Episode 144 - Limerence

Transcript

David: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: The Podcast, where two philosophers explain the theoretical dimensions of your pain and suffering.

David: I'm David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: And I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: The French author Stendhal wrote a personal collection of essays about the experience of being in love. It's very creatively titled 'On Love', De l'amour.

And in these writings, he reflects on the experience of loving somebody while knowing that they may never love you back, not a great place to be, but maybe it's a place where a lot of us have found ourselves at some point in our lives. And it turns out that he was inspired by his own [00:01:00] life in thinking about this.

So it turns out that he, in the 18 hundreds, was obsessed with this Italian woman named Métilde Viscontini Dembowski.

And long story short, she was just not into him at all, which caused him to obsess more and more and more about her. So much so that he ended up writing a whole book about the passions of love and obsession and infatuation.

Ellie: Actually on that point.

So I was really into this book in college.

David: Oh really?

Ellie: Because there's a whole section, cures for Love, and I think I actually read a excerpted version of the book that was like a mini book called Cures for Love.

It was like, oh, I need this. And you know, I don't really remember whether it actually helped me get over get it things or not, but I didn't know that there was that biographical background. Poor guy, we've all been there.

David: That's why it's like, it's like the figure of the tortured author pouring his heart out in writing. And [00:02:00] in the book he talks about how lovers tend to idealize the love object. And he uses a term for that process of idealization, he calls it crystallization. And that is a reference to a natural process. I had to google this 'cause I didn't know, but apparently if you grab a, like an ugly piece of wood, you know, like an ugly lover or like an unremarkable lover, and you throw that piece of wood into a salt mine, there is this natural process that happens that turns that piece of wood into what Stendhal calls an object of shimmering beauty.

And so what he means is that there are certain passionate attachments that lead us to crystallize the object of our desire, where the object of desire is so idealized that they're almost trans substantiated. Like that piece of wood literally being crystallized. And so in our eyes, rhose that we obsess over, become unimpeachable, untouchable, they [00:03:00] can do no wrong.

We literally almost deify them.

Ellie: Yeah. And in addition to that, deification, there's also, like you said, a transformation of them where the crystallized branch is no longer a branch. It doesn't appear the same way, and it doesn't even have the same physical composition. It's actually changed form too.

I mean, the real branch is still under the crystallized branch, but it's now a new thing. And I've been teaching a class on intimate relationships this semester. There's also the public version of it on Substack both versions have been so fun. I recorded 26 lecture videos, one of which is on the topic that we're talking about today.

And I was just teaching on this topic in the Pomona version of my class last week, and a student, I have students facilitate discussion and crystallization, you know, comes up here and, I was trying to describe the process of crystallization in Stendhal and I couldn't remember that it was a salt mine.

And so I was like. What is the crystallization again? Is it ice? And then I revisited the [00:04:00] text and remember that it's a salt mine.

David: I mean, they're icy toward you, I guess, right? So you're the one that's being crystallized in that situation.

Ellie: Yeah. But he says that there are two moments of crystallization as well.

There's first crystallization where you pull the branch out of the salt mine, and you see it as this shimmering object. And then there's the second moment where they really become installed as like the object of your obsession. And I think that's really the painful part, right?

Yeah, no, I think that's right. What I find really interesting about this idea of crystallization is that it's not as if you lose sight of the fact that this is a piece of wood. You know, that it was or is a piece of wood good. And so in the case of crystallization, it's not like, oh, I believe this person can do no wrong.

It's like, I know they're a human being rationally. I know they have their flaws, but I just experience them as beautiful as well. So it's like it's not hiding the truth about them. It's like taking the truth about them and putting it side by side with [00:05:00] their deification.

Okay. But I do think that there is still an extent to which the crystallized branch really does appear to you as something else, and so you don't, yeah you might have the theoretical knowledge that it's still a branch, but it really appears to you as the shimmering object. It doesn't appear to you as a shimmering object and the branch. And I think that's the idealization part. They no longer appear to you maybe as they really are, they appear to you as transfigured. Or, I like that you said transubstantiated. Okay Catholic.

David: Today we're talking about limerence.

Ellie: Why does falling in love so often feel like a painful obsession?

David: When does being infatuated become being creepy?

Ellie: And how can we better learn to cope with limerence?

David: For an extended version of this episode, community discussion and More, please subscribe to Overthink on our Substack.

Ellie: The term Limerence may or may not already be [00:06:00] familiar to you.

I hope that you've clicked on this episode even if you don't know what the word means, because you are going to find out it's gotten much more popular in the past few years, I would say, in online spaces, and there are a few of us, including myself, working on it from a philosophy of love perspective.

But the term has a very recent origin. It was coined in 1979 by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov in her book Love and Limerence. Tennov suggests in this book that we need to come up with a new name, which luckily she has created for us for the experience that we usually call falling in love and the kind of romantic obsession that is said to go along with it.

She's a psychologist and she was finding in her practice that when people were described falling in love, they were describing a particular condition that maybe we wanted to disentangle from love, and so that's why we maybe needed a new term for it. So she comes up with this term limmerence. And she says in the book that she chose the word [00:07:00] because it sounded French.

Although, honestly, it sounds way more Irish to me.

David: Oh yeah, I don't know about that.

Ellie: I mean, I just think it's probably because it sounds like Limerick.

David: Well, Irish or French. I think the main contribution of this book by Tennov is that it does introduce and give us a name for this phenomenon that she's identifying and that she builds an entire theoretical artifice around it.

She tries to explain it and help us see just how pervasive it is in our experience and in our culture.

Ellie: And can I tell you when you are going through it, having a name for it is an absolute blessing.

