Limerence Quotes

Limerence.' There's no other word like it. The state of being infatuated with another person.

Limerence.” There’s no other word like it: The state of being infatuated with another person.

Is it love, obsession, infatuation? You don't know. You think of a strange and beautiful word you read about once, Limerance, a psychological term, meaning an obsessive love, a state that's almost like a drug. Need like a wolf paces the perimeter of your world, back and forth, back and forth, never letting up. ...You're appalled by the new appetites within you, kicking their feet and clawing to get out.

Limerence is an obsessive, unrequited love. It is actually a disorder. A disease if you will.

I wanted to build a fire with our shadow selves and burn there or be erased by the narcotic of limerence when I turned your face into a fire: a love story.

Have you considered extreme, desperate measures like talking to her again?" "Yeah, but, well..." "You've yeah-but your way to this point," said Jean. "You're going to yeah-but this mess until it's time to go home, and I don't doubt you'll yeah-but her out of your life. Quit circling at a distance. Go talk to her, for Preva's sake.

I had no technique for dealing with him: only an overpowering, unnerving, irrational, chemical desire to be with him.

Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in. —Robert Seidenberg

It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.

The eyes, as we shall see again and again, are so important in limerence that they, not the genitals or even the heart, may be called the organs of love.

In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being “in love” while discounting the importance of loving.

the amorous relation is “a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror game which carries within itself its own frustration,

I feel like an addict. Like if you leave, I'll go into withdrawal.

limerence noun. An involuntary state of mind caused by a romantic attraction to another person combined with an overwhelming, obsessive need to have one’s feelings reciprocated.

I grew a flower that can't be bloomed in a dream that can't come true  —Fake Love, BTS

She could have rambled with all the fervor of a woman who had loved one entity for longer than most races live, and with the inviolable, unquestioned certainty found in dementia. There were references dated and sealed with meticulous care which she would have enthusiastically opened with the mirth of one proclaiming a lifetime of honors and awards. But that singular event was freshly disturbed; its pores still drifted on the faint zephyr of remembrance.

There was an old man of St. Bees, Who was stung in the arm by a wasp; When they asked, "Does it hurt?" He replied, "No, it doesn't, But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet.

Big Hit

limerence,

It was an evening of that feeling you wanted to bottle, the feeling that no drug or orgasm could replicate—the skyrocketing high of limerence.

I don't know how the average person survives the period of limerence, that chemical insanity of early love, in the age of text messaging. How we avoid crashing our cars, walking into walls or out of open windows.

Despite ideals and philosophy, you find yourself a player in a process that bears unquestionable similarity to a game. The prize is not trifling; reciprocation produces ecstasy. Whether it will be won, whether it will be shared, and what the final outcome may be, depend on the effectiveness of your moves and those of your LO; indeed on skill.

He could still feel his brain aching where it once had reposed: he could still feel his skull throbbing. By just standing there in front of him. Hwi cried out to his lost humanity. It was too much for him and he moaned in despair: "Why do your masters torture me? " "Lord?" "By sending you!" " I would not hurt you, Lord." "Just by existing you hurt me!

Jung writes that people experience two kinds of fantasies; active, a normal part of a creative imagination and passive, something that happens out of the control of the individual.

I had mixed feelings about it: a queasy combination of flattery and discomfort, but sometimes mixed feelings are the hardest to resist indulging in. They can make us feel alive again.

BTS, an acronym for Bangtan Sonyeondan, in English, Bulletproof Boyscouts, are a seven-member group hailing from South Korea. Echo thought it was funny that BTS had as many members as Voldemort had Horcruxes, in a way when she first saw them she believed them to be fragments of her soul.

But I don’t direct this thing, this attraction, to Emily. It directs me. I try desperately to argue with it, to limit its influence, to channel it (into sex, for example), to deny it, to enjoy it and, yes, dammit, to make her respond! Even though I know that Emily and I have absolutely no chance of making a life together, the thought of her is an obsession. I am in the position of passionately wanting someone I don’t want at all and could find no use for if I had her.

This yearning for harmony, or limerence, can manifest itself in small mundane ways. People experience a small spark of pleasure when they solve a crossword puzzle or when they sit down and find a perfectly set table that meets their standard of “just so.

