I recently heard from John, a reader whose wife has become limerent for someone else, but with an unusual twist that I hadn’t come across before. First off, John has clearly been reading carefully as he raised an important point:
A lot of content I came across at LwL seems to have been written for a “self-aware limerent”—someone who knows that they are limerent.
Yeah, that’s true. I kind of work on the principle that blissed-out limerents who are deep in their obsession are… hard to reach. And also very unlikely to be googling “how to get rid of limerence” and end up here. John, however, has a harder problem:
Then there are those who are blissfully unaware of what’s happening to them. My reason behind writing you is that I’m not finding much text on the effects of limerence that has ZERO reciprocation. I mean zero. There’s at least two countries distance between my wife and the LO. So what I’m working on is “How to break it to an SO that they are in the grips of Limerence and that’s not good”.
The quick, simplistic answer to this question is: You probably can’t. It’s easy enough to tell them, of course, but having them hear is the problem. The only thing you can control is yourself, so focus on your goals and your purposeful life and do the best you can to navigate through this mess.
While that response is undoubtedly true, I can’t help feeling there is an element of defeatism around that central truth. After all, none of us reach wisdom without guidance.
So, is there a way to reach resistant limerents and raise their awareness about what’s going on with them? Can friends, spouses, parents, nudge these folks towards the realisation that their euphoric state is not healthy, not based in reality, and not going to last?
John’s story goes deeper:
I wonder if NC caused deepening of limerence, which later morphed itself into alternative spiritualities and crystal healing for enhancing affirmations of seeking reciprocation from the absent LO. YouTube and the Internet has plentiful material on this alternative spirituality which would only feed into the ecstasy of limerence as it’s full of synchronicities, 5th dimension connections, soulmate spiritual awakening, etc. She now thinks this is her new calling.
So John’s wife has responded to enforced No Contact by retreating into her inner world. She has embraced a narrative about soulmates, Twin Flames; Destiny. Even more, she is sustaining the limerence by trying to reach out to LO through “spiritual” channels that obviously must exist or else how would their Twin Flame souls be able to perceive each other?
I’ve got to be honest: it’s quite hard not to scoff. But it’s important not to, because there is a lot at stake for John, and all the SOs out there going through the same thing.
Can we make sense of this? Can we figure out why it happens and what can be done to reconnect with a spouse who has drifted away from a sensible grounding in reality?
1) Limerence does feel extraordinary
I’ve talked before about the numinous quality of limerence.
Most of us go through life on a fairly even keel, periodically disrupted by periods of excitement, happiness, and depression – as events rock us up and down. But limerence feels like surfing a tsunami. The euphoria is an experience like no other, a strength of reaction to another person that genuinely does feel transcendent – literally “beyond or above the range of normal or physical human experience”.
It’s not simple to make sense of this. I would guess that most limerents’ reaction to their first limerent reaction is to think “Ah! This is Love! It really is like the poets said.” The second limerent experience can be a bit of a surprise, but the concept of falling in love twice is hardly remarkable. I guess the biggest difficulties come when someone becomes limerent for the first time after they have committed to marriage. Then they have to wrestle with some testing ideas:
I love my spouse, but I feel something amazingly powerful for this other person.
Does that mean… I don’t really love my spouse?
Or is this something different from simple love? Is it something extra?
What does this mean about what true love actually is?
So, limerents like John’s wife have essentially got the wrong answer to a difficult question. What limerence practically means is that this person – the LO – has triggered something deep within you, some pattern of traits that is recognised by your subconscious, and provoked an all-guns-blazing motivational program to try and get you to bond with them. This is not evidence of divinity. It’s not extra-love or super-love. Limerence is a romantic experience that could be the prelude to love, but is certainly no guarantee of it.
Simple when you set it out like that, but expecting someone to see that while they are limerent, is expecting a lot.
2) Narratives really matter
Having reached the wrong conclusion, the limerent may find lots of confirming evidence out in the wide world that forms a coherent narrative they can believe in. For John’s wife, the extraordinary nature of limerence fits into a spiritual (or quasi-spiritual) framework that is also believed in by millions of other people as a way of making sense of the world.
This is such an important idea. Narratives really matter. It’s the heart of tribalism – because stories are emotional not rational – and we connect with our tribe, our people, by the common story we tell ourselves about how the world works. As an incendiary example, let’s consider politics in the UK and US.
We are currently in a period where two highly vocal tribes watch the same events playing out on the world stage, but come to radically different conclusions. One tribe believes that their country’s leader is obviously, undeniably, a racist bigot who is sowing division with his hateful rhetoric. The other believes that at last someone is in charge who is not going to pander to the patronising elites, with their hypocrisy and their sanctimonious scolding, and will actually make the country great again for ordinary people.
(N.B. It’s actually a little unsettling just how well those sentences map onto both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson)
The problem is, viewed from their own perspectives, both tribes are right. The same evidence can be used to prop up both worldviews. It’s internally consistent as a story – as long as you are selective in the evidence you recognise and biased in your assessment of other people’s motives.
And John would face that same problem in trying to reach his wife: it’s consistent with her narrative that her husband, limited by his constrained awareness, wouldn’t understand the transcendent beauty of her connection to LO. He is hidebound by a materialist worldview. He cannot let go and reach a higher level of awareness. So, of course he responds with confusion and bargaining and denial.
3) What can be done?
Looked at in this way, there are two barriers to be overcome. First, John’s wife needs to come to the realisation that the strength of her emotional reaction to LO is not evidence of LO’s specialness. Second, she needs to realise that her spiritual framework for understanding the phenomenon is incorrect. Basically, she needs a new narrative to explain her predicament.
How do you persuade someone that their worldview is wrong? How do you get them to see a new narrative, a new framing of the facts that makes just as much sense and yet reaches a diametrically opposite conclusion? What you’re aiming for, I guess, is the equivalent of a dramatic twist in the story.
Unfortunately, in real life sudden reversals like this are rare. They do happen – sometimes an event will be enough to make a previous belief untenable, and people suddenly see the world differently. The scales fall from their eyes. Sometimes a guru or mentor dazzles someone by crafting a new narrative that is more seductive and compelling (for good or ill).
More commonly, though, the change is slow. Doubts begin to build. Small contradictions make the old narrative break down. Ideas that used to seem insightful lose their power. Crucially, though, a reversal like this only tends to work in a lasting way if the “hero” of the narrative believes they have discovered it themselves.
That’s probably the best hope here. John can do his best to sow small seeds of ideas and hope they sprout, but a full frontal assault on his wife’s worldview is unlikely to succeed. Mentioning limerence, explaining the concept, talking about other people’s experiences and how they have overcome them may start ideas running. Framing it more as a story of an unmet emotional need than a spiritual connection could help, but it is like leading a horse to water. You can’t make them drink.
And that brings us back to the beginning. Ultimately, John can only control himself and his own choices. He can decide how patient he is willing to be while his wife indulges in her Twin Flame fantasy, and at what point he decides that his patience is exhausted. It always comes back to that: what can each of us do to live our own lives in the most purposeful way?
If there are any super-persuaders in the commentariat who have clever ideas about consciousness raising – please do share your suggestions for John!
While the similarity is only partial, I recommend an essay called ‘The Barrister’s Clerk: Love that accepts no denial’ in the collection ‘The Incurable Romantic’ by clinical psychologist Frank Tallis (Basic Books: New York 2018).
I have some questions:
1. What glimmer is appealing to her?
2. Does she really believe the spiritual aspect of things? Did she always have a spiritual tilt or did this come about as part of the LE?
3. Is she coming across that if but for some cruel cosmic twist of fate, they’d be together?
John will be fighting a Guerrilla war. Getting her to turn will likely have a better chance using a targeted approach vice a broadband approach. If he knows what’s singing to her, he can make himself look better in those area while subtly diminishing the LO. Chip away at the glimmer.
The second and third questions may give John an idea of what his chances of success are. If her spirituality is newly acquired, he has a better chance of getting her to turn. If she’s always had this type of spirituality but only transferred it to her LO, he’s in for a much tougher fight. If they attend a church, most organized religions don’t usually endorse this line of thinking. It may be something to chip away at. If she thinks but for the cruel twist of fate, they’d be together, John subtly chips away at what she’d lose and what it would take to achieve those. That would take a lot of subtly and carries risk.
Going personal here:
According to family history, my maternal ancestors dabbled in the occult. This rankled my paternal side of the family who dissuaded it but I’ve always felt kind of drawn toward the metaphysical. I bought a Dell Pocket book called “Everyday Witchcraft” in HS and my grandmother went through the roof.
