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.

Midlife is an interesting time. It begins to dawn on you that whatever endeavours you threw yourself into in early adulthood are coming to fruition. In most careers, it becomes clear – and pretty much settled – whether or not you will reach the highest levels. By definition, most people won’t.

In love, your choices will have determined whether you are partnered in a long term relationship, bruised from bad encounters, alone, or living one of the many non-conventional models of interdependence. If you have children, they are growing to independence, and you start to face an empty nest.

Midlife relationships can also be burdened by responsibility. At the benign end of the spectrum that could just mean letting domesticity drive out romance, leaving you vulnerable to new limerence. Worse, you might have drifted into a sexless marriage.

Regardless of the choices that you made, the realisation comes that you are halfway through your life and have to decide whether you are still happy with those choices. Our bodies also confront us with evidence of our age – grey hairs, wrinkles, flaccidity, menopause.

Halfway through your life. Or halfway to your death.

The things that you decided to do with your life are no longer characterised by the promise of future achievement – it is now clear whether or not that promise has been, or will ever be, fulfilled. Time is running out if you want to make a change.

For some people this can cause a panic of regret and fear.

For others, it is closer to ennui – a sense of dissatisfaction and fatigue, and nostalgic loss.

It is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, the prime time for affairs.

Romantic misadventures

Many people report that a peculiarity of midlife is a sudden eruption of libidinous energy and romantic interest in others. It’s been described as a second adolescence. Whether this is mainly a psychological response to the emotions of midlife, or also a hormonal surge due to physiological changes at midlife, is unclear, but the consequences are a powerful sense of a “last chance” for a fling, or to reinvent yourself with a new partner.

This impulse can be complicated by the realisation that your appeal has changed (for better or worse) with age. Physical maturity, the confidence of experience, financial and emotional stability; all of these can affect the perception of your attractiveness to others. 

Of course, another common cliche is the desire to secure a younger partner, in an attempt to regain your passing youth or get a second chance at making a relationship work. Equally, spending time in the company of other attractive midlifers going through the same suite of sensations can prove… combustible.

All of these factors come to a head and present a particular vulnerability for limerents.

When I surveyed the general population on the prevalence of limerence, there was a peak in the data at early midlife – the 35-44 age range – where people self-reported experiencing limerence more commonly than at any other age.

It may be a long time since a midlifer felt the pull of limerence, and if it has been an infrequent part of their life, it may be an unfamiliar challenge and upend their emotional stability. 

Limerence hits like a whirlwind. It’s impossible to carry on in the old complacent routines when your romantic circuits are firing explosively.

I’ve speculated before that limerence is a mechanism for establishing a pair bond, but as it typically only lasts for a few years at most, serial monogamy would seem to be the natural outcome. Another realisation that hits at midlife is that such a lifestyle is limited by your ability to reliably find a new lover – which proves a much easier prospect in the flush of youth.

The combination of a sudden urgent sense that this is the last chance to find a new mate, coupled to the whirlwind of resurgent limerence, is a powerful force to resist.

Responding purposefully

Ultimately, all this turmoil may drive our midlife limerent into a tailspin, but what can be done?

Well, they could spend hours studying psychology, throw themselves into new projects, take up a new hobby, or just weather it as best as they are able with the coping skills they’ve developed through adulthood. More pertinently, they might try to reconnect with their spouse and revitalise their marriage, taking the limerence as a warning sign that their need for romance had been neglected for too long.

Alternatively, they could embark on that affair, and start the second half of their lives by jeopardising everything they’ve achieved in the first half.

It will probably come as no surprise to regular readers that I would advocate reflection and self-awareness. As the heart of this is self-honesty, and here are some blunt questions that could help navigate your way forward if midlife limerence throws all your old certainties into doubt:

1. Was I happy in my relationship before this started?
2. Do I honestly think that starting a new relationship will solve my emotional problems?
3. Am I facing the future or running away from it?
4. Do I want to make big decisions when addled by limerence?

Usually with these bloggy ramblings I try to adopt a broad point of view about the nature of limerence, but this topic is a personal one for me, and so it’s hard to be objective. 

The first stage of my adult life is over. I am no longer a young man.

I have a family, who are growing fast and will not need me so urgently in the coming years. I’m facing the second half of life, and determined to attack it with purpose. To take the opportunity to live well, and decide for myself how I want to measure success in the afternoon of my life.

Luckily for me, I have a supportive wife that I love very much – and we’ve spent many enjoyable afternoons together already.

Here’s to a purposeful future.

The post Midlife crisis for limerents first appeared on Living with Limerence.

For people of my vintage, “going out” with someone was a different experience. Online dating sites had just got started when I was free and single, but were seen as a bit weird and suspect. “How could you establish any kind of a relationship over a computer?” we chortled. “Can’t you find someone in real life?”

Oh how naive we were.

Nowadays, online dating is the norm, and has grown to a $3.5 billion industry. It’s a good example of how technological innovation can dramatically transform social behaviour in a frighteningly short space of time. It’s pretty much impossible to predict the long term consequences of such changes on our social structures, but the short-term effects are already having a noticeable impact. I’ve been thinking about this from the perspective of limerence, and how the dynamics of online connections would influence the three big factors for limerence – glimmer, hope and uncertainty. 

It’s not going to be trivial. 

Expanding the pool

One of the biggest impacts of dating apps is to dramatically increase the size of the potential dating pool for everyone. It used to be the case that meeting someone depended on local networks of interactions. First, there was your direct social sphere: friends, friends of friends, and work or college networks. Then, there was what might be called “the scene” – those clubs, bars, and cultural hubs where single people hung out in the knowledge they might get chatted up. Now, you have electronic access to basically limitless numbers of single people in your local area, all only a swipe away. 

This has undoubtedly been a boon for some people. For LGBTQ+ folks, it was a game-changer. Having your search limited to a relatively small subculture was challenging enough, but when you add the risks of a bad reaction from someone whose sexuality you weren’t sure of… well having a big database of people who have already confirmed their preferences was a massive benefit. 

For straight men and women, the picture is more complex. We’ve touched on this before, but the dominance of online dating has had a strange impact on the supply-and-demand dynamics of dating. The bottom line seems to be a Pareto distribution of attraction: 80% of women are matching to the “top” 20% of men, leaving the remaining 80% of men chasing only 20% of the women. This feels like a horrible, reductive and utilitarian way to look at romance, but I guess that is one of the downsides of the marketisation of dating.  