We don’t teach this ability in school—to harmonize patterns, to seek limerence, to make friends. But the happy life is defined by these sorts of connections, and the unhappy life is defined by a lack of them.

The desire for limerence drives us to seek perfection in our crafts. Sometimes, when we are absorbed in some task, the skull barrier begins to disappear. An expert rider feels at one with the rhythms of the horse she is riding. A carpenter merges with the tool in his hands. A mathematician loses herself in the problem she is solving. In these sublime moments, internal and external patterns are meshing and flow is achieved.

Love Hurts. I daresay there’s two or three poems, six novels and at least twelve songs on the subject. That’s how the Janus-faced beast of poetry gets written in the first place, in all its myriad of magical forms. So; why cover this hitherto uncharted and highly original territory? Why leap fearlessly into the unknown, nostrils flared, eyes flashing fire? Well, in the name of love, lust and limerence, why on earth not? Suffering is gratuitous and pointless, yet also vital, valuable and necessary. My last tête à tête gave me plenty, incorporating elements of the forbidden, of rebellion, pornography, pregnancy, parental approval – followed by fury – of infidelity, friend estrangement, life on one island that was heavenly and a second that veered between purgatorial and infernal, of violence, miscarriage, masturbating Indians, pepper spray, antipathy, disloyalty, evictions, a planned future, failed globetrotting and **** ***, whilst being indicative of a wider, all-encompassing social corrosion, and while the story itself may remain merely hinted at or alluded to in the course of this generalised polemic, it’s as worthy or valid as any other such tale told round the campfire and whispered across the beaches of the world...

You’re not happy unless you’re in a constant state of limerence.” “Limerence.” He tried to take some of the heat out of her tone. “Is this like when you said you wished that I was semelparous, and I was humiliated a second time because I had to look up the word?” She gave a begrudging smile. “It’s a state of infatuation. It’s how you feel when you first fall in love with someone. You’re obsessed with them. Euphoric. They’re all you can think about.” “Sounds great.” “It is, but then you have to take out the garbage and pay the bills and pretend you like your in-laws and that’s a relationship. Limerence gets you into it, but there’s got to be something else that keeps you there.

I really want to pull the pin and toss this bitch right inside Limerence. Bye-bye, whorehouse. Bye-bye, Russian assholes. But every time I get the itching to do it, to watch it all go BOOM, something stops me. That something being more of a someone. Scarlet. You see, she might be inside, and that’s a bit of a problem. The kind of problem, I’m discovering, a grenade just isn’t solving.

Emory Scott hated me, but she hated nearly everyone. So, she was making me work for it. So what? I’d be disappointed if she didn’t. She didn’t respect Michael, Kai, or Damon, either. It shouldn’t hurt. But it did. I always liked her. I always looked for her. And over the years, passing her in the halls and feeling her in the classroom next to me, she got hot as fuck in ways no one else seemed to notice but me. God, she had a mouth on her. I loved her attitude and her anger, because I was always too warm and I needed the ice. It made me smile.

Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you’re attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug.

Limerence (also infatuated love) is a state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and have one's feelings reciprocated.

Love Hurts. I daresay there’s two or three poems, six novels and at least twelve songs on the subject. That’s how the Janus-faced beast of poetry gets written in the first place, in all its myriad of magical forms. So; why cover this hitherto uncharted and highly original territory? Why leap fearlessly into the unknown, nostrils flared, eyes flashing fire? Well, in the name of love, lust and limerence, why on earth not? Suffering is gratuitous and pointless, yet also vital, valuable and necessary. My last tête à tête gave me plenty, incorporating elements of the forbidden, of rebellion, pornography, pregnancy, parental approval – followed by fury – of infidelity, friend estrangement, life on one island that was heavenly and a second that veered between purgatorial and infernal, of violence, miscarriage, masturbating Indians, pepper spray, antipathy, disloyalty, evictions, a planned future, failed globetrotting and habitual lies, whilst being indicative of a wider, all-encompassing social corrosion, and while the story itself may remain merely hinted at or alluded to in the course of this generalised polemic, it’s as worthy or valid as any other such tale told round the campfire and whispered across the beaches of the world. All life’s a roll of the dice, tiger; ride into the bastard storm and if your wounds hurt, be grateful you survived to lick them, even in the darkest nights of the soul when the sun is a mattress fire the god of your love died in. Love Hurts, and in a stupendous and savage cosmos, it’s my right to sit at the keyboard and bleed. Besides, love, poverty and war are the necessary accoutrements to a fulfilled life; this is the all-encompassing theme of our human condition and the crooning, persuasive symphony of that philosophically unfathomable miracle of life itself… especially as love leads to poverty and war. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, after all. I certainly am… we choose our own chains... ~excerpt, "Love Hurts

