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Limerence is the mental state of being madly in love or intensely infatuated when reciprocation of the feeling is uncertain. This state is characterized by intrusive thoughts and idealization of the loved one (also called "crystallization"), typically with a desire for reciprocation to form a relationship. This is accompanied by feelings of ecstasy or despair, depending on whether one's feelings seem to be reciprocated or not. Research on the biology of romantic love indicates that the early stage of intense romantic love (also called passionate love) resembles addiction.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term "limerence" as an alteration of the word "amorance" without other etymologies. The concept grew out of her work in the 1960s when she interviewed over 500 people on the topic of love, originally published in her book Love and Limerence.: "Tennov (1979) interviewed more than five hundred passionate lovers. Almost all lovers took it for granted that passionate love (which Tennov labels 'limerence') is a bittersweet experience." According to Tennov, "to be in a state of limerence is to feel what is usually termed 'being in love. She coined the term to disambiguate the state from other less-overwhelming emotions, and to avoid the implication that people who don't experience it are incapable of love.
According to Tennov and others, limerence can be considered romantic love,: "Despite the attempts to define and describe romantic love, no single term or definition has been universally adopted in the literature. The psychological literature often uses the terms 'romantic love,' 'love,' and 'passionate love' .... Seminal work called it 'limerence' (Tennov, 1979). The biological literature generally uses the term 'romantic love' ... or being 'in love' .... In this review, what we term 'romantic love' encompasses all of these definitions, descriptions, and terms." falling in love,: "Numerous researchers accord with a basic distinction between infatuation (also known as ... limerence) and attachment .... In a self-report study of over 1,000 individuals, Tennov (1979) found that infatuation was characterized by intense desires for proximity and physical contact, resistance to separation, feelings of excitement and euphoria when receiving attention and affection from the partner, fascination with the partner's behavior and appearance, extreme sensitivity to his or her moods and signs of interest, and intrusive thoughts of the partner." love madness,: "Tennov discovered that many who considered themselves 'madly in love' had similar descriptions of their emotions and actions. She chose the label limerence to describe an intense longing and desire for another person that is much stronger than a simple infatuation, but not the same as a long-lived love that could last a life-time. ... In 2002, Helen Fisher, PhD, in concert with other researchers, published the article 'Defining the Brain Systems of Lust, Romantic Attraction, and Attachment' in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Considered a leading researcher ..., she and her research colleagues have identified several characteristics of a person who is 'madly in love,' or, as we put it, in limerence." intense infatuation, passionate love with obsessive elements or lovesickness. Limerence is also sometimes compared and contrasted with a crush, with limerence being much more intense, impacting daily life and functioning more.
Love and Limerence has been called the seminal work on romantic love, with Tennov's survey results and the various personal accounts recounted in the book largely marking the start of data collection on the phenomenon.
Joe Beam calls limerence the feeling of being madly in love. Nicky Hayes describes it as "a kind of infatuated, all-absorbing passion", the type of love Dante Alighieri felt towards Beatrice or that of Romeo and Juliet. It is this unfulfilled, intense longing for the other person which defines limerence, where the individual becomes "more or less obsessed by that person and spends much of their time fantasising about them". Hayes suggests that "it is the unobtainable nature of the goal which makes the feeling so powerful", and occasional, intermittent reinforcement may be required to support the underlying feelings. Frank Tallis calls limerence "love that does not need liking—love that may even thrive in response to rejection or contempt" and notes the "striking similarities" with addiction.
A central feature of limerence for Tennov was the fact that her participants really saw the object of their affection's personal flaws, but simply overlooked them or found them attractive. Tennov calls this "crystallization", after a description by the French writer Stendhal. This "crystallized" version of a love object, with accentuated features, is what Tennov calls a "limerent object", or "LO".
Limerence has psychological properties akin to passionate love, but in Tennov's conception, limerence begins outside of a relationship and before the person experiencing it knows for certain whether it's reciprocated. Tennov observes that limerence is therefore frequently unrequited and argues that some type of situational uncertainty is required for the intense mental preoccupation to occur. Uncertainty could be, for example, barriers to the fulfillment of a relationship such as physical or emotional distance from the LO, or uncertainty about how the LO reciprocates the feeling. Some people may also fear intimacy so that they distance themselves and avoid a real connection.
Not everyone experiences limerence. Tennov estimated that 50% of women and 35% of men experience limerence based on answers to certain survey questions she administered. Another survey administered by neuroscientist and limerence blogger Tom Bellamy indicated that 64% had experienced it at least once, and 32% "found it so distressing that it was hard to enjoy life". A 2025 study of the largest cross-cultural survey of currently in-love people in relationships categorized 29.42% of the study as "intense" romantic lovers, and 28.57% of those fell in love before their relationship. (That is, only 8.4% of the study were both intensely in love and also fell in love before their relationship. The majority of participants fell in love after their relationship started.)
