New Year is always a time when I reflect on the concept of purposeful living and planning for the coming year. Usually that means getting all excited about new projects, new goals, and new opportunities, as my mind naturally seems to focus on personal creation as the most purposeful use of time and energy – YouTube channels, books, courses, that kind of thing.
This year, I’ve been reflecting on how that view is too limited.
Purpose can take a wide variety of forms; it doesn’t need to mean grand personal ambitions.
Home is where the heart is
For those of us lucky enough to have a happy family life, Christmas and new year is a cherished time. We focus on domestic concerns, household tasks, and spending more time together. It’s a good reminder that home is important in the broadest sense, as somewhere we belong.
Building and maintaining a home is important work. I don’t mean this in the narrow sense of “household chores are valuable work” (even though that’s true), I mean it in the “home is the foundation of life” sense.
Having children really, well… brings this home.
One of the most valuable things that a parent can do for their children is to create a stable home – a secure base to explore the world from. This is not just about bricks and mortar, it’s about feeling safe, feeling loved, and being able to intrinsically trust that tomorrow will be much like today.
When parents don’t manage this, all sorts of issues arise that have long lasting consequences – most obviously attachment problems.
It is not trivial or easy to achieve this. As the famous opening of Anna Karenina puts it:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
Disharmony is effortless, harmony requires skill and practice.
Purpose in domesticity
Dedicating effort to improving your home life is every bit as purposeful as undertaking a grand new project. This might mean a new approach to your relationship with your partner and/or children. It might mean breaking free of a “situationship” and finding someone who is willing and able to commit. It might mean decluttering a chaotic environment.
It will mean facing your own sources of unhappiness and addressing them, and that can be painful because it normally requires change on your part.
The essence of harmony is mixing your tune with others to create a pleasing composition. Bands aren’t just a group of soloists doing their own things side by side. You have to work together, experiment with different styles, and find complementary melodies, or you’ll make a discordant din and then break up due to irreconcilable musical differences.
Families are likewise full of compromise, conflicting demands, and sacrifices. Like a good band, everyone needs space to express themselves, while also recognising that they can’t always be centre stage.
Making the purposeful choice to be a better member of the family means finding that balance – making sure everyone has their time to shine, without hogging the limelight, in a mutually beneficial way.
Once you make the decision, you’ll realise that it’s not actually all that challenging or complicated. You’ll get 80% of the way there by spending more time together, taking interest in what everyone is doing, expressing love in a way that feels natural, and being patient with each others idiosyncrasies.
It’s worth it, not just for your own domestic harmony, but for the impact it has on the wider world.
Troubled lives
One of the most affecting books I read last year was Rob Henderson’s memoir, Troubled.
Rob grew up in the Californian care system. His first hand account of a life moving through a series of unstable (sometimes abusive) homes is sobering, to put it mildly.
Among the many insights, a few that stood out were his learned distrust of adults (a psychologist trying to assess his progress failed to realise that Rob was lying and uncooperative throughout – no adult had ever helped him, so why should he help them?), his fear of strange cars in the driveway (meaning someone had arrived to move him to the next foster home), and his amazement when arriving at Yale to discover that most of his classmates came from two-parent homes.
Intact families were basically a fairy tale in his life experience, and yet here was a whole social niche full of people who had benefited from them – but who were also, paradoxically, disdainful of marriage and heteronormativity.
That experience was a catalyst for his idea of “luxury beliefs” – opinions held by cultural elites, which communicate their educational status while inflicting social harms on others in a way that they themselves are insulated from.
Today, Rob is a psychologist and writer, working on the impact of family stability on life outcomes and community cohesion. From his own experience he knows how beneficial it is to have a critical mass of stable families in a neighbourhood:
Many people overlook this broader impact. They often frame the discussion as simply “married parents versus unmarried parents,” without recognizing the larger, community-wide “spillover” effects. It’s not just the children of those married parents who benefit—it’s the entire neighborhood that feels the ripple effects of that stability and trust.
Working on the foundations of your own family doesn’t just benefit you. Others notice – sometimes the most vulnerable among us – as they can be searching for role models of what healthy relationships look like.
We
That broadening of the concerns of family beyond the immediate nuclear unit highlights another concept that links nicely into Teika’s last post about the novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Who do we mean when we talk about “we”?