One non-limerent, on learning of limerence theory, felt that the pain of limerence may be great but that it should not be forgotten that non-limerents hurt, too. He expressed his feelings in a poem about his sadness over having to end a relationship that was dear to him because his lover had begun to demand the impossible in her limerence. ‘We hurt too you know, its not easy to give up a good friend. To see someone change before your very eyes from someone you feel knows and loves you, to someone who is suddenly demanding the impossible. As if you were not you at all.’ This poem tells how strongly I felt the sadness of having to part. I was allowed to keep a copy of the poem to show others. I did. I explained the circumstances of its being written before reading it to a few interviewees. A limerent who was suffering from the pain of non-mutuality gave the following reaction, ‘Okay, I understand what the poem is saying, and I can see that the writer really didn’t like the relationship to break up and all. But frankly, almost from the first line my feelings were for the person addressed in the poem. The person being told to leave by a lover when the crime has only been that of loving.

There is something special about certain people. Obviously, over the course of a lifetime most limerents will meet many people who are potential sexual and romantic partners, but they don’t become limerent for them all. There is something about particular individuals that chimes with the limerent, and often it is recognised at a subconscious level very soon after meeting the potential LO. It’s best described as an immediate sense that this person is romantically potent in some way – they cause what I call “the glimmer”. I suspect that this glimmer is the same elusive “spark” that people complain is missing from a disappointing date, but without the ability to actually articulate what it was that was wrong. But we limerents know an LO when we meet one. Their appearance, their mannerisms, their scent, their laugh – some physical or personality trait accesses the networks in our brains that trigger limerent interest.

We interpret the exchanges with our LO solely from our point of view, and we make up in our heads what we think their responses would be. We are making up all these things in our heads, feeding our own thoughts whilst our LOs are completely oblivious to it all.

Instead of approaching their object of attraction and trying to get to know them better, limerents start heading into fantasy-land and imagining all types of scenarios with their LO.

There is give and take in the relationship. In limerence, the LO usually exists as a fantasy and is never actually present to engage in a two-way relationship with you

uncertainty, the more intensely the individual will ruminate about the LO and the more the limerent individual will seek out reciprocal behaviour from the LO (Wyant, 2021), which further increase the desirability of the LO (Carswell & Impett, 2021).

you may already know by now – limerence is actually a form of addiction. At the heart of addiction is a set of triggers, routines and patterns.

They only cherry-pick and see the good sides about the person and refuse to acknowledge their flaws. Their LOs are perfect in their eyes, but perfection doesn’t exist, especially when we are talking about human beings – who are fundamentally flawed.

There is also evidence in the limerence literature that an “externally imposed obstacle” like in the case of Romeo & Juliet, where they met resistance from family and society, may also serve to feed limerence further.

When we choose to fall for emotionally unavailable partners who cannot show up in our lives in the way we want, or physically unavailable people - those who you literally do not share the same physical space with - it actually is a sign that you are emotionally unavailable for a relationship.

When we struggle to make friends, or the social connections we have are superficial, we don’t feel we have someone who “has our backs” in good or bad times. We don't feel we can trust others. That is what makes it so easy to just disappear into a fantasy relationship with someone whom we can project all of our affection onto.

I've become a junkie for the idea of you. Mainlining potentiality into my veins, getting high on the possibility of us

You're a wave and a particle simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in my thoughts, collapsing into form only when I try to measure your feelings

The key point is to recognise that increased limerence can be an indicator of increased stress, and that the actual problem to solve is the stress.

Mixed signals can also cause insecurity in the limerent, making them even more likely to ruminate over their behaviour and their strategy and, generally, keep guessing about the state of their relationship with LO.