David: Yeah. No, I absolutely agree. And let's go back to the basics here, because in the book Tennov says that limerence is above all a kind of mental activity. So it's a thought pattern that is rooted in obsession. So it's obsessing over somebody who is usually not reciprocating your feelings. So it's asymmetrical, but also a little bit [00:08:00] compulsive. And the person who is typically not reciprocating, who is the object of your limerence, is called the Limerent object or the LO.

So a lot of this is about how we develop limerent reactions in relation to LOs.

Ellie: Yeah. We'll be using that term LO a lot. Yeah. So keep it in mind. It means the Limerent object, the person that you obsess about.

David: Yes. And, and if you think about the kind of mental activity that she has in mind, it's a yearning.

It's a yearning for reciprocation, for commitment. From the LO. The LO coming to you and saying, Ellie, I do love you after all, let's be together. She points out, based on her observations of a lot of the people that she was working with, that this thought pattern can be all consuming.

it can take over your life and it can get even in the way of normal everyday functioning because she found individuals who are spending 80 to a hundred percent of their free [00:09:00] time actively thinking and obsessing about the LO.

Ellie: Oof, so rough, so rough. Somebody needs a hobby.

But you know, it's not like you can just think your way out of it, I think, which is also part of the challenge. And so this passionate obsession that she's describing, which as you mentioned usually occurs when they don't reciprocate our feelings, but also can occur when we're not sure whether they reciprocate our feelings, is on her view, not quite the same thing as love.

And so even though she says it's usually, it's what we usually refer to as falling in love, she wants to conceptually disentangle the two. And one of the things she says, and I will say, I actually don't think she's super consistent on this point. She says that limmerence and love are different, but then she sometimes says things that make them sound like actually limerence is love.

David: Or like a stage toward, yeah.

Ellie: Yeah. Maybe she needed a little bit more of a background in philosophy to help her get her conceptual distinctions [00:10:00] clear.

David: I see a sequel in the works.

Ellie: Yeah. Well, I have been working on a, on a article on limerence for some time now, which maybe we'll talk a little bit later. I'll share some of the ideas that I'm working with there.

But I do think that one of the things she says is that love involves concern for the welfare of the other, whereas limerence is mainly interested in conquest. You want to conquer the others' feelings, emotional life cognition. You basically want them to become limerent with you.

And so the goal of limerence is reciprocation. And it seems like when she's talking about that, it's not so much a desire for reciprocation 'cause you think that's the best thing for the other

David: Oh no, it's all about you.

Ellie: Yeah, it really is.

And that demand for return as she puts it, that desire for the other to feel limerent toward you, that can like really manifest in a demand can be extremely painful for the person undergoing it. And I think we can even say that it can be a contributing factor in [00:11:00] creepy behaviors, like romantic stalking. Yeah.

David: I mean, and she even says that it can become an addiction, right? Because it's all about what you want and getting what you want.

You said it's like in the domain of conquest, and I like that you focused on the distinction between limerence and love, even if there's some ambiguity about exactly where the line is. One thing that stood out to me is the difference between limerence and sexual fantasies, because there is definitely a lot of vivid imagination at work in limerence, where you're imagining all these scenarios of union and ecstasy, so on and so forth. But she insists that just as limerence is very different from love. So too, it differs very clearly from sexual fantasizing. And let's say that I have like this unfulfilled fantasy of having a threesome, for example.

It's not about any individual person I want to threesome in any two other people, I guess would do, right? Because it's about the scene, it's about the event. It's not about the particular people who are making the fantasy possible, [00:12:00] whereas limerance, the person is everything. It's about this particular person.

You cannot take the individual and replace them with somebody else.

Ellie: Oh, I think people who have sexual fantasies about, like certain people say a celebrity might be raising questions here.

So maybe I would qualify that and say, if you find yourself fantasizing about a particular person. I think on Tennov's view it would be maybe because like they're just physically attractive to you or something.

But what she's talking about with Limerence is this whole crystallization process where it's like it is them as other that you're really obsessed with.

David: Yeah. But she also does say that the limerent object is always an individual, whereas in fantasies there is more variability as to who can fulfill it.

Ellie: Oh, okay.

David: You can change it.

Ellie: But you were, you were making it sound like a sexual fantasy is not, it's like never about an individual. It's about anybody.

David: No, no, but it's more about the scene and so, like, I might wanna have sex with a celebrity, but like, I would still fulfill my fantasy if it was a different celebrity that was equally [00:13:00] famous to an extent.

A second difference between limerence and sexual fantasies is that limerence is kind of plausible, right? Like I am limerent about somebody and what I want is for them to love me back to reciprocate. That could happen. It's not out of the realm of the plausible.

Ellie: You would like meet the celebrity that you're limerent towards in real life and make them fall in love with you.

David: Yeah. Whereas in the case of some sexual fantasies, they can be a little bit more outlandish. Okay. You know, like I could have a fantasy of like sleeping with like a thousand people at the same time. Well, how practical is that? Not very practical.

Ellie: Yeah. And she does suggest that. There might be a longing for sexual connection with the limerent object.

In fact, the limerent object, the LO, she explicitly describes initially as a potential sexual partner. So there is a sexual valence for sure, but she also says that limerence is a desire for more than sex and that isecause it's a desire for reciprocation.

David: Yeah. The reciprocation of feeling. [00:14:00] Like it's about union and connection.

Ellie: And one of the fun things about Tennov's book is that she has a ton of examples, you know, from her own interviews in psychological practice, which is a good and bad thing.

I think my students were a little bit annoyed that I assigned an entire 70 pages of reading for one class session from this book. But I was like a lot of it's stories.

David: Yeah. 50 of those are like really juicy examples. Like exactly where she's like, my client, whom we shall name Sally. And then it's like a really detailed story about Sally. Yeah. I like that. I like that about the book.

Ellie: No, it is really fun.