Zamyatin invented a totalitarian communist dystopia, where “we” was programmed into citizens from birth as universal devotion to the Benefactor. It was not an organic development of kindred affection, it was enforced. That is why limerence proves so destabilising in the story, as it is a personal bond of frightening power that separates the heroes from the synthetic, fake bonds to their community.
This question of how wide a feeling of “we” can grow was a key concern of the philosopher Roger Scruton. He coined the term “oikophilia” (same Greek root as “economics”) to denote the love of home that most people feel keenly. He wondered what it is that nurtures affinity between people.
There are some obvious candidates – family, religious congregation, village, parish – but once the population size starts to rise to the level of towns and cities there comes with it an anonymity that is alienating.
Scruton ultimately seemed to settle on the idea that the Nation was the largest level at which people could still feel a sense of “we”. Nations have shared history, heritage, landscape, culture, and customs that can unify people – even to the ultimate point of citizens being willing to die fighting for their nation if it comes under attack.
He argued that love of home could be scaled up from a household, to a community, and a nation, as long as people felt a sense of kinship and mutual inheritance, investment and gratitude. But, it must be organic, it cannot be imposed or insisted upon by a state apparatus.
Postscript
This long and rambling reflection began as a rather sentimental response to Christmas, but it’s taken on extra poignancy in the last few days as X.com has erupted with international scrutiny of the “grooming gangs” scandal that has plagued the UK for decades.
The girls who were targeted were from poor communities and often broken homes. The men who preyed on them came from a different cultural “we” and saw them as subhuman – “easy meat” for exploitation.
The institutions of state that should have protected the girls instead decided that community cohesion was best served by strictly controlling what could be said and by whom – apparently operating from an ethical framework that Islamophobia was a more serious moral hazard than the systematic rape and torture of thousands of children.
Even now, our media and politicians seem obsessed with why and how Elon Musk is talking about it, not why and how it happened – role-modelling in real time the same behaviours that concealed the crimes in the first place.
It’s been quite something to witness the total moral collapse of the British establishment.
In the face of such demoralisation (in every sense of the word), the mind fills with urgent questions – how can I protect my children, how do we stop this from happening again, how can the victims be helped?
I suspect that the answer to these questions lies in strengthening the bonds of family – asking how we can be better fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, neighbours and friends. Doing the purposeful work of self-development that enables us to build better relationships, and become more reliable, patient and compassionate with the people who depend on us.
It won’t undo the evils of the past, but it might help build a sense of unity around the idea that safeguarding children matters more than anything else in any civilisation worth the name.
That’s the only way to really feel secure, confident and free.
To feel at home.
Dr L.,
Which of Roger Scruton’s books covers nurturing affinity please? I am interested in learning more about it.
Thank you as always for continuing with your blog.
Hi Onyx,
I think it’s a theme in all of his work, but I came across it in the book “How to be a conservative”. I believe the one in which he first defines oikophilia is “Green Philosophy” – although I haven’t read that one myself.
Thanks. I’ll start there.
I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while. Probably due to my single status and likelihood of remaining that way for a long time. I moved to a country town in the hopes of finding my community. I’d say that I’m finding it, but my daughter isn’t. And I have to wonder if a big part of that is what we keep trying to push as ‘normal’ and ‘better’ or ‘healthy’ when from an anthropology perspective, this is simply untrue.
I would argue that children of single mothers fare worse because of society telling them it is so. As in, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why do we marry? Why do we believe staying together as a family unit is so important? I came from a supposedly stable family unit and I still have attachment issues (and many others!). The ‘stability’ everyone saw was for the sake of keeping up appearances. ‘Good families’ live around here. WE don’t behave that way. Everyone I know who grew up near me feels the same way. It was a ‘safe’ childhood compared to that of a foster child, but it was a behaviorist parenting style and psychological science has come a long way since then.
The same argument applies to holding children back at school. Here, it is very unusual for a child to repeat and the argument given is that children need to be with their peers. It’s detrimental if they aren’t. That’s unbelievably untrue. I also went to school in Europe. There were 19-year-olds in my Year 11 class. Nobody cared. It was ‘normal’.