Limerence can be difficult to understand for those who have never experienced it, and it is thus often derided and dismissed as undesirable, some kind of pathology, ridiculous fantasy or a construct of romantic fiction. According to Tennov, limerence is not a mental illness, although it can be "highly disruptive and extremely painful", "irrational, silly, embarrassing, and abnormal" or sometimes "the greatest happiness" depending on who is asked.
Many writers on love have complained about semantic difficulties. The dictionary lists two dozen different meanings of the word "love". And how does one distinguish between love and affection, liking, fondness, caring, concern, infatuation, attraction, or desire? ... Acknowledgment of a distinction between love as a verb, as an action taken by the individual, and love as a state is awkward. Never having fallen in love is not at all a matter of not loving, if loving is defined as caring. Furthermore, this state of "being in love" included feelings that do not properly fit with love defined as concern.
(The type of love that focuses on caring for others is called compassionate love or agape.)The other principle reason given is that she encountered people who do not experience the state. The first such person Tennov discovered was a long-time friend, Helen Payne, whose unfamiliarity with the state of limerence emerged during a conversation on an airplane flight together. Tennov writes that "describing the intricacies of romantic attachments" to Helen was "like trying to describe the color red to one blind from birth". Tennov labels such people "nonlimerents" (a person not currently experiencing limerence), but cautions that it seemed to her that there is no nonlimerent personality and that potentially anyone could experience the state of limerence. Tennov says:
I adopted the view that never being in this state was neither more nor less pathological than experiencing it. I wanted to be able to speak about this reliably identifiable condition without giving love's advocates the feeling something precious was being destroyed. Even more important, if using the term "love" denoted the presence of the state, there was the danger that absence of the state would receive negative connotations.
Tennov addresses the issue of whether limerence is love in several other passages. In one passage she clearly says that limerence is love, at least in certain cases:
In fully developed limerence, you feel additionally what is, in other contexts as well, called love—an extreme degree of feeling that you want LO to be safe, cared for, happy, and all those other positive and noble feelings .... That's probably why limerence is called love in all languages. ... Surely limerence is love at its highest and most glorious peak.
However, Tennov then switches in tone and tells a fairly negative story of the pain felt by a woman reminiscing over the time she wasted pining for a man she now feels nothing towards, something which occupied her in a time when her father was still alive and her children "were adorable babies who needed their mother's attention." Tennov says this is why we distinguish limerence (this "love") from other loves. In another passage, Tennov says that while affection and fondness do not demand anything in return, the return of feelings desired in the limerent state means that "Other aspects of your life, including love, are sacrificed in behalf of the all-consuming need." and that "While limerence has been called love, it is not love."
In this sense, romantic love is idealized, unrealistic and irrational, the kind of love often found in a fairy-tale depicting a tragedy. This can be contrasted with rational, practical and pragmatic love, or the kind of love found in steady, long-term relationships.
The literary genre of romantic love dates back to troubadour poetry from the Middle Ages (or earlier) and the doctrine of courtly love. Tennov credits the cleric Andreas Capellanus as describing the state of limerence "very accurately" in The Art of Courtly Love, a book of statutes for the "proper" conduct of lovers. The work includes rules such as "A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by the thoughts of his beloved." and "The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized." This work helped spread the cultural doctrine of romantic love throughout Europe. Because of the literary and cultural origins of the term, the romantic love phenomenon is sometimes held to be Social construct (especially by critics, according to Tennov); however, Tennov argues that limerence has a biological basis and evolutionary purpose.
Tennov also sometimes considers limerence to be synonymous with "falling" in love, a concept which also has origins in the romantic tradition and the idea that love is tragic. To "fall" in love evokes a connotation of physically falling over. One influential work in the middle ages described lovers who frequently fainted or lost consciousness.
Romantic love is also often used as a synonym for passionate love, also called "being in love", and also often associated with limerence. Academic literature has never universally adopted a single term for this. Helen Fisher has commented that she prefers the term "romantic love" because she thinks it has meaning in society.: "I don't think there is any difference between. I used to know Dorothy and I guess she wanted to invent a new term, and that was fine. I don't mind that, but I actually like the term of romantic love. Her concept of limerence was a rather sad one. It had a sad component to it. Anyway, she created a new term. It's a perfectly fine term. I could have used it myself. I decided not to because I felt that the term romantic love had meaning in society and I didn't see the need for a new term. But I certainly liked her work. I certainly read her book. I certainly knew her. I admired her. And I didn't happen to adopt the term limerence, but if people want to use it, fine with me. ... My memory of limerence—and this is—she wrote that book in 1979, so I—and then she died pretty recently—and she was sick, and even the day that I met her at a conference, she was with her son who she really needed for, I don't know, for emotional or physical support. From my reading of it, she sort of felt that limerence was a somewhat unhealthy experience, that it so overtook you and could lead to some disaster."
