Romantic love was never really considered a fit subject for academic enquiry, but in the 1970s, Professor Dorothy Tennov began investigating romantic attachment and the nature of infatuation.
She filled binders with information from hundreds of people suffering through the exquisite agonies of romantic heartache, trying to make sense of the “madness” of love, to identify the psychological foundations of romantic obsession and to figure out how she could help people recover their emotional balance.
She identified a very specific mental state of romantic infatuation that only some people experience and coined a new word to describe the phenomenon that she was uncovering: limerence.
Limerence is an overwhelming feeling of elation and excitement triggered by the presence of this remarkable other person. When you are with them, it feels like you are walking on air. They cause a surge of giddy euphoria that is intoxicating.
Your whole body feels supercharged – your thoughts fizz and pop, you are more optimistic, your heart races and flutters, you tingle with excitement and energy. You feel invincible. Unfortunately, that state of bliss is fragile.
It’s like riding a wave and, inevitably, the wave breaks. The over-arousal of their company becomes exhausting. It becomes hard to focus on anything else – your concentration is shot, and you come to realise that the whole world is full of reminders of them.
Worst of all are the times when they seem cold to you. Your heart, that used to flutter like a butterfly, now hammers and aches. Shame and anxiety shiver through you. Desperately, you cling to memories of times when they were kind or attentive or flirtatious – using happy memories like anchors to stabilise your mood and soothe the pain of rejection.
This emotional volatility is a symptom of limerence, and it is largely involuntary. Your mood seesaws back and forth, seemingly out of control. Your thoughts and feelings are at the complete mercy of this person, who has entered your life and upended it: your limerent object (LO).
Dorothy Tennov died in 2007. We’ve accumulated an additional half-century of knowledge since she began her work, and know far more about the neural mechanisms that control euphoria, reward, motivation, obsession and addiction.
My best estimate is that about 50 per cent of US and UK adults have experienced limerence, and 25 per cent of adults found it so disruptive that it affected their enjoyment of life. There are many times in life when limerence can be a problem.
Perhaps you have fallen for someone who is unavailable or disreputable, and so getting tangled up with them is an emotional train wreck. Perhaps you are already committed to someone else and are building a life together, and a new episode of limerence threatens that future.
“Like any process of recovery from addiction, there are going to be withdrawal pains, relapses and missteps”
Sometimes the timing just isn’t right, and limerence becomes a drag on your productivity, a waste of mental energy, and a distraction from more important goals. Whatever the circumstances, it’s obvious that there will be lots of situations in which wild, dizzying, uncontrollable infatuation is inconvenient. Learning how to get rid of unwanted limerence is therefore a life-changing skill.
Recovery from limerence isn’t a fool’s hope. It’s entirely possible. Many limerents have done it; many have pulled back from the brink of disaster with their dignity and integrity intact.
An important first step is to consider a foundational principle: adopting a “recovery mindset”. Developing the right frame of mind at the outset will make it more likely that the techniques for recovery will bear fruit. A recovery mindset is an attempt to construe the situation in a useful way, to approach it as a problem to be solved, to recognise that limerence is a self-reinforcing mental state that can be escaped from, and to behave in accordance with that perception. Adopting this mindset means believing that you have the power to improve your life by the actions you take, and that it is possible to make progress even in the face of external pressures that might work against you.
How To Recover From Limerence
Over the years, I’ve boiled down some of the most powerful lessons into a list of key principles for limerence recovery, which are outlined below:
Limerence Is Happening In Your Head
The extravagant passions of limerence lie within you, are generated by you, and that’s where they need to be fixed. We can’t expunge limerence from the brain, but we can find ways to turn down the volume and neutralise its effects. Limerence is happening in your head, and that means it’s within your power to reverse it.
You Make Them Special
The effect your LO has on you has its roots in your complex personal history. What limerence practically means is that this person has triggered something deep within you, some pattern of traits that is recognised by your subconscious and provokes an all-guns-blazing motivational program to try to get you to bond with them. This means that, once again, limerence is all about you. Facing the past, and understanding yourself, is the way to understand where their power over you comes from.
Check Your Instincts
We don’t go through life questioning every decision we make, we run on autopilot – doing things that feel good and avoiding things that feel bad. Because of the way our brains are wired, our instincts train us to seek our LO until addiction sets in. To stop this, reason needs to step in and moderate instinct; your mental CEO needs to pay attention and take charge.
Don’t Self-Medicate With Limerence
Repeating the learned pattern of behaviour – I feel bad, I daydream about my LO, I feel better – trains you to become more dependent on them. Once the urge to seek the LO becomes a compulsion, limerence causes more psychological distress than pleasant reward. Using limerence for mood regulation is another instinctive behaviour that works against the goal of attaining freedom. It’s important to learn alternative strategies.
You Can’t Just Be Friends
It isn’t credible to try to remain friends with an LO during recovery, but there is some benefit to mollifying your limerent brain with a sliver of strategic hope: it is possible to be friends with an LO, but only after you have freed yourself from the limerence. Until that time, be highly suspicious of your motives for maintaining an attachment.
You’re In Charge
You may have an LO who makes life difficult by flirting, encouraging your attention, or acting in other ways that make it hard for you to detach. Alternatively, you might feel the problem is with your partner. They might be withholding affection or disrespecting you and making you want to seek solace outside of your relationship. It’s wishful thinking to believe you can persuade your LO to change their behaviour to take away temptation and make your limerence struggles easier. It just invites conflict when they inevitably don’t do as you ask. Look to yourself for the solution.
Anticipate Hardships
Like any process of recovery from addiction, there are going to be withdrawal pains, relapses and missteps. The secret to setbacks is to reduce their impact by knowing they are coming and anticipating their arrival. Adopt the mindset that you are aiming for gradual improvement over the long term, but it won’t always be a straight path without obstacles.
A Better Life Awaits
The last and perhaps most important principle is that you have to believe that the obsession will end and that you can look forward to a better life beyond it. That requires a vision for a more purposeful life. Living with purpose means you stop depending on the LO for comfort, stop following their lead, stop letting their behaviour dictate your mood. Unshackle yourself from the false comfort of LO. Seek out new passions, new rewards, new directions in which to take your life. Find a new north star and follow it to freedom.
This is an edited extract from Smitten by Dr Tom Bellamy (Penguin) Out now.
Related articles:
- The Tell Tale Signs Of A Love Addict
- Can Asking These 36 Viral Questions Still Make You Fall In Love?
- This Is Why We Become Obsessed With Our Romantic Partners