It’s a form of rationalisation or bargaining: we’re only friends. I’ll just wallow here in the shallow end of the relationship pool – the friendzone, if you will – and bathe in their loveliness. No danger of drowning.

Limerence is fundamentally about neurochemistry. It feels spectacular, but that feeling is coming from within you. That means you are the one who can reverse it. Your limerent object may be a splendid person, but they are just a person. Not a god or goddess. Not an angel or demon. Your feelings are not evidence of true love, or a twin flame soul connection. The fact that limerence emerges from your internal world means that the mechanism to stop it lies within you and your ability to understand and manage your emotions.

remarkable ability to emphasise the positive features of the LO, and minimise, or empathise with, the negative.

That’s the basic reality of limerence: sensation overload.

Another issue is that the different attachment styles of LOs will exacerbate or neutralise limerence symptoms. If anxious-preoccupied people are more prone to limerence, then fearful-avoidant types are the perfect LOs – unpredictable, emotionally hot-and-cold, variably available or unattainable

Happiness comes from self-esteem and self-actualisation, and they come most reliably from concrete achievement.

It seems there is some sort of blueprint deeply integrated into each limerent’s psyche that the subconscious mind is able to rapidly access, and if it spots a match, it activates the limerent circuitry.

You become hyperaware of the body language and emotional state of your potential LO. Each interaction is analysed for meaning. Signs of hoped-for reciprocation accelerate the drive to full-blown limerence; overt disinterest or hostility can slam on the brakes. More simply, if the signs of reciprocation are very good – your LO flirts with you, is obviously aroused themselves, and starts fiddling with their hair or laughing at your flimsy jokes – that in itself can be a powerful limerence aphrodisiac.

The final factor for a full-blown limerence reaction seems to be uncertainty. If for some reason there are obstacles to the free expression of mutual feeling, it acts as fuel. Either consummation or direct rejection can lead to the cooling of limerent feelings, but uncertainty seems to inflame them.

Seeking pleasure leads to a life of escalating thrills, risky behaviour and short-term gratification of drives. Seeking happiness, by contrast, leads to long-term thinking, self-discovery, honesty, and consistent work to improve the situation of your life.

They are not that special. Nobody is. You’ve probably had moments of clarity when you’ve seen this, and had that weird dissociative experience of wondering why you are so gaga about someone who is objectively pretty ordinary

Ultimately, there comes the realisation that the LO is detrimental to your life, but you also know you can’t give them up without significant emotional pain. Heads you lose. Tails you really lose.

The intoxication of reverie is a defining feature of limerence, and a primary cause for deepening it.

Murder. Murder is in my future. Limerence was a nice idea, but it looks like it will be prison time for me, unless I can insert him into a wood chipper without getting caught.

Den mand der vendte tilbage den aften, er ikke længere den samme som ham jeg gik rundt med indeni gennem det år hvor han var her, og derefter mens jeg skrev. Den mand kommer jeg aldrig til at se igen. Ikke desto mindre er det denne uvirkelige, næsten ikke eksisterende tilbagevenden der giver min lidenskab den sande mening. Som er at være uden mening - og i to år at have været den mest voldsomme og mest uforklarlige virkelighed.

I chose to trust, because my hormones were surging, and I was limerent and infatuated, and I wanted with all my heart and soul to believe. In us.

Limerence es un estado mental involuntario, resultado de una atracción romántica por parte de una persona hacia otra, combinada con una necesidad imperante y obsesiva de ser correspondido de la misma forma.

What had people done for me that had truly made me fell loved? she had asked me at the next session. I thought about the time K, with a beatific, postcoital smile, wrote I LOVE U in my menstrual blood on his bedroom wall, just above his bed, dipping his middle finger lingeringly into me like a quill into an inkpot as I watched and laughed and my eyes went wide as teacups. Was that gesture a doing or merely a saying? Was it an action verb? Was it empty or was it a promise? Watching him do it gave me the feeling I'd always understood to be love--something low, rumbling, a little bit evil, a little revolting. Some sick and special secret wizardry that fouls you up with its unexpectedness, its brazenness.