A state of intense longing for union with an other. Reciprocated love (union with the other) is associated with fulfillment and ecstasy. Unrequited love (separation) with emptiness; with anxiety, or despair. A state of profound physiological arousal.
Passionate love is linked to passion, as in intense emotion, for example, joy and fulfillment, but also anguish and agony. Hatfield notes that the original meaning of passion " was agony—as in Christ's passion." Passionate love is contrasted with companionate love, which is "the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined". Companionate love is felt less intensely and often follows after passionate love in a relationship.Passionate love is commonly measured using the Passionate Love Scale (PLS), which was originally designed to measure the same state denoted by limerence. The PLS has been critiqued as having questions which are overly broad, and it actually has two general factors: an obsession factor and a non-obsession factor. The PLS obsession factor has questions like "Sometimes I feel I can't control my thoughts; they are obsessively on my partner." and "An existence without my partner would be dark and dismal." Limerence has been compared to passionate love with obsession:
Passionate love, "a state of intense longing for union with another" ..., also referred to as ... "limerence" (Tennov, 1979), includes an obsessive element, characterized by intrusive thinking, uncertainty, and mood swings.
In Love and Limerence, Dorothy Tennov also lists passionate love among several synonyms for limerence, and refers to one of Hatfield's early writings on the subject. However, the focus of Tennov's study was on the aspects of love that produced distress, and on individuals rather than relationships. She has also said that one of the problems she encountered in her studies is that her interview subjects would use terms like "passionate love", "romantic love" and "being in love" to refer to mental states other than what she refers to as limerence. For example, some of her nonlimerent interviewees would use the word "obsession", yet not report the intrusive thoughts necessary to limerence, only that "thoughts of the person are frequent and pleasurable".
In the triangular theory of love, by Robert Sternberg, "infatuation" refers to romantic passion without intimacy (or closeness) and without commitment. Sternberg has stated that infatuation in his theory is essentially the same as limerence. Another related concept (which also has qualities reminiscent of limerence) is "fatuous love", which is romantic passion with a commitment made in the absence of intimacy. This can be, for example, lovers in the throes of new passion who commit to marry without really knowing each other well enough to know if they are suitable partners. In this situation, their passion usually wanes over time, turning into a commitment alone (called "empty love") and they become unhappy.
When limerence is a component in an affair, for example, Fisher's theory can be used to help explain this. Fisher's theory is that while a person can feel deep attachment for a long-term spouse, they can also feel limerence for somebody else, just as how one can also feel sexual attraction towards other people. Joe Beam comments that if somebody in a committed relationship ends up in limerence like this, it will pull them out of their relationship.
Fisher's theory has also been used to explain why some people can feel "Platonic love" limerence without sexual desire, because sexual desire is separate from romantic love.: "Most researchers acknowledge a distinction between the earlier 'passionate' stage of love, sometimes called 'limerence' (Tennov, 1979), and the later-developing 'companionate' stage of love .... Although it may be easy to imagine sexual desire without romantic love, the notion of 'pure,' 'platonic,' or 'nonsexual' romantic love is somewhat more controversial. Yet empirical evidence indicates that sexual desire is not a prerequisite for romantic love, even in its earliest, passionate stages. Many men and women report having experienced romantic passion in the absence of sexual desire (Tennov, 1979) ...." Lisa Diamond argues this is possible even in contradiction to one's sexual orientation, because the brain systems evolved by repurposing the systems for mother-infant bonding (a process called exaptation). According to this theory, it would not have been adaptive for a parent to only be able to bond with an opposite sex child, so the systems must have evolved independent of sexual orientation. People most often fall in love because of sexual desire, but Diamond suggests time spent together and physical touch can serve as a substitute. In Dorothy Tennov conception, sexual attraction was an essential component of limerence (as a generalization); however she did note that occasionally people described to her what seemed to fit the pattern of limerence, but without sexual attraction. Additionally, for those who do have a sexual interest, their desire for emotional union and commitment is a far greater concern to them.