LO #1 was the most genuinely spiritual person I’ve ever met. A woman I dated briefly who became an ordained Zen priest comes in a close second. When I got mono via LO #1 likely from one of her bong-swapping buddies, I went to the student health center. The doctor recommended a double Johnny Walker and sent me home. LO #1 took me to a Shaman. I don’t ascribe to this line of spirituality but that man had a presence that was undeniable. That guy had an indescribable personal power like no one I’ve ever met since. LO #1 told me she wished I could have seen our auras clash when we met. She said that when I walked in, our auras expanded like mushrooms but his was bigger. No joke.
LO #2 paid to have a birth chart run on me. In 5 years we were together, I never detected the faintest hint of any genuine spirituality in her. I put seeing a marriage counselor on as a condition of reengaging her. She declined. She later told me she’d undergone a Past Life Regression and had a Tarot Card reading done. She and I had very different ideas of what constitutes “professional help.” I held out hope she’d come around and she never did. The therapist said that these pursuits can be a way of avoiding the unpleasant real issues and avoid responsibility. You can’t fight fate. LO #2 once asked if I thought she was a shallow person. I thought reconciliation was still possible so I lied to her and said no.
I fought a guerrilla war with my wife for almost 20 years to get her to address a problem that had nothing to do with limerence. It her took multiple attempts, my consulting a divorce attorney, and the prospect of losing custody of her kids to get her to decide to address the problem. She did and we’re still married because she did. I sat in a therapists office listening to my teenage daughter slamming me for being in denial and enabling her mother to the detriment of the family. She was half-right. I was enabling her mother but I wasn’t in denial. I told my daughter that I’d been fighting this since before she was born. I wasn’t ready to give up on her mother but I was getting close. I held out and my wife came around. So, it can work.
It took me several years of working with therapists to dismantle the cosmic connection I thought I had with my LOs. Every so often I think about them, look up, and say, “Talk to me.” So far, neither of them have.
I wish John luck.
At the very least, John needs to ensure they are untangled financially as much as possible. “Twin Flames”, “catfishing”, etc. doesn’t preclude money being wired two continents away, or a huge credit card bill getting rung up on Go Fraud Me or something. Remove her as an authorized user on your credit card, shut down joint cards (or get yourself removed from the account), etc.
She can believe whatever she likes but if she can only spend her money on it/him, he may drift away.
I found out Mr. Lee presented Miss LO with a (brand new!) gift and it reappeared later in a secondhand shop where he was searching for a gift for me. Mr. Lee started bleating about her ingratitude and how he hoped she wasn’t paid the retail price. He suddenly stopped when I very quietly asked him for the price of what he had purchased for me versus what he had spent in her. His eyes got very wide and his face very pale when he ran the numbers.
I told him to return it straightaway. I didn’t want it in our home.
John, minimize or shut down how much money YOU may find yourself spending on her LO.
Firstly, good luck to John as that must be an extremely difficult position to be in.
I’ve always had an interest in spirituality and astrology, but the concept of twin flames is something I’ve only come across during the LE.
There is so much conflicting “information” and “advice” about Twin Flames that as you say, you can find evidence to fit your narrative. However one thing I found to be consistent in my reading on the topic, was to focus on your personal growth and not on the other person, and if you are “destined to be together” then this is the best route. It tied in nicely with the concept of purposeful living, and by working on my own weaknesses I was not causing further damage to my marriage. I’ve since come to the conclusion that TF is either made up or not applicable to my situation, but focusing on that aspect helped me come round to that realisation.
This is a rather long-winded way of saying could this be a way of John suggesting to his SO that instead of using external forms of healing, that she looks inwards and focuses on her own growth?
I’m definitely not a super-persuader in any way!!!
I have never believed in “true love” or there existing 1 person that you were meant to be with. During euphoria (and I should mention reciprocation), I did try to make sense of what was happening to me, and what term to call LO and myself. “Companion soulmate” is what fit best at the time, as “Twin Flame” felt like an overreach. I had known LO for a few years and we were close friends. But while in the depths of painful limerence before finding this site, I needed to know why I was going through the most emotional pain in my life. Twin Flame actually began to fit better, as there were characteristics of somebody running and the other chasing, then vice versa; as well as seeing traits in the other person that were actually items in my life that needed work. The term just really seemed to fit, though I also wanted her to see that it fit also. But I also read that Twin Flames weren’t necessarily meant to wind up together forever.
After nearly 2 years of slowly regaining my perspective, I know that there exist many people that could have evolved into my “Twin Flame” had I spent similar time and conversation with them under the right (wrong) circumstances. It has taken a while, but I am understanding the aspects of my LO that make her a fun and exciting person to be with but also a poor long-term relationship candidate who has likely (mostly unknowingly) had other victims along the way. Part of me is relieved to see this conclusion, but part of me is disappointed.
I don’t think I could have been persuaded out of my LO being super duper special, other than facing SO giving an immediately sobering ultimatum to wake the hell up or I’m outta there. Perhaps it could also work if SO had a mutual close friend intervene.
“I don’t think I could have been persuaded out of my LO being super duper special, other than facing SO giving an immediately sobering ultimatum to wake the hell up or I’m outta there. Perhaps it could also work if SO had a mutual close friend intervene.”
Hmm. Check all three for my situation. I was the intervening friend for #3. Didnt work. Also, the SO did not leave as yet. Fortunately for me I’m no longer involved.
John: Have your wife watch this video by Matt Khan. I found it very helpful.
http://youtu.be/n2da2CQEyy0
I have to say im a bit like johns wife i like spiritual answers , i like to see signs particularly with my limerent experiences. The way he should speak to her is with a language she knows and likes to hear such as it is a sign that JOhn met her first, sign that she needs to fight her bad side to stay with her true love etc
This song came out in 1983, the year I started dating LO #2. By January, 1988, I could have written this. It has it all, Tarot Cards, past lives, returned pictures, rings, letters, pride.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BMacPIDQZE
“Well, I’m up there besides the magic man
And he laid some tricks on me
He said, “You do need help, my friend”
I whispered… “Obviously”
He laid a spread of Jacks and Queens
And he begged me take my pick
But every face it had your face
I cried out… “I am sick”
This is the first that I have heard of these terms and I just did a little brief research. It seems like hocus pocus (at the risk of being judgy). I can see a lot of holes in the theories and also a lot of the “signs” and “stages” points sound like what happens in just about every relationship as time passes. It might be useful to ask pointed questions about what evidence there is about the fated relationship with the LO.
In my experience, I had an LO (crush) from grade 1 through grade 12. All of them different. So out of those 12 boys I had a relationship with exactly zero of them! Yet, at the time I could swear there was some form of fate working to bring us together. I was not limerent in the slightest for my ex-husband, but at the same time, I could see reasons that we might have been supposedly fated to be together. I was limerent for my 2nd husband (married to him now) but we had issues that needed worked out and we were apart for a while. My point being, that real life experience is a good indicator to most logical people that no matter what seems to be going on spiritually the real crap of daily life and relationships between fault- filled, imperfect humans still has to be dealt with.
I know that throwing logic at someone who is a bit far gone in the limerence reverie seems hopeless. My most recent LE had moments where I felt I had met my LO for a reason. The power of suggestion in the attraction (especially when it seems mutual) is another mind game to deal with. I came to the conclusion that maybe we were fated to meet and be attracted so that we would work on our marriages! That was the most useful part of the experience!
To me, limerence is more about dealing with yourself and your internal issues than it is about the out of control emotions for someone else. It is a displacement of coping. You are creating someone that seems perfect. You are also recreating yourself in the process to be desirable. The question is: What makes you desirable to you? The question is not: What makes you desirable to this other person whose mind you can’t read.
What is the limerent person REALLY looking for? It probably isn’t a relationship with someone perfect. It is probably more about loving themselves. That is what I have found to be true for myself in the last year of my LE. It is the only thing I have control over- learning to love me as I am. I certainly can not control my SO or the LO. I can’t make anyone else love me as I am.
So to John I would suggest that he ask his wife what void she is trying to fill. Her desire may be more about who she wants to be than it is about something lacking in the marriage, or her longing for someone fated to enter her life.
“I can see a lot of holes in the theories and also a lot of the “signs” and “stages” points sound like what happens in just about every relationship as time passes.”
I agree. However, when feeling totally out of control over what was happening, this pseudo-science was a lifeboat for me.
“I know that throwing logic at someone who is a bit far gone in the limerence reverie seems hopeless. My most recent LE had moments where I felt I had met my LO for a reason. The power of suggestion in the attraction (especially when it seems mutual) is another mind game to deal with. I came to the conclusion that maybe we were fated to meet and be attracted so that we would work on our marriages!”
This is such a good spin on the subject. And your entire post is spot on. I feel better from having read it.
