It’s October. Time for another visit to the LwL virtual coffee house.
My week has been super busy with prep for the Obsessive Thoughts Workshop. It’s launching in 8 hours time.
Last chance to get the discounted price of $49.
Sign up now if you want to learn how to break free of obsessive thought loops without withdrawal pain.
Social media and indirect contact
OK, moving on to something new.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of social media on limerence, as it’s a topic that comes up a lot in discussion.
I’ve written before about how it can be a sort of double addiction. As well as the limerent reward, there’s also the dopamine hit of checking your phone for an update.
If you have an LO who posts a lot on social media, the temptation to check for updates will be driven by both desire for indirect contact with them and desire for a quick social media hit.
What I hadn’t really considered before was the impact of the times when you don’t get the rewards.
When you check and there is no update.
That isn’t neutral, when it comes to reward signalling in the brain. It registers as a reward prediction error.
The original impulse to check is your dopamine neurons firing to motivate you to seek reward, so you check their feed, and… no new message.
Your hope is disappointed.
That silences your dopamine neurons, and as a result you feel bad. A dip in dopamine is aversive.
This phenomenon is partly why uncertainty is so powerful for reinforcing limerence – you are constantly experiencing reward prediction errors, so your dopamine levels are peaking and dipping and never settle down. You can’t learn a correct pattern of behaviour that reliably gives the reward.
Instead, you are trapped in a state of expectancy. Never knowing. Always wondering. Constantly reinforcing the addiction.
A good example of this principle is managing nicotine cravings. If airline cabin crew know that they are on a long-haul flight and aren’t going to be able to smoke for a long time, their cravings subside. There’s no uncertainty. They make peace with the limitation.
But, as their arrival time approaches, the exact moment when they will at last be able to light up and take a deep draught of smoke into their expectant lungs comes closer, but is not yet certain. That sends their cravings into overdrive.
Expectancy is tough for mood regulation.
I suspect this is more important for intensifying limerence symptoms than I previously realised.
So, there’s a topic to kick things off today: has expectant waiting on social media (or email or texting) affected your limerence cravings?
Anyone noticed a pattern?
I am not on social media, so that is one problem I don’t have.
Also, LO is not much of a texter, so that’s not really a problem, either.
My limerence seems to have bottomed out for the time being. Where I do have a problem is that being around LO is thrilling, even though my opinion of him continues to slide downward.
I estimate that I am at about 20% of my original insanity, which I actually find to be bearable. Since I am finding it bearable, actually enjoyable, I can’t seem to come up with a way to motivate myself to reduce it further.
On the one hand, I am pleased to be doing as well as I am doing. On the other hand, I have self-loathing that I could be so attracted to a man who says so many things that I find objectionable.
I saw LO yesterday. He brought up the “unedited” video of the Minneapolis confrontation between ICE agents and civilian Renee Good, who was shot dead in what appears to be an unprovoked attack. I asked him if he had been able to find the video showing that Ms. Good rammed the ICE agent with her car. He snapped at me that it would take him 30 minutes to find it, suggesting that he was never going to do so. Just as well, because I am sure it doesn’t exist.
The fact that he continues to believe that Ms. Good instigated the attack and deserved to be shot is ridiculous and completely unacceptable.
Yet I continue to drool.
Speaking of which, did you see the family just filed lawsuits over this? I watched Becca Good’s portion of the news conference they gave. There were so many awful things said about her online, and about Renee, basically painting them as frauds or convicts or that they brought it on themselves—and they’re just ordinary people. There’s Becca struggling to move on without the love of her life, trying to raise Renee’s youngest child and get him to Kindergarten, while he’s desperately missing his mother. And I go into the comments of the AP article (oh why did I do that) and people are still in there with their character assassinations.
To Serial:
I did notice that. One good thing is that LO would not be online attacking her, I will at least give him credit for that.
But I fail to understand why these people are so vilified.