In Helen Fisher's taxonomy, limerence and attachment are considered different systems with different purposes. In the past, other authors have also suggested that limerence could be related to the anxious attachment style. However, in their original 1987 paper conceptualizing romantic love as an attachment process (and relating limerence to attachment style), Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver also caution that they are not implying that the early phase of romance is equivalent to being attached. Other prominent authors have also criticized the idea that attachment theory can replace concepts like love styles or types of love.
A 1990 study found that the 15% of participants who self-reported an anxious attachment style scored highly on limerence measures (especially obsessive preoccupation and emotional dependence scales), but found considerable overlap of distributions between all three attachment styles and limerence. Studies and a meta-analysis by Bianca Acevedo & Arthur Aron found that while passionate love with obsession is associated with relationship satisfaction in short-term relationships, it's associated with slightly decreased satisfaction over the long-term and they speculate this could be related to insecure attachment.
A manic lover is obsessively preoccupied with the beloved. When asked to recall their childhood, a typical manic lover recalls it as unhappy, and they are usually lonely, dissatisfied adults. They are anxious to fall in love; however, they are unsure of which physical type they prefer. Because they are unsure of who to fall in love with, they often fall in love with somebody quite inappropriate (even somebody they initially dislike) and project onto them qualities they want but do not actually have. According to Lee, "Mania can become almost an addiction nearly impossible for the addict to end on his own initiative." Mania is often the first love style of a young person, but others may not experience it until middle age—for example, after a marriage has lost its interest. According to Lee, a cycle of manic loves is often caused by a desperate need to be in love, the cause of which the manic lover must locate and remedy to break free.
While Lee describes the manic lover as Jealousy, Tennov states that people can be limerent and not be jealous. Rather, according to Tennov, what a limerent person desires is exclusivity and this is often mistaken for jealousy.
Among the other love styles, mania can be closely compared to eros (or erotic love). Both are often considered "romantic love", and mania and eros taken together correspond to passionate love. Like the manic lover, the erotic lover is also intensely preoccupied with their beloved, but the thoughts are optimistic while a manic lover is insecure. Unlike a manic lover, the erotic lover is aware of which physical type they consider ideal. As such, eros begins with a powerful initial attraction, referred to by Stendhal as "a sudden sensation of recognition and hope". Because the erotic lover is in search of an ideal, the eros love style is not "blind". According to Lee, only manic lovers typically "crystallize" and ignore the shortcomings and flaws of their beloved. The erotic lover also recalls their childhood as happy and eros has been associated with secure attachment, while mania has been associated with attachment anxiety and neuroticism. A third love style, manic eros, is a mixture of the two, where the lover is "moving either toward a more stable eros or toward full-blown mania". Some are typical erotic lovers under a temporary strain (moving toward mania), while others are typical manic lovers with a self-confident and helping partner (moving toward eros).
According to Lee, the love style ludus (noncommittal love as a game, avoidance and juggling multiple partners, e.g. Don Juan) and mania possess a "fatal attraction" for one another. It's surprisingly common, but not a good match for happy, mutual love. According to Tennov, Don Juan was probably nonlimerent, "more interested in exploiting the feeling in others for his own sexual gratification". However, Tennov states that being nonlimerent and being exploitative are unlikely to be related.
The sexologist John Money regarded erotomanic delusions to be a type of lovesickness, which he defined in terms of unrequited limerence.: "Lovesickness may take the form of a bizarre and obsessional fixation known in the clinical sexological literature as Clérambault-Kandinsky syndrome (CKS) ..., and also known as erotomania .... The CKS person is falsely convinced, to the point of delusion, that the target of his/her one-sided limerence is actually limerent in return, but dares not reveal it until a later date, even years ahead." Helen Fisher and colleagues have stated that erotomania may actually be a type of schizophrenia, and may not involve the brain reward system activity and addiction mechanics involved with intense romantic love. The term "erotomania" was coined by Hippocrates, historically also did not have a precise definition and may have actually reflected disorders such as nymphomania.
For what ultimate cause might the state of limerence be a proximate cause? In other words, why were people who became limerent successful, maybe more successful than others, in passing their genes on to succeeding generations ...—in the long run, that is .... Did limerence evolve to cement a relationship long enough to get the offspring up and running? ... The most consistent result of limerence is mating, not merely sexual interaction but also commitment, the establishment of a shared domicile in the form of a cozy nest built for the enjoyment of ecstasy, for reproduction, and for the rearing of children.
