Thank you for these good pointers and reminders you’ve shared, cj! Somehow, after a forced NC with LO#1 due to a breakup and not long after, our college graduation, I recall feeling and doing a lot of what you’d advised. The best revenge is by living well, right? Thanks to that, I’ve had quite a lot of fun in my late 20s, from volunteering to joining an underground band, etc.

However, somewhere in my 30s, I lost track after the band died its natural death of mates getting married, migrated or moved on. I’ve let go of making art over the years and eventually hit my 40s with a LE second-coming, latching on to the high of limerence as if trying to look for signs of meaning in life.

You’re right, I need to focus on re-building my life again like I did back then. It’s a different phase now that I have an SO and hitting midlife, but that makes it even more worth it to work on this, no matter how hard it will be along the way.

Better a challenge of taking back my sense of self in a new and, hopefully, more matured way, rather than grappling with lost dreams that I’ve left with LO#1 and its similar form with other LOs thereafter.

If you find yourself trying to earn someone’s love, get the message they’re not really interested in you. Maybe you’ve noticed they’re not curious about you.
Just be yourself with others and be okay with whether they take it or leave it. It’a simply not true that you need this person. Focus on building your real life. Life without him will be just fine.

Try to keep in mind no one owes you reciprocity. Accept it. You weren’t kidnapped. You were a naive and a willing participant with no idea of what you were getting into. Forgive yourself. Accept it. In future, protect yourself by being very careful about who you respond to. And recognize there are people in this world who like to hook you, knowing it will never go anywhere, and get a feeling of power and control, of owning you, that feeds their ego. You must put in place protection because you know now what a dead end limerence is . Ask yourself, Is this person really available? Are you really in their league? Are you available really? Don’t indulge in flirting.

The best revenge is living well. When you (any limerent) go no contact with your LO, your number one job is survival. You have to be strong, you have to have high self-esteem, you have to stiffen your backbone and allow your survival instincts to grab your attention.
The only way to survive is to value and protect what you have, and think aboit what it was you envied about the LO’s life. Instead of trying to obtain what that is by association, take steps in your life to create your own version of that. It’s not about your SO, it’s not about your LO. It’s about you and the attention you pay to what you want for yourself, nothing to do with getting the life you want through association. There are no shortcuts to becoming who you want to be. Let the limerent experience guide you to what part of your life to need to build for yourself.

I’ve experienced limerence and I’ve experienced falling in love with an available person that turned into lasting love. I don’t get the “there’s nothing better” hierarchy some limerents insist on. The truth is reality hurts when it slaps you in the face and in limerence you’ll have micro-slaps all along the way, including during the euphoric and obsessive stages. There is a lot of built-in frustration, blows to your ego and glimpses of reality that don’t fit your fantasy, all of which feels uncomfortable and destabilising. As the article describes, in short order your overloaded system creates the opposite of euphoria. In limerence, you are not living life in the real world. What good might you have done, what accomplishments might you have achieved, what might you have built, who might you have loved out in the real world with the time, energy and attention you spent on limerence? There might be a passing sense of dullness without the LO, but it passes quickly when you start investing in and living your real life again.
The real world is exciting and rewarding when you invest in it and living well.

Since finding this website, I have spent hours of introspection, analyzing my internal thoughts and motivations, picking my brain apart, etc. Today I think I discovered an insight and I wonder if it resonates with other sufferers of limerence …

I found a website that has a video of my LO. I succumbed, downloaded it, and have played it over and over, including in slow motion. There is a point in the video where the corner of her mouth turns up at just the right angle, and ooooh… I started having the most pleasurable sensation ever. I immediately recognized it as the same sensation as the “tingles” that I get with ASMR (some have called the tingles a “braingasm”).

Note: ASMR is mostly an audio response, but there are similar sensations that some people get with visual stimuli.

I’m wondering:
(1) Are people with limerence more likely to also experience ASMR?
(2) Is it possibly the same mechanism? To me it feels identical.
(3) Am I a “one-off”? Or just the first to make the connection?

That there would be a connection really makes sense to me. I initially experienced ASMR as an incredibly pleasurable braingasm. The effect wore off over time, just like the limerence glimmer effect wears off. Not everyone experiences limerence, just like not everyone experiences ASMR.

My conjecture is: Limerence glimmer is a form of ASMR. If that is correct, then I would expect a strong correlation between people that report experiencing ASMR and people that report experiencing limerence.

Anyone out there have something similar going on?

Until it gets away from you, you can have a lot of fun with limerence.

“Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go.”

I think limerents can relate to the last line. I know I loved to send something out and see what effect it had.

Sammy
“Your comment about LOs escaping with barely a scratch really hit home. ”
It wasn’t an observation I ever wanted to make. 🙂 Sometimes I wondered if I pricked him with a pin, would he bleed?

@Marcia. I was re-reading this thread and thought what you shared here with Jaideux is beautiful and painfully accurate.

“Yes, that and the moment you finally understand the LO has escaped with barely a scratch while you have taken years to get over them.”

“An LO can mean pain but also some delicious color in your life. It’s a catch 22.”

It makes me realise that while the circumstances of our LEs may be wildly different, the emotions seem to be mostly the same. This suggests to me that limerence has roots in biology rather than environment. This is of course consistent with what Tennov discovered – cultures the world over have stories about lovers experiencing limerence.

Your comment about LOs escaping with barely a scratch really hit home. The catch-22 observation is also spot-on. 😛