Whatever our egalitarian discomfort with the outcomes, opening up the competition for mates to such a large scale has permanently altered dating life for those that use the online apps. For limerents with a high market value in the dating app world, they should be able to get loads of dates with loads of people, but the first LO who comes along would eliminate the competition. Seems fine.

But what if LO was playing a high-churn game and ghosted you? How many arguments result when a limerent thinks they’re in a couple, but the LO still has Tinder on their phone? And what would that abundance of choice mean when it comes to making a longer-term commitment? Could any one person measure up to the amalgam of all the many positive encounters that someone has had through a busy dating history?

For those in the trenches of the 80%, the risk of ending up in an LO friendzone trap seems greater. There seems to be a big population of disillusioned folks out there, who see this new technology as a massive self-esteem wrecking database of false promises. Especially when some people seem to use the sites as a way to get ego-validation through counting matches, even though they have no intention of doing anything more than seeking flattery. 

The scale of online dating seems destined to feed both hope and uncertainty. 

First contact is totally different

Another big difference with dating online is how you develop a first impression about a potential match. In real life, you are confronted with the actual person – their whole appearance when talking, smiling, laughing; their scent, their mannerisms, their charisma. Online, you are served a photo and some finely crafted text as a micro-biography. Basically, you try to judge their attractiveness based on their photogenicity and sales patter. You have very few cues to work with. 

The perils of this have started to become clear. Aside from the obvious manipulations – out of date photos, lies about vital statistics, or outright catfishing – the tendency to see what you want to see, and extrapolate the best from limited data is hard to resist. Some regular users set a rule that they will only exchange a very limited numbers of texts before meeting in person, to avoid the trap of falling for an online persona that is not representative of the actual person. 

I suspect this trap is especially risky for limerents. Given our powers of idealisation, it seems all too plausible that we could build up an impressive glimmer for a nice photo coupled to some great text banter skills. 

Hook ups 

Another striking change in dating dynamics is the proliferation of hook-ups. In an ideal world, this would be no problem, as everyone would be open and honest about their desires and intentions and only those who were cool with casual would end up matching. In our actual world, it’s an emotional mess. 

First there’s the problem of players and their games. Men who just want sex often conceal this in the hope that pretending they want more is a good ruse for getting what they want. Women who want more than sex also often conceal this, in the hope that they can seduce horny men into more commitment. 

I am generalising. I know that, and it’s probably overdue to add that I do understand that population averages cannot be used to predict the desires or behaviours of individuals. But we have got lots of cross-cultural and cross-generational data that show that on average men seek casual sex more avidly than women. For now, let’s not get bogged down in whether those data have a biological or social origin – it doesn’t really matter when thinking about the consequences. 

Second, I think many men and women underestimate the impact that sex has at a physiological and psychological level. Sex is not just masturbation with another person. Skin-to-skin contact, scent, taste, and eye-contact can all have profound effects on our brains. Bonding is not an exclusively psychological process, there are a lot of hormones involved. We are physical beings. 

Some people are able to emotionally separate sex and love, but not everyone, and not always. Limerents would be well advised to take care not to delude themselves that casual sex with LO is consequence-free. It is much more likely to deepen the limerent obsession. It’s all too easy to talk yourself into thinking that “friends with benefits” works for you, because at least it means you get to be with them, but not many limerents are able to keep their feelings so compartmentalised. 

What does this all mean…?

As you can probably tell, I’m still trying to figure this out. It’s a topic where the outcomes are not at all obvious to me. I know I have blindspots because I am not in the thick of the action, as it were, so this is a bit of an open end to the post:

For anyone in the commentariat – how has online dating affected you as a limerent?

All thoughts welcomed.  

The post The perils of online dating for limerents first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Isn’t that just a crush?

To my regret, I have not yet come up with a concise, clear answer for this. 

If you’ve experienced limerence, it’s obvious that it stands out markedly from other romantic attractions. We recognise the appeal and sexiness of many people in the world, but the first time an LO hits us like a freight train, we know that This Is Different. Similarly, once you’ve immersed yourself in reading and thinking about the idea for long enough, you develop a kind of high-level view of how limerence differs from ordinary attraction, but it’s still hard to capture the essence of that difference in a simple way. 

When confronted with this question, I find myself talking about the importance of intrusive thoughts, or the involuntary nature of the obsession, or the extent of the emotional highs and lows, and trying to distinguish the severity of these experiences from puppy love or a crush.

Sometimes I get bogged down in the argument about whether a crush becomes limerence when it disrupts your life to such an extent that it degrades wellbeing, or causes psychological distress – but that seems inevitably to lead to the “so it’s a mental illness?” question. 

Part of the problem is that limerents and non-limerents make perfectly reasonable assumptions about the nature of romantic attraction, based on their own experiences. If you describe limerence to a limerent, they nod and say “yeah, that’s love.” Describe limerence to a non-limerent and they assume that you’re talking about an adult stuck in adolescent fantasies who needs to grow up.

Dorothy Tennov battled against this issue when she was trying to get more recognition for limerence in the psychological community. Later in her career she argued that limerence was best understood from the perspective of ethology, and argued that resistance from psychologists stemmed from a distaste for personal testimony as an approach to research:

My conclusions seem incapable of being communicated within the presently existing field of psychology, but may be acceptable to the field of human ethology.

What were those difficult to communicate conclusions?

[The two main conclusions] are (1) the state is distinct; it occurs in exactly the same way whenever it occurs across personality and other categories, and (2) it is so unlike any other condition that those who have not experienced it have no experiential base from which to imagine it. Therefore, they tend not to believe in its existence except as romanticism or as pathology.

As I understand Tennov’s argument, it is that limerence is a universal experience once it has set in. All limerents report the same key phenomena: total cognitive capture by the LO, and intense craving for reciprocation to the exclusion of all other concerns. She argued that limerence is a binary state – you are either in limerence or not. There is no continuum of limerent feeling. 

Limerence is an either-or-matter. Either the algorithm is operative or it is not. Intensity depends on immediate conditions. Therefore, a “scale” is meaningless. Intensity changes from day to day, even from moment to moment.

This conclusion fits with reports from limerents – that it is a distinct mental state that you feel yourself to be “in”, and that it dominates life so much that it feels all encompassing. 