But another thing is that the book also has a ton of different criteria that identify limerence. And so I wanna touch on a few of these here. I think the first that really stands out to me, and that has been, I would say particularly troublesome for myself in when I've had experiences of limerence is intrusive thinking or preoccupation. I would describe it as you have that LO kind of installed as an internal other in your consciousness. [00:15:00] Whatever you do, you're thinking about how they might think about what you're doing.

You're kind of constantly ruminating over their mental image, right? They just become really important as a figure, as a reference point within your consciousness. And this can make it difficult to focus on other things. She says, all other concerns really fall into the background. And so suddenly maybe your work, your other relationships, your other pursuits just become harder to concentrate on.

They seem less important. What seems most important is just like mentally chewing on this image of the LO.

David: Well, and that's what makes it analogous to an addiction, right? Because it prevents you from doing things that normally you would prioritize. And it can, as she says, it can disrupt people's lives, it can destroy people's marriages. It can destroy people's friendships because I mean, nobody, especially when you're thinking about the really, really intense forms that she describes in the book, it's really hard to know how to relate to somebody [00:16:00] who can only talk about their obsession with somebody that doesn't love them back or who might love them back, but we don't know.

And that was the kind of tragic dimension of the book that she says, look this creates a real. Suffering and pain in the lives of individuals who never thought they would find themselves in this situation.

Yeah, and I wanna say too, so one of the other features of limerence that she identifies is sensitivity to signs.

Ellie: And so, I mean, in general, a lot of the features of limerence have in common that there's a significant imaginative component. And the sensitivity to signs is, or what she puts, she puts signs in quotation marks 'cause it's sensitive to sensitivity to quote unquote signs that the other person is limerent with you.

And so let's say, David, that you have an LO that you know casually. I feel like you would see this person at the gym. You talk about the gym all the time. So let's see.

David: It's the smelly guy from our episode where we talked about disgust, right?

Ellie: [00:17:00] No, it wasn't our disgust episode. And actually it wasn't our smell episode either.

Which episode did we talk about the smelly guy?

David: I don't know but he's my LO.

Ellie: We have like straight up done too many episodes now if we can't remember which episode we talked about the smelly guy in.

Okay, listeners will, will identify it for us. So, okay, you've got this LO at the gym and you are going to the gym one time and you wear a band t-shirt.

Like let's say you go to the gym and you're wearing an Aphex twin T-shirt. Then next time you go to the gym, you see this guy and he's forgotten to put in his headphones and he starts his workout and he starts playing on his phone a song that he's listening to. It's Aphex Twin song.

What are the chances? He's obsessed with me. Exactly. So you think to yourself, oh my gosh, he saw me wearing an Aphex twin song last time I was at the gym and then he on purpose, forgot to put his in his headphones because he wanted me to know that he was listening to Aphex Twin, and that is, you know, a sign that he's obsessed with me.

David: Yeah. Well, and this is what [00:18:00] brought for me limerence into very close dialogue with conspiratorial thinking. Where you start seeing signs everywhere. You start connecting the dots and you convince yourself that there is a story behind the official story. Like, officially, he's not showing any interest in me, but like, I can put the signs, I could like read the signs, and I know that he's been obviously obsessed with me because what are the chances that he would not put his headphones on when I was walking by and he played exactly that song.

One of the criteria that she talks about in connection to limerence, that made me think about it in a really clear way, is what she calls not seeing red flags in the LO. You know, and focusing and dwelling upon their admirable qualities almost exclusively. And Tennov calls this borrowing the term from Stendhal, whom we talked about a few minutes ago, crystallization. So it's that process of like a piece of wood becoming [00:19:00] a shimmering object of beauty.

Ellie: We still remember David. It was like 10 minutes ago.

David: Yeah, I know. But, the reason I'm emphasizing that is because she says there's actually a slight difference between traditional idealization and crystallization as she understands it.

Idealization is when you refuse to see the bad in the person, you're like, they're all just good. Whatever flaws other people point out, you deny them. Crystallization leaves room for you to accept what other people see as flaws, but you reinterpret them as virtues. Like, oh, this person that I'm obsessing about doesn't text me back, not because they're not into me or because they're dismissive, but because they love me so much that they don't know how to express it. Like, they're being so considerate of me. So everything gets transfigured or transubstantiated because of my Catholic background into this person only having good qualities.

Ellie: Yeah. So rough Or like, [00:20:00] oh, they're so mysterious, you know.

David: It's like, no, they're ghosting you, it's not mysteriousness.

Ellie: Yeah, it's so rough. And this gives us a sense of what limerence is like from the perspective of those who experience it.

It is obsessive and involuntary according to Tennov.

One of her main points is that we confuse limerence and love. And I think the best evidence for this is that almost all of the romantic stories that we see in the arts, whether literature, film, poetry, and so on and so forth, are by Tennov's criteria actually about limerence rather than about love.

And I think there's something that's particularly interesting about the way that Limerence lends itself to artistic creativity. But let's just stick for a moment with the fact that, you know, most of what we see would be limerence not love. Tristan Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, so on and so forth.

David: Yeah, that the Great Gatsby.

I want to talk about that show., Crazy Ex-Girlfriend [00:21:00] 'cause I think it's like the best illustration of limerence that I've ever seen on TV. But for me, the question is of course, what's the difference between love and Limerence, but also why do we confuse them? And part of the reason here, I think, has to do with our customs around dating and romance.

So earlier you specified that limerence exists in the domain of conquest, right? Like, you wanna overcome all these obstacles that prevent you from getting the LO to love you bad. So it exists in a space of gamification almost, where it's like almost a game where you wanna defeat obstacles, you wanna defeat enemies in order to get the prize, which is the LO.

Now the problem is that we have certain views about how we should go about dating and romance, that we are told we should do these like practices that we think we should do to get love. But in fact, those things get us [00:22:00] limerence rather than love. So for example, you know, we have this idea that when you go on the dating market, you should be aloof, you should not show a lot of interest, you should pretend like you're too busy, you know, for people who might be interested in you.