Thinker, as someone who has always been an atheist/scientific materialist, I spent the last 9 months trying to get over this person using psychology and seeing it as a neurological problem. It was only in the past *two weeks* that I considered maybe he’s my Twin Flame. So I reached out to someone for help. They pointed me to Matt Khan and I feel more on the road to acceptance than I have in months. The old me would scoff at Twin Flames. I don’t actually care though. It WORKS. I felt more peace listening to Matt talk than I have in so long and I’ve listened to that talk linked above 3 times now. It helped me make some kind of sense out of an otherwise senseless experience. I am also moving closer to understanding what my “purpose” here is, so I am very, very thankful for the spiritual wisdom offered by Khan. You have to be careful though. Much of TF advice on the internet are just hucksters shilling their BS tricks to get you “union” with your TF.
“To me, limerence is more about dealing with yourself and your internal issues than it is about the out of control emotions for someone else.”
YES!! I’ve been reading a LOT of the comments on this site really wanting to feel the crux of what Limerence ‘actually’ IS. This is the closest I’ve come across. I believe its for sure internal. In other words, its not even really about the LO. Its what the LO brings up in YOU.
Oh and, ” I came to the conclusion that maybe we were fated to meet and be attracted so that we would work on our marriages! That was the most useful part of the experience!” This is it exactly!
If we’re talking ‘spiritual’, for me thats waking up to who we truly are. And that seems to always happen by meeting specific people who will bring up/unearth exactly what we’re unaware of brewing beneath the surface in our subconscious, that in fact is not actually ‘us’, but merely distorted BELIEFS of who or what we think we are and/or feel about ourselves.
The LE nails that for me every fucking time. When I find myself in a LE, its a heeeerrrrreeee we go again, back on the INwards journey.
In my experience of EVERY LE I’ve had, its never ended up being about ‘them’, even though every fibre of my being at the time is screaming ….ITS ABOUT THEM!!!!
Hello. I can speak from wife’s perspective because I am a limerent addict myself. I wasn’t aware of this term, but it definately describes my whole life. Because I can’t have been in love for 10-12 times in my life, this is impossible. Some of them within the same year ! I have only started searching what is going on with me after being in an affair, with the most extraordinary strong feelings for LO, for whom I suspected I am a LO too. The reason I have started to search is because my LO, being in only 3 weeks affair with me, seemed to be absolutely attached to me, couldn’t handle his behaviour, couldn’t think clearly at all, talking about leaving our families and go away to live happily everafter. As a limerent addict myself of course I thought the most strong and special love occured to me !! And then I remembered that last year I was feeling exactly the same strong, extraordinary, out of reality feelings about a narcissist who most probably got scared of me !!! But now was an affair, not a fantasy situation. So my LO was acting so crazy for me that his wife found out and took strict measures against him such as cutting his contact with me by watching his phones etc. And now of course I want my addiction because I am starving. If I review my whole limerence past, I will tell you that I got over these feelings each time with one of following ways :
– change LO
– distance, which makes you see who this person really is and detach
– anger, you feel deceived by this perfect loving person, when they do not receiprocate your
feelings, while at first you thought they did
– non availability of the LO which creates to you more starving at first but then the feeling fades
away
– also, as I was self aware that something was not quite normal with these feelings of mine, because love suppose to make you happy, not miserable, sometimes I cut the addiction myself, while I was full limerent, which was very very painful, but kind of romantic (suffer from unfullfiled passion).
The worst limerent episodes of my life were with a somatic narcissist (poor man was disordered but I though he was my soulmate and my white knight), and with someone I met online, never met in person, and I was obsessed with him for almost 5 months. No way I ever thought there was a possibility to not like each other after meeting.
But now I face the most dangerous one, because I am married and this is an affair, which means limerence got me on step ahead and crossed the line. So I try all the above methods in order to cut ties. However we manage to bring each other back in the relationship.
This very short video from Russell Brand is useful on the whole soulmate thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3xlYrpt6Q Well worth John showing it to his wife. I can get a bit caught up in the whole soulmate thing too – so I relate to this and found it quite powerful.
Much of Brand’s output is related to his experience of multiple types of addiction. As we know, Limerence is just another type of addiction. I found his addiction handbook ‘Recovery’ useful too.
I think this is a very important topic. People experiencing limerence who don’t know what is happening to them (and I am writing from
experience) are likely to search the web for the numinous experiences they are having. The first thing they will come across is likely Twin Flames or other alternative spiritual concepts. It look me 8 months to finally come across the term “limerence” and find this blog, and at first it was kind of disappointing to realize that this was all in my head (even I’m not normally particularly spiritual, I liked reading about the Twin Flames and giving justification to my experience).
As far as consciousness raising, I think if limerence and other more scientific sites including this one, Helen Fisher’s TED talk, Dorothy Tennov’s writings and book, etc. were to appear more readily when people search for numinous experiences, it would benefit a lot of people. I am quite sure that if I learned about limerence earlier I would not have spent 9 months in it. Perhaps a study of the numinous search terms that limerents who are unaware are using (I could suggest some) and then updating your SEO to include these terms as keywords….
Finally, in my opinion, in order change awareness, I think it would help to look closely at the Twin Flame narrative (without being dismissive) and compare it to limerence. It would be important not to tell the person who is unaware that they are completely wrong, but just explain to them, for example, that the concept of Twin Flame telepathy could also be explained by a limerent-limerent experience where the LO is also limerent, so it does make sense that both would be having a similar mental experience. By going through each “alternative” narrative and comparing it to the scientific limerence narrative, you could then allow the person to choose for him/herself.
Thanks for this insightful site.
Hi PS,
Welcome, and thanks for the thoughtful comment. I think a comparison of Twin Flame narrative and limerence would be a good and useful post. The thing that always strikes me about the full-on “two halves of a single soul” version is that it is surely falsified by a second limerent episode. But I haven’t done much deep research into the spiritual framework for understanding love. It’s definitely worth a ponder…
Hello Dr. L,
I wonder about the role of memory post-limerence: once a limerent experience ends, how do we record it in our memories, and what revisionist history do we attribute to it? Also, as someone who has had several limerent experiences but only one where the LO was also limerent and all the barriers were present, the Twin Flame narrative only fit this last experience (which I assume is more rare, but perhaps possible to experience again with someone else).
I think you could make a big impact in people’s lives if every time someone searched for “twin flame” or “soul call” or “karmic love” your site came up in the top hits! Could this be possible with some good search engine optimization?
I’m probably one of the furthest, if not the furthest, post-LE person posting here.
Have you read http://www.thelawofattraction.com/twin-flames/ ?
It describes my relationship with LO #2 to an uncanny degree. But, there are also other possible explanations. https://thoughtcatalog.com/brianna-wiest/2019/07/how-to-know-youve-met-a-woundmate-because-they-feel-like-a-soulmate-but-turn-out-completely-different/ is one of them.
None of the therapists I’ve worked with appeared to know anything about limerence. The clinical explanation is I have/had an insecure attachment style with codependent traits and my childhood left me with a taste for unhappy women with PD tendencies. DrL can explain how those neural pathways came about. My LEs were my attempt at an “emotionally corrective experience.” Thinking that LO #2 is my Twin Flame and fate is keeping us apart was way cooler than thinking that the therapist was right about her showing symptoms of PTSD /NPD/BPD and what played out between us was really manifestation of Borderline/Narcissist relationship. The concept of Twin Flames didn’t do much for my quality of life but Attachment Theory did.
If you can get far enough away to get some perspective, the Twin Flame concept can work in your favor. If you really believe things that are meant to happen will happen, you also should be sensitive to the idea that if things aren’t happening as they should, there’s a reason. With LO #2, I felt like a salmon swimming upstream for much of the relationship. On paper, there was no appeared to be no reason for things not to work, but they didn’t. When I met my wife, I didn’t feel anything like that. Things fell into place like dominoes.
The “cosmos” can tell you you’re wrong just as much as it can lead you to think you’re right. I’ve never had a single dream in over 30 years in which LO #2 and I had stayed together or had successfully reconciled. In my dreams about LO #4, in many of them, she doesn’t even know who I am, and several of them predict disaster if I maintain contact with her.
It entirely possible my destiny lies with LO #2, LO #4, or a woman I haven’t met, yet. I have a few years left and I’ve seen people’s lives overturned in an afternoon. That’s not the plan and I don’t foresee it but it’s possible.