According to the evolutionary theory by anthropologist Helen Fisher, limerence is the activation of a motivation system for choosing and focusing energy on a potential mating partner. This brain system evolved for mammalian mate choice, also called "courtship attraction". In this phenomenon, a preferred mating partner is chosen based on a display of physical traits (such as a peacock's tail feathers) or other behaviors. Fisher also includes the attraction to personality traits and other characteristics in her mate choice theory for humans.: "Passionate love, obsessive love, being in love, whatever you wish to call it. ... In short, Explorers preferentially sought Explorers, Builders sought other Builders, and Directors and Negotiators were drawn to one another." Who a person falls in love with then is determined by their "Lovemap", a largely unconscious list of traits they desire in an ideal partner. Love maps begin forming during childhood based on experiences with parents and friends, among other associations, but also change over time. In most species, courtship attraction is brief, but intense romantic love can last much longer in humans. A competing evolutionary theory to Fisher's is that courtship attraction only encompasses love at first sight attraction, and the obsessive thoughts and intense attraction associated with early-stage romantic love instead evolved by Exaptation (or re-using) the brain systems for mother-infant bonding. In this theory, romantic love may serve the function of mate choice but the brain systems were not originally for this. In Fisher's theory, only the attachment system is co-opted in this way.
Tennov has suggested that if the neurophysiological "machinery" for limerence is not a universal among all humans, then having both (limerent and nonlimerent) in the population might be beneficial and an evolutionarily stable strategy.
In addiction research, a distinction is drawn between "wanting" a reward (i.e. incentive salience, tied to mesocorticolimbic dopamine) and "liking" a reward (i.e. pleasure, tied to hedonic hotspots), aspects which are dissociable. People can be addicted to drugs and compulsively seek them out, even when taking the drug no longer results in a high or the addiction is detrimental to one's life. They can also "want" (i.e. feel compelled towards, in the sense of incentive salience) something which they do not Cognition wish for. In a similar way, people who are in love may "want" a loved person even when interactions with them are not pleasurable. For example, they may want to contact an ex-partner after a rejection, even when the experience will only be painful. It is also possible for a person to be "in love" with somebody they do not like, or who treats them poorly. Fisher's team proposes that romantic love is a "positive addiction" (i.e. not harmful) when requited and a "negative addiction" when unrequited or inappropriate.
In brain scans of long-term intense romantic love (involving subjects who professed to be "madly" in love, but were together with their partner 10 years or more), attraction similar to early-stage romantic love was associated with dopamine reward center activity ("wanting"), but long-term attachment was associated with the Globus pallidus, a site for opioid receptors identified as a hedonic hotspot ("liking"). Long-term romantic lovers also showed lower levels of obsession compared to those in the early stage.
For a person in limerence that goes unrequited, the pleasurable aspects tend to diminish over time, with the person becoming lovesick and the addiction being maintained more by avoidance of the pain of separation.: "Unrequited love is a synonym for unrequited limerence. It leaves a person vulnerable to an attack of lovesickness. Lovesickness may be transitory or prolonged, and major or minor in degree. It may be brought on by a person's anticipatory uncertainty about getting or not getting a reciprocal response to his/her limerence. Lovesickness may be brought on also by unequal proportions of limerence, for example, 100:70 instead of 100:100. The most unequal match is 100:0, total rejection. The formal definition of lovesickness (Money, 1986) is as follows. lovesickness: the personal experience and manifest expression of agony when the partner with whom one has fallen in love is a total mismatch whose response is indifference, or a partial mismatch whose reciprocity is incomplete, deficient, anomalous, or otherwise unsatisfactory."
The physiological effects of limerence include trembling, pallor, flushing, weakness, sweating, butterflies in the stomach and a Palpitations. According to Tennov, the sensation of limerence is associated primarily with the heart: "When I asked interviewees in the throes of the limerent condition to tell where they felt the sensation of limerence, they pointed unerringly to the midpoint in their chest. So consistently did this occur that it would seem to be another indication that the state described is indeed limerence ...."
Lovesickness has been pathologized in previous centuries, but is not currently in the ICD-10, ICPC or DSM-5.: "The feeling of romantic love (also 'infatuated love' or 'limerence'; see Tennov, 1998) is the strongest sensation known to humankind and is characterized by a mix of unbearable exhilarating joy, anxiety, obsessive thinking and craving for emotional and physical union .... ... Unrequited love, erotic frustration and the craving for the beloved object manifest themselves in what is commonly referred to as lovesickness (see Tennov, 1998). This often depressive and melancholic state of mind is characterized by intrusive thinking and also has an addictive component." Author and clinical psychologist Frank Tallis has made the argument that all love—even normal love—is largely indistinguishable from mental illness. There's a debate among academics over whether addiction is really a "true" mental illness, but some forms of addiction are nevertheless treated as one by the DSM (for example, gambling addiction). Some have argued that all romantic love can be considered an addiction, although the lovers described by Tennov and Hite bear a particularly striking resemblance to addicts. Limerence was not intended to denote an abnormal state, however, and lovesickness is no longer recognized as a medical condition.