But it has problems too. Linking a binary state to the underlying neuroscience is tricky. Euphoria is a definable mental state, but it subsides fairly quickly, and you would still consider yourself “limerent” even in the moments of calm between LO contact. Similarly, addiction is a definable condition, but it takes time to develop. There isn’t a clean moment where you can state unequivocally that you have flipped from “not addicted” to “addicted”. Once the consequences become undeniable you concede that the behaviour (say, gambling or alcohol abuse) is destructive. Similarly, limerence is something that you recognise as being detrimental after the accumulated psychological stresses outweigh the early excitement. 

I think the only way you can square this is if limerence is a state where your baseline neurophysiology has been altered. Your sensitivity to arousal is heightened. Your motivational drive has been amplified. Your motivational salience is focused intensely on the dominant stimulus of LO. In principle, this might be detectable at the level of changes in gene expression and synaptic strength that reinforce particular neural circuits – just as for drug addiction. 

Tennov’s insistence that limerence is a universal experience for those that have it is a strong claim. Even in devising a quiz, it became clear from the comments that the scenarios I’d felt were representative of limerence clearly were not universal.

That suggests either that Tennov’s hypothesis is wrong, or that my quiz has too many questions and should be whittled down – perhaps to two. A third alternative is that many people are drawn to the description of limerence, but do have different experiences at some level – perhaps that could be conceptualised as limerence exists as a core neurophysiological phenomenon, but that the behavioural manifestations once “the algorithm is operative” can be more idiosyncratic. 

Having worked through all that, I think it’s fair to say that I’ve helped demonstrate that the concept of limerence is difficult to communicate.

Let’s try and get this back on track. I want to be prepared for the next time that I need to explain this to a sceptical journalist. Here’s another useful take from Allie in the comments:

For me, the key difference between a crush and limerence is the mind space it takes up. A crush can exist alongside my life without impacting it much. Limerence stands front and centre in my mind all the time, regardless of what else I am doing, making it hard to live life fully. 

I think that’s useful because it captures this idea that it is possible to be strongly attracted to someone (sexually, intellectually and/or emotionally) without being limerent. You can have a crush that adds excitement to life, as distinct from limerence that wholly takes over life. Maybe that’s the key:

Limerence is when a crush has taken over your life. Another person dominates your mind so completely that you feel like you are addicted to them. You swing from incredible highs to exhausting lows and desperate craving. Limerence makes it almost impossible to concentrate on anything other than how much you want them.

Well, I guess that’s progress. A bit pithier. But it could be better.

Let’s refine that raw material in the crucible of the comments…

Can you summarise the difference between limerence and a crush in three sentences or less?

The post Why limerence is not just a crush first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Limerence is not actually a disease, and so talk of a cure is perhaps a bit misleading. Limerence does seem to be a common feature of many people’s experience of love, but in the context of seeking cures, we are focussing on times when limerence is detrimental to someone’s health and happiness – when it has shifted from euphoric intoxication to exhausting obsession.

In the previous post I talked about ways to get rid of limerence, or at least ways to get rid of limerence for a specific LO. That’s great as a decisive response, but limerence doesn’t just spring from nowhere. It might be triggered by the sudden appearance of a new limerent object, but there must also be some deeper psychological vulnerability that primes us to succumb.

Many serial limerents come to a point in life where they wish to be able to control, or at least moderate, their core sensitivity to limerence. While not a cure as such, the best strategy I know for managing limerence – and a great deal else – is to live a purposeful life.

That needs some explanation.

There are several aspects to what I would call a purposeful life, and they are interconnected. Overall, the idea is that you do not act in an unthinking way. You prioritise long term goals over immediate thrills. You pursue activities because they give you satisfaction, rather than gratification. But the main thing is that you recognise the most powerful choice you can make in life is how you act.

Feelings are complex, mercurial things, stimulated by subconscious drives that are hard to untangle, and while they should be acknowledged and respected, it is our actions that define us. Judge others and yourself by your actions, not your feelings or motives.

All very high-falutin’, but what are the requirements for living more purposefully and how can it help with limerence?

1. Self-awareness
The first element is self-awareness, and the key issue is honesty. Be absolutely honest with yourself about who you are and what you are doing, and why. Especially if it is something ignoble. You will never find peace until you understand yourself properly, and are able to transcend the little lies and rationalisations that we all tell ourselves to maintain our self-image.

Through adolescence and early adulthood we tend to try on different personas and see how they fit. This is normal and healthy self-exploration, but as adulthood progresses, we need to come to an acceptance of who we are at our core, if we are to live authentic lives. It is OK to not want to go on an overseas adventure to South America because you find it frightening, as long as you are honest with yourself about your reasons (and don’t pretend to yourself that you really are the sort of person who is fine with being in the middle of the Patagonian wilderness without shelter or support, but it’s just not possible at the moment because of job commitments).

I don’t subscribe to the “say yes to everything” school of thought. Don’t set yourself goals that are antithetical to your nature because you think you should aspire to them. Home in on your true self, and accept yourself completely, and then you can make informed decisions about when you should do something that is frightening because it is worth doing. There are times when your fears hold you back from self-fulfilment, and there are times when your fears are protecting you from danger. Without self-awareness it is hard to tell the difference.

In terms of limerence, this means being honest about your motives when making decisions about LO. Recognise when you are doing something because it might give you a fix, rather than because it is the right thing to do. Then forgive yourself for being human, but do the right thing, with purpose. The way to get good at this self-analysis is to…

2. Understand your drives
We are all of us a hugely complex milieu of influences. I am not sure we are ever able to fully understand the foundation of our own temperaments and psychological makeup, but there are lessons to be learned from examining our most powerful drives. Even if you never get to the heart of why you have a tendency to self-sabotage, for example, correctly recognising the pattern and then taking purposeful steps to counter the behaviour in future can be transformative.

Sometimes, the origin of these drives can be pretty grim. Disordered bonding in childhood through abuse, neglect or trauma is not going to be properly overcome with a good think. Therapy is a very good idea, but with the usual caveat that finding a good therapist is no small feat. Given the range of lived experiences out there, I’m not going to try and draw universal truths here. I’m going to illustrate the idea with a personal anecdote:

I have only ever become limerent for “damsels in distress”. Specifically, women who are bold and confident on the outside, but hiding an emotional wound within. I don’t fully understand why, but it is probably a combination of cultural conditioning, romantic notions of knights in shining armour, and a mother with abandonment anxieties. Regardless of the fractional contributions of each influence, I am now very aware of the fact that I am vulnerable to limerence with women that fit this model. Armed with that awareness, I can take positive steps to respond in a more sophisticated way in the future, recognising that my own triggers are being activated, and not that this person before me is a wondrous but broken soul, who doesn’t understand how wonderful she is and needs me to save her.