Hi Scharnhorst,
Thanks for the link to the LawofAttraction article on Twin Flames. This was a good one because the 7 Twin Flame stages can all also be explained by the 3 limerence triggers. Twin Flame Stage 1: Search = Glimmer. TF Stage 2: Awakening = Glimmer + Reciprocation. Stage 3: Test and Stage 4: Crisis = Uncertainty. Stage 5: Running or Chasing = Uncertainty, specifically the oscillating sequence of euphoria and depression, ie. “crazy push-pull dance” of seeking closeness but then withdrawing in shame. Stage 6: Surrender = accepting that what you feel is limerence. Many limerent journeys will end here. Stage 7: Reunion or Joining = assumes an active decision to leave current situation to be with the LO. Might happen for some people, but for most this is not the goal.
Placing the Twin Flames narrative beside the LwL narrative has been very helpful for me, and hopefully for others as well.
You’re welcome!
LO #2 and I failed between Steps 5 & 6. After declining my marriage proposal, LO #2 moved across the country but she didn’t want to break up. The therapist said she wasn’t fleeing from me, she was distancing herself from me.
Dr. Marion Solomon put it this way, “When anxiety about intimacy is too great, however, one partner will push away to a safe emotional threshold. If the pushing away leads to too much distance, the separation may generate great anxiety and fear that there will be no way to reconnect, stimulating movement toward more closeness.” – Breaking the Deadlock of Marital Collusion
It was bad enough when she left, it was worse when she came back.
Sounds a lot like steps 5 & 6 to me.
Continuing in my string of bad movie analogies, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR7CeC-rqiE
Twin Flames are the Force, limerence and traditional psychology are the computer.
I just had better results using the computer.
I forgot about this until I saw a sign for a Psychic Reader on my way home from work. Sometimes, we only remember the lucky guesses.
Back in early 1980, right after LO #1, a few months before I met the woman who became the Zen priestess, and almost 3 years before I’d meet LO #2, I briefly dated a woman while I was in training. She claimed to be able to read palms and offered to read mine. [Apparently, I had some kind of affinity for women with these traits]
She said I had an “…interesting Love Line.” She said it was short but strong and unbroken. I asked what that meant. She said that I wouldn’t get married for a while but when I did, I’d stay married. I asked about her. She said she’d be married 3 times and on the third try, she’d get it right. I told her to call me in 2 divorces.
I lost touch with her so I don’t know if she was right about herself but she was right about me.
When it comes to the Tarot, LOs #1, #2, & #4 were definitely Queens of Wands. My wife is definitely a Queen of Cups. https://www.psychicsdirectory.com/articles/tarot-queen-cards/
In the spirit of non-scientific inquiry and trying to introduce some levity into the often downers of Limerence, I’m proposing an unscientific survey to see if there are any cosmic commonalities among limerents. I’ll start.
Western Astrological Sign: Sun- Aquarius, Rising – Sagittarius, Moon – Cancer, Venus – Pisces
“Sagittarius rising…” has a nice ring to it.
Chinese Astrological Sign: Goat/Sheep – although the placemats in Chinese restaurants and a few
websites say I’m a Monkey and I think I’m a Monkey
MBTI: ENTJ/ESTJ – In 2 tests sponsored by work, I’m an ESTJ but outside work
the ENTJ profile describes me better, I’m going with ENTJ
Enneagram: 8 – I forgot the “Wings”
Jungian Archetype: The Trickster
Love Language: 9 – Quality Time
Tarot Significator: King of Swords
So, given the above, if you could map things accurately enough, would it be able to produce a neural profile that uniquely identifies the above description?
My main interest is astrology, so I don’t have the details for the others.
I’m Aries Sun, Sagittarius Rising (agree that sounds good!), Cancer Moon, Venus in Taurus and Mars in Capricorn.
(If anyone is interested, my LO is Libra Sun, Virgo Moon, Venus in Virgo and Mars in Scorpio. Never found out his time of birth so can’t calculate ascendent!) I’ve spent WAY too many hours on synastry charts…
Im also a Chinese Dragon.
And a limerent who isn’t as far out of things as she thought she was!!
We Sagittarius Risers need to stick together! My Mars is in Sagittarius.
We’re not “far out.” We’re “well rounded.”
At the risk of dating myself, after I broke up with LO #2, I put an ad in the personal column of “Men Seeking Women.” The paper declined to publish the first one. I don’t think they understood it. So, I came up with an entirely different one.
“Aquarian/Goat Knight of Swords seeking Gemini/Sagittarius Rabbit or Pig Queen of Wands. Let’s explore the universe together.” I figured I needed to cover as many bases as I could.
I got 4 responses; three from women and one from a guy. I went out with two of the women but neither of them panned out.
My wife is a Pisces. That’s all she knows and all she cares to learn about it. I think she’s an INFJ but she isn’t interested in finding out. My daughter and I enjoy discussing the metaphysical. I taught her how to do a basic Tarot card reading, much to my wife’s dismay.
If you really want to screw with yourself, put on your LO playlist, have a drink, and head over to one of the free online Tarot reading sites and ask something like, “Do LO and I have a future together?” That can be a trip.
That can mess with your head even if you leave out the alcohol. I speak from experience.
Me and alcohol = sobbing wreck.
My last drink was Christmas 2017. Ironically a Christmas gift from LO (everyone in the team got the same) Should have taken that as a clue we weren’t as close as I thought we were. Before that I’d not drunk for over 10 years. I can’t stand feeling not 100% in control.
I tried using that as dutch courage to disclose to SO but it didn’t happen. I just had even more to explain on Boxing Day!!!
All the makes me do is want to look at mine and my LO’s sun and ascendant signs together to know that we are ideally matched. Just when I think I’ve plumbed every adolescent depth, I find another one to have a go at. (I may have written his name on the back of a notebook the other day…. God help me as a 45 year old woman who knows much better )
Jinx Sophie 😂
I’m Aquarius with Scorpio rising I think …
LO is Pisces.
I’ve got to say this. My wife although I don’t think she had a limerence episode joined a religious cult. We could not and still cannot change her mindset. This split our family. Let them do what they need to do. Let them go. Send them to the place where they need to find their own truth. Let them flood to their hearts content. If they find flaw then so be it.
I am a serial limerist. No one has empathy for us when we have episodes.
I developed limerence for a stranger I knew only from YouTube videos. He lived a good 2+ hour drive away from me and was married. Over 6 months, a bizarre series of coincidences led to him being single once again and me ending up accidentally stumbling into a room alone with him at a party. I am still astonished by that turn of events even years in hindsight (it’s legitimately weird), but at the time it felt like sheer magic. I resisted assigning any supernatural meaning to it, but it was hard. It felt like Fate.
Meanwhile, he was limerent for someone else (hence the end of his marriage) and followed his limerence off a cliff. A friend of mine who became connected with him on social media claimed that he posted about Jesus all the time, as if God Himself had ordained his affair as a way to get him back where he needed to be. He alienated his friends and family, burned down his whole life, and married his mistress. I often wonder how quarantine with her is going almost a decade on from all this and if he still feels like all the forces of God and the Universe put him in the right place.
Article of the Day: https://thoughtcatalog.com/january-nelson/2021/05/gemini-woman/
Whatever you think of Astrology, sometimes you come across something that just makes you wonder…
LO #1 and the love-bombing SIL of A coworker I spent a week with after breaking up with LO #2 were Geminis in spades. I think LO #3 was a Gemini but I don’t remember for sure and I never got close enough to her to find out. LO #1 was one of the most intellectually stimulating women I’ve encountered.
I can’t wait for the articles Pisces (Wife), Virgos (LO #2) and Scorpios (LO #4) [none of whom are supposed to be great matches for Aquarians] to come out.
Marcia,
My last LO was a Gemini. Never again. 🙂
Imma leave this here
https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-believing-in-astrology-is-not-as-harmless-as-you-th-1595802206
But, it’s soooo much fun! Toss in tarot cards and the possibilities are endless.
Pre-internet days, LO #2 paid someone to do a birth chart on me. I had to dig out my birth certificate to get the time. The gist of it was my quality of life will be to the right of the mean but still within the first standard deviation.
LO #4 said something once in all seriousness and I came back with that it was just what you’d expect from a Scorpio INTJ.
She came back with, “Don’t push your luck, clown.”
Song of the Day: “Born Under A Bad Sign” – Cream (1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1pzXJuvdAY
I guess if you like problematic psuedoscientific gobblety gook then sure.
I find that the Enneagram personality descriptions are dead on the money. More so than horoscopes. At least my enneagram type is dead on the money. Eerily so.
If DrL and his cronies would get off their collective fannies and apply themselves to something useful, you might be able to prove or disprove that.
If you start with the assumption that all Geminis have similar traits, all ISTJs, have similar traits, all Enneagram 5s have similar traits, then a fair assumptions that similar personality types would have similar neural maps.