It was the purest love any being ever felt for another. A love unspoiled by higher intellect, human frailty, foolishness and foible, limerence or lust or neurotic obsession. She never forgot her boy, never stopped longing for him. Her heart forever broken after she abandoned him while he slept.

So now that you’ve felt all sorts of things,” Mavis said, her eyes red-veined. “Leaving. Limerence. Lust. Love. What will you do tomorrow?

limer /lime/ I. vtr 1. (façonner) to file [ongle, métal]; to file down [clé, aspérité] • avoir les ongles limés | to have filed nails 2. (couper) to file through [barreau] II. vpr • se ~ les ongles | to file one's nails

The last thing that I want you to do is to think that you need to become someone more 'conventional', emotionally-flat and unreactive, because this is a). impossible (suppression never equals healing) and b). entirely unnecessary. Serial limerents are normally quick-witted, verbally-expressive, perceptive, emotionally-astute, analytical lovers of life; I am yet to help someone suffering from limerence who has not had a beautiful command of their first language, someone unusual hobbies and a great degree of interest in affairs of the humand mind. This curious essence does not need to be tampered with in any way, and this is why I treat limerence the way that I do; the wonderful thing about considering the pathology from a psychological-touching-on-spiritual perspective is that it allows you to spot-treat your psyche, only altering elements that do not serve you.

Max Hunt hasn’t even touched me, yet he had me coming so fast and hard that I’m debating building a fucking church in his honour...picturing what it will be like when he finally does, because he will. I see that now.

Since coming across Tennov’s book, I’ve bored a significant number of friends and acquaintances with my excitement about the concept of limerence, and (possibly somewhat impertinently) asked them what they think of it. Their responses have tended to fall into two categories: That’s just love. You don’t need a special word for that. That’s crazy. There’s something wrong with people like that. Curiously enough, that is exactly the reaction that Dorothy Tennov got after publishing her work.

People who have not experienced limerence are baffled by descriptions of it and are often resistant to the evidence that it exists. To such outside observers, limerence seems pathological... it seems inconceivable that a sane person could attach so much importance to another individual.

After five years as a group, and many more spent training, who would the individual members be if BTS were to no longer exist?

Saat kau menjadi dirimu sendiri, bukan jaminan kau disukai orang. Ukuran manusia yang baik berbeda-beda untuk setiap kelompok.

The relationship between limerence and sex remains extremely complicated. Despite virtually unanimous agreement among interviewees that sex with LO under the best circumstances provides the “greatest pleasure” knowable in human existence, it appears that the very nature of limerence and the very nature of sex conspire to undermine the happiness except under the luckiest and most extraordinary of circumstances.

It was an evening of that feeling you wanted to bottle, the feeling that no drug or orgasm could replicate - the skyrocketing high of limerence. I was delighted by everything: the way he paused to think before answering any question, as if whether or not he liked pickles was worthy of deep contemplation; the way he laughed loudly at my offhand jokes; the way his chest looked in his button-down shirt. And he delighted equally in me. It was delightful to be delighted in. By the time we made it back to his apartment, which was just a short walk away, it was not a question of whether the night was ending but, rather, where were we going next. The idea of parting was simply unthinkable. When I gathered my things to return home forty-eight hours later, he seemed adorably confused. "Where are you going?" he asked. "Home." I laughed. "I've been here two nights. How long did you think I would stay?" He looked at me as if it was the strangest thing I'd ever said. "Pippa," he said, "I thought you'd stay forever.