The symptoms of lovesickness also bear resemblance to many other entries in the DSM. For example, when people fall in love, there are four core symptoms: preoccupation, episodes of melancholy, episodes of rapture and instability of mood. These correspond with conventional diagnoses of obsessionality (or OCD), depression, mania (or hypomania) and Bipolar disorder. Other examples are physical symptoms similar to (Palpitations, Tremor, shortness of breath and lightheadedness), excessive worry about the future which resembles generalized anxiety disorder, appetite disturbance and sensitivity about one's appearance which resembles anorexia nervosa, and the feeling that life has become a dream which resembles derealization and depersonalization. Bioethics Brian Earp and colleagues have argued that the voluntary use of anti-love biotechnology (for example, a drug made to cause the person who uses it to fall out of love) could be ethical, but there is currently no drug which is a realistic candidate.
There's also a debate about the involuntary nature of romantic love. The notion that falling in love is an involuntary process is different from the issue of whether one's behavior can be considered Autonomy while in love. Tallis argues that love evolved to override rationality so that one finds a lover and reproduces regardless of the personal costs of bearing and raising a child. He uses the example of Charles Darwin who, never being romantic, is said to have sat and made a list of reasons to marry or not to marry. Being accustomed to total freedom and worrying about such things as financial austerities that would limit his expenditure on books, Darwin found his reasons not to marry greatly outweighed his reasons to marry. However, shortly thereafter Darwin unexpectedly fell in love, suddenly becoming preoccupied with cozy images of married life and thus quickly converting from bachelor to husband. Tallis writes:
At first sight, it seems extraordinary that evolutionary forces might conspire to shape something that looks like a mental illness to ensure reproductive success. Yet, there are many reasons why love should have evolved to share with madness several features—the most notable of which is the loss of reason. Like the ancient Humorism model of love sickness, evolutionary principles seem to have necessitated a blurring of the distinction between normal and abnormal states. Evolution expects us to love madly, lest we fail to love at all.
According to Tennov, "Love has been called a madness and an affliction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks and probably earlier than that." Historical accounts of lovesickness attribute it, for example, to being struck by an arrow shot by Eros, to a sickness entering through the eyes (similar to the evil eye), to an excess of black bile, or to spells, Love potion and other magic. Attempts to treat lovesickness have been made throughout history using a variety of plants, natural products, charms and rituals. The first known treatise on lovesickness is Remedia Amoris, by the poet Ovid.
Yes I knew he gambled, I knew he sometimes drank too much, and I knew he didn't read a book from one year to the next. I knew and I didn't know. ... I dwelt on his wavy hair, the way he looked at me, the thought of his driving to work in the morning, his charm (that I believed must surely affect everyone he met), the flowers he sent, .... Okay! I know it's crazy, that my list of 'positives' sounds silly, but those are the things I think of, remember, and, yes, want back again!
This kind of "misperception" or "love is blind" bias is more often referred to as "idealization", which modern research considers to be a form of positive illusions. For example, a 1996 study found that "Individuals were happier in their relationships when they idealized their partners and their partners idealized them." However, Tennov argues against the term "idealization", because she says that it implies that the image seen by the person experiencing romantic passion "is molded to fit a preformed, externally derived, or emotionally needed conception". In crystallization, she says, "the actual and existing features of LO merely undergo enhancement."A limerent person may overlook red flags or incompatibilities. Tennov notes that the bias can be an impediment to a limerent person wishing to recover from the condition, as another of her interviewees says:
I decided to make a list in block letters of everything about Elsie that I found unpleasant or annoying. It was a very long list. On the other side of the paper, I listed her good points. It was a short list. But it didn't help at all. The good points seemed so much more important, and the bad things, well, in Elsie they weren't so bad, or they were things I felt I could help her with.
A limerent person can spend time fantasizing about future events even if they never come true, as the anticipation on its own yields dopamine. According to Tennov, limerent fantasy is unsatisfactory unless rooted in reality, because the fantasizer may want the fantasy to seem realistic enough to be somewhat possible. The fantasies can nevertheless be wildly unrealistic, for example, one person related to her an elaborate rescue fantasy in which he saves an LO's 5-year-old cousin from a group of motorcycles only to be bitten by a snake and die in his LO's lap. This fantasizing along with the replaying of actual memories forms a bridge between one's ordinary life and the eventual hoped for moment of consummation. Tennov says that limerent fantasy is "inescapable", something that just "happens" as opposed to something one "does".