With a large enough database, you could look at a neural map and say, “There’s an Aquarian Sun, Sagittarius rising, Cancer Moon, Pisces Venus, ENTJ, Enneagram 8 Wing 7 if I ever saw one.”
If sociopaths and psychopaths have similarities in brain maps, why can’t everyone else? The answer, because there isn’t a scientific basis for Astrology, MBTIs are loosely based on Jung, and I have no idea where Enneagrams come from.
If the maps are detailed enough, you could run a study of X number of people with the same birthdates and see how similar the traces are. But, I’m not a scientist so while it sounds interesting, I’m sure I’m missing something somewhere.
But, think how cool it would be if things did match up?
I have cronies?
Re. horoscopes in all their various forms… my view is probably predictable given my background. I think all these systems work around the principle that the big five personality traits tend to cluster. There are correlations that can be quite robust (e.g. disagreeable people tend to be less neurotic; open people tend to be less conscientious). The more modern systems are better at the cluster analysis and group people on common traits, rather than birth dates.
But, as an Aries, I would say that.
I’m just talking personally. Whenever I read my horoscope, at last 50% does not pertain to me at all. In fact, it’s often laughably inaccurate. But the enneagram personality description is about 98% accurate. The Myers Brigg maybe 70 – 75 % in terms of how I relate to personality type I tested into. YMMV
I rather dislike pigeon-holing people with these tests and categories but on the other hand they are fun!
I find that if I read each of the star sign personality descriptions in turn, I can fit myself to each and every one… hence why they are so convincing to so many people.
With Enneagram personality descriptions, I fit into 4 types really well. With Myers Briggs, I fit into only 2 types (INFJ & INTJ). So MB gets my vote.
Clip of the Day: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/05/17
I know I come back to this a lot but it’s brilliant!
I’m sure Calvin would agree that all this “Purposeful Living” stuff is entirely overrated and say, “Phooey to that!” 🙂
I enjoyed Calvin’s last quip: “Careful! We don’t want to learn anything from this.” 😛
I think one thing that really helped me personally come to grips with limerence was to emphasise the biological angle. I.e. constantly reminding myself of the covertly sexual nature of limerence helped me stop romanticising the feelings involved. (Nothing wrong with sexuality, of course – unless one isn’t being honest with oneself and one’s partner/s about one’s desires).
I think once people start reaching for spiritual explanations for limerence, they might find some spiritual explanation such as Twin Flames that satisfies them, and then they won’t try to understand what’s really going on inside and outside of their pants. Our cartoon friend Calvin believes “Ignorance is Bliss”. There may be many schools of thought that support him. I beg to differ. I want to understand my own motivations. I want to emulate tiresome spoilsport Hobbes. 😛
Limerence, when requited, probably does feel like an astonishing and unprecedented mental connection to another. How better to explain that connection than through spirituality? However, the spiritual explanation glosses over all those messy biological facts. Human beings have bodies. Bodies are drawn to other bodies. Bodies want to merge and reproduce, etc, etc. Spiritual explanations can lead us to deny the fact we’re always first and foremost biological organisms. Nobody can live from the neck up forever and forever…
Western civilisation does encourage people to be detached from their bodies. This might be even truer of women than of men. (Women tend to invest most heavily in the values of their culture, as women are the ones tasked with teaching those values to the next generation). Hence, it would be very easy for a first-time sufferer of limerence to downplay the physical and overplay the spiritual. There is a word for this – self-deception. Self-deception is something we all do everyday.
Of course, there IS something about limerence that feels really … noble, pure, otherworldly. It feels like the purest of pure friendships (if purity is one’s thing). But at the end of the day, physical attraction is involved. That is to say, if I wasn’t physically attracted to my LO, he would never have become my LO in the first place. Strong physical attraction is a non-negotiable part of the criteria. Without physical attraction, there would be no limerence, and what’s noble about that?
I do think Twin Flames theory does do a good job of one thing, however – describing the push-pull, euphoria/despair stage of limerence. This is the phase of limerence that really trips people up. This is the phase where the interaction stops being fun and starts to become painful. Yet people won’t readily turn their backs on the anguish and the person supposedly inspiring such anguish.
I think I’ve only fully entered into this stage twice, because you DO need an awful lot of real and/or perceived reciprocation from an LO to go there. I have probably romanticised the push-pull stage when I was actually in it. However, when I see other couples act out the push-pull thing, I think the “relationship” they have with each other is tedious and dysfunctional, and I wish they’d go away!! 😛
It’s interesting – we can have contrasting opinions of limerence-inspired behaviours, depending on where we are in the whole energy exchange…
Sammy,
“I think one thing that really helped me personally come to grips with limerence was to emphasise the biological angle. I.e. constantly reminding myself of the covertly sexual nature of limerence helped me stop romanticising the feelings involved.”
I think there is a lot more to limerence than the biological. Sure, that’s a big part it, but there’s also the particular limerent’s personality (some people are more prone to limerence), what’s going on in the limerent’s life (what are you longing for? what are you missing?) and a deeply emotional element. If it were mostly biological, we wouldn’t be posting about the LEs 10 years later. I dated some people years ago I can barely remember, but I can tell you all my LO’s names, whether or not anything much happened with them.
“I think there is a lot more to limerence than the biological. Sure, that’s a big part it, but there’s also the particular limerent’s personality (some people are more prone to limerence), what’s going on in the limerent’s life (what are you longing for? what are you missing?) and a deeply emotional element.”
@Marcia. Mm, yes. I agree with you, of course. It’s MORE than just physical attraction. But the rest of it – what makes limerence limerence – is so hard to unpack.
I’ll try to answer two of the questions you’ve raised:
(1) Why are some people more prone to limerence?
In my case, I think it runs in the family tree. My mother has borderline and narcissistic traits. I’m not sure whether she’s ever suffered from limerence herself. (Possibly she enjoyed several years of mutual limerence with her second husband, who is now deceased). But her unpredictable behaviour certainly carries with it the potential to inspire limerence in others.
She does the whole “damsel in distress” thing very well. Except she doesn’t want to be rescued exactly, because then the attention would dry up. And that’s what she wants – constant attention. She is an incredibly magnetic woman, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I almost admire her. But her magnetism, which is a strange form of sexual power I think, comes from the sheer strength of her personality and not her looks.
My older sister is a lesbian and admitted to me that her last relationship led to a very painful 2-year limerent episode. But it seems the obsession was only triggered when she and girlfriend broke up. It was limerence inspired by a breakup, which is apparently very hard to get over because you’ve genuinely had that person in your life, acting as if they desired you too, and then “lost” the connection. The personality of this girlfriend and the personality of my mother apparently a very close match.
So, yes, the genetic factors are there…
(2) What was going on in my life when limerence was triggered?
Well, I was in my mid-teens when my mind started to betray me. I’d always been a really good student, and suddenly I couldn’t concentrate on my work, and my grades slipped noticeably. Of course, I was the right age to have infatuations, but I think other factors were involved as well.
I think I had major depression in my teens. I think this depression was the result of coming from a dysfunctional home. As already noted, my mother has very pronounced narcissistic traits. She’s the star of every occasion. Steal the spotlight from her at your own risk! It didn’t matter if I brought home straight As – my mother wouldn’t congratulate me. Straight As were expected, de rigueur, the bare minimum. Nor would she attend functions where other people might be the focal point. (My pre-formal bash, for example). I couldn’t win this woman’s approval no matter what I did.
My depression probably stemmed from vague feelings of deprivation pervading my entire childhood. I grew up without ever feeling the sincere love of a maternal figure. I didn’t feel valued for myself. I only felt valued for what I achieved. But it didn’t matter how well I did – my mother still wouldn’t look at me, still wouldn’t affirm me, still wouldn’t acknowledge my individuality. She could only ever see me as an extension of herself.
Because of my frustrating relationship with my mother, I came to regard males as a much more reliable source of affection than females, since my father was sometimes capable of nurturing me and my sisters. He didn’t care about what grades appeared on my report card. This is probably why I eventually settled on a same-sex LO. Rightly or wrongly, I unconsciously reached the conclusion that men are legit, solid, trustworthy, a safe bet.
All in all, when I look at things from an emotional perspective, I think I was trying to use limerence to “self-medicate” myself out of depression. I remember going to a church camp with a friend in grade twelve. One of the activities we did at this church camp was scripture memorisation. We had to learn this verse about remembering the Creator in the days of our youth, before we get old and take no pleasure in said days. (Ecclesiastes 12:1). I remember thinking bitterly to myself that I’m seventeen years old and already “take no pleasure” in my days! What a stupid admonition!! 😛
I was suffering from anhedonia, in other words, the inability to take pleasure in activities one normally enjoys, one of the key symptoms of depression. About three weeks later, I returned to school, and that’s when my limerent episode started in earnest. I’d made a subtle overture to LO during the holidays in the form of a letter praising him to the skies – a fan letter I guess. He responded positively to the letter, thanking me profusely for it. Our friendship become warmer, but we never got truly close.