I just don’t really understand why we feel the need to have biological family to feel safe (other than the economic issue of who pays for the child’s food and clothing etc but I’m ignoring that for the sake of the hypothetical argument). I’d argue a lot of biological relatives are extremely unsafe and I’d rather choose my family. I wish my child didn’t compare herself to other kids her age and wonder why they ‘all’ have good dads. I think it’s society (and probably specifically capitalist society) insisting she has a relationship with her dad. In other cultures, uncle and father can be synonymous. I think we need to look further than our own society and culture because in my opinion, this is a problem we created and something that could be solved by changing our perspective at a cultural (and economic) level.
Does limerence occur in cultures where they don’t feel compelled to marry and commit for life, or where our idea of a ‘traditional’ family group isn’t the norm? What if they’ve never been subjected to a Disney movie or romcom? I wonder if many of our issues are psychological conditioning. Just like in Zamyatin’s story.
CMC,
Marriage is an interesting concept in that in most Western societies, it’s not just an emotional commitment, it’s a legal contract. Marriage is likely the second biggest obligation one can assume, children being the first. You can usually dissolve a marriage, but you’re a parent forever. Some people are better at meeting those obligations than others.
Growing up, I don’t remember anyone having a happy marriage. I saw a few content ones. My parents have a collective 0-5 record for marriages. Of my 4 aunts and uncles, half of them divorced at least once. Of my 13 cousins, at least 5 of them are divorced. Until I was old enough to enjoy regular sex and understood the US tax code, I thought marriage was some grotesque punishment God inflicted on adults for original sin.
LO #2’s parents stayed married. I don’t know how. LO #2’s father was in an open affair going back to the 80s. Maybe they weren’t living together. I have two former coworkers whose parents were married on paper but lived separate lives for decades.
Given my parents’ track record, I’d be a lousy candidate for marriage. Yet, there was never any doubt that I’d want to be married. For me, it was the ultimate expression of commitment. I took a vow before God and a few dozen of my closest family and friends. I backed it up with half my assets.
LO #2 understood some of that and didn’t understand some of it. I believe it factored in her decision not to marry me. Her parents stuck it out and made each other miserable. When things became unacceptable for my parents, they’d cut and run.
As far as cultural norms and such go, it might be more simple. Where do children learn to model behavior? From their parents and home environment. My wife grew up in an age-appropriate two parent family with two siblings. I was on only child raised largely by my elderly grandparents after my parents divorced. I wasn’t their grandchild, I was their fourth son. The dynamics of being raised by two people in their 60s was different than those I would have seen being raised by two parents 20 years younger.
The differences in our upbringing landed my wife and me in marriage counseling less than two years into our marriage. My wife told the counselor that I wasn’t meeting her expectations. When the counselor asked my wife if she’d ever communicated those expectations, my wife said no, I should have known them. The counselor pointed out that we had been raised differently and I had never observed the expectations my wife took for granted. We worked through it.
Like everything else, everybody’s perception is unique.
@LE
I also thought that I wanted a partner for life although I never felt the need to get married. I now don’t feel that way at all. I feel that if I found another person it would be for as long as it works. I wouldn’t be going into it thinking or even hoping ‘this is forever’.
I wonder if we think we want ‘til death do us part commitment in relationships because we feel it’s better for the kids? Or because women needed financial security? Or because God says we must? So we ‘know’ who fathered a child to prevent inbreeding?
I just don’t think any of those are good enough reasons to tell people that one partner for their whole life is the best way to go. And that dissolving that relationship should be seen as a failure in some way. It’s making me want to learn more about tribal or village communities where children feel their family is a much larger group than even just mums, dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Do small children become well attached to multiple people? Do they feel safer knowing if anything happened to their biological parents, there’d still be ‘family’ there for them.
I’m too used to my own space to desire communal living. I have also read enough about cults to know that this utopian ideal can quickly turn dystopian. I think my argument stems more from a desire to stop children being conditioned to believe that their parents have failed in some way because they’re not together. That a child brought up in an environment where family units not living together (to the exclusion of others) was ‘normal’ would be none-the-wiser, and therefore not feel they’re deficient in some way.
I think the biggest failure should be seen as the one where we don’t try to grow and do/be better, not that we can’t find a good partner.
@Dr L
I suppose I’m mostly asking ‘why’ it’s best for a partnership to stay together? As per my reasons above, what else makes it ‘better’ to try and stay together other than society telling us it is so. One person usually dies before the other so can’t be for company in your old age either. And good friends can fill that gap.
