“Before you, had I ever known love

Or had I only known misuse

Of the power another had over me”

•  Julie Byrne, Sleepwalker 

I would often wonder why me and many of my friends ended up staying in relationships with people who made us unhappy for so long, or why we pined after those who we knew were walking red flags. I thought, how can this be love if it’s so painful for us, if the mental sacrifice feels so great - why do we return over and over again to these damaging partnerships?

Since discovering the word Limerence my fractured understanding of what love is, and what it is not, has started to make a bit more sense. 

What is love? Baby, don’t hurt me.  

What causes us to fall in love remains as indefinable today as it was when it first broke out as a thing in the olden days of yore. We might think we know what we’re looking for initially; maybe someone who makes us laugh or someone who’s a good cook. However, when that bewitching person pops up, our sprawling lists of delectable traits are often swept to one side, as we blindly surrender ourselves to the magnetic rays of our new found muses.

The reasons we fall in love span across a broad spectrum, featuring a confusing array of subconscious and conscious desires. Maybe we want to start a family, or to have someone to go on adventures with... or we could just be really really horny. This is by no means a complete list.

Whatever our reasons, the feeling we get when we find that special someone seems to be generally the same; a fuzzy sensation of excitement, often accompanied by a lustful longing, where that person becomes the focus of your attention in a big way. 

The one thing we do know is that love is a two way street. Ideally, you’d both end up loving each other equally, in a way that is sustainable in the long term and makes everybody happy.

Limerence on the other hand, is defined as 

“ 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. Limerence can also be defined as an involuntary state of intense romantic desire.” 

Hold up, that sounds very familiar… Love, is that you?

Don’t be fooled by it’s charms. Limerence is more of an obsession than a healthy admiration. The object of your affection lives on a pedestal - the one you made for them in your mind - and your heart aches for them in a mildly painful way that makes you fantasise about somehow ending up in a lift together. 

The similarities between the initial stages of love and the obsessive feeling of limerence are clear though and I believe Limerence can become love… but only once you stop seeing your potential lover as some kind of all healing, all knowing being, that was made specifically for you.

From what I can gather, the path to limerence is paved with attachment issues and is a distracting detour from the big boy path of self actualisation - the motive to realize one's full potential. Essentially, the person you obsess about, the object of your irrepressible fantasies, may actually to you, be the subconscious embodiment of the missing piece in the jigsaw that is your life.

Maybe they remind you of the father who abandoned you, or the mother who never told you she loved you, and so this person becomes a reflective trope. It might feel as though they hold the key, that they and they alone have the ability to crack the case of Who The Hell You Are wide open. This may be because they represent a part of your life that you consider broken or unfulfilled, and through them, you feel as though you can repair that part.

We’re all trying to understand ourselves, and finding basically a modern day version of the person who is missing from your life, or has wronged you in some way and getting them to love you, can seem like a fast track way of dealing with your issues. 

But though this might feel like a shortcut to self actualisation, it is more often than not a painfully unrequited detour that only leads to further rejection and further confirmation that you are ‘not good enough’. 

The problem here is that if this person does not reciprocate, you are left feeling more empty than ever before. You’re rolling the dice in a really big way there and what’s more, even if they do declare their love for you, you are then completely reliant on this person for your self fulfillment. You hold them to an unsustainable standard; they tower over you and are not your equal, which is not Love, it’s worship.

A friend of mine gave up her religion for a man that she thought she was in love with. Her family turned their backs on her. The man she fell for unfortunately was a bit of a tit and basically ghosted her after she did this. She was alone, left with the choice she had made, ostracized from her community and sadly didn’t even get the man she had given it all up for in the first place.

2 years after this rejection, she was still obsessed with eventually being with this man, still painfully convinced that he was the one for her, even though they hadn’t ever officially been going out with each other, and he had told her he wasn’t interested multiple times. 

And it makes sense that she would still be obsessed, because of the scale of the sacrifice she made for this ‘love’. 

She left her family believing she would be filling that void with the love of this man, this personification of ultimate freedom, an embodiment of the parts of her that had been forced to lay dormant because of her religion. But when he turned his back on her, she was left in limbo. She and her family are very close and clearly love each other very much, but now things are different - they live in a different country to her and she doesn’t get to speak to some members because of the religious conflict. 

She pines after her ex, with a mindset that ‘If only he would fall in love with me, then it would all make sense’ but unfortunately, the family shaped hole cannot be filled with this man, and she is left in a suspended state of obsession. This plagues her with bad thoughts about herself and prevents her from finding someone she could actually love.

The danger of limerence is that unlike regular old heartbreak, Limerence doesn’t seem to pass as easily. At some point after a break up, the sun peeks it’s little head out and begins to tentatively shine on you again. Limerence however, as it remains unrequited, often is void of closure (especially if like my friend, the guy is an immature idiot). This makes it extremely hard to move on or let go. You feel all those intense feelings and you are left feeling as though a part of you is missing, the part of you that needed verification that you were worth loving, the part of you that thought this was the key to the next stage of your life.

The saddest thing about Limerence is that it taints your view of what a relationship should be like, and what love should feel like. We all deserve to be loved, and to love our partners equally, so make sure you’re falling for someone and not the power they have over you - or at least, learn how to turn those powerful feelings, if possible, into a reciprocated love. 

So, we’ve gathered that limerence can feel like the first stage of falling in love, or rather, more like the all-consuming crushes that many of us had in our teens. Surely, those intense feelings could translate into something of value? Of course they can, once your rose tinted glasses are put to one side. 

As we’ve noted, when in a state of limerence, the object of our desire is idolised and held to a ridiculous standard of perfection and we’re swamped with overwhelming feelings. These can manifest both physically and emotionally, whenever they creep into our minds or lives, and as you can imagine this intensity of emotion is completely unsustainable. 

If you’re lucky enough to nab your crush, (congrats first of all - teenage me would be in awe of you) there are two ways it can go:

1. If you continue to harbour these obsessive thoughts, rely completely on this person for affirmation and hold this person to an unsustainable standard of perfection, this will eventually lead to a painful break up full of let downs and misunderstandings - your hero has fallen, as of course, they would.
2. The alternative and best outcome is that you drop the facade and get to know the object of your affection properly. If you decide that you actually like the real them, and they like you as you are, you’ve a chance of falling in love with each other as you actually are, ‘flaws’ and all. This does require communication from both sides, which can be difficult, but with mutual respect this should be possible. If you can’t communicate, it’s not worth the misery. There’s nothing worse than feeling alone while in the company of another, particularly someone you idolise.

By being open and honest with each other, instead of hiding things or trying to live up to what you think they want you to be, you will have a much more realistic view of that person over time, which will allow you to move away from obsession and ease into a healthy, accepting and truly loving relationship.