Limerence

Limerence is a state of mind resulting from romantic feelings for someone. It involves intrusive and melancholic thoughts – or tragic concerns for the object of one's affection – along with a desire for a relationship.

Overview

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov made the word limerence^[1] to describe a concept based on her work in the 1960s, when she interviewed over 500 people on the topic of love.^[2] As per Tennov, limerence can be seen as falling in love,^[2][3] infatuation,^[2][3] or lovesickness.^[2][3]

Many experts have seen infatuation as a synonym for limerence.^[2][4] However, Tennov and other experts said that infatuation had a negative meaning, sometimes as a pejorative, to refer to situations including a teenager being obsessed with a celebrity.^[4]

In Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love, infatuation refers to romantic passion without intimacy or commitment.^[4] Sternberg himself believed limerence to be the same as infatuation.^[4]

Prevalence

Not everyone experiences limerence.^[2][3] Tennov estimated that 35% of men and 50% of women experience limerence.^[2][3] Experiencing limerence sometimes comes with social stigma as it is often seen as sickly.^[2][3] Tennov noted that limerence was not a mental illness,^[2][3] despite it sometimes being "highly disruptive and extremely painful [...] irrational, silly, embarrassing, and abnormal".^[2][3]

Components

The components as described in Love and Limerence include but not limited to:^[2][3]

• acute desire for reciprocation
• acute sensitivity to any act, thought or condition that can be interpreted positively
• intrusive thoughts about the object of your passionate desire (the limerent object or "LO")
• fear of rejection and sometimes incapacitating but always unsettling shyness in LO's presence
• temporary relief from unrequited limerent passion via vivid imagination of LO's actions as reciprocation
• mood dependence on LO's actions or, more accurately, your interpretation of LO's actions regarding the probability of reciprocation
• a remarkable ability to emphasize what is admirable in LO and to avoid dwelling on the negative, even to respond with a compassion for the negative and turn it into a positive feature

Controversy

In 2008, Albert Wakin, a professor who knew Tennov at the University of Bridgeport, and Duyen Vo, a graduate student, pointed out the similarities between limerence and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), or substance abuse.

They presented their work to the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences (AABSS) conference and suggested that much more research would be needed before proposals could be made to the American Psychological Association (APA) to include limerence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). They then did an unpublished study, which found that 25‒30% of their participants had had a limerent relationship.^[5]

Anthropologist Helen Fisher later commented on Wakin's and Vo's study, "They are associating the negative aspects of it with the term, and that can be a disorder."^[5] Fisher is one of those who originally compared limerence to OCD, proposing that romantic love is a "natural addiction", which can be either positive or negative.^[2]