I’d also argue that my child has just as much chance to access a good university education as a child from a two-parent family, but that’s down to my financial stability and me being a responsible loving parent. Not that she doesn’t have two living together with her. I would need to read the book you referenced, but I worry that in social sciences we can have the tendency to incorrectly extrapolate (or interpolate) from our own perspective and experience. But these arguments only apply to a construct of our own making and those of us who don’t fit that construct have to do a lot of inner work to convince ourselves we’re actually OK. Because we are ❤️
Call me Cordelia,
I just wanted to say I get absolutely what you are saying. The important thing for a child is maybe an overall loving and stable atmosphere, from one or more parents or other caretakers or environment, and not that parents stay together no matter what.
I‘m myself from a stable two-parent-family and now have one myself, but I see in my friends a lot of other ways of life, and I think the most harm that was done was by the guilt the parents were feeling about having „failed“ and not having been able to hold it together.
From the outside you could see that it was clearly the best decision to part ways, but for them it was a kind of failure, and that’s sad because they actually really did the only best thing for their kids but couldn’t perceive it like that because of this societal „sacredness“ of the two-parent-family.
@Mila
Thank you for that. I think you get what I’m saying 💯
In my case I don’t see myself as a failure (relationship-wise anyway! 😅 motherhood is a whole other thing).
My concern is for my child. When we constantly refer to the sacredness (as you aptly put it) of a romantic relationship that lasts until you die, we teach children that it’s ‘lesser’ to be from a single parent home.
So even if I don’t feel I’m a failure, society tells her otherwise. We have families with mums who have children via donor, same sex couples, and multigenerational homes. As long as there’s love and respect for everyone in the home, that child should not suffer thanks to an ideal that is clearly difficult for a lot of people to attain/sustain. I should look further into the research. I am OK if things are true and there is simply an observed correlation. It doesn’t mean I can’t be an outlier 😅 But that also doesn’t mean the research isn’t biased. Like my example above that children need to be with their peers. I think this will only apply to cultures where children are schooled in peer groups. That is entirely a construct. Humans didn’t naturally organise children into peer groups until schools came along. Children who aren’t constantly compared to their peers at school would have no reason to care what ‘grade’ they are in. Society forces the outcome by telling the child it is so. Aren’t blue-eyed children smarter after all? 🤷♀️
Did humans from every culture form lifelong monogamous relationships? So research suggesting two-parent households are better is only applicable to a certain context and it might be worth exploring this chicken and egg scenario with regards to outcomes for children from single parent homes. As for my little darling, she says she will never marry, never have children and be a dog mum. I’m fully supportive of her choice ☺️
CmC
I absolutely love what your saying here.
I am single at middle age and now after addressing my co-dependency and other attachment issues I am feeling more “at home” with myself than I have ever had my whole life.
Sure, I’m not saying that I wouldn’t like a partner to share life with but I’m ok just the way I am!
I don’t have any children but to be honest I wish I was raised by my mother only, my childhood was rather disordered thanks to my Narcissistic father.
And that’s the very reason I’m here and on other sites like this trying to make sense of it all.
Hi Anna
I think it’s fantastic that you’re finding home within yourself ☺️ I think that’s why I don’t need to see any relationship as lasting forever. I belong to me (and my child for as long as she needs to be dependent on me) which means nobody can take ‘home’ away from me.
I read a great article in the Atlantic about people who have quit dating. We’d be happy to have a good relationship, but not actively looking for one. In the article, a therapist posed the question ‘if you knew your partner would finally show up but not within the next ten years, what would you do with your time?’
I love that because it takes the pressure off finding someone and puts the emphasis back on living purposefully. Whether you find someone or not, you will still feel fulfilled ☺️
Thanks for a thoughtful counterpoint, CmC.
I was aware as I was writing that my argument ignored the rather big issue of it being undesirable to keep dysfunctional/abusive families intact regardless. As you say, simply being intact is not beneficial in itself – the benefits come from healthy, loving relationships. But, I didn’t want to bog down the point with lots of caveats about all the possible ways families can go wrong.
From the perspective of individuals choosing to act with purpose, I’d advocate for trying to improve relationships as far as possible, but this isn’t always very far (when dealing with narcissistic or abusive parents, for example).