And so we start planting these obstacles between us and potential love or romantic partners. And so that gamification, again, 'cause it has to do with obstacles and with winning and with conquest, already channels our possible relationships in the direction of limerence rather than love. And Tennov of says that when those obstacles are in place, limerence goes up, you're not only more likely to become liran, but if you already are limerent, your limerence increases, the reaction gets more intense. And she even cite, uh, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, both of whom kind of write about this, about how the way we approach love [00:23:00] carries the seed of its own frustration because it leads to obsession and infatuation rather than genuine feelings of reciprocity.

Ellie: Yeah. Well, so that's more Sartre's view than Beauvoir's view, although, interestingly, Beauvoir gave a little blurb for this book.

David: Yes, she did.

Ellie: She is on the cover. Excellent. It deals with a subject in an entirely new way. Okay Simone de Beauvoir. What a flex for Tennov. I think I would resist the term gamification here.

I don't think it's fair to say that limerence is a phenomenon of gamification. I think there are many elements of Limerence that are just. broader than that. But I do think the gamified way that we date perhaps does have the tendency to increase limerence. And I think in particular, in addition to things like dating apps and norms of dating, we might think about the role of social media here, because I found myself wondering on multiple occasions whether social [00:24:00] media can enforce and give rise to limerence because, okay. So part of it is that on social media you can see your LO much more frequently than you might be able to otherwise. You can watch their stories, you can look at their posts and you can go back and look again and again and again at their posts.

So there's a lot of fodder for your imagination around the LO. In addition to that, a phenomenon that deeply interests me is the way that you can imagine the gaze of your LO on you on your own social media profile. So you might be tempted,

David: wait, no, repeat that last point. I'm not sure I got it.

Ellie: Yeah. I'm gonna give you an example. You might be tempted to see if your LO has watched your story.

David: Oh, wow.

Ellie: You might fantasize about what they might see if they go to your profile.

David: All the signs.

Ellie: Yes. Well, it's actually not all the signs, [00:25:00] it's more like the installation of them as an imagined other within your consciousness, a privileged other, can lead you to imagine what they are thinking about your daily activities and they're not actually witnessing your daily activities. And so that's just like a fun, you know, ruminative thing. But they might actually be looking at your social media.

David: Yeah. But what does that mean?

And it goes back to the example of my LO my stinky LO at the gym. Like maybe they just didn't bring the headphones. And similarly it could be that somebody watches your stories and you find that out, but it doesn't mean anything. But you interpret it as a sign that they must be obsessing over you.

Ellie: I see, I see. Yes. No, I have had dark times when I have like obsessively seen whether somebody has watched my story. I'm like, okay, that is a bad sign. I need to get my shit together right now.

David: Well, you know, in making things even more complicated in relation to the present and you know, how we approach these issues today, there is the fact that she talks about this, she says, in the past, you could have [00:26:00] certain indications that somebody wants to reciprocate that kind of give you certainty that you're on the right path in connection to the LO. So back in the day, for example, if you're obsessing about an lo and finally you get them to have sex with you, you convince them, you like something happens and you have sex.

Sex was a sign, a kind of reliable sign of commitment and reciprocity, and that maybe the relationship is going to grow. But Tennov says that nowadays, because our social views about sex have changed significantly, sex doesn't perform that function anymore. So you could have sex with your LO and that doesn't bring you any consolation or any comfort 'cause it means nothing. And so nowadays, as a limerent subject, you have fewer guarantees that things are going to change for the better. And I also think about this, for example, in connection to the rise of new relationship types, like what the young kids call situationships, which are [00:27:00] ambiguous, romantic entanglements without a clear name, without clear status.

And where both partners don't know what they're entitled to expect from one another. And that ambiguity also feeds the fire of this limerence, because it drives you to obsess about what is this relationship, what does it mean? What are we to one another, and therefore what should I expect from this person?

Ellie: Yeah. And one of the key ideas in Tennov's theory is that limerence involves a balance of hope and uncertainty. So she thinks that if you truly realize that somebody will never be into you. There's just no chance the limerence is gonna die out. And if you're certain of their feelings for you, the limerence is also going to die out because then you'll just establish a relationship with them and hopefully like actually love them.

But if you have a mix of that hope and uncertainty, then that's what really sustains the limerence and I think situation ships can absolutely foster that. So can related phenomena such as bread [00:28:00] crumbing, this idea that, you know, you think somebody's not into you, you're just about to give up hope, and then they text you back.

David: Little breadcrumbs of hope.

Ellie: Yeah. Kindles of hope again. And then you sleep with them and then, oh my gosh, I don't text you back for a while. There comes the uncertainty.

David: Yeah. And this is why I do disagree with you when you said that it's not gamified. I mean it's obviously not literally a game, but it is a chase. It's the thrill of the chase. And in that sense it puts you in a position of solving clues and obstacles. And living in that space between uncertainty and hope.

Ellie: It's just that gamification is a specific phenomenon that refers to making games out of things that are not originally games

David: Or turning things Or turning things into games. And I think this turns romance into a kind of game.

One of the main differences between love and [00:29:00] Limerence is that love is concerned for the wellbeing of the other, whereas all limerence wants is reciprocation. So the question becomes, is limerence fundamentally selfish?

Ellie: This is one of the things that interests me most in the phenomenon of limerence.

This is a key part of the paper that I'm working on, on limerence because I'm also interested in like what is the self? And so I feel like this gets exactly the intersection, my interest in selfhood and love. My view is that Limerence is not necessarily selfish, but it is self regarding To have a self regarding state like limerence, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that we need to be really careful to not to conflate it with love, because I think it can lead us to treat the LO poorly.

