Hi MJ,

Thanks for giving your reality check and after reading your story a few weeks ago I can imagine how hard it must have been. You’re spot on with everything and a part of me really wishes I could be open with my LO but that just wont work because we are both committed. I know I can do this and I do want my marriage to work.

I’m trying to focus on my SO but somehow that emotional dependence is there with everything we are going through and he himself is struggling to support, though he is trying. I wish I could talk about my LE with my SO but it upset him so much last time that I dont want to go down that road of opening up to him. So I don’t have an outlet and the one friend I trusted with my limerence was also a work colleague and she started ghosting me, which sucked. It’s not an easy topic to vent about with friends or family so I just have to hold it in or speak with my therapist weekly. My other friend who helped me is amazing but she’s busy with her kids and I dont meet her often and don’t want to keep bothering her. This forum really helps. Thanks for bringing some sense to me.

Hobby wise I dont have a lot of time but I do play music and I throw myself into work and social impact projects if I can. It’s hard to do more because I’m mostly with my kid but I guess I need to find something that makes me happy. Otherwise I’ll explode. Thanks for encouraging me to continue and resist this urge.

LL,

I agree with Bewitched here. It seems you are setting yourself up for a letdown. I do empathize with how that dying feeling leaves such a sick feeling in your stomach, and anxiety that goes through the roof. It’s that kind of thinking that can become so depressing. I was in that place for a very long time. Almost daily. It made going to work a challenge because I always wanted to see LO but not if we couldn’t at least be Friends. Since that operation got shut down indefinitely, her transferring departments when she did was actually good timing on her part. I don’t know how I would’ve handled things if I had transferred out first.

If you didn’t have an SO, I would suggest you just walk up to LO at some point and be blunt about it. Like just ask him, “Hey man, do you or don’t you like me?” (Or something along those lines) Yes it’s probably awkward as hell but it would set definitely set the record straight and give you the clarity to move forward.

However you do have an SO, so unless you are planning to give up on him, you will need better distractions to move away from the idea of LO. A hobby or something else you enjoy..

Think about also, if things with your SO don’t work out and then you get shot down by LO, your loneliness and anxiety might increase exponentially and is that what you really really want here?

Tough stuff I know, but you can do this. It will get better.

Hi Bewitched,

Thanks for coming to my rescue. A part of me just wishes to see the LO again to stop fantasizing and putting him on a pedestal. The NC has made the fantasies worse because I don’t really know the guy.

However, you’re right in that it leads nowhere. I was reading through these posts and I think that I’m reinforcing the fantasy with music (bad habit since it was mentioned in the books) and romantic tv. I just feel like I need a hit.

I almost got myself a new LO to get over the old one. I do meditate daily too but it’s just been hard. Will try my best to continue the thought stopping process or go to the therapist for depression pills if nothing else works. It doesn’t help that I always look out for him when I go out for a run in the neighbourhood. When I do see him he will just wave and run past me, clearly uninterested.

I am staying put and firm in my NC but it’s killing me. Did Trifles and Womp post last week? Will look up. I don’t get any notifications from this website so not sure how to interact with the community. Thanks!

Dear Limerent Lady,

I remember your story and I wanted to respond straight away to urge you to hold fast to your NC.

You are self aware and thank goodness for it. You have written on here so that someone will talk you out of your own impulses. So here goes:

You said it all yourself:-

“The uncertainty and the lack of time to clear the air with him is killing me but he just seems to want to avoid me. My urge has not lost any intensity in spite of being NC. However, if I contact him I go into an anxious state and it feels like microcheating so I haven’t. I wouldn’t want to tell my SO if I did meet him, he wouldn’t be too pleased. So I’m resisting my urge and dying daily”

Under the circumstances you described yourself, there are three reasons to resist suggesting coffee:
+ an LO who is avoiding you,
+ an SO who would not be pleased if you reached out,
+ setting yourself back on 4 successful months of NC

It is imperative that you resist or you will risk feeling embarrassed and guilty for the three reasons above. But the most important advice I can give you is to stop fantasising about your LO, because if you do, he will go away. It will happen slowly at first and then all at once.

Maybe get yourself a mantra for when unhelpful thoughts like contacting your LO for coffee spring to mind. Someone last week mentioned a mental ‘Stop’ sign (Trifles or Whoomp, I think it was; both of whom are at a similar stage to yourself, so maybe look at some of their posts?)

All the best!

Are you feeling any better? How did you overcome this? I know this was 4 years ago.

I’m having really terrible urges to contact my LO and ask him to meet me for a coffee. He was avoiding me before so not sure how to approach this and where it leads. I haven’t seen him and I worry he will ghost me. The uncertainty and the lack of time to clear the air with him is killing me but he just seems to want to avoid me. My urge has not lost any intensity in spite of being NC. However, if I contact him I go into an anxious state and it feels like microcheating so I haven’t. I wouldn’t want to tell my SO if I did meet him, he wouldn’t be too pleased. So I’m resisting my urge and dying daily.

“I have found when I have those urges I come here and it’s truly therapeutic…”

Cheaper than therapy, too.

We haven’t talked in 6 months. We live 1,800 miles away from each other and we don’t follow each other on social media any longer. I have sent him 2 cards in the mail since we stopped talking. I almost contacted him yesterday and I had an opportunity to have an exchange with him today and I haven’t. I don’t know what to do.
Six effing months…

Yeah, all this pretty much adds/has added up to the fuck-up in my mind.

Jaideux, yeah this repressing thing is weird… It’s like I repressed my initial romantic feelings for a full decade while meeting him from time to time, here and there definitely more frequent meeting too… he never completely let go of me. You can imagine how much that must’ve fucked up inside my brain. Maybe it’s like I had the addiction without being aware of it for 10 years, and so I would make these mistakes of staying around with justifications (mostly the FWB for the justification, I enjoyed hanging out with them and the sex too). But I would not have stayed at all if he hadn’t kept chasing me. I never initiated, it was always he who did. After finding this site, I even had thoughts that maybe he consciously had limerence Lol.

Never mind, not going down that line of thinking… Since anyway the way he behaved in the end when I tried to make things clear he gave very much mixed signals and was manipulative. (Only the cold from the “hot and cold”… suddenly being “just a friend”. But also manipulative in a bad way.) Would that be like, a narcissistic person wanting some emotional supply from me. Or can it be both limerence and narcissism? Does this make any sense??

So aside from his stuff, yeah, do any of you have experience (I didn’t find info on here yet on this) about how hard it usually is to fully get past it if you played with the addiction for a whole decade? (Even if not consciously and not willfully, like in my case. I know I’m unique eh?)

Interesting how you find it very hard to talk about the LE stuff now with that friend. In my experience this doesn’t necessarily mean the chapter is fully closed, but that’s just my experience. I mean, I had a lot of periods in these 3 years where it seemed hard to think of or talk of this guy. But then it reopened anyway at a new chapter… I imagine full recovery to be like… not hard to talk about it, just plainly no particular interest. I hope that in your case it’s full recovery though 🙂 I mean this only for my own case.

Sammy, yeah I’d take that medication now. : P Hell yeah.

As for the repressed emotions, yeah, I don’t think I’d call it “bubbling to the surface”, it was more intense an experience than that lol. Oh well. Yeah I’m pretty sure it’s got heavily to do with how my brain works. But the emotions themselves seem pretty “limerent”. (Sorry, still quotes.) Just that raw form without much imagination though. If that made sense. Let me know if not.

Yeah the therapist… I don’t know if I’ll regain my trust in her, but we’ll see. And thanks again 🙂