LO could sometimes be a very warm person. And he could sometimes be a very aloof person. I think he had a lot of admirers, both guys and girls. He was attractive to both sexes, and was always surrounded by a large group of friends. People got hooked on his strange mix of charisma and formality. He kind of had a “come-close-but-not-too-close” mentality.
He certainly gave me all the intermittent reinforcement my little heart could desire. I believe I came as close to him as anybody could. Our closeness sparked jealousy – not from girls, ironically, but from his other guy friends. One girl was curious, though, as to why I always wanted to say goodbye to LO. I think she liked him too, in the secret depths of her heart. But, like me, she was destined to be just one more taken-for-granted hanger-on – used for narcissistic supply today, and forgotten tomorrow.
LO come off as very independent and he didn’t really confide his thoughts or intentions in anyone. You never knew where you stood with him, or what he was thinking, but he was surprising generous with gifts. He was less forthcoming with physical affection, but when he did drape an arm around a shoulder or brush a leaf off one’s back, that was like sun coming out on a cold winter’s day. I thought his smile was … dazzling. He reminds me of the Dickie Greenleaf character in “The Talented Mr Ripley”. (A garden-variety narcissist, according to all literary analyses I’ve read).
I guess he was the non-prescription “drug” that was going to save me from depression? Also, I think I figured out that a male LO would be less threatening to my mother’s ego than a female LO. If I had a girlfriend at that age, I think my mother would have seen the younger female as a rival. I didn’t have the confidence to stand up to my mother. Maybe limerence was a way to get some needs met (i.e. begin the individuation process from family and especially from mother) without rocking the boat too much?
I kind of saw LO as a version of Jesus. (I.e. a completely idealised male). That might sound weird to people who aren’t religious. However, I grew up in an environment where one is constantly encouraged to have a “personal relationship” with a male deity. So casting LO in that role (hero, saviour, messiah, and what have you) didn’t seem like too much of a stretch. All the scripts had already been written, all the backing tracks recorded, all the emotional cues well-established. LO just had to step into the narrative…
So, yes, Marcia, I’d agree with you – limerence is a fascinating confluence of biological influences and cultural influences and the exact composition of that confluence comes down to the personality of the individual limerent. (My limerent episode speaks volumes about me, and my aspirations as a teenager, but it reveals very little objective information about my LO).
Sammy,
“She does the whole “damsel in distress” thing very well. ”
I don’t understand why that is appealing. I know some women like a “fixer upper” man, particularly a man who they feel needs a new hairstyle, new clothes, etc. I don’t have any interest in redoing someone. If you have to do all that, what’s the point? But a strong sense of self is very sexy. And if that includes wearing mismatching plaids … well… that’s who the guy is. 🙂
“So, yes, the genetic factors are there…”
I meant personality type. It’s been written about on here. Certain personality types on Myers Brigg may be more prone to limerence.
“I think I had major depression in my teens.”
I think depression is a big limerence trigger. There is NO anti depressant, no drug or drink that will ever make you feel better than limerence, until it goes south.
“I couldn’t win this woman’s approval no matter what I did.”
I’m sorry you had to go through that. I spent most of my life trying to get my dad’s attention … until I stopped and asked myself … what would I be losing if he wasn’t in my life? Not much. I asked myself (not surprisingly) the same question about my last LO.
Sammy, What a fascinating narrative! I’m always blown away by the intelligence & depth displayed in people’s posts on LwL and this is a prime example.
“My mother has borderline and narcissistic traits.”
You and your sister may benefit from joining BPD411.org or another survivors of BPD support group.
You may have picked up some ‘fleas’ and much as you disliked the drama that you witnessed and experienced, it is familiar to you both. One or the other of you may also have developed some worrisome habits/traits as a consequence that *may* play into limerence. Or not.
Good luck.
@Marcia.
“I don’t understand why that {damsel in distress} is appealing.”
At its simplest, I think the “damsel in distress” thing is appealing to men because it gives guys a real-life chance to play the hero. Deep down inside, a lot of fellows probably want to impress women. There’s a subtle ego boost involved. Also, it might be a natural “in”, a good way for ordinary chaps to strike up relationships with attractive women. The man’s showing off his resources such as free labour. He’s sort of saying: “Look, I can be of use to you.”
“I meant personality type. It’s been written about on here. Certain personality types on Myers Brigg may be more prone to limerence.”
Oh, gotcha. Introvert who thinks too much? Guilty as charged! I’m an INTJ or an INTP, depending on the day of the test. 😛
“I think depression is a big limerence trigger.”
Yeah. And it certainly ties in with your earlier comment that maybe we’re prone to limerence because something is missing from our lives. 😛
“Sammy, What a fascinating narrative! I’m always blown away by the intelligence & depth displayed in people’s posts on LwL and this is a prime example.”
Thanks, Blue Ivy. 🙂
Seems like my LO was for me some kind of Christ figure, which probably closely correlates to the Hero archetype in Jungian psychology.
In retrospect, I must have projected “all things good” onto my LO, while denying many of those same positive traits in myself. No wonder the interaction made me feel so down – in order for him to be all sweetness and light, I had to be all darkness and pain, and over-identify with my shadow side. I had to become “The Sinner” so he could play “Christ”. Neither characterisation was accurate…
LO had some good traits and some bad traits. He wasn’t all-good. He wasn’t Christ. He had feet of clay. He was human, notwithstanding his golden visage sometimes appearing in my dreams. (And do I detect the flutter of wings?) I had some good traits and some bad traits. I too was human. During LE, in my head, I was acting out some kind of redemption narrative, inspired by themes from my childhood and fuelled by self-hatred. Deep stuff.
“I meant personality type. It’s been written about on here. Certain personality types on Myers Brigg may be more prone to limerence.”
@Marcia. Out of interest, I’ve worked out the Myers-Briggs type of my two most enduring LOs. BOTH men are very likely ISTPs, according to my calculations, or the type called Virtuosos.
ISTPs tend to be strong on fairness – that’s probably the goodness factor/apparent virtue I’m drawn to and tempted to idealise.
They tend to make great friends in the short term. They are creative, practical, love to tinker, lots of interesting hobbies, connect with basically everyone, freedom-loving, spontaneous, etc. They can make bad friends in the long run – they sometimes get bored of people and don’t feel the need to inform said people. ISTPs are both great fun and famously insensitive. (Limerence material alert?) They are “true introverts”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
ISTPs possess a lot of traits that would be frustrating to a potential romantic partner. E.g. they’re very private, don’t share feelings, aren’t attuned to other people’s emotions and motivations, don’t have a problem with casual sex, don’t like commitment, stubborn, unpredictable, live in the present, risk-taker, difficult to get to know.
Weird that this type has so often singled me out for some kind of ill-defined social bond. Question: why am I, an INTJ man, so darn attractive to ISTP men? I don’t chase them initially – they chase me, before shrugging off all responsibility for their actions. Is it because they sense (correctly) that I’ll (a) excuse poor social skills as normal male behaviour and (b) never put pressure on them to commit?
The tragedy is an ISTP will eventually get fed up with an INTJ like me anyway, no matter how lovely I am, or how little pressure I place on him. By all reports, they find it hard to be around people who don’t share the ‘S’ preference. ‘N’ types are too abstract and impractical and forward-looking. We want answers to embarrassing questions.
Yet the fact ISTPs have repeatedly sought me out for friendship, and acted as if they valued that friendship, suggests they get something from me they don’t get easily from other personalities… Am I just patient enough to put up with all the mixed signals offered by these seemingly laidback but in reality fiercely independent individuals? Why am I attracted to men who are “difficult to get to know”? I wonder – does some sick part of my brain enjoy playing detective? That’s probably it, you know – I just like playing detective games!!
If my analysis here is correct, then at least I know why I’ve “lost” the men I thought I loved. It wasn’t me or my many personal shortcomings. It was always the other chap’s personality! Ah-ha!
The upside of all this: I don’t need to feel guilty anymore. 🙂
Sammy,
“He’s sort of saying: “Look, I can be of use to you.””
So a man wants a woman to be into him because of what he can do for her? It’s a bit like a man being into a woman for her appearance. At some point, both parties will have to show who they are as people.