When you listen to a piece of music, for example, sound waves travel through the air at 1,100 feet per second and collide with your eardrums, setting off a chain of vibrations through the tiny bones of the ear, against the membrane of the cochlea; producing tiny electrical charges that reverberate all across the brain. Maybe you don’t know anything about music in the formal sense, but all your life—from the time when you were nursing in rhythm with your mother—you have been unconsciously constructing working models of how music works. You have been learning how to detect timed patterns and anticipate what will come next. Listening to music involves making a series of sophisticated calculations about the future. If the last few notes have had pattern Y, then the next few notes will probably have pattern Z. As Jonah Lehrer writes in his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, “While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music. From the three-minute pop song to the five-hour Wagner opera, the creations of our culture teach us to expect certain musical patterns, which over time are wired into our brain.” When the music conforms to our anticipations, we feel a soothing drip of pleasure. Some scientists believe that the more fluently a person can process a piece of information, the more pleasure it produces. When a song or a story or an argument achieves limerence with the internal models of the brain, then that synchronicity produces a warm swelling of happiness. But the mind also exists in a state of tension between familiarity and novelty. The brain has evolved to detect constant change, and delights in comprehending the unexpected. So we’re drawn to music that flirts with our expectations and then gently plays jokes on them. As Daniel Levitin observes in This Is Your Brain on Music, the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow” arrest our attention with the jarring octave-gap between them, then the rest of the song eases us into a more conventional, soothing groove. In his book Emotion and Meaning in Music, Leonard Meyer showed how Beethoven would establish a clear rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then manipulate it, never quite repeating it. Life is change, and the happy life is a series of gentle, stimulating, melodic changes.

deep in the heavenly mania of lesbian limerence.

Word of the year: limerence noun. An involuntary state of mind caused by a romantic attraction to another person combined with an overwhelming, obsessive need to have one’s feelings reciprocated.

The odd things you sometimes came out with, along with the disparity in our vocabulary, started our tradition of “word of the day” before bedtime. Yours are often better than mine because I let you win too sometimes. Perhaps we could start having a word of the year? This year’s should be “limerence,” I still have a soft spot for that one. I know you think words are important—which makes sense given your chosen career—but I have realized recently that words are just words, a series of letters, arranged in a certain order, most likely in the language we were assigned at birth.

Ivy is carrying two steaming cups of coffee. What a perfect morning. Oh, sweet limerence.

Is it limerence if the feelings of that obsessive attachment are reciprocated?

Thank you, Xero. You’ve saved my life more times than I can count, and I’m not just talking about the men who want me dead. Before you, I was sleepwalking through the years and living vicariously through a character in a manuscript.” Still groping through the narrow hallway, I continue onward. “And I like you a lot, but I’m not sure if it’s love or limerence. I…” I clear my throat. “Put it this way. I don’t have the best track record with men, but it feels different with you. Sometimes, you can love a person, but they never really existed. They were just a figment of your imagination. I don’t want to do that to you.

The illustrious and influential Sigmund Freud dismissed romantic love as merely sex urge blocked. Pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis provided his famous and entirely incorrect mathematical formula: sex plus friendship. (It seems to be neither.) Contemporary sex researchers seldom discuss love since they view sex and love as quite distinct from each other. Psychoanalytic writers have disagreed with each other as well as with the master, Freud. Theodore Reik asserted that sex and love are quite different, although the usual interpretation of Freudian concepts is that they are fused. Psychoanalyst Robert Seidenberg comments that the only similarity he could think of is that neither makes sense. In books with the word “love” in their titles, two of the most widely read writers on mental and emotional life managed to virtually avoid the subject of romantic love: Erich Fromm, in the Art of Loving, dismisses “falling in love” as a clearly unsatisfactory, as well as “explosive,” way to overcome “separateness”; and Rollo May, in his best-selling book Love and Will, forces the reader to search for romantic love in the interstices between sexual, procreational, friendly, and altruistic loves. The general view seemed to be that romantic love is mysterious, mystical, even sacred, and not capable, apparently, of being subjected to the cool gaze of scientific inquiry.

Limerence is not mere sexual attraction. Although something you may interpret as sexual attraction may be, or seem to be, the first feeling, sometimes nothing you would label sexual interest is ever consciously felt. Sex is neither essential nor, in itself, adequate to satisfy the limerent need. But sex is never entirely excluded in the limerent passion, either. Limerence is a desire for more than sex, and a desire in which the sexual act may represent the symbol of its highest achievement: reciprocation. Reciprocation expressed through physical union creates the ecstatic and blissful condition called “the greatest happiness,” and the most profound glorification of the achievement of limerent aims.