The same strategy of searching for triggers applies to many other aspects of life: when and why do you start procrastinating? Why can’t you seem to get some jobs finished? What sends you into a rage, and causes you to pick arguments for their own sake? Why does that thing that they do (you know, that thing, urgh) irritate you so much?

Getting a handle on your drives and triggers, even if you don’t fully understand their basis, can allow you to change your behaviour. To act differently. To act purposefully to overcome your vulnerabilities. Then you can choose…

3. What do you want to do?

“We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This is one of my favourite quotes for two reasons: it highlights our tendency to self-aggrandisement, and it (less obviously) highlights the importance of doing over being.

There is a natural tendency to identify ourselves by what we do for a living. “I am a lumberjack”, for example. But linking self-esteem to identity can be destructive. “I am a writer”, is actually quite significantly different from “I write for a living”.

Understanding yourself and your drives can lead you through this distinction. If you want to express a new idea, or share your life experience with other people, then you sit down and write. If you want “to be a writer” then you are aspiring to the notion of an imagined identity, with associated cultural and personal expectations. You may shop for the perfect writing desk. You may strategise about the most promising genre for a bestseller. You may get defensive if people ask how the writing is going, because, as you see it, there is an implicit criticism of your identity as a writer by making you confront why you haven’t written anything.

We judge others by what they have done, because that is the only measure that really matters. You may be a wonderful, sensitive, romantic soul, full of ideas and potential (I hope so, because those people are great). However, other people do not have access to that interior world; they can only see what you have done. So, make sure you are doing something that you care about, and enjoy, and do it with purpose.

4. The pursuit of happiness
The final aspect of a purposeful life comes from this last notion: do something that you care about, because it will bring you happiness. Proper happiness. Lasting satisfaction of time well spent, a life lived with purpose, and an ambition fulfilled. Not the transient pleasure of spectacle, or the passive distraction of entertainment, or the thrill of an illicit high. Happiness comes from self-esteem and self-actualisation, and they come most reliably from concrete achievement.

Limerence is not a route to a purposeful life. If anything, limerence is a signal from your subconscious that something is not right, that you are craving something new, and seeking relief from an emotional ache that you feel someone else can fix. But, living a purposeful life can protect you from unwanted limerence, empower you to act when you become limerent for someone who actually could be a worthy SO, and enable you to direct the energy that limerence can give you towards worthwhile endeavours.

It might take a lifetime to solve the problem of why you are how you are, and why you fall so spectacularly for some people.

But you stand a much better chance, and will have a much better time of it, if you live purposefully.

Want to learn more? Download a free e-book on how to take control of your fate and master limerence (in ten steps): click here

The post The best cure for limerence first appeared on Living with Limerence.

This can lead, somewhat predictably, to a loss of erotic connection with your partner, with the endgame being a sexless marriage. There are three common scenarios: 

1. A significant mismatch in libido where one partner gets sex whenever they (rarely) want it, and the other is frustrated.
2. One partner no longer wants sex, but the other does.
3. Neither partner wants sex with the other. 

None of these scenarios are easy to manage. The principal barrier is the strong sense that most of us have that “reluctant sex” is distasteful at best and traumatic at worst.

It’s an old joke in my country that a dutiful wife would “lie back and think of England” on her wedding night, putting aside her womanly frigidity for the greater good of conceiving the next generation. What can I say? The English had peculiar attitudes to sex. It’s a good job we’re so much more enlightened nowadays, and have no strange beliefs or attitudes anymore, eh? 

Snark aside, it’s obviously progress that everyone can reasonably expect both sexual fulfillment and bodily autonomy in their relationships, and that’s what’s at the root of the discomfort about “making an effort” when it comes libido loss. Having to cajole yourself into intimacy with someone you don’t feel spontaneous desire for, feels wrong. Having a partner who still desires you, and tries to cajole you into sex (when you are solidly turned off), feels coercive – especially if their frustration and sense of rejection causes them to become impatient and angry. It’s easy to see how this can turn into a downward spiral of ever-decreasing desire.

Of course, that scenario can also be looked at from the opposite perspective.

How corrosive is it to self-esteem, to romantic and sexual confidence, to be continually rejected by the person who married you? Even this person – the one who declared their love for you to the world – cannot muster enough desire to touch you. Every attempt to initiate intimacy leads instead to rejection and shame. Every romantic overture is rebuffed.

Enough of that negative reinforcement, and you arrive at the other big intersection between limerence and the sexless marriage: a pressurised tank of thwarted desire that finally bursts open when a new limerent object arrives. 

When the frustrated spouse become infatuated, it leads to a multiplication of the marital problems. Now the couple no longer has to just deal with the loss of erotic connection, they also have to deal with an existential threat to the marriage, a loss of the comfortable security they’d taken for granted, and, possibly, the disintegration of a family. 

So what can be done about this apparent “incompatibility of wants”? We want the nourishment and secure love of marriage, but we also want erotic excitement. How can we purposefully respond? 

1) Abandon the marriage

Option one is to decide that marriage and erotic desire are incompatible for you, and so abandon the pretence of a sexless marriage. This could be followed by a life of either serial monogamy (which would suit limerents best), casual dating, or simply remaining single and self-sufficient. It does seem as though this is an increasing trend, with new marriages in 2018 being at the lowest level since records began in the US (and that includes during both world wars). With divorce rates hovering around 45%, the future does seem to be one of fewer marriages. 

The causes of this are many, but the simple explanation seems to be that men and/or women now feel that the benefits of marriage are outweighed by the costs, and that they can get their emotional and sexual needs met in alternative lifestyles. That could be the self-interest of MGTOW or the disdain of feminist separatism. It could be trendy self-partnering. It could be involuntary celibacy. 

Clearly, choosing a lifestyle alternative to marriage solves the central problem of losing erotic connection to a primary partner. You are free to pursue romantic adventure. The cost, of course, is the loss of security, the loss of emotional support, and the risk of not being able to find a romantic partner who is interested in you. You can no longer rely on the availability of a loving partner. You have to trust to hope. 

