Dr L - Living with limerence: A guide for the smitten

Living with Limerence

A GUIDE FOR THE SMITTEN

Dr L

Copyright 2020 lwlonline

All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

For the tribe of fellow limerents at livingwithlimerence.com, without whom this book would never have happened.

Introduction

This is a book about heartache.

The highs are so high but there is always a crash. Always pain afterwards. I just want to feel normal again but can't untangle myself. - J.D.

For the last three years I have written a blog about limerence. It started as a way of processing a personal crisis, but quickly grew into a community of fellow travellers, united by a common experience: they (or someone they love) had become wildly, absurdly, and destructively infatuated with another person.

Since starting the blog, Ive heard from hundreds of limerents and their partners. Some of the stories are upsetting men whose wives have emptied the family savings account and sent all the money to an online scammer theyre infatuated with. Women whose husbands have morphed from a devoted partner and father into a dismissive and cruel adulterer. Some have been limerent for weeks, some for decades. Some stories are comic, some are tragic, but by far the most common emails are from goodhearted people who dont understand what has happened to them. People who never intended to become infatuated with their co-worker, their boss, or their childs teacher, and they want it to stop.

Well... they mostly want it to stop, but also, at a deep, fundamental, and guilty level, they dont really want it to stop because at the beginning it felt fantastic.

The worst part is being completely at the mercy of these super strong emotions. Going between the happiest I have ever felt when there is a positive interaction and the deepest depression when something negative happens. I try to remember the bad times to help me get control and back to some semblance of normality, but all it takes is a word from him and I am back to square one. Logic has absolutely no power with me. - S.B.

This weirdly contradictory mental state is what limerence is all about. When you succumb to limerence, your emotions seem supercharged, and swing between extremes: exhilaration and debilitation, excitement and anxiety, elation and shame. Most of all, though, limerence is about obsession the complete mental capture of your inner world by this other person, until it feels inescapable.

Changes in mood and behaviour this striking must have their root in our brains, and that realisation was the starting point for my efforts to better understand what limerence is and how to live with it. Looked at from the perspective of neuroscience, limerence is comprehensible. Although the phenomenon itself is underinvestigated (and slippery to define), the processes that drive it arousal, reward, sexual desire, pair bonding, craving are well studied and well understood. A lot of the lessons learned in other fields help make sense of limerence too.

So, the purpose of this book is to summarise whats currently known about limerence in an attempt to understand it, and figure out the best way to live with it both from the perspective of the underlying neurochemistry, and from the collective wisdom of the hundreds of limerents who have shared their stories with me.

If I succeed in my aim, this book should be a lean and effective primer for understanding what limerence is, why some people are so good at provoking limerence in others, and how, as a limerent, you can lead a purposeful life. By necessity, therefore, there will be lots of good stuff that I have to leave out. For those interested in an even deeper dive into limerence, you are cordially invited to join the community at livingwithlimerence.com .

There you will find many more resources for limerents, their partners, and professionals that work with clients who are suffering with limerence.

Sometimes there is cake.

Part 1: Limerence

First, we need to understand what limerence is, how it was discovered, and what causes it.

There are multiple levels to be considered, from specific neurotransmitters all the way up to social and cultural pressures. Limerence arises from hard-wired neural systems that were refined over evolutionary history, which are then programmed by our own individual experiences of growing up in a complex social environment.

Given that, its not too surprising its such a powerful force to reckon with.

Chapter 1: What is limerence?

T he obvious starting point for an analysis of limerence is to clearly define what it is. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as one might hope.

The definition of limerence

The word limerence does at least have a very clear historical origin. It was coined in the 1970s by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, to describe a particular mental state that she had identified during her study of romantic love. Through interviews with a wide range of people who were going through the trials and tribulations of romance, Tennov observed that many of her subjects experienced a common set of symptoms during the early stages of falling in love. She saw this pattern of behaviour frequently enough to decide it would be useful to unify the symptoms into a defined state, which she described in her 1979 book Love and Limerence: the experience of being in love . Here is the (paraphrased) list:

I would also add to Tennovs list:

Since coming across Tennovs book, Ive 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:

Curiously enough, that is exactly the reaction that Dorothy Tennov got after publishing her work. People who have personally experienced limerence have no difficulty accepting its validity, and have generally just assumed that it is the universal experience of anyone falling in love. In this assumption, they are, of course, well supported by centuries of literature, poetry, art, music and film that try to express the ecstatic agony of romantic surrender.