I’m looking forward to this post. I hope it covers the difference between limerence in the beginning of a reciprocal romantic relationship, and limerence as a person addiction negative pathology.

Wow, thank you for your work.

Thanks for the detailed review, David. Especially the Bode papers, which I hadn’t seen.

By one of those quirks of the universe, your comment came in a couple of hours after I got the results of a survey I carried out to try and answer the question directly. It’s interesting to re-read this old post that starts “the obvious approach would be to construct a survey with questions designed to identify limerent traits, and then persuade a large number of randomly selected people within the population to take it.”

Well, I’ve done it now with a sample of 1500 US and UK adults (using the amazing persuasion technique of paying for it…). I’m going to write a full post once I’ve properly analysed the data, but the headline result is that it looks like 50-60% of the general population have experienced limerence. So Tennov’s hunch about two roughly equal tribes was about right!

More to come…

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232532243_Attachment_Style_as_a_Predictor_of_Adult_Romantic_Relationships

They found 55% secure, 30% avoidant and 15% anxious-ambivalent. 45% scored highly on self-conscious anxiety limerence, but with “considerable overlap” across all three attachment styles.

This suggests limerence is common.

(Note: see e.g. Fraley & Shaver for contemporary view on attachment style. Attachment style is not an enduring trait from childhood experience, changes over time, is different from relationship to relationship, has correlation with personality, etc. https://adultattachment.faculty.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/66/2015/09/Fraley_2008_Attachment-Theory-and-Its-Place-in-Contemporary-Personality-Theory.pdf )

Another study has found around .3 or .35 correlation between romantic love, depression, anxiety and hypomania.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260680456_I_love_you_more_than_I_can_stand_-_Romantic_love_symptoms_of_depression_and_anxiety_and_sleep_complaints_are_related_among_young_adults

It’s also Helen Fisher’s view that limerence and romantic love are the same thing. See “Madly In Love” podcast episode: https://kimberlybeamholmes.com/#podcast

And there’s extensive literature on romantic love at this point. Many researchers cite Tennov as a source on romantic love, even if they don’t use her word, such as Adam Bode in these two papers:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.573123/full

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1176067/full

Furthermore, in this article Albert Wakin himself seems to think about 25% of his own study participants experienced limerence:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080210054316/https://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-06-limerence_N.htm

“Of about 200 who have agreed to participate in the study, the researchers suspect 50 or 60 have at one time experienced a limerent relationship.”

Wakin started that study 16 years ago and hasn’t published anything since, probably because his own results contradicted his theories and basically every actual researcher on this topic seems to disagree with him. Judging by the date of his master’s thesis, he must be in his 80s. Who knows if he’s still working on anything at all.

By the way, did you notice that Wakin’s paper was published in a university newsletter and was not peer-reviewed material? (It’s probably a rejected paper.) He also has no other publications I could find besides it and his master’s thesis in the ’60s. Wakin is not an expert on this topic. He is a nobody in this field who just managed to solicit a number of media articles by going around calling himself an expert and getting his baseless claims republished.

(His paper even cites a paper which cites Donatella Marazziti’s study, which contradicts him by arguing romantic love normally is “like OCD” and might lower serotonin levels. Did he not read into his own citations?)

Obviously Wakin is one of the sorts of critics that Tennov talks about in her book:

“Abraham Maslow, […], was also a spokesperson for an ideal form of love that is clearly nonlimerent. Maslow wrote of “D-love,” which he said was not love at all but a state of dependency. “B-love,” in contrast, should be welcomed into consciousness; it is never a problem but can be enjoyed endlessly. It has beneficial effects on the persons involved since it is associated with individual autonomy and independence. B-lovers are not unreasonably jealous and they are not blind. It is the other, damaging D-love which blinds you. In true love (B-love) you are able to perceive your lover clearly and penetratingly.”

And:

“Another writer who denied that “secret love” is in fact love is sociologist Paul Bohannan, to whom “romantic love” is a condition in which your “love fantasies become ends in themselves.” You are blinded to LO’s “real” personality because you refuse to look at the facts. Clearly, Bohannan speaks of limerence, but like Solomon he classified this state as other than “true love” and considers it ‘a sort of psychological love potion that some people either administer to themselves or else use as an excuse when they want to be irresponsible.'”

And:

“But Bach and Deutsch do not view these feelings as an integral aspect of a complex involuntary human reaction pattern. Instead, they label the feeling “destructive” and propose a form of psychotherapy aimed at helping people achieve “authentic” intimacy that would not be hindered by the shyness and fear of lovesickness.”

Etc. Tennov of course talked a lot about these sorts of people in her book.

Anyway, basically the 5% is just a fabrication by a critic, really a fringe author, who is trying to denigrate the phenomenon, as far as I can tell.

