Limerence...

I can’t believe with all I have read and all the time I have spent in my career sitting at love’s demise, I have never heard the term before!  I read it in a book the other day and didn’t know the meaning and wasn’t familiar with the word, so I do what I always do when that happens...I looked it up.

Limerence is an involuntary, consuming state of infatuation with another person. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term in her 1979 book Love and Limerence, after interviewing hundreds of people who described the same experience.

Its main features:

Intrusive thinking. The person (Tennov called them the “limerent object,” or LO) takes up most of your mental space, often for hours a day.

Craving for reciprocation. What you want most is for them to feel the same way. Sex or companionship matters less.

Reading signs. You pick apart small gestures, texts, and glances for hidden meaning.

Mood that depends on them. A warm reply lifts you, and silence or ambiguity sends you down.

Uncertainty keeps it going. Limerence grows on intermittent hope. Obstacles and mixed signals tend to make it stronger, not weaker.

Idealization. You focus on their good qualities and explain away or ignore the rest.

Fear of rejection, often with shyness or awkwardness around them.

How it differs from love: limerence is mostly about wanting something from the other person, while mature love is about knowing them, faults included. It usually fades within months to a few years. It might turn into a lasting bond if the feeling is returned, or burn out when it isn’t, or when reality gets in.

It comes up a lot around divorce and big life changes. People in a lonely or dissatisfied marriage sometimes fall into limerence with someone else, and that can be the spark that ends the marriage. Newly separated people often fall hard for the first person who makes them feel seen again. Naming the experience can help people slow down before they make irreversible decisions while they’re in it. (Claude search - I mean do we have to give credit to the robots?  I am not sure, I guess I need to check my Elements of Style, but first I am going to have to get a newer copy, robots were not invented when I bought mine in 1983).

And after reading the above...I realized that I do not think I have ever been in love.  I have been in limerence  A FUCKING LOT! But Love?  Not so much.

The above describes my dating life up until very recently.  All of my attempts at relating and relationshiping fall into the above definition and I swear to God I didn’t know this until just fucking now.

I have known that I am better at liking and falling than I am at loving.  And I am also better at being liked and wanted than I am at being loved.  I seem to crave the temporal where anything is possible but nothing is lasting.  I like the newness of infatuation far more than I like the drudgery of showing up year after year.  I have just always thought myself immature.  And I suppose that is true.  But I never heard myself described so accurately and so completely until I read the above.  And it has kind of shaken my foundation of what the fuck I have been doing all these years.

I have ordered the book and will devour that fucker as soon as Amazon delivers it...so you can be sure I will be writing about this more, shortly.

But for today, I am just gobsmacked about finding out that all my attempts at what I thought was love, was really just limerence...

Fuck, this explains so fucking much!  So fucking much!

I have been in a place recently that I have, I think, begun to change what I want from dating and love.  I think I am finally accepting that I just can’t do the depth and long term.  I can’t do the forever and I love you. I will never say that I don’t want that one big true right fucking amazing love story, but after all these years, I have to own that I am coming to terms with the fact that, given all my history and trauma and all the shit, I may just not be capable of it for a variety of reasons.  And for a long time, I thought that I would be forever sitting outside dating and relating.  But I have come to think about this differently...perhaps, I am just supposed to own that I am better for a good time, not a long time.  And that good time doesn’t have to be dysfunctional or transactional.  It can be honest, loving and deeply meaningful, but with a clear path towards the exit always.  I think I just need that.  I am not sure I am capable of forever.  And hell for the last ten years, I have not really been capable of even a year.

And I have done the work to change this about myself but I am rounding the corner into some acceptance...that I may just not have the capacity and I am tired of trying to develop a skill that no matter how hard I try, just doesn’t come online.  Perhaps my lot in life is just to limerence my way through, obsessed and obsessing about things, riding those highs and lows.  Delusional in my belief that love is ever going to be produced the way I do it...

Hard to see. 

Hard to accept.

Sigh.

But I have to own a certain level of excitement about this latest revelation. I think it might be akin to someone attempting to play pro sports for years and being good but never great and always being on the DQ list.  Then finally quitting the fucking game and finding that playing a pick up game in the park, finally brings the joy, peace and fun they were looking for all the time.  Right sport, wrong venue.

And this is how I feel about dating.  I have loathed it for fucking ever.  I thought I would much rather just fall in love.  And now, I kinda feel that when I take dating out of the forever, the “I do until death do us part, “ the I love you with all that I am category, I am far more excited to get in the game.  Perhaps, for me, love will just be a pick up game in the part, and not a career that pays handsome dividends to the end of my life?

Who the fuck really knows...

I am just excited for new ideas, new words and a new way to think about a long standing issue!

It may not be progress by your standards, but I feel fucking lit up at the freedom limerence provides for me. I know what I am doing now.  And maybe now that I know that perhaps I can do something else, and if I can’t, at least I am not playing football and calling it soccer any longer.  And that feels pretty right on for now...

Again, still...