Like it might lead us to think that we deserve some treatment from them. And I think [00:30:00] we absolutely do not. I think we need to be really careful about that. But part of what I think is really cool about limerence, painful as it can be. Is that it can be deeply formative for our own personal identity.

I mentioned earlier that I think limerence has a lot of imaginative dimensions, and one of those dimensions is imagining what the LO would think about your behavior. And I think when you have that internalized gaze of the other, it can lead you to self-improvement. Of course, this depends on the possibility that your LO has good qualities, but hey, as we said earlier, we tend to idealize those red flags anyway, and so I think whether it's developing a passion for film that maybe your LO has or maybe it's what in the symposium one of the interlocutors talks about is like developing a sense of shame at acting poorly when you're thinking about how the other would experience your behavior. I do think limerence can [00:31:00] really lead us not only to crystallize the other, but also to consolidate, I was gonna say crystallize, but that seems outta context. Like consolidate our sense of self and really think about our own aspirations differently.

David: I mean, I guess that would depend on how it is that we imaginatively construct that internalized ga of the other. Yeah. 'cause part of the problem with limerence is that it's a distorting perspective, right?

It's like a lens that prevents you from seeing things as they really are. And so I could imagine a scenario where I'm like, oh, I wonder how my LO thinks about me. Well, they think I'm great and they love all the gestures that I'm making. They really appreciated me showing up at their work with a bouquet of flowers.

And so I think there's a self-justifying self construction that's hard to justify from the perspective of like a third person like an objective third person [00:32:00] perspective. Right? Where it's like, no, you're stalking that person.

That's what's actually happening here.

Ellie: Well, and limerence of course does need to be responsive to the cues of the other, but I wanna focus on the self-development aspects of Limerence and maybe I can self-disclose here, which is not something I will do in the actual article. So here's my adolescent story of Limerence.

So my experience of Limerence is that it has been profoundly identity shaping for me. I would probably not be a philosopher if it weren't for adolescent limerence. And I do think that Limerence can be, especially identity forming for teenagers. Being a teenager is a time when you're trying to figure out who you are.

It's also a time when a lot of people experience limerence, and I think that can be totally beautiful and cute. So I had a childhood friend growing up and we always kind of were interested in each other. And then when we were in eighth grade, he moved to Northern California. And talk about balance of hope and uncertainty that [00:33:00] moved to Northern California after we had already been kind of interested in each other from a young age completely vaulted me into Limerence and I basically spent my entire high school career

obsessed, limerent,

David: really four years?

Ellie: with this person. Yes. It literally lasted the entire time I was in high school. Granted, I went to all girls school and I'm straight, so it's not like I had a lot of prospects in high school.

David: Well, you know, I was gonna, I was wondering about that because as you said that I thought I was this queer kid in a Mormon town, in rural Nevada, I had nobody to be limerent about, so I wonder whether I was robbed of an opportunity for self-discovery, self-questioning. And just like working out who it is that I want to be in the eyes of other people.

Ellie: Yeah. Well, so that also leads to the question, is limerence a good that we should value?

And if so, then do people have a right to limerence that takes us in a whole other sphere [00:34:00] that we're not gonna be able to tackle today? But I was also, as listeners know, Christian when I was growing up, and this is the weirdest thing.

I will write about this at some point in the future. In a bizarre way my LO when I was a teenager kind of became conflated with God and I, and really became sort of like an idolized figure for me. Thank God for once you're correcting my English. Thank God.

David: Yes. Finally it happened.

Ellie: Yeah. And then we would occasionally see each other because he would come down, he moved up north because his parents got divorced.

David: No, because his feelings for you were so strong that he couldn't be near you anymore. It was a sign.

Ellie: Right. So he'd occasionally come back to LA and I would see him at church and on those occasions I found myself super awkward and actually like not even really [00:35:00] attracted to him.

And that's also something Tennov talks about is like when you're around the other person, you actually might feel like awkward or weird around them. Classic adolescent experience. But I think this was self formative for me because. He was one of the first people that I knew who was interested in philosophy.

He was, as many teenage boys interested in philosophy are obsessed with Nietzsche. And I started to get interested in philosophy as a result. Now, decades later, like he's not into philosophy anymore, but it's like become the entire organizing principle of my life. And I really don't think I would've had that experience if it weren't for this teenage landmarks.

David: Okay. Now I understand the connection to philosophy. I thought you were gonna say, I was just like so lost in my thinking that I became a philosopher just by virtue of the fact that I was limend. But it was because he shared this, like you wanted to share this interest with him as a way of conquering you know him and getting him to develop a limerent reaction toward you.

Ellie: Yeah. And can I just quickly add like a philosophical point to that, which is that I think the way that this shows up in the [00:36:00] work that I'm doing on Limerence, where I don't talk about this like particular story, but you know, literally writing about it in terms of Yeah.

Well, no, I'm not writing about that. That that's just for the podcast. No, the, the article is like just more straightforwardly philosophical, but so I think what's happening in Limerence is that we value the other instrumentally as a means of valuing ourselves. And so I would sort of think about like, oh, would he be excited to, to see me reading philosophy?

Would he think I'm smart? There was like a sort of value that I placed on intellectual life through that imagine gaze of the other, and also that I put on myself. And yeah, you could say that was like weirdly narcissistic, but I actually think it was like really formative in a morally, and aesthetically, I was gonna say valuable, but I already said valuable, let's say meaningful way.

And so through valuing ourselves through the refracted gaze of the other. I think we're especially valuing ourselves in our potential or in our becoming. [00:37:00] So it's like we're not valuing ourselves for who we are already, but for who we want to become.

David: Or who we could be. Right? No, that's right.

And I was gonna save this for later, but this is exactly why I love that show. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which is about this character Rebecca Bunch, who is like a high powered lawyer in New York, who at one point, this is like episode one, she runs into a high school sweetheart, and she reads that as a sign that they're meant to be together and develops this extremely intense limerent reaction towards him.