Limerence has certain basic components: • intrusive thinking about the object of your passionate desire (the limerent object or “LO”), who is a possible sexual partner • acute longing for reciprocation • dependency of mood on LO’s actions or, more accurately, your interpretation of LO’s actions with respect to the probability of reciprocation • inability to react limerently to more than one person at a time (exceptions occur only when limerence is at low ebb—early on or in the last fading) • some fleeting and transient relief from unrequited limerent passion through vivid imagination of action by LO that means reciprocation • fear of rejection and sometimes incapacitating but always unsettling shyness in LO’s presence, especially in the beginning and whenever uncertainty strikes • intensification through adversity (at least, up to a point) • acute sensitivity to any act or thought or condition that can be interpreted favorably, and an extraordinary ability to devise or invent “reasonable” explanations for why the neutrality that the disinterested observer might see is in fact a sign of hidden passion in the LO • an aching of the “heart” (a region in the center front of the chest) when uncertainty is strong • buoyancy (a feeling of walking on air) when reciprocation seems evident • a general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background • a remarkable ability to emphasize what is truly admirable in LO and to avoid dwelling on the negative, even to respond with a compassion for the negative and render it, emotionally if not perceptually, into another positive attribute.

It’s not love, it's limerence.

I don’t care what I have to do. Who I have to kill. I’ll break you into tiny pieces and rebuild you myself if it means I get to keep you. You’re never leaving me, sweetheart.

Just as all roads once led to Rome, when your limerence for someone has crystallized, all events, associations, stimuli, experience return your thoughts to LO with unnerving consistency. At the moment of awakening after the night’s sleep, an image of LO springs into your consciousness. And you find yourself inclined to remain in bed pursuing that image and the fantasies that surround and grow out of it. Your daydreams persist throughout the day and are involuntary. Extreme effort of will to stop them produces only temporary surcease.

In summary, limerent fantasy is, most of all, intrusive and inescapable. It seems not to be something you do, but something that happens. Most involuntary are the flash visions in which LO is reciprocating. Compelling, seductive, tempting, or even, as one man described them, “tantalizing,” the longer limerent fantasy is a deliberate attempt to achieve relief of the limerent yearning through imagining consummation in a context of possible events. Limerent fantasy is unsatisfactory unless firmly rooted in reality. Sometimes it is retrospective; actual events are replayed in memory. This form predominates when what is viewed as evidence of possible reciprocation can be reexperienced. Otherwise, the long fantasy is anticipatory; it begins in your everyday world and climaxes at the attainment of the limerent goal. The intrusive “flashes” may be symbolic; you find LO’s indication of returned feelings expressed by a look, a word, a handclasp, or embrace. The long fantasies form a bridge between your ordinary life and that intensely desired ecstatic moment. The two types of fantasy are ends of a continuum, not mutually exclusive. The duration and complexity of a fantasy often seem to depend on how much time and freedom from distraction is available. The bliss of the imagined moment of consummation is greater when events imagined to precede it are believed in. In fact, of course, they often represent grave departures from the probable, as an outside observer might estimate them.

When you are limerent, no matter how intensely you desire reciprocation you cannot simply ask for it. You cannot simply inquire as to whether or not it exists. To ask is to risk premature self-disclosure. The interplay is delicate, with the reactions of each person inextricably bound to the behavior of the other. Like a hunter for whom the crackle of a twig in the bush measures the presence of the hunted, you subject LO’s seemingly ordinary postures, movements, words, and glances to incessant analysis in quest of “true” meanings obscured beneath an ambiguous surface. Here, where the path is treacherous and possible consequence profound, face values cannot be trusted. Things may be what they seem or, again, they may in fact be just the opposite of what they seem. Despite ideals and philosophy, you find yourself a player in a process that bears unquestionable similarity to a game. The prize is not trifling; reciprocation produces ecstasy. Whether it will be won, whether it will be shared, and what the final outcome may be, depend on the effectiveness of your moves and those of your LO; indeed on skill. The rocky course of progression toward ecstatic mutuality may involve not externally created difficulties, but the feinting and parrying, the minor deceptions, and the falsehoods of the lovers themselves that are so frequent as often to have been viewed as a “natural” aspect of the romantic love pattern. (They also occur in sexual seduction and in many other forms of human interaction.) The lovers’ fears lead them to proceed with a caution that they hope will protect them from disaster. Rather than commit themselves, they flirt. They send out ambiguous signals more or less as trial balloons. Reason to hope combined with reason to doubt keeps passion at fever pitch. Too-ready limerent availability cools them. Andreas Capellanus, medieval author of The Art of Courtly Love, was neither the first nor the last to advise lovers to. erect artificial barriers and if necessary conceal their true feelings. When Stendhal began to fall in love himself, he feared the failure that certainty could bring and so, for “effect,” he avoided his LO and walked about alone, brooding. You may lose your love through open declaration of your true feelings.