I’m not on social media and since I became Limerent almost 3 years ago I’m so thankful that I’m one of the few who stays away from it. I believe it’s more than a double edged sword, maybe more like a triple edged sword.
On the first edge I’d be checking it constantly to see if she posted any pics of herself which would only feed the addiction and break the no contact rule.
On the second edge I might see that she had a get together with a group of friends over the weekend and couldn’t even think to invite me giving me a huge sense of FOMO/ (fear of missing out).
On the third edge I would constantly be posting pictures of myself doing cool things like extinguishing a vehicle fire with all of my turnout gear and air pack on as a way to look all heroic or letting everyone know I just got back from a 10 mile run. And I would only be doing it with the purpose of trying to get my LO to notice and maybe comment, not for my own good.
In my humble opinion social media is nothing more than adding gasoline to a fire for us limerents!
10 miles? That’s a half of Marathon 🏃♂️ Very impressive 👍! You’d run your LO out of your system soon…
Keep it Up 💪
To Richie:
Such a great post. Social media is one big exercise in FOMO.
I already suffer from FOMO due to being disabled and semi-housebound. I prefer not to think about all the activities I can’t participate in. I’m not in denial, but I don’t want to shove my own face into it, either.
Now, if I could extinguish a vehicle fire while running ten miles (?), that might be a different story. (Might as well combine your accomplishments for an additional boost.)
I don’t think any long-distance jugglers, runners, walkers would carry with them a whole air pack, except a big bottle of water w/o a smart watch.
Extinguishing a vehicle (most likely someone else’s) 🔥, with whatever one has in hand, is truly heroic!
The most challenge still lies on how to extinguish LE 🔥 in 1 year or 5 decades… 😍
Dear Snow ❄️
Great point about extinguishing my LE 😆!
However according to Dr L and several other sources Limerence on average lasts between 18 months to 3 years. The very end of this month will mark 3 years since my infatuation began so fingers crossed 🤞 that I wake up bright and early on November 1st and my LE is 100% gone! 😆 however I’m not going to hold my breath.
To Richie:
When I hit my three-year anniversary of limerence, I naively thought that my feelings for LO would turn off like an expired parking meter.
Didn’t happen. However, when I look back at how badly I was bouncing off the walls in 2023 and 2024, I feel blessed to be doing relatively well today.
I’m coming up on 3-1/2 years, and I think I am stuck at a plateau, but it’s not unpleasant.
To Miss Snow:
I was trying to make fun of the way that people exaggerate on social media.
Too bad Richie can’t extinguish all of our limerence problems with his cool firefighter gear!
Richie,
Oh, by November 1st your ❤️🔥 will be gone 🪽 with 💨 ?
Okay, I’ll trick-n-treat a ❤️🔥 👻 to leave on 10/31 evening 🎃 , and then check with you the next day…. 🤪
Miss Norma 🏠 ,
I’m not on Social Media (except a suspended work IG), so I did NOT even get your joke. Anything on SM does not interest me.
Let’s see if Richie could extinguished his own ❤️🔥 🔥 by the end of this month, with all his cool gears from his work…
Thank you Norma. And to clarify I’m a firefighter/ EMT in my town so that’s why I used that as an example and just like my LO I’ve been a runner for over 20 years so that’s why I used the 10 mile example.
I am very sorry to hear you are disabled and semi-housebound but I always enjoy reading your posts. Thank you and all the best to you!
To Richie:
You don’t have to clarify. Your post was very clear. I was just making an attempt at a joke.
Also, perhaps a gentle poke at myself–just yesterday, I screamed with ecstasy because I was able to install the Hulu app on my TV correctly.
LO has all sorts of positions in the church, community, AND demanding job, and he often shuts off his personal phone, so he’s never done a lot of texting. Doesn’t do much on social media, either, though he does now and then. BUT just searching for his name in the Facebook would bring up his picture to gaze at….