2) Unconventional marriage 

Here you separate out the two conflicting drives – secure love and erotic excitement – and satisfy them with different people. In polyamory, there is usually a primary (love) partner, and one or more secondary (erotic) partners. This is not always the model, though, and some poly groups sustain multiple love relationships that have all the secure and erotic elements. They just want to have multiple partners.

The other extreme would be swingers, who have a stable marriage, but with licence to pursue erotic play elsewhere. This is conceived as being an almost entirely lust-driven enterprise – scratching the itch for sexual novelty. 

These sorts of arrangements are completely rational on the surface. It’s a simple division of labour. Unfortunately, love, lust and limerence are often inconveniently irrational. 

With apologies for not properly curating my sources, I recently read an article by a marriage counsellor somewhere, who stated that in their decades of practice they had only known one couple who successfully solved their relationship problems by opening the marriage. The vast majority collapsed because of jealousy, insecurity, resentment (usually as one spouse was much more successful at finding additional lovers than the other), regret (emotions are complicated), or one spouse falling in love with one of their new lovers and leaving the original marriage. I think the latter case is the massive risk for limerents.

Finally, of course, there is the option to unilaterally stray from the marriage and commit infidelity. That carries all the preceding risks, and loads more. 

Seriously, just don’t do it (if it isn’t already too late). 

3) Work on the marriage 

So, the last option seems like the most promising, but it isn’t easy because it requires personal change.

Here you decide to try and strike a balance between the need for security and the need for excitement. For the familiar and the novel. It’s a lot to ask any one person to provide, and achieving this state of tension is tough, but it’s the best hope of sustaining a long-term partnership that remains sexually satisfying.

This is the approach that sex therapists (most famously, Esther Perel) typically advocate, with varying degrees of sophistication. The banal end of the spectrum is to “spice things up” (role-play! lingerie! toys!), but the more profound insight is the need to cultivate eroticism in yourself. 

The “lie back and think of England” quip hides an unspoken truth. Most of those ladies weren’t thinking of England. They were thinking about how enjoyable sexy fun times can be, and they were thinking about the things that fired them up, fuelled their engines, pressed their buttons. Maybe they were thinking of the gardener.

So much of erotic excitement happens in the brain. Certainly the prospect of a new lover can supercharge it, but that’s an easy fix. It’s table stakes. Believing that you can only get aroused by a series of new lovers, each of whom will pall with time, is a very defeatist approach to your erotic potential. 

Our minds are incredibly creative when they need to be. There are lots of ways to kindle the fire, even if it needs the occasional spark of outside stimulus (e.g. erotica or pornography) to get things started. Cultivating the ability to arouse yourself without the need for someone new equips you with the skill to find gratification without seeking stimulus outside the marriage.

We all take responsibility for our erotic fulfillment when we are single. We’ve no choice, after all. So, why not adopt this same attitude in a marriage that has gone stale? What can you do to excite yourself? Look on your partner not as a fantasy figure that provokes desire by their very essence, but as an erotic playmate who helps you enjoy some recreational sexy fun. They are not responsible for creating lust in you, they’re the ones who can help you satisfy that lust. Increase your receptivity to them by stoking your own libido first, and then invite them to join in. 

This obviously requires trust and vulnerability on your part. The best way to add novelty to a sexual relationship is to try new things. Not just athletically challenging positions, but opening up about what really turns you on. Because often, what really turns us on is not what we think should turn us on – indeed it’s often a kink or quirk that we are a bit embarrassed about. Perversely, most of us are more willing to pursue those fantasies in a one-night stand with a virtual stranger, than with the person who knows us best of anyone. We trap ourselves in a bind where we don’t want to admit our sexual peccadilloes to the one person who could most readily satisfy them. 

The worst case scenario here is if you feel that the very presence of your spouse would be a turn off. If that’s the case, then chances are you have moved them into a mental category incompatible with lust – i.e you see them as a friend, quasi-sibling, or (worst of all) a dependent. The parental impulse and the erotic impulse are incompatible, for very good reasons, so that means extra work to do. 

All is not lost, though, if you once looked upon them with lustful eyes. The key is to try and reset your mental image of them. To simulate novelty. 

Ways to do this include having new life experiences separately, and then coming back together to discuss them. Or, trying to observe them from a fresh perspective – say at a party or professional event of some sort when they are interacting with other people – to sort of catch them behaving naturally when they are not aware of your gaze. Seeing how other people react to our spouse can be surprisingly potent in shaking us out of our mental ruts. 

Read their twitter feed or Instagram stories, and read the replies. What does your spouse look like through other people’s eyes? How do others react to their ideas and personality? Even a make over or fresh wardrobe can be enough to cause a mental hiccup that could be a route out of the status quo.  

If your libido is tied to limerence, you really only have two options if you want to also have a long-term monogamous relationship: give up on sex, or cultivate your ability to stimulate your libido in ways that don’t require a limerent object. 

The idea that lust must be spontaneous, and based on your reaction to someone else’s animal appeal, is a limiting belief. Those couples that survive into the long term learn how to take charge of their own erotic levers, and then teach their spouses how to pull them.

The post Limerence and the sexless marriage 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.

In part two, we’re going to try and apply what we learned about the overlap between limerence and the different forms of love and see if we can come up with some concrete ideas about solving those difficult problems.

First, a quick recap of definitions:

• Eros – erotic, sexual love.
• Philia – emotionally deep, life-enriching friendship.
• Pragma – practical, co-operative commitment, for mutual benefit.
• Storge – affectional bonding of a familial, unconditional nature.
• Agape – spiritual or altruistic love that transcends (e.g. love of God).
• Ludus – playful, but casual love, without deep commitment.
• Philaupia – self-love (in the self-esteem sense). 

To figure out how to respond to the loss of some of these forms of love you have to ask a critical question:

What does love mean to you?

Being really honest with yourself when you answer that question is the key to understanding how to purposefully respond to most romantic dilemmas.

There is no right answer. We all have our own preferences, expectations and dreams. Our views change with time, experience and emotional mileage. But if you find yourself unhappy with your current situation – lamenting your inability to sustain romantic interest beyond limerence, or losing the erotic connection with your partner – the starting point for recovery is being very clear on what you really want.

Let’s look at some possible answers.

Eros bias

For some people the overload of sensations that limerence brings is their definition of romantic love. Naturally enough, when limerence fades (as it inevitably will), they conclude that they are no longer in love with their onetime LO. This is the classic “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” conversation that precedes the end of so many relationships. Without the limerence high, there just isn’t enough to make the relationship satisfying. They’ll always be restless and seeking more.