Whether or not sex destroys romantic love or limerence, as moralists have proclaimed vehemently, seems rather to depend on the meaning attached to sex by the two people involved, the limerent meaning. In former times, sexual surrender of a woman to a man also communicated complete social and emotional surrender. If this occurred prematurely so far as the development of the man’s limerence was concerned, the effect was quite different from what it might be among people today for whom sex carries no such connotation of commitment. In other words, sexual surrender once indicated the end of uncertainty in LO’s response, uncertainty that was as necessary then as now for limerence to reach its peak.

At first, I’d set up little tests. I’d say that if at the next meeting she elects to sit beside me or facing me, I will count it as proof that this madness is not unilateral. But when she chose a seat farthest from me, or one which made it very difficult for us to look at one another, I realized that the test was not a test at all. No matter what she did, I could interpret it in my favor. Her remote position in the room could serve the function of helping her to hide feelings as intense as my own. She was as afraid as I was of overt interaction! Of course, if I had been certain of that conclusion, I’d have found it possible to take a positive step, but my thinking on the matter oscillated like a seesaw. Up and down, back and forth, my reactions went, but always with the same final result: I dared not advance.

Scientific research has emphatically confirmed the age-old suspicions concerning the importance of gaze. When we are experiencing intensely pleasurable emotions, our pupils dilate and become larger. Unconsciously and involuntarily, this pupillary reflex can betray feelings. In addition, a small increase in the secretion of the tear ducts causes the eyes to glisten producing “shining eyes of love,” which, when combined with dilation of the pupil, emit signals of amatory interest. Not only that, the eyebrows, once thought designed by nature to keep perspiration from running into our eyes, are now believed at least by some scientists to have as a basic function the indication of mood change. When we are surprised they rise; when we are angered, they lower; and when we are anxious, they knit together. To arch them means to question, and to flick them quickly once up and down is to acknowledge another person in an attitude of friendliness.

While limerence has been called love, it is not love. Although the limerent feels a kind of love for LO at the time, from LO’s point of view limerence and love are quite different from each other. It is limerence, not love, that increases when lovers are able to meet only infrequently or when there is anger between them. No wonder those who view limerence from an external vantage are baffled by what seems more a form of insanity than a form of love. Jean-Paul Sartre calls it a project with a “contradictory ideal.” He notes that each of the lovers seek the love of the other without realizing that what they want is to be loved. His conclusion is that the amorous relation is “a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror game which carries within itself its own frustration,” a kind of “dupery.” It should also be clear now that limerent uncertainly as well as projection can be viewed as the consequence of your limerent inclination to hide your own feelings: If you hide your true reactions, then LO, if indeed limerent, can be expected to do the same. When LO appears not to be eager, or even interested, it is not unreasonable to interpret that behavior as evidence itself of limerence; and a kind of “paranoia” becomes an entirely logical consequence of a situation that may indeed be what Simone de Beauvoir has called it: “impossible.” Because one of the invariant characteristics of limerence is extreme emotional dependency on LO’s behavior, the actual course of the limerence must depend on the actions and reactions of both lovers. Uncertainty increases limerence; increased limerence dictates altered action which serves to increase or decrease limerence in the other according to the interpretation given. The interplay is delicate if the relationship hovers near mutuality; a subtle imbalance, constantly shifting, appears to maintain it. Each knows who “loves more.” If limerence were measurable by an instrument that enabled its intensity to be read by the points on a dial, one could imagine that, if lovers sat together reading each other’s degree of reciprocation, the dials would rarely if ever set themselves at the same point on the scales. For instance, if you found yourself more limerent than your partner, then your limerence might decline through reduced hope, or if your partner’s were higher, it might decline through reduced uncertainty. Perhaps such true awareness would provide a means of controlling the reaction.