One theory of obsessive thinking draws from the parallel with drug addiction: as the early stage of romantic love is compared to addiction to a person, and drug addicts also exhibit obsessive thinking about drug use. Tennov has written that limerent fantasy based in reality "can be conceived as intricate strategy planning". In the late 1990s, it had also been speculated that being in love may lower serotonin levels in the brain, which could cause the intrusive thoughts. The serotonin hypothesis is based in part on a comparison to obsessive–compulsive disorder, but the experimental evidence is ambiguous. The experiments have tested blood levels of serotonin, with the first experiment finding lowered serotonin levels, but the second experiment finding that men and women were affected differently. This second experiment found that obsessive thinking was actually associated with increased serotonin levels in women.
For some people who have a fear of intimacy or a history of trauma, limerent fantasy might be an escape or a means of having what feels like a relationship but without the threat of real intimacy.
The recognition that some uncertainty must exist has been commented on and complained about by virtually everyone who has undertaken a serious study of the phenomenon of romantic love. Psychologists Ellen Bersheid and Elaine Hatfield discussed this common observation made, they note, by Socrates, Ovid, the Kama Sutra, and "Dear Abby," that the presentation of a hard-to-get as opposed to an immediately yielding exterior is a help in eliciting passion.
Rather than being an emotion itself, romantic love is a motivational state which can produce different emotions depending on the situation: positive feelings when things go well and negative feelings when things go awry. As one of Tennov's interviewees recalls it, "When I felt Barry loved me, I was intensely in love and deliriously happy; when he seemed rejecting, I was still intensely in love, only miserable beyond words." According to Tennov's theory, the goal of limerence is "oneness" with the LO, i.e. mutual reciprocation or return of feelings, and two elements are required for limerence to develop and intensify: hope and uncertainty. There must be at least some hope that the LO will reciprocate, but uncertainty over LO's true feelings is required for the most intense preoccupation and mood changes to occur. Reciprocation is a matter of perception on the part of the limerent person, therefore Tennov says the goal of limerence is "removing uncertainty" about whether or not the LO reciprocates. Limerence then subsides when either 1) all hope of reciprocation is ended, 2) the limerent person enters a relationship with the LO and receives adequate reciprocation or 3) limerence is "transferred" to a different LO.
Uncertainty has been interpreted as intermittent reinforcements, which prolong the duration of limerence and keep the brain "hooked" in. When people behave inconsistently or contrary to expectations this can spark passion (ecstasy or agony). Robert Sternberg has written that passionate or infatuated love essentially thrives under these conditions: "Tennov's (1979) analysis suggests that limerence can survive only under conditions in which full development and consummation of love is withheld and in which titillation of one kind or another continues over time. Once the relationship is allowed to develop or once the relationship becomes an utter impossibility, extinction seems to take place." Hence, Judson Brewer characterizes the uncertainty of receiving an occasional message from an LO as "gasoline poured on the fire". "Limerence can live a long life sustained by crumbs," according to Tennov, who compares uncertainty to gambling: "Both gamblers and limerents find reason to hope in wild dreams."
Uncertainty can be introduced by the presence of barriers to a relationship, or what Tennov calls "intensification through adversity". The presence of barriers was crucial to the mutual limerence of Romeo and Juliet, hence this is often called "the Romeo and Juliet effect." Helen Fisher calls it "frustration attraction", and has suggested that it happens because dopamine levels increase in the brain when an expected reward is delayed. Another theory promoted by Fisher is that separation evokes panic and stress, or activation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis. According to Tennov, "It is limerence, not love, that increases when lovers are able to meet only infrequently or when there is anger between them."
One can attempt to extinguish limerence by removing any hope that an LO will reciprocate.Dorothy Tennov (2025). 9789069843056, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. ISBN 9789069843056 An individual who is the object of unwanted attraction should give the clearest possible rejection to the limerent person, rather than something more ambiguous like "I like you as a friend, but...".
Shaver and Hazan observed that those suffering from loneliness are more susceptible to limerence, arguing that "if people have a large number of unmet social needs, and are not aware of this, then a sign that someone else might be interested is easily built up in that person's imagination into far more than the friendly social contact that it might have been. By dwelling on the memory of that social contact, the lonely person comes to magnify it into a deep emotional experience, which may be quite different from the reality of the event."
Tennov's estimate of 18 months to 3 years is sometimes used as the normal duration of romantic love. The other common estimate, 12–18 months, comes from Donatella Marazziti's experiment comparing the serotonin levels of people in love with OCD patients. In this experiment, subjects who had fallen in love within the past 6 months (who were in a relationship) were measured to have serotonin levels which were different from controls, levels which returned to normal after 12–18 months.