One possible response to this is to have a series of relationships that last as long as your limerence, and for as long as you can continue to attract LOs (I hear from limerents in their eighties, so this shouldn’t be seen as hopelessly discouraging). This is perfectly legitimate. It might be challenging in a society that values long-term commitment, but as long as you are open and honest with your partners about what you are seeking, you can live a life of integrity and romantic fulfilment.

The downsides to this model, though, can be significant. First, you will probably have to reconcile yourself to periods of loneliness when you do not have a LO who reciprocates. Many people are fine with the single life, but others want the stability of a monogamous relationship (even if it is only destined to last for a few years). Second, the other forms of love do not disappear when you have an eros bias, they build in the background and form a deeper bond. Unless you are a sociopath, it is hard to break up with someone that you deeply care for, who may still be in love with you. It is going to cause a lot of pain, even if everyone was fully informed at the outset, and intellectually you can agree that it is time to move on. Emotions are not always convenient. Asymmetry in philia can be just as painful as asymmetry in eros.

One possible way forwards for limerents who want stability but also want limerence is to adopt another relationship model…

Pragma bias

Pure pragma marriages are nowadays frowned upon in the west, but they remain common in other cultures and were standard practice throughout history. Affection, loyalty, commitment, shared goals and experiences – these can mature into philia and storge, and provide the stability of a lasting bond, even if they lack the spontaneity and excitement of an eros connection.

In the past, extra-marital affairs outside pragma marriage carried stigma, but social mores tended to demand discretion rather than abstinence – plausible deniability, if you will. Nowadays, many people who struggle to reconcile limerent craving and lasting commitment consider a modern version of a pragma bias: polyamory. They seek a pragmatic open relationship (with a fully informed and willing partner, of course) from which to seek eros and/or ludus connections with LOs. Polyamory, or even simple swinging, is much more accepted now, even if it is still seen as an “alternative” lifestyle.

This is not to say that there is no erotic component to the primary relationship, just that the partners have made a pragmatic agreement that they will stick together for mutual benefit, but also have the freedom to seek ludus or eros with others.

The downside to this model is the ever-present risk that jealousy, complications, and dishonesty will wreck the carefully laid plans. Many limerents only entertain the idea of opening their marriage after becoming limerent for someone new, which suggests a rather self-serving change in circumstances that the spouse was not informed about.

Most poly couples also have to negotiate quite detailed rules about how much time, energy and intimacy is permissible for secondary relationships. Also, those “secondaries” are real people with all their own hangups, emotional complications and hopes. Sustaining a poly arrangement that works for everyone, in which everyone is honest and enlightened, and no-one develops inconvenient philial feelings for someone they only intended to be ludus for, is a lot of work.

Philia bias

Another possible answer to the question posed above is “I mostly want the deep bond of affection, and am not that bothered if the eros fades.” This is the classic sexless marriage that is comfortable, familiar, safe and fulfilling in many ways. You may want a best friend – meaning a proper intimate, affectionate friend – more than a lover. Again, there is nothing wrong with this, as long as everyone involved is open and agrees. Many couples rub along together quite nicely with this arrangement, even if they’ve stopped rubbing certain parts of their anatom-

The big downside here, of course, is the risk of becoming limerent for someone else. With minimal erotic connection, the relationship can drift into companionable friendship, and then *boom* along comes an LO who reignites passion in one of them and upends everything.

A medium blend

My sense is that the mainstream hope for a long-term loving partnership is for a combination of eros, philia and storge, underpinned by a dose of pragma. Most people want security and sex. They want hot erotic connection but also the warm familiarity of a best friend – a stable, loving, deep commitment, spiced up by a satisfying sex life. Is that too much to ask?

There are many commentators who say it is. That the different forms of love are incompatible. That eros needs novelty, spontaneity, and the sexy frisson of the unknown to thrive. Philia and pragma lead to a cooling of ardour and inevitable staleness. Familiarity breeds romantic contempt, if you will. 

It’s certainly tough to sustain eros in the long term if your libido is generally low except during limerence. It’s also difficult if your libido is linked to novelty or ludus-style games, and possibly most difficult of all if you find sex shameful or degrading and incompatible with “purer” forms of love (e.g. the Madonna and whore syndrome).

The solution to this is probably, ironically, to lean on pragma.

Cultivating eros

I suspect that one of the reasons limerents link limerence and love so closely is because of the eros-amplification that happens during limerence. Erotic excitement comes spontaneously and LO is inherently desirable, while there is the promise of sexy fun times ahead. Because eros comes so readily during limerence, there is a sense that it has to come spontaneously, or it doesn’t count. That if there’s a dip in libido or erotic desire that means that the relationship is failing, rather than the erotic energy is failing. In other words, if eros has to be cultivated then it isn’t real. There’s something a bit off if it has to be worked on. 

In some ways, this mirrors the classic limerent error of thinking that eros emerges from LO because of their inherent specialness, rather than coming from the mind of the limerent themselves. That libido is about them rather than you. I mean, obviously they are a factor, but your own mind is where the majority of your erotic power lies. 

Erotic connection can be cultivated. Looked at another way, it’s a bit naive and sentimental to think that eroticism has to be effortless and spontaneous. Marriage and sex therapists are in near universal agreement that the relationships that succeed are those in which both partners are willing to make some effort to fan the embers of eros and reignite lust. That can take some work if your libidos are mismatched or your sexual desire for them has faded, but the basic idea is to make sure that your partner is the focus of your erotic energy. There are a few things that can help:

• Play some ludus games with your partner – try new things, seduce and tease. 
• Lay off the porn, unless it’s something you enjoy together. 
• Get in the mood. Pay attention to how the environment, time of day, atmosphere etc. affect your libidos and then cultivate the conditions that promote sexy vibes.
• Schedule erotic time. Eros tends to be something that increases with reinforcement, so lean on pragma a bit to make sure you are committing to that positive reinforcement.
• Most importantly: talk to your partner about their preferences and your preferences. Cultivating eros can work well if you are pushing each other’s buttons effectively, but if one of you loves dirty talk but the other squirms, you need to know that before whispering in their ear over dinner. 

Problem solving

Having worked through all these possibilities, the problems that started the whole love versus limerence discussion can now be pretty neatly summarised: there is a mismatch between the blend of love forms you want and the blend you have. 