I’ve had guys go into “let me impress you/I’m trying to win yo over” mode and it turns me off. The energy they give off makes me uncomfortable. Much sexier is someone who is himself and thinks : She either likes me or she doesn’t. Years ago, I was with a group of people with a hobby I do and one of the guys, playfully but still a bit seriously, told me to shut up. And I was being a jerk. 🙂 I had never noticed him before, but I did at that moment! He wasn’t afraid to call me out. He wasn’t kissing my butt. That was sexy.
Sammy,
“Yet the fact ISTPs have repeatedly sought me out for friendship, and acted as if they valued that friendship, suggests they get something from me they don’t get easily from other personalities”
Or what is it about them that draws you? I noticed that my last two LOs were in the in group. I am SO not in the in group. (I mean at work.) So there must be something about that that appeals to me, as, for some reason, me being an outsider appeals to them. Although I will admit that my last LO being so mired in the system got on my nerves (a man who takes few chances). Mired in the work system, the social system of the area, deeply entrenched with his family (lived in the same place all his life), all of which I could never relate to.
“Or what is it about them that draws you?”
@Marcia. Yes, good question.
ISTPs completely live in the present. People like this are not inclined towards depression, although they sometimes have outbursts of strong emotion, usually anger. (An adult who knew LO well described him as “a pressure cooker” – a good assessment).
LO didn’t express a lot of emotion around me. I fell into the trap of thinking I could help him express his “hidden depths”. Bad idea. He didn’t have the soul of a poet. He just admired others’ emotional range expressed in artistic works. Maybe he was drawn to me because I had something he knew he lacked – emotional literacy.
As a depression-prone INTJ, I could benefit from living more in the present. ISTPs and INTJs have an opposites-attract kind of chemistry. But we’re similar too – we’re both highly introverted. We share that two-introverts-rolling-our-eyes-together thing when we’re in a group of loud, attention-seeking extrovert friends. 😛
I’ve come to the conclusion, though, that ISTP and INTJ don’t work one-on-one. For all their introversion, ISTPs like excitement. A lot of excitement. They’re basically quiet people who love being at the centre of the action. As an INTJ, I can’t deliver the goods. I’m not exciting. I don’t want to take risks. My bond with an ISTP man only thrives in a group setting. One-on-one, all the incompatibilities (and his boredom with my intellectual side) come to the surface.
I’m a strategist. ISTPs have these flashes of creative genius, but they’re not strategic. They are naturally bright and have great ideas and fly by the seat of their pants. They’re disorganised at work, and even more disorganised in relationships. They go into romance with no game plan. Sooner or later, I notice “this man has absolutely no clue what he’s doing”. Sex is a completely sensory experience, no subtext. The deep emotions that should be present never turn up.
I think ISTPs are the LOs that “fly under the random”. They seem so wholesome, and yet their freedom-loving, you-can’t-pin-me-down, live-for-today mentality represents a kind of chaos. Subconsciously, I’m drawn to their chaos. I view that chaos as a kind of challenge. As a purposeful adult, it’s time to me to say no to chaos.
I can free myself from an ISTP LO by giving him permission to be his messy, confused self. He’s not really my problem now, is he? 😛
*That should read “fly under the radar”. Although “fly under the random” is a great Freudian slip. ISTPs are nothing if not random. 😛
Sammy,
“As a purposeful adult, it’s time to me to say no to chaos.”
I had that mindset in my early 30s. I thought I should be more serious. I went to graduate school and focused on my career while ending a nearly decade-long best friendship with the type of chaotic person you mention. I have regretted it for years as I have yet to meet one person who even compares in terms of outrageous boldness and sheer fun to hang out with (he passed away years ago). My point is … don’t run from the chaotic types. They are really hard to find as you get older. At my age, I don’t think they exist. 🙂
“My point is … don’t run from the chaotic types. They are really hard to find as you get older. At my age, I don’t think they exist. 🙂”
@Marcia. Your remarks make me both think and laugh, and think some more. I keep forgetting that what my overly picky brain might define as a “terrible choice” is somebody else’s “great catch”. 😛
Also, just from participating in this blog, I’ve come to see the extraordinary diversity of human minds. For example, not even all introverts think alike. There are different kinds of introverts!
I think I’ve made two big mistakes in life: (1) expecting people to see the world through the exact same lens as I do and (2) underestimating the role emotion plays in relationships. No wonder I was so bad at divining the motivations of my LOs! If my LOs remain a mystery to me, I too most likely remain a mystery to them…
I think I’ve been able to be very open about feelings on this blog (very unusual for my personality) due to something in the air provided by INF- types, who seem to gather here en masse. I didn’t know I needed something INFJ/Ps offer (compassion? empathy in spades?) to make sense of my life. It’s been a healing experience as well as a fun way to trade ideas. I’ve received a gift from a different kind of introvert…
I don’t know what your personality type is, Marcia. But you bring a real energy to conversations, which I rather enjoy – an intellectual crackle, if you will. Your mind is both quick and playful. You draw people out, but still express a strong individuality. (And all the above is meant as sincere praise, in case you were wondering). 🙂
Sammy,
“I think I’ve made two big mistakes in life: (1) expecting people to see the world through the exact same lens as I do and ”
I do that too.
“I don’t know what your personality type is, Marcia. ”
I am an INFP but identify much more with my enneagram type (4).
“…still express a strong individuality. ”
Well, thank you. That is a truly a nice compliment. I enjoy your posts as well. So lyrical and contemplative. 🙂
Marcia,
“My point is … don’t run from the chaotic types. They are really hard to find as you get older. At my age, I don’t think they exist. 🙂”
I have to disagree with this one.
One the Bell Curve from Boring to Chaotic, maybe you can deal with some to the right of the mean long term but I think anyone outside the first standard deviation would eventually become exhausting to deal with. Run anything over its rated capacity long enough and it’s likely to fail. Some people find High Maintenance appealing. I don’t have much of a tolerance for them.
Never get involved with someone who has more problems than you do. As Linus (Peanuts) puts it, ” There’s no heavier burden than a great potential. LOs seem to have a lot of potential but some people are just more trouble than they’re worth. Sad, but true. Limerence can really cloud determining where that point is.
I have to ask, what would make you happy? Have you ever had a fulfilling relationship? What ended it? It’s almost like you’re a shark without an air bladder.
Stop swimming and you sink and die.
If you read my answer to Sammy, I was talking about friendship. Not EVERYTHIG is about a romantic relationship.
Sorry, Marcia,
I blended this post in with the post on flirting where you said, “And I’ll be honest: I would have given up all that empty attention for one night with my LO.”
I thought the chaotic guy was your LO. It’s hard to keep track of everybody’s arcs.
LE,
“I thought the chaotic guy was your LO.”
No. He wasn’t chaotic enough. Lived in same town he grew up in (had never left even briefly), same job for decades, married high school girlfriend. But I stand by what I wrote. If a person is single and not looking for a permanent situation, and someone with a risk-taking, fun personality shows up, friend or LO, ride the ride as long as you can. Or as long as it’s still fun. 🙂
Marcia,
“If a person is single and not looking for a permanent situation, and someone with a risk-taking, fun personality shows up, friend or LO, ride the ride as long as you can. Or as long as it’s still fun. 🙂”
I totally agree with this!
That was LO #1. As a college student, I could overlook things like the heavy recreational drug use and drinking. Once I graduated and became a Naval Officer, I couldn’t. I had so much fun and learned so much from her.
LE,
“As a college student, I could overlook things like the heavy recreational drug use and drinking”
But why must all of our fun happen in college or in our 20s? THe chaotic friend who I mentioned was in his 40s and hanging out with people in their 20s. By then, I was in my 30s and thought he was immature. But now, from my own middle-aged vantage point, I get it . You can only sit through so many more appropriate lunches.
Marcia,
Short answer to your last post and by no means intending to bring religion into the mix, for many people,
“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” ( 1 Cor 13:11)
In other words, we grow up and other things become important to us. I got tired of being lonely. I wanted a reason to come home and wanted someone to care about me. You don’t have to. Peter Pan never did. Nobody’s forcing you. It works for some people.
As you said, the older you get the harder it is.
LE,
“I got tired of being lonely. ”
I wasn’t lonely in my 20s. I had a core group of friends. Talked to them on the phone every day. Hung out every weekend. It wasn’t until everyone fell off into domesticity that I realized how many people actually wanted that. 🙂
Sammy,
The more I think about it, the more I think that the two most important MBTI elements for me are NJs. I really enjoy dealing with NJ combos. I find them energizing and challenging. I tend to enjoy their company.
ISTJ/ESTJ kind of leave me cold. I’ve dated accountants and engineers and it’s like we’re on different planets.
The one kicker is xSFJs. LO #2, LO #3, XPLO, & my wife are ESFJ/ISFJ.
@Limerent Emeritus.