Definitely, “everyone playing happy families” is not going to solve the problems of feeling homeless. It really does need the families to be sincerely happy.
I was driving home from work about a week or two ago and saw a younger woman with two children. Pushing one in a stroller and pulling one in a wagon. It was in the neighborhood of 30 F outside at the time. I pulled into the nearest parking lot and got out of my truck and asked the woman if I could offer her and her children a warm ride to wherever they needed to go. I was standing a very safe 6 feet plus away from her. She shook her head no and the look of fear in eyes ….. not even a kind act can be appreciated. I got in my truck and drove away wondering where in hell this country is headed.
Adam,
The few bad men get the more good men a bad name here. When the man is a stranger, the woman has no way to tell which category the man belongs to.
I agree it’s sad, but I do get it.
Adam,
we teach our children not to get into the car of strangers at any time, no matter what, so she couldn’t really take your offer in front of her kids! Also, I wouldn’t do it either- you never know. There might be one bad man in 10000, but what if he’s the one.
I think this is a good example of the alienation at town/city scale that I talked about, Adam. Once you get to the point where most of the people around you are strangers, the default setting is caution rather than trust.
There were probably times in the past when some community figures engendered trust (policeman, teacher, vicar, solicitor) but even those times are gone now – regrettably, often because that trust was broken by bad actors.
Hi Dr L, I have a random question for you. I was reading an academic book this morning when I remembered that during limerence, I didn’t have enough attention span to read a book. I’m curious about my lack of attention span during limerence. What caused it? Was I overstimulated on dopamine? If dopamine was the reason I couldn’t focus during limerence, is dopamine (from other sources) a likely culprit when I struggle to focus and I’m not limerent?
I hope my question makes sense.
Hi Lovisa,
Yes, it is likely a consequence of the reward system (powered by dopamine) being overactive. Every thought that brings LO to mind triggers urgent motivation to go and seek them, or ruminate about them, or plan for how to secure their love. It’s like your reward-seeking impulse is on a hair trigger.
This is a big part of procrastination generally – focusing on a task is cognitively demanding, and we naturally try to escape that discomfort. At a totally subconscious level the motivation drive is activated to find pleasurable rewards to provide relief from the hardship of mental effort.
That makes sense! Thank you so much for explaining it to me.
That was illuminating also for me, I think that’s what is behind my subconscious drive to find new shiny glimmers objects to focus on.
“This is a big part of procrastination generally – focusing on a task is cognitively demanding, and we naturally try to escape that discomfort. At a totally subconscious level the motivation drive is activated to find pleasurable rewards to provide relief from the hardship of mental effort.”
https://despair.com/cdn/shop/products/procrastinationdemotivator_1024x1024.jpeg?v=1416776298
Ok you caught me!
Thanks Lovisa for calling out the Sheriff to shine the searchlight on procrastination culprits. 😀
to add that women going through hormonal changes can play a role in brain fog too, meaning concentration levels are significantly compromised than before.
“even to the ultimate point of citizens being willing to die fighting for their nation if it comes under attack.
Maybe one day all of humanity will unite around this principle”
Careful what you wish for!!! There are rumors of “Operation Blue Beam”, which is a red flag operation (kind of like, George Bush invading Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction) whereby staging a fake alien invasion and passing world domination/new world order over to The Bilderberg Group, The Club of Rome and
Population Council.
Sorry excellent post. Forgot to take my meds today!
🙂
We should all be wary of false flag alien invasions!
OMG This reminded me of something I read when I was a kid. It was a book written in the 80s following up on “The Late Great Planet Earth,” that 70s book that sparked an End Times craze in the fundamentalist Protestant churches. The author wrote that he thought demons would stage an alien invasion to deceive people and get them more vulnerable to the Antichrist, lol!
If you want to think of it that way, which makes more sense to me in hindsight; that the aliens in Signs weren’t aliens but demons invading Earth. There several theory videos out there on youtube that make a lot more sense than the invaders being actual aliens.
“I suspect that the answer to these questions lies in strengthening the bonds of family – asking how we can be better fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, neighbours and friends. Doing the purposeful work of self-development that enables us to build better relationships, and become more reliable, patient and compassionate with the people who depend on us.”