If eros fades as limerence fades, you have three options: embrace the serial limerence lifestyle, seek a pragmatic open relationship, or delve deep into your psychology to figure out why limerence and eros are so tightly linked for you. Then experiment with cultivating eros in the absence of limerence. Limerence does distort our judgement. It isn’t the baseline mental state for most of us. 

If you feel trapped in a marriage with mismatched eros, there is one major goal: try and understand what blend you want, what blend your partner wants, and decide whether these are compatible. Eros can be cultivated if both are open and willing. Coercion, nagging or demanding will not help, but letting the low libido partner set the terms of eroticism unilaterally is just as unhealthy. There should be some pragma in the blend, not just settling for the lowest common denominator. 

Unsurprisingly, a purposeful approach to these problems works best: understanding yourself, understanding your drives, being totally honest with yourself and your partner, and communicating sensitively but openly are the key skills needed. Self-awareness, openness to new experiences, and balance in give and take are at the root of most successful relationships. 

The post Love and limerence (part two) first appeared on Living with Limerence.

The relationship between love and limerence is complex. More recently, those few psychologists who have researched the phenomenon have tended to focus on the pathological aspects of limerence – the intrusive thoughts, irrational behaviour, and distress caused by person addiction. They tend to contrast it unfavourably with healthy, mature love. I’ve commented on this before, but I just recently realised that two of the commonest dilemmas that people contact me about are actually linked by this ambiguity between limerence and love (although they don’t obviously seem so at first glance). This is quite a big topic, so I’m going to tackle it over two posts.

Here are the dilemmas, summarised by comments from two recent correspondents:

My problem is that I lose all romantic feelings and attraction for my partner after a year or 2. I completely lose interest no matter how much in love I was at the beginning.

The heart of the problem here is the strong mental association between limerence and love. When falling out of limerence, the conclusion is reached that they have fallen out of love, and that leads to the final conclusion: this romantic relationship is over.

For some people, this can be the truth of their lives: serial monogamy for one LO after another, but no longer-term relationships that have lasting romantic connection. In contrast, limerence can give way to lasting romantic love of a more stable but less exciting kind, which leads to long-term bonding.

For others, though, there is a less satisfactory compromise: a few limerent love affairs, until one results in legal and/or social commitment (perhaps precipitated by external circumstances), which then settles into a lasting relationship that has lost its romantic impetus, but persists because of duty and responsibilities.

That scenario commonly leads to the second dilemma:

I love my husband and he is a good man but we haven’t had sex for nearly two years (he just doesn’t want to, but refuses to talk about it). I’m now deep in an emotional affair with my boss and nearly going mad with lust!

So what links these two dilemmas? Well, even by just spelling out the different scenarios above, the basic issue is obvious: there are multiple different kinds of love.

This is not a novel observation.

The Greeks classified love into seven principal forms – eros, philia, pragma, storge, agape, ludus and philaupia – and since then there have been many other attempts to demarcate or classify love into different types (such as color wheels, triangles, languages and, indeed, limerence). 

There’s a good summary of the ancient model here, but very briefly, here’s how the forms break down:

• Eros – erotic, sexual love.
• Philia – emotionally deep, life-enriching friendship.
• Pragma – practical, co-operative commitment, for mutual benefit.
• Storge – affectional bonding of a familial, unconditional nature.
• Agape – spiritual or altruistic love that transcends (e.g. love of God).
• Ludus – playful, but casual love, without deep commitment.
• Philaupia – self-love (in the self-esteem, rather than masturbation, sense). 

One further type that some psychologists and philosophers include is mania – being a sort of obsessive, possessive, and jealous love of the insecurely attached. 

In reality, of course, most of our meaningful relationships are characterised by some blend of these various forms of love. That is the tension at the heart of much of the pain caused by limerence, including for my two correspondents. How much do the different forms of love matter, how do they change with time, and how does limerence relate to it all?

Well, as promised, I’m tackling this over two posts. Today is how limerence relates to these classical forms of love, and part two will cover what to do about it all.

Let’s jump in…

How does limerence map on to the different forms of love?

Oh my, it’s complicated. Only way through this is to take them one at a time.

Eros: obviously relevant, as limerence almost always involves sexual desire. Philia: commonly essential for deepening the emotional bond and for singling out an individual as a desirable LO rather than just an object of lust. Pragma: the least relevant form – practicality is rarely a consideration in limerence. Storge: of little relevance early on, but as limerence progresses the feeling of bonding becomes more and more important. Real storge takes time, though. Agape: many limerents report a feeling of selfless admiration, and a numinous, transcendent quality to their longing for LO. Complicated to disentangle this from idealisation, though. Ludus: more obviously a non-limerent form of casual romance, but playfulness and teasing is very attractive to many people, so could stimulate the glimmer. Philaupia: most relevant to how resilient limerents will be once they succumb. Those with low self-esteem are more vulnerable to predatory LOs. If we also include mania, then we can add the obsessive thinking and unstable moods of limerence too.

What a tangle! For me, the obvious conclusion is that limerence does not map simply onto any one of the long-established forms of love. So, limerence is not a separate form of love or a phenomenon that is only experienced by people who love in a particular way, it’s a combination of many of the different forms.

Limerence as a concept seems to fits much better with the three stage model of  romantic love proposed by Helen Fisher where a relationship progresses through lust, attraction and then attachment. Limerence colours (possibly even, determines) the experience in each of those stages, through a personal combination of the forms of love that we are all variously prone to.

As a final note, though, I can’t not comment on the killer combo of a LO with ludus and a limerent with an eros/philia blend.

So, what is limerence then?

If limerence isn’t a distinct form of love, what is it? Well my argument has always been that it’s best understood as an altered mental state – a change in psychological “affect” caused by the neurochemical response to a hyperstimulus (LO).  Limerence leads to an increase in libido, an increase in physiological arousal, an increase in motivational drive, and a general intensification of feelings that will impact on nearly all aspects of mood, and even cognition. 

It’s likely to be a volume control or amplifier for all aspects of love. Most immediately, eros will spike, but limerence will also ramp up desire and attraction, singling out LO as an object for philia – emotional as well as sexual connection. 

In fact, true philia or storge (and even pragma) takes time and experience to build to being meaningful, but limerence seems to intensify the promise of those forms of love. In the grip of limerence, the LO seems a source of emotional succour and thrillingly interesting and attractive. Someone you want to spend time with and bond with, someone who seems to offer the promise of lasting philia, coupled to eros. 

When limerence fades, what remains of that promise? That’s where my first correspondent finds herself: repeatedly disappointed by the residual feelings that remain once the limerence amplifier is unplugged.

This could be due to a mismatch between people who stimulate eros/ludus excitement and people that stimulate philia. Or, it could be due to a very close psychological association between limerence and libido, as I’ve speculated before, meaning that sexual desire only lasts as long as limerence lasts. But, it could also be due to a mismatch between expectations and reality when it comes to long-term bonding.

And that leads us to the end of part one. Next week: how to respond purposefully to our twin dilemmas.

The post Love and limerence (part one) first appeared on Living with Limerence.

A Twin Flame is different from an everyday soulmate. The idea is that on some occasions you can meet people who you connect with so powerfully that it can only be explained as meeting your soul’s twin. The theories I’ve seen are that – literally – one soul has been split into two bodies and that you are recognising that other fragment of your own soul when you meet this special person.

Explanations depend on the spiritual framework employed, but it can either be that a soul split in two at the beginning of eternity [sic] and is constantly seeking reunion, or that some souls incarnate into two separate bodies at rebirth. 

Now, obviously, these concepts are not compatible with a scientific world view, but for now let’s just sidestep that discussion. Instead, let’s focus on the similarities in reported experience between limerents and people who believe they have found their Twin Flame.

A little background

The Twin Flame concept seems to have arisen from the experience of meeting someone that seems so especially complementary that the extraordinary emotional connection must be evidence of spiritual union. There are many books, websites and videos out there explaining how to know if you have met your Twin Flame, and they usually present lists of signs (“you finish each other’s sentences!”) and symptoms (“you feel emotionally safe with them”). Collectively, there seems to be a consensus around a few key indicators:

• You have a rapid and and powerful sense of affinity after meeting, experienced as a “recognition that you are coming home” or “feeling of rightness”.
• You have an unusually intense emotional connection, and an overwhelming urge to be together.
• If you attempt to separate, it will be painful, and probably unsuccessful. This is a bond that cannot be denied.
• You have a strong intuitive sense of what they are thinking and doing even when away from them.
• You have a strong desire to fuse your lives and are happy when isolated together away from the world.

In the previous discussion thread PS did a great job of deconstructing a popular article on the stages of a Twin Flame connection in comparison to the phases of limerence. The overlap in experience is obvious to any regular LwL readers:

• The sense of rapid and powerful affinity is basically the glimmer.
• The unusually intense connection and urge to be together results from the neurochemistry of infatuation.
• Pain when separating and a desire to deeply bond, is uncertainty coupled to desire for reciprocation.

It’s pretty clear therefore, that limerence can explain a lot of the signs and symptoms of Twin Flame beliefs, but there are some subtleties and loose threads too.

Let’s pick at them!

When could limerence best fit twin flame symptoms?

For all the overlaps between the ideas there are some dissimilarities too. Twin Flames are supposed to recognise each other, but many limerents have suffered the cruel sting of an LO who is ambivalent about their feelings. Limerence can definitely be one-sided.

Twin Flame connections are also supposed to be spiritually elevated above petty concerns like jealousy, but limerents are often fiercely jealous of other people flirting with LO if their confidence in reciprocation is shaky.

Twin Flame thinking seems to require reciprocation to make sense. At one level this would seem to limit the duration of limerence, because “ecstatic union” is self-limiting when uncertainty is removed. So, mutual limerents may feel they have met a twin flame, but the flame should snuff out within a few months or years – rather spoiling the whole “reunited soul” theory. 

No, I think the most powerful overlap would come for the following scenario: a person who is married, but becomes mutually limerent for someone new, and they were not limerent for their spouse. That seems like the killer combo to me. 

Why is the twin flame concept appealing?

Limerence is an exceptional experience. It is out of the ordinary. Your perceptions change, the world transforms as your mood rises to euphoric heights or drops to crushing lows, your emotional landscape is transformed, and the LO that has caused the change in your worldview blazes in the centre of it.

As an experience, it does rather demand some sort of explanation.

One very appealing explanation is capital-R Romance. The framework that explains love as a transcendent, numinous force; evidence of divinity. That explanation means our feelings of extraordinary connection are sublime. They are grand passions, validating the strength of our feelings, justifying our pursuit of our LO, indeed demanding that we bring the spiritual union into consummation. 

As humans, we do search for the sublime. When touched by it, through music or art or love, we are enriched. What a seemingly noble way of reconciling the conflict of limerence for someone we should be forsaking (if our wedding vows have meaning).

It’s a psychologically seductive way of resolving cognitive dissonance.

Circular reasoning

Another way that limerence and twin flame thinking can align is through the likelihood of circular reasoning. For example: one of the commonest manifestations of limerence – the thing that makes other people around you think “ah ha! Those two are up to something” – is the tendency to adopt the mannerisms, opinions and attitudes of your LO. It comes from spending lots of time talking with them, thinking about them, idealising them, and generally conferring special significance on everything that they say or do.

The idea that you have a “strong intuitive sense of what they are thinking and doing” comes not from soul connection but from very attentive study of LO and their behaviour, combined with willfully changing your own behaviour in a subconscious attempt to get closer to them.

Even worse: the intuitive sense is often a total illusion. You are sure you know what they are thinking and feeling because you have a very highly developed “model” of them in your head. Every time you correctly guess what they are doing you take that as evidence of a magical connection, every time your guess is wrong you incorporate it into your refined mental model of LO and think you know them even better.

Finally, another inbuilt circular argument is when limerence starts to fade or sour. If you are in conflict with your LO but still crave them, that’s evidence of your fractured soul trying to heal its old wounds (which have been opened by the Twin Flame connection). If the extraordinary attraction fades, that’s evidence that in fact this wasn’t a twin flame, it was only a soulmate. And that last get-out clause also explains the fact that you can become limerent for many people; this isn’t a Harry Potter Horcrux scenario with soul fragments all over the place, it’s a misreading of the signs.

So, I’ve kind of gone snarky at the end, but only because theories that explain everything and can’t be disproved really annoy me. And that brings me back to the conflict between science and spirituality when it comes to understanding love and limerence. I have things to say about that, but goodness me look at all the words I’ve already typed out.

In summary: Twin Flames is a very potent idea for conflicted first-time limerents.

To be continued… 

The post Can limerence explain Twin Flames? first appeared on Living with Limerence.