So much so that he's like, oh, nice to see you. They like run into each other in the streets of New York. But then he's like, on his way, he's heading back to California. She then follows him to California. She secretly moves to California, gets a job in the same town, west Covina, California. Yeah.

Ellie: Pretty close to where I teach, in fact.

David: Yeah. And so the, the narrative arc of the show is similar to what you're talking about because it's a story of her initially falling into the pit of [00:38:00] limerence. Stalking him, trying to ruin his relationships with other people.

Ellie: That's not that similar to my, I never stalked this person.

David: Or just let's say a harsher version of obsession, but eventually coming by virtue of limerence to get to knowing herself in a new way, to developing a new form of self-acceptance, where it's not about denying that she has these limmering tendencies, but just developing a more meaningful self relation that is not entirely, or even not even at all narcissistic.

Ellie: Interesting. I've heard so much about this show. I even had a student in my Love and Friendship class write a paper on it a number of years ago.

David: Oh really?

But I haven't watched it yet. And so is that because, does she end up adopting some of his characteristics?

Ellie: Or how does it play out? How does, like the instrumental valuing of him, but really the valuing of herself.

David: Yeah. Whatever he likes. She likes. She goes out of her way to mold herself into a [00:39:00] reflection of his personality, his hobbies, et cetera.

Ellie: Okay. It's still sounding creepy. It, so when does it stop being creepy?

David: It's, no, it is, but like, it, it really is about her relationship to herself ultimately rather than her relationship to him. And that's why I really like the show. I haven't seen the final season, so I don't really know how it ends.

Ellie: So no danger of spoilers as it turns out.

David: Yeah. No danger of spoilers. But, you know, in all this discussion about Limerence, I also wonder about the inverse of this. So in the case of the show, there is the woman, Rebecca Bunch, and then there is her love interest, her LO. I wonder what the experience of being an LO is like.

To my knowledge, I've never been anybody's LO, sadly. Yeah. Like, if anything, my history of dating and romance has been that people are not really interested in me initially, like for romance, but their interest grows over time. So it's like a slow burn.

Ellie: But you're so hot, David. [00:40:00]

David: So for me it's the opposite, where like I've experienced people's interests grow over time rather than the like, really intense off the back interest that is characteristic of Limerence. I do wonder whether there is an ethical dimension to probe here. If I am somebody else's LO they're obsessed with me, they follow me and I just, I don't reciprocate. I'm not interested. Do I have certain ethical obligations toward them? How should I treat them?

So for example, obviously I'm not obligated to reciprocate. That's very clear. But do I have an obligation to let them down softly? To like be very accommodating of their interest and their expressions of attraction. Or do I at some point knowing that they are so obsessed with me, have an obligation to really let them down harshly because otherwise they're going to continue. So it really makes me wonder about this and Tenol doesn't talk [00:41:00] about this for the most part.

Ellie: Not that I recall because it's more about the experience of limerence. Yeah. I love this question though. It's actually one of the reasons I think it's really important to disentangle limerence from love.

I don't think that the LO has any obligations toward the Limerent person. I actually think the Limerent person has obligations to treat the LO with respect, which may, of course, which may include not disclosing their own limerence. I think that correlatively, the lo has a right not to be bombarded, impinged upon.

Yeah. Yeah. And interestingly, in the case, at least if you think my life is interesting, sorry, this is so podcast host vibes right now. I'm like, lemme just tell you about me.

David: But it's juicy. So we accept.

Ellie: I hope you think it's juicy.

So my senior year of high school, I hatched a plan with my girlfriends and I was like, I need to reunite with this guy.

I've been thinking about him literally [00:42:00] my entire high school career. You went, you moved to West Covina? I was about to go to college on the East Coast and so I hatched a plan with my friends. Let's do a road trip to, he was living like near Monterey at the time. I was like let's hatch a road trip to Monterey.

It was called Operation Bumblebee for reasons I don't recall. And we were like, the whole the ostensible plan will be that we're gonna go up to Northern California, we're gonna end in San Francisco. But the secret plan, and all my girlfriends were clued in on this, was that we were gonna reunite. So we still had landlines at the time.

So I literally work up the courage to call his family landline and be like, Hey, I know I haven't seen you in like two years, talked to his mom first. And I was like,

David: Oh my God.

Ellie: We are coming up to San Francisco. We were thinking about stopping at Monterey on the way. Would we like, do you guys wanna hang out?

And of course she knew all of us 'cause we were all like church friends from childhood. [00:43:00] She was like, oh my gosh, it'd be great to see you girls come up, stay with us. And I was like, yes. And so we go up and of course I'm like trying to look my best and I reunite with this person. And then the tables completely turned.

Oh, I had like a really nice time hanging out with him, but I kind of got jolted out of my limerence.

David: So suddenly in, like in that trip?

Ellie: Part of it was that I had started dating somebody.

Like a little bit in my senior year summer, who was a bit older. Okay. And that I was like, oh, seemed cooler. And so then yeah, I was like jolted out of my limerence and then this guy became super limerent with me and so then suddenly, my LO became limerent towards me and he was no longer my LO and then I was the LO.

David: Okay, so you are like the perfect person to talk about because you've been on both sides in the same relationship, which I think is like really peculiar.

Ellie: No, I think so too. I actually think you've met him because like we're [00:44:00] still friends.

Now we're no longer limerent for each other.

David: I'll ask you after the podcast who it is.

Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. We're no longer limerent with each other. Okay. We've literally been friends since we were three years old, but we just had like this really intense experience of like, I was first then he was limerent.

And you know, we're much older and wiser now, and so the water's under the bridge, but I will say he acted kind of creepy when he was limerent with me, and in particular was jealous of people that I was dating in college would send me unsolicited love poetry and mixed CDs with like tons of hidden meanings.

