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The Beautiful Trap: How Limerence Warps Perception and Fuels Obsession

The experimental psychologist Dorothy Tennov writes in her 1979 book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love of the moment she began to take an interest in the systematic study of romantic love.

It was a fall afternoon in the mid-1960s when Dr. Tennov walked into her office from class to discover her student Marilyn Weber waiting for her. Ms. Weber was particularly impressive and bright, but her posture was sloped that day, and her eyes were time-stamped red, marking hours of crying.

She'd come to apologize for having failed to hand in an assignment and vowed to get it done within a week.

Without detailing her distress, Ms. Weber said she couldn't pull herself together and wasn't sure why she was behaving the way she was but wondered aloud whether life was just too hard for her.

Dr. Tennov flashed to a conversation about romantic love she'd had with two graduate students a few weeks earlier. Both students described the pain of past breakups and how it rendered them utterly useless.

The emotions they expressed were ones Dr. Tennov had experienced, and she wondered if there was a universally shared progression to the stages of romantic love.

As Ms. Weber headed out the door, Dr. Tennov couldn't help but ask whether her distress had "anything to do with a disappointment with love?"

Indeed, it had.

Dr. Tennov was curious about this distress caused by love that Ms. Weber was experiencing—her students had been describing something similar.

She turned to her textbooks, journals, psychology papers, and other writings on romantic love but found nothing about the agonizing pain of loving another.

WHAT IS THIS STATE CALLED?

The question gripped her until she decided to simply conduct the research herself.

Guided by the notion that this particular love-distress was not a pathological state, nor an aspect of neurotic personality (based on the psychological states of students who were known to her), she concluded that the pain from love must be a regular, universal experience.

Her research required her to seek the answers to the following questions:

1) What caused people to fall in love? 

2) Were some people more likely than others to fall in love?

3) Could those who were unhappy in love be helped?

From there, she would record the incidence of unhappy love and look for commonalities that induced love-distress.

She created a questionnaire of 200 true or false statements about romantic love, sex, and personal relationships and solicited volunteers through ads, bulletin boards, newsletters, and in person. She interviewed over 500 people.

It was during a conversation about unrequited love that she realized she was closing in on the answer. Those who didn’t reciprocate love, who didn't feel the same intensity of feeling, who weren't gripped by agonizing ruminations about another were the ones who helped her crystallize the state she was seeking to name.

The term "love" wasn't quite right. Love doesn't stay propped in such a heightened state as reported by those trapped inside unrequited longing. Being in love also didn't suffice, as the condition described included feelings one had to sometimes endure.

The state being described repeatedly was of an unrequited and agonizing longing for another, a yearning that seeks reciprocity above all else.

This is the state that Tennov coined "Limerence."

WHAT IS LIMERENCE?

In her book Love and Limerence, Tennov expressed the difficulty of conveying a limerent's specific craving for full emotional enmeshment with their limerent object (LO).

"Obsessed comes closer but leaves out the aching," Tennov writes.

This all-consuming state affects a staggering 5% of the population, indicating a genetic component. There is also some scientific data to back up claims that limerence is a type of cognitive obsession—the state of experiencing "catastrophic misinterpretations of the significance of one's unwanted intrusive thoughts"—possibly caused by low serotonin levels in the brain.

To be in its thrall causes a wondrous euphoric high but then leads a person to descend into the hot quicksand of despair, only to rise again into a halo of rabid, enthusiastic energy strong enough to power a hundred suns.

Tennov declared that limerence is a mental activity centered on the emotional sensations themselves and the limerent's interpretation of events. For the limerent, the possibility of reciprocity is the driving force. Like drugs, it's wildly easy to fall into its grip and absurdly challenging to escape.

WHAT DOES LIMERENCE LOOK LIKE?

When you're around a person in the throes of limerence, you may notice that the praise they heap upon their LO sounds like a young person experiencing romantic love for the first time.

Their declarations of love for the object of their affection are over-the-top, from the moment limerence strikes, even if it happens a week after the meeting. You might hear the limerent describing a person they've just met using declarative statements, which are usually reserved for people one has known well and for years.

"I have just met the wisest person I’ve ever known. They are so attuned and so deeply in touch with their soul. I’ve never known anyone like them." —limerence from a fictional limerent.

At first, it may sound sweet, but for a limerent person, these sensationalized pronouncements can often replace the healthy stages of falling in love, and when they fall head-over-limerence every few months or years for a new person, it should be a cause for concern.

A chronically limerent person is stuck in a damaging cycle that often doesn't change, no matter how many years pass nor how old the ill person is. Choosing to quit is as difficult as quitting actual drugs. One can safely deduce from a person who often struggles with limerence that they have difficulty forming healthy relationships.

The act of desiring enmeshment with one person to the exclusion of all others is a clue that the limerent is seeking something that has nothing to do with the LO.

The LO is simply the mirror reflecting the limerent's difficulties, but the limerent cannot see their struggle with themselves.

When limerence is in full force, it eclipses all other relationships. One of the main characteristics of its powers is the extreme emotional dependency a client has on the behavior of their LO.

The limerent will be driven mad by the uncertainty of an unreturned call or a monosyllabic text. Not knowing what this absence means will send a limerent into a tar-fired hell of cognitively distorted interpretations.

These wrongly decoded interpretations by the limerent always foretell a future where their LO has tired of them or is leaving them. The limerent reacts to their loss narratives as though they are reality, which causes them to spin out and become unglued for an hour, a day, a weekend, or longer.

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