You should try interviewing Helen Fisher or something. She is actually an expert.

Yes, for example, if there were ESTJs that were limerent, they would be under-counted simply because they’re much less likely to know their MBTI type and be reading neuroscience blogs on love.

By the way, this author Lucy seems to be very untrustworthy.

She wrote this article for example: https://youmemindbody.com/mental-health/My-First-Limerence-Lesbian-Love-Gone-Wrong

But a lot of the info in that article is blatant misinformation, and if you check her citations, they don’t support her points.

For example she says this:

“The tendency to enter manic states is also a prerequisite to limerence, so bipolar disorder is naturally also often a comorbidity”

There’s no evidence whatsoever that mania is a “prerequisite” to limerence, and there’s no study on prevalence of certain disorders among limerent people yet. Her “citation” is just a random paper about Bipolar disorder and relationships. It doesn’t mention limerence and doesn’t support either of her statements.

“As I will elaborate on soon, there is a reason why sustained highs and lows in romance are associated with trauma bonding and toxicity. Our neurobiological machinery only allows us to feel those ‘ups’ for people who are unavailable and confusing.”

People “only” feel emotional highs for unavailable and confusing people? Just what?

There’s a ton of stuff like that in her article.

She’s just making things up and linking random stuff for fake citations. I’m not that familiar with her material, but that article is really alarming.

I don’t know what’s going on with her that she’s doing this, but it really makes her survey data suspect too.

Thanks, David for that info. (N.B. I suspect my contact form rejected your entry because of the number of links).

If I understand your point, it’s that the INFJ/Ps really are disproportionately engaged in online communities that discuss MBTI and so the bias is coming in at the self-selection stage? So, almost any discussion of an aspect of human experience would have those personality types over-represented if the discussion was anchored to MBTI in some way?

Makes sense.

It’s a shame that so many estimates of the prevalence of limerence are based on “expert reported X% value” without more controlled analysis.

In the article you say this:

“Third, there is a bias towards people who have taken a MBTI test and been engaged enough to remember their type. Again, this may not be evenly distributed across the population.

Despite all those caveats, the effect size is really large. It’s hard to believe that INFJ/Ps would be so disproportionately over-represented in online readers. ”

The thing is that the distribution of interest in MBTI is really extreme, especially with types like INFJ and INFP. One way to show this is by looking at Reddit subscriber counts. For example, compare https://www.reddit.com/r/infp/ (~200,000) and https://www.reddit.com/r/isfj/ (~20,000).

Here is a chart that I made: https://i.imgur.com/Rlbjbut.png (and my code https://jsfiddle.net/waynro7h/)

You can see how extreme the distribution is, and that it’s actually almost identical to the chart you showed in your post.

I think you should post a correction of some kind, in light of this evidence, especially given that the 5% estimate from Wakin seems to be made-up. I think it’s probably way off, maybe by an order of magnitude according to some rough calculations that I did.

This explains the effect size entirely.

You could also try to use subscriber counts to try to control for this issue with the survey, but at that point things are really a mess.

Note that Dorothy Tennov believed limerence was very common. Noah Wolf’s master’s thesis on limerence indicated Tennov thought it was 50%. Helen Fisher’s work relating romantic attraction to dopamine systems also suggests it would be very common. (Helen Fisher is quoted saying limerence is romantic love.)

I appreciate the work you’re trying to do, though.

I can confirm Allie’s view, I’m on the same page there.

My current theory is that there are two explanations for why people get an INF type assignment and become limerent:

One is related to trauma. Under normal circumstances, the person would not have developed and INF personality and would not have become a limerent. But childhood issues „push” the person into seeking refuge inwards and cause limerence to develop in a very unhealthy manner towards „bad LOs“ related to their issues.

The other one is related to the inherent personality. A „healthy” INF has probably had these traits already in early childhood – I definitely did. For them, limerence is simply a part of growing up and how they fall in love with someone who could be an amazing romantic partner (a „good LO”).

I’m an INTJ and I 100% agree with you. The feeling of euphoria is nice, but having my irrational emotions completely hijack my life is not something that sits well with me. It’s also so far outside of my usual experience that I was completely thrown by the whole thing at first. It took me months to get my bearings.

“I was absolutely determined to get to the bottom of it. I’m not really comfortable with loose ends/lack of closure.”

Exactly how I reacted as well. It hit me out of nowhere and one of the first things I did was try to figure out what in the world was happening to me. And I’ll tell you what, not liking loose ends has made this whole situation VERY difficult for me. I just want to know WHY, you know? Especially when it comes to my LO’s behavior, which is very hot and cold. He’s an enigma and it drives me crazy.

I am a limerent INFJ that had a happy non-traumatic childhood.
I think who you are is a combination of many things. The interactions between nature and nurture follow a unique course in every individual.