I think that his behavior was more cringe than it was unethical. But there were a couple moments when it verged on, you have a right to my attention and I have a right to be jealous of other people that you're dating.

And so I think for that and a number of other reasons, it's really important to be super careful about how we treat LO when we are limerent, I think. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Including, maybe not this is a special case, but I think that there are a lot of cases where you shouldn't tell somebody if [00:45:00] they're you're LO.

David: Yeah. I agree with that. And I still wonder about whether, especially in the case of people that you've known in other contexts, like a friend or a classmate, if somebody becomes super limerent about me and I just know it will never happen and my mere presence in their world causes them suffering, do I at some point have a moral responsibility to like block them on social media for their own good. And it sounds paternalistic and it sounds somewhat extreme. But I'm open to that possibility in very extreme cases.

Ellie: Well, but I feel like we change the language from obligation to responsibility. I do not think you have an obligation.

I don't even think I would say you have a responsibility. I would say if you wanna do it, you know, whatever. But I don't think, I think that's the point, is like it's kind of on them.

David: Yeah. And that's where I maybe I want to hold space for the possibility that you inherit certain responsibilities by virtue of being an LO.[00:46:00]

I just am not ready to fully articulate what those are because I haven't thought it through enough.

Ellie: Yeah. See, I really don't think you inherit responsibilities. I do think, however, that you might have to engage in self-protective behavior.

David: Oh, that for sure.

Ellie: Because Tennov talks about how there can be, I mentioned romantic stalking earlier, but there's also like the violent stuff, right?

David: Yeah. Well, there's a whole chapter on the consequences of limerence on the positive side, of course, you have like cases where the relationship ends in reciprocation and ecstasy and you get married and whatever. But on the negative side of things, it can lead to alcoholism. She talks about cases of suicide and also cases of

Ellie: Sorrows of Young Werther is basically, yeah, well, a story of limerence gone wrong.

David: She mentions legal cases where somebody murders the LO because they developed this Madea complex where if I can't have them, nobody will. And one point that I'll add here, and it taps into this tragedy of limerence, Tennov says that limerence can destroy a [00:47:00] relationship even in cases where the LO finally agrees to reciprocate your feelings.

Because by the time you've expressed so much limerence and you've maintained this mental activity in relation to the LO, you've built them up. You've crystallized them so much that they will fall short of your crystallized idea of them, so that in cases of limerence, even when you get what you want, you will be disappointed and the relationship is doomed to fail.

Ellie, you mentioned being both a limerent subject and a liran object, but 10 off points out that there are some people who just don't experience limerence at all. And those people, because they don't have any experience with it, may have a lot of difficulty understanding the very concept. They might think like, what exactly is this feeling?

How can people obsess so much over somebody that clearly does not reciprocate? [00:48:00] But there are some really interesting statistics and I wanna share a couple with you about limerence. So recently a study suggested that 50 to 60% of the population has experienced limerence, and of those people half have had it so badly that it clearly negatively damaged their lives.

Limerence, it seems, this is somewhat surprising, honestly, is equally common in men and women, whatever their sexuality. But there is one pattern that people have found , and that is your attachment style. So people with anxious attachment style are especially prone to becoming limerent.

79% of people with an anxious attachment style reported having experienced limerent, whereas people without an anxious attachment style had a lower incidence of a limerent reaction at a mere 55%. So that's a significant difference, right? Between like 55 and 79.

Ellie: Yeah. It doesn't surprise me that anxious attachment style would be associated with [00:49:00] limerence, given the balance of hope and uncertainty that limerence involves. You mentioned being surprised by the gender statistics. So can you say what you were surprised by?

David: So, I don't know. I just would expect a difference. I could imagine making the argument that we should expect it more in women because women think a lot more about relationships because of social conditioning.

On the other hand, because of my earlier comment about conquest and like overcoming obstacles, I could imagine men becoming so obsessed with not losing the battle for a limerent object that they become more limerent because they don't wanna lose. So I could see it going both ways, but maybe that's the reason why both experience it to the same degree, maybe for different reasons.

Ellie: Yeah. I mean, whatever the case may be. I think the fact that there are some people who tend to experience limerence and others who do not, a group that Tennov calls non limerents should also be another sign to us that limerence is not the same thing as love. Because I think that all [00:50:00] people are capable of love.

And so it works out nicely for me that I don't have to say that all people are capable of limerence. And I do think at the same time, because so many of our social messages around love, as we discussed before conflate it with Limerence. People who are limerent can tend to be suspicious of people who don't experience Limerence.

They might be like, oh, you just don't know what love is, for instance.

David: You don't know what real love is.

Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess a question is what does it look like to love, especially romantically love without limerence? And I don't really know the answer to that. I'm curious what you think on that, and maybe to put it differently, like what can limerents learn from non limerents?

David: Okay. So two questions. Let me answer the first one. What does love look like without limerence? I think my experience of falling in love with my [00:51:00] partner fits that model. I mean, I have experienced low level limerence in the past, so I'm not one of the non limerents. But when I met my partner, my interest was kind of like a slow burner.

It was like, oh, I like him, he's fine. But I never had that peak of intensity early on. So if you were to graph it, it would be like a slow upward curve. Where if anything, my limerence came, like if, if we call it that, or like my kind of intensity in relation to him. Increased over time. Yeah. So maybe that's what it is. It's just like a different graph where it goes up rather than up and down. Okay. yeah.

Ellie: And actually as I think about it, I've had three significant multi-year relationships and none of them have actually involved limerence. They've involved like wonderful love, like yeah. Big crushes, you know, like lots of excitement and interest.

But I think when I think to the times that I've been limerent, I've been limerent at least three times, maybe three times. So three, three [00:52:00] significant relationships and three experiences of limerence, not the same people.