Thank you for your interest in this admittedly tangential discussion. I think I’ve strayed a little bit away from limerence and into general psychology. I’m trying to understand my own blind spots and weaknesses in interpersonal relationships, actually. 😛
The angle from which I’m trying to approach the whole personality thing, which probably isn’t very clear, is … emotional rapport. I realise I’m not as good with people as I sometimes think. People don’t automatically see my good intentions – there’s a communication breakdown somewhere. I’m not good at validating people’s feelings, which is different from agreeing with people’s opinions. End result: I often feel a strong sense of connection with others, but others don’t feel the same strong sense of connection with me. Other people might assume I’m laughing AT them and not WITH them.
In short, as a matter of course, I’m not giving other people what they need…
I realise when people come to me with their emotions, they often walk away feeling unsatisfied or unheard or dismissed. My responses to other people’s pain can seem unhelpful in the best of times, even cold, despite my best attempts to find the right words or offer wise counsel.
For example, the other day, on this very forum, you said something to someone, and I noticed what you said actually helped matters. What you said made the other person FEEL BETTER. What you said provided comfort to someone who was looking for comfort. You said the right thing at the right time. You spoke “a word in season” to “the weary” (Isaiah 50:4). I don’t know if that’s some gift you’ve acquired as a result of being a father? But you did something I couldn’t do, and I admire that and I envy that. It’s hard for me to switch from “logical brain” to “emotional support brain”.
I tend to miss emotional cues in conversations. I miss the cue that says: “It’s time to stop kidding around. Jokes are great, but now it’s time to be serious.” I want to stay in sarcastic, jocular mode long after the conversation has moved into bleaker terrain. I don’t want to give up childish things, to borrow your Biblical quote. 😛
As an INTJ, historically, I’ve been tempted to throw up my hands in dismay at friendships involving “drama”. Now I see that maybe said drama wasn’t something I needed to walk away from per se. In certain situations, all the other person wanted was for their feelings to be acknowledged as real. I didn’t need to come up with any brilliant solutions to the problems presented to me. I just needed to listen, show some sympathy, etc, let both parties be human beings.
There are a lot of INFJ/Ps on this board. This is what INFJ/Ps do well – listening to people talk about their feelings, without snickering, or clowning around inappropriately. INF- types do have a sense of humour, but that sense of humour seems to be very well integrated with their empathy circuits, so it’s rarely jarring. Jaideux, for example, has been wonderful. Her comments always make me feel better. Allie has been wonderful. Marcia has been wonderful.
Basically, what I’m saying is, when I give people in my life purely logical responses to their emotional petitions, I end up offending said people, and then wondering why said people are offended. I kind of understand what’s going on now. I.e. people aren’t always looking for logical answers. If I can learn to let others share their feelings with me, then mutual connection will come about naturally.
There is just something powerful about emotional connection by itself. I always thought I had to give more than emotional connection to be “of value” to my friends. I thought I had to fix people. Giving less might be the key to success in relationships for me. I need to stop resisting other people’s energy fields. Marcia, for example, “leans in” to people, but she doesn’t stop being herself. I feel like I can be myself around her because she is so much herself. She shows me that connection doesn’t mean losing/hiding oneself.
Sammy,
Continuing on the tangent…
I don’t see it as a gift. It’s what led me into the LW with LO #4. I could see she was in pain, the guy that should have been there for her wasn’t (turns out he was causing a lot of it), and I made the mistake of butting in and trying to comfort her. It blew up on me. Good intentions don’t always give good outcomes.
I’ve kind of always had the ability to read people it but it didn’t start to develop it until I met LO #2 and got close enough to someone that I cared about enough that it was important to be able to read them. Someone whose happiness was important to me.
That gift goes both ways. LO #2 said that I’d say something and she’d “melt.” She said it was like there was an angel on my tongue. She stole that from U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” My wife says that I can say the most amazing things at exactly the right time. My wife also says that when I go after someone that I know exactly how to inflict the precise amount of pain I want to. She says it’s not one of my better traits. If you want to check it out, watch this clip from Heinz Kohut.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ6Y3hoKI8U
You can start at the 1:45.
It took a marriage counselor to really get me to see that “Do you want coffee?” could be more than a “Yes” or “No” question. My wife and I have vastly different communication styles. The marriage counselor said she didn’t know how we could agree on a restaurant, let alone discuss significant emotional issues, especially when we didn’t know ourselves what baggage we were dealing with. We couldn’t have expressed ourselves to each other even if we knew what we wanted to express. It took years but we did it.
Sometimes, what MBTI profile you test out at doesn’t seem to fit who you think you are. I tested as an ESTJ twice at work. But, ENTJ describes me more accurately. They give a possible reason for that. They say your external environment can force you to operate in a way you wouldn’t under different circumstances.
I think I was always an ENTJ. But, as the child of two alcoholics, one pretty volatile, I couldn’t rely on intuition (N), I had to keep my eyes open for the next shit-storm (S). I also learned to keep a really low profile, suppressing the (E).
I joined the Navy and served on submarines. It’s a very literal world. We believe what we see on the gages, dial, and meters. We believe what people tell us. Nuance doesn’t exist on a submarine. As I got out of that environment, I think my (N) was able to emerge more.
A lot of it’s conjecture but it makes me think I understand myself better.
@Sammy
Am enjoying reading your post as really resonates with me.
I think the human tendency to try and fix people or their problems is a very common one. The pain of others can be unbearable to witness so we are all strongly driven to remove both their pain and, in doing so, our own discomfort. I too have a strong tendency to “fix” and have to remind myself frequently to try not to.
Because as you say, what most people really need is to know that you feel and understand their pain, that you care and that you have faith in their ability to resolve their problems themselves. This is how we lend them our strength.
I find sharing another’s pain yet doing nothing to solve it is so much harder to do but this is what true empathy is. And often, doing just this is enough to provide them with some degree of relief.
Interesting tangent 🙂
Article of the Day: https://thoughtcatalog.com/january-nelson/2021/05/scorpio-woman/
There’s a section on trust with a Scorpio woman.
When I first started testing boundaries, one of the things I said to LO #4 was, “Heaven help the man you ever really trust. He won’t know what hit him.”
She was living with her ex at the time. What I was expecting was something like, “I’m living with him and you’re over the line.” She never directly responded to what I said but our communications started to get a lot more personal.
The Gemini and Scorpio male articles are up on TC.
Article of the Day: https://thoughtcatalog.com/january-nelson/2021/05/virgo-woman/
This completes LE’s LO series.
The part I like best: “They might assume you’re going to leave them today, even though you told them you loved them yesterday.”
LO #2: “I was afraid that one day you’d wake up and not want to be with me. If I gave myself to you and you left, I’d be devastated.”
Marcia,
“I wasn’t lonely in my 20s. I had a core group of friends. Talked to them on the phone every day. Hung out every weekend.”
Once I settled in on the first submarine, I had a group of close acquaintances, two of whom are still my closest friends. Most of the group were either couples in the group or others with SOs who weren’t in the group. We worked out together, hit bars together, all kinds of things.
But I was still lonely. I think my life began when I met LO #2. She showed me happiness was a possibility. She gave me things to look forward to. I stopped merely existing and started living. The first two years we were together, I was happier with her than I’d been in my entire life until then.
I didn’t get what I wanted from her, but at least now, I learned what I wanted and that those things existed. I found them with another woman.
LE,
Hmmm… I am trying to think of someone who I’ve met who I could say started my life, but I can’t. I was watching a documentary last night on clothes designer Halston. He was this glamorous, successful person living in New York who’d come from the Midwest and reinvented himself. A different look. Even a different voice. He was being interviewed and asked about his childhood and his past, and the interviewer couldn’t get much out of him. “I don’t want to talk about history crap. I want to talk about today.” The older I get, the more I understand that. In terms of romantic relationships, if these people were so important, they’d still be in my life. At the time, of course, it felt that the world was at stake. 🙂 I spent a lot of time thinking about the past, but lately I don’t even feel that connected to it. And I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing.
It’s not a bad or good thing to feel connected to the past. You feel the way you do and you’re entitled to your feelings.
I didn’t revisit the past because I like it there, I revisited the past because I had problems in the present that could continue causing problems in the future.
To fix those, I needed to understand how I got there.
I understand. I just think there is a freeing, shed-your-skin kind of thing when we let of the past. I read an interview with playwright Edward Albee, who made no effort to find out who his birth parents were when he found out he was adopted. He said, “I know who I am. Once I figured out who I was, I had no interest in finding out where I came from.” That’s deep.
Do NOT try to see if you and your LO are compatible astrologically-it’ll tell you what you want to hear!!! if I’d gone by my horoscope and left my SO it’d have been the worst mistake of my life!