failure (rejection by LO), fear of social disapproval (by family and friends), and fear of the unfamiliar have caged us, and stopped us from realising our potential.

It’s worth thinking about. Always examine your motives.

But here’s why I think it’s misguided, and why it’s right to be cautious of the enticements of limerence:

1) Limerent objects can be very bad for us

Anyone who has become limerent for a narcissist will testify that the “life enrichment” of limerence can involve some very hard lessons. Embracing limerence for an LO who is unavailable, selfish, manipulative, flaky or just unpleasant, can really ruin your life. I suppose there is a sort of Nietzschen argument that “that which does not kill us makes us stronger”, but wilfully putting yourself in harm’s way to toughen your emotional resilience muscle seems a bit masochistic to me. 

2) We can be manipulated into limerence

Linked to the previous point, we know there are LOs out there that excel at leading limerents on, manipulating their emotions, and ensnaring them. Most limerents would be susceptible to a campaign of love bombing, intermittent reinforcement and emotional oversharing from an LO they were attracted to.

The triggers are quite predictable once you know them. This, to me, shows that limerence is not a mysterious, divine force that serves to lead us to enlightenment – it’s predictably rooted in psychology.

3) Brains are stimulus-response engines

That predictability comes largely from our neurophysiology. We understand how hormones and neurotransmitters influence our behaviour and our fundamental motivations. We understand why these mechanisms exist within us, from the perspective of reproduction and evolution. There is a materialist basis to limerence. Activate the right neural pathways, and bingo! Again, this makes me view it as a predictable drive that can be switched on just as easily when it will damage your life as when it can enrich it.

4) It is incompatible with long-term monogamy

Many of us desire long-lasting love in a form and blend that requires monogamy. Not everyone, of course, and ethical non-monogamy is widely accepted and perfectly feasible. But, despite the current promotion of more enlightened and sophisticated lifestyles, monogamy remains stubbornly popular. If you want it, you have to reconcile yourself to resisting limerence for other people.

5) It can lead to bad consequences

If you are not single when limerence comes calling, it is almost impossible to avoid bad consequences if you embrace it. Following limerence through the tipping points to an affair is inevitably destructive. Many other people are hurt by limerent self-empowerment, and many who embrace limerence as a route to fulfilment bitterly regret it. Even if you are in an open relationship and have tried to be ethical, limerence is such an unbalanced adoration that someone is likely to be hurt. Most poly couples have rules about how to handle this, but it turns out that people don’t behave rationally when they are emotionally devastated. “Stop crying, I got you to sign this legal disclaimer when we met!” turns out to be cold comfort.

6) It comes when it’s unwelcome

There are times when limerence is great (you’re both single, and LO is a good person), and times when it is not great. My email inbox is full of stories that mirror my own: “I wasn’t looking for this. I’m happily married. I never expected it to get out of control.” Limerence may well be teaching us all lessons about complacency and benign neglect of romance, but that doesn’t mean we should respond to the lesson by immersing ourselves in a new infatuation.

7) It doesn’t last

Finally, limerence has a definite lifespan. Eventually it ends, meaning either that you transition to a different kind of relationship with your LO, or that you accept they no longer have value for you romantically and so you seek a new LO. For me, the decline of limerence is another good indication that it isn’t linked to the intrinsic value of the LO, it’s a mechanism for accelerating pair bonding.

Overall, after assessing the good and bad of limerence, and accepting that it is a part of who I am, I reached the conclusion that it needs to be integrated into my life in a way that serves my bigger goals. Limerence felt great at first, but rapidly ran into the reality that I care more about my family than about romantic novelty. At that point, limerence became a problem. 

That was the right decision for me, but ultimately, it comes down to this: you have to figure it out for yourself. There’s no right answer. Everyone has to make their own decisions and live with them. Real failure comes when you lie to yourself, rationalise away your doubts, and behave in opposition to your principles. The only solution is to do the deep work of examining your true nature honestly, and acting accordingly.

In the meantime, I’ll keep advocating for a purposeful, stoical approach to living with limerence.

The post Why am I so down on limerence? first appeared on Living with Limerence.