David: Yeah. And that's I think, really instructive. No, in connection to the second question about what limerent people can learn from non limerents or what non limerents might say to limerents about this issue.

I mean, I think a non limerent person would look at a limerent person and say stop being creepy. Yeah, this is a lot. You're being extra in practically every regard. I mean maybe a little bit more seriously. They might say you need to keep in check your desire for controlling this relationship, and I myself would add as a recommendation for dealing with limerence is embracing the inherent ambiguity of things, especially in connection to this desire for quote unquote signs.

This desire that we have for like finding out the story behind the story and in particular Tennov's description of body language brought this home for me [00:53:00] in the book because she says a lot of limerent reactions can be triggered by body language, right? So you run into your lo and like you brush elbows while passing, what are the chances?

Clearly they wanted to touch me. Or you catch each other's gaze from across the room. What did that mean? And she says, by nature, body language is fundamentally ambiguous. So the point is that yeah, it could mean that they're into you, but it could also mean that they're not into you. And it was just a random coincidence and it just could mean nothing at all.

And I think learning to sit with that ambiguity is really important because the limerent subject rejects that space of open-endedness. Like things need to mean as specific thing. And that's where we start filling in the gaps and coloring inside the lines.

Ellie: A different way of putting it is don't overthink it.

David: Yeah. Like in fact, don't think it at all.

Ellie: Yeah. And [00:54:00] I think growing accustomed to limerence over time, one can also start to recognize the early glimmers of it, and I think to some extent control it.

David: Yeah, I mean the control, I don't know because Tennov sometimes speaks of limerence as a wave that you have to let wash over you based on its own temporality.

Like she says, if you are find yourself in the middle of Limerence and it's deeply affecting your relationships and your lives, don't worry it will be over eventually and so it, it will run its course. It's just that you don't know how long that course actually is. It could be,

Ellie: Well you do, if you read her book 'cause it's a couple years.

David: Yeah. Well it could be anything from like weeks to, yeah, she says a couple of years. She says three years on the upper end, yours was like longer than that in high school. It was like four. It actually was, yeah.

Ellie: But it's so funny because I first encountered her book in 2019 when I had been brutally dumped by somebody I was limerent with. Listen to our emotional labor episode if you want that story.

And it was [00:55:00] so cathartic to be like, oh my God, I only have a couple more years of this. So I was like, oh it'll be over at some point. And so, yeah, no, she says you can't just think your way out of Limerence, but she does think that there are some things that you can do to minimize limerence. More recently, however, there's been a real coming together of the Limerent community online through Reddit and blogs, and one of the people active in this community has written a book that a lot of people in the Limerent community online have said, provides a really helpful rubric for trying to overcome limerent, like a lot more helpful than Tennov's original book.

And this is a book called Smitten Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence, and How to Make Love Last by Tom Bellamy. Bellamy in this book talks about how he himself had been limerent as a young man, but then many years into his marriage, by the time he was already middle aged, he had a midlife crisis and became limerent toward a [00:56:00] colleague.

And he was realizing, so he was like, ah, I gotta suffer this in silence. It's not fair to my colleague to disclose my limerence. But suffering in silence was not working. And he realized that, so he admitted his plight to his wife.

David: Oh, wow.

Ellie: Yeah. So he's in a monogamous marriage, which is another reason that it wouldn't be right to disclose his limerence and they decide to team up and help him overcome his limerence.

David: Recruit your current partner, that's the solution.

Ellie: Exactly. And like this wife must be awesome. I actually like get good vibes from both of them, just hearing this story. He's an academic neuroscientist and he has specialization in altered states. So he basically used his expertise to help him understand the phenomenon of Limerence.

He started a blog living with Limerence, and he wrote Pseudonymously until he decided to come out and write a book in his own name. Partly because like it's helpful that he's an expert in neuroscience, so Bellamy understands Limerence as an addiction to another person. So it's not just like, it's like an addiction, as you mentioned earlier, he [00:57:00] literally thinks about it as an addiction. And he thinks that overcoming it involves disrupting the habits that reinforce it. So for him, this involved things like limiting contact with his coworker, deliberately spoiling daydreams and reframing happy memories with her to instead focus on the negatives as well as, and I think this is a really interesting point, reframing a more positive future for himself that wasn't dependent either on his limerence or on his shame about it. And so kind of decaffecting from not only the LO, but also from his own limerence as he thought about his future. And that seems to be really different from what I said earlier about Limerence as catalyzing self-development.

It's almost like, yeah, his limerence was getting in the way of that.

David: Yeah. Well, it's because here it's conceptualized as an addiction, not as like an addiction. And in fact, I actually now wonder whether this, like I'm teaming up with my wife to tackle this issue, to what extent that hinges on medicalizing [00:58:00] conceptualizing it as like a medical problem that somebody is powerless in the face of, and in fact, the subtitle of the book, you said it was like romantic obsession, it's like, and it's an altered state. So that's just one question that I have about that. How much work is that framework doing for the way in which we respond to it?

But as far as the proposals for how to go about it, I think the decaffecting from this like sense of, I will always be this limerent subject or this person who is ashamed about being limerent is spot on. And the other one that I really like is his claim that we need to, remember the negative and not just the positive in our relationships to our LO.

Yeah. I do think we need to bring to mind how we feel. Not when we see the LO, but when the LO moves on with their lives and we go back to our lives. We need to remember how we feel when we are alone obsessing at three in the morning. And I think that can redirect [00:59:00] the thought patterns in a way that could potentially break the cycle.

Ellie: And I think what you're speaking to here is basically a moving away from the imaginative indulgence of limerence and towards a reality check.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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Ellie: We'd like to thank our student employees, Aaron Morgan, Kristen Taylor, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene, and Yuhang Xie, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.