According to Tennov, ideally limerence will be replaced by another type of love. In this way, feelings may evolve over the duration of a relationship: "Those whose limerence was replaced by affectional bonding with the same partner might say, 'We were very much in love when we married; today we love each other very much. The more stable type of love which is usually the characteristic of long-term relationships is commonly called companionate love, storge or attachment.
In a technique called cognitive reappraisal, one focuses on positive or negative aspects of the beloved, the relationship, or imagined future scenarios:
Preliminary results from a 2024 study of online limerence communities conducted by Langeslag found that negative reappraisal decreased limerence for the study participants. A therapist named Brandy Wyant has also had her limerent clients list reasons their LO is not perfect, or reasons they and their LO are not compatible. Love regulation doesn't switch feelings on or off immediately, so Langeslag recommends, for example, writing a list of things once a day to feel a lasting change.
Based on the addiction theory of romantic love, Helen Fisher and colleagues recommend that rejected lovers remove all reminders of their beloved, such as letters or photos, and avoid contact with the rejecting partner. Reminders can cause cravings which prolong recovery. Fisher et al. also suggests that positive contact with friends could reduce cravings. Rejected lovers should stay busy to distract themselves, and engage in self-expanding activities. Setting a "no contact" rule during recovery can also facilitate self-care and time to reflect on the situation.
Limerence and romantic love in general have been compared to OCD since 1998, according to a hypothesis invented by other authors. This was partly based on a theoretical comparison between preoccupation features, like worries about a family member being harmed and a need for things to be "just right". This hypothesis is also sometimes paired with a theory involving the neurotransmitter serotonin, but experimental evidence for that is ambiguous. A 2025 study found no association between SSRI use and obsessive thinking about a loved one or the intensity of romantic love. Neuroscientist blogger Tom Bellamy has argued that limerence is distinct from OCD on the basis of psychological and neurobiological differences. OCD is characterized by compulsions to perform rituals that ease some type of fear, whereas limerence initially starts with a period of joy and only reaches a stage of anxiety when a pair bond cannot be formed.
Helen Fisher has commented on Wakin & Vo in 2008, stating that limerence is romantic love and that "They are associating the negative aspects of it with the term, and that can be a disorder." Fisher is one of the original authors to compare limerence to OCD, and has proposed that romantic love is a "natural addiction" which can be either positive or negative depending on the situation. Fisher stated again in 2024 that she does not think there is any difference between limerence and romantic love.
In 2017, Wakin has stated that he feels that brain scans of limerence would help establish it as "something unlike everything that has been diagnosed already", but brain scans have been described by Fisher's team since as far back as 2002. In Fisher et al.'s original brain scan experiments, all participants spent more than 85% of their waking hours thinking about their loved one. Wakin also claims that a person experiencing limerence can never be satiated, even if their feelings are reciprocated. Tennov found many cases of nonlimerent people who described their limerent partners being "stricken with a kind of insatiability" in this way, and that "no degree of attentiveness was ever sufficient". However, according to Tennov's theory, the intensity of limerence diminishes when the limerent person perceives sustained reciprocation, so it is prolonged inside of a relationship when the LO behaves in a nonlimerent manner. Other authors who are in the mainstream have speculated that obsession inside a relationship when it's a problem could be related to self-esteem and an insecure attachment style.
In the 1999 preface to her revised edition of Love and Limerence, Dorothy Tennov describes limerence as an aspect of basic human nature and remarks that "Reaction to limerence theory depends partly on acquaintance with the evidence for it and partly on personal experience. 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." Tennov states that limerence is normal and says that even those of her interviewees who experienced limerence of a distressing variety were "fully functioning, rational, emotionally stable, normal, nonneurotic, nonpathological members of society" and "could be characterized as responsible and quite sane". She suggests that limerence is too often interpreted as "mental illness" in psychiatry. Tragedies such as violence, she says, involve limerence when it is "augmented and distorted" by other conditions, which she contrasts with "pure limerence".
In a 2005 Q&A, Tennov is asked if limerence can ever lead to a situation such as depicted in the movie Fatal Attraction, but Tennov replies that the movie character seemed to her to be a caricature. Most romantic Stalking are an Breakup, Erotomania, have a personality disorder, are limited or Social skills incompetent. One writer who investigated the phenomenon of limerence videos on TikTok in 2024 has written that it seemed to her that the many videos created by the relationship coaches there were actually about Cyberstalking rather than having anything at all to do with limerence.
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