Really fascinating read, as always, Dr. L.
To achieve life in a relatively safe and happy world, a few things need to be accomplished:
(1) People first need to live in a community.
(2) The people who live in said community need to believe in and actually invest in said community.
(3) It’s very helpful for people in said community to have common goals, so they have a reason to work together and hang out and invest in community.
(4) Community needs to be understood primarily as the relationships that exist between responsible adults in that community (who then provide safety for more dependent/vulnerable members of the community e.g. the young, the old).
Now it’s very hard to balance this “invest in community” mindset with the very strong individualistic mindset people are encouraged to have in the West. Also, close-knit communities can sometimes become dysfunctional and/or suffocating, despite the best efforts of all participants to make them welcoming/healthy.
A classic limerence scenario I think is a limerent yearning to break free of the constraints of family or religion or country because for some reason they’ve found those constraints burdensome. Or, perhaps, the original community hasn’t met the needs of certain people in the community, including children growing up. Unmet needs/glaring injustices may prompt some people to reject community values and/or not want to invest in community when they have the opportunity. I.e. there’s some unresolved “quarrel” with the community one grew up in.
LGBT+ folk can obviously get upset when the shared goals of the community appear too heteronormative. However, are LGBT+ folk being selfish for failing to empathise with the needs and dreams of straight people and specifically the desire of straight people to build strong, healthy families? Gay people don’t automatically have to oppose society’s norms and traditions. For example, I knew a lovely gay man in his 50s with a lot of religious friends who taught Sunday school in a (Baptist?) church, and was much loved by all in his community.
Personally, as a gay man, I find I get on a lot better with the heterosexual majority when I empathise with the goals of the heterosexual majority, even if I’m not about to adopt the goals of the majority. I love going out and observing men who are obviously fathers, and community-minded women who are socialising in large groups in order to achieve some community-minded goal. I realise, as I age, I have to find some compromise between “offbeat self” and “member of mainstream society”. If I spent my life, for example, rebelling against mainstream society, all I’d be doing is cutting myself off from warm connection with most of the human race. At some point, for me, never-ending rebellion would become self-defeating.
I’ve also observed neurodivergent people can often rebel against social norms as adults, probably because they were great kids who obeyed all the rules growing up, and were still treated like dirt by neurotypical peers. Those childhood wounds relating to rejection, etc, clearly still loom large in autistic consciousness. So there’s that sense of “why bother investing in community if I’m not respected for my contribution or if I don’t receive the benefits I was promised i.e. full social acceptance/inclusion?” Neurodivergent people may self-isolate for this reason.
I have recently had a very unpleasant interaction with an autistic person, despite being autistic myself. We were talking about limerence, actually, and this person absolutely refused to believe that maybe just maybe they have a few things in common with other people (both autistic and non-autistic) who have experienced limerence. I was trying to help this person see that maybe they weren’t some unique case in their pain after all, and they turned on me like a rabid animal. lol
I believe I am 100% out of my limerence now, which is so cool. I had a dream about my LO last night, and it was a completely positive dream. I felt ecstasy during the dream, but not anxiety. I feel like my LO appeared to me one last time in a dream to let me know that it’s okay to let him go if I would like to let him go. It wasn’t some violent forced separation. It was a gentle “setting the other free”.
I have found in general that people in the throes of limerence are extremely resistant to the idea of community, and the benefits of community life, perhaps because (a) they are in so much pain or (b) limerence is simply so taxing on one’s rapidly-shrinking mental reserves one hasn’t the energy to engage with others. Essentially, people in limerence very noticeably WITHDRAW from community.
@Sammy,
Those are some very interesting ideas. Personally when in limerence, I reached out to community/counseling to try to get help for it, once I realized what it was. But yes, it was easy for me to withdraw internally during the high and low of limerence because it took up all of my emotional space, and I couldn’t control it. On the outside, I may have been going on with community as I normally would, but inside was either a hot, ecstatic raging fire when it was in the good phase, and then a cold, raging storm in the downward/withdrawal phase. It wasn’t until it went away that it became neutral phase again (peaceful, normal, calm, logical, rational). I have learned to love the peaceful, neutral phase and hope to maintain it for the rest of my life.
One has to put in a lot of work to get rid of limerence: delete all conversations, photos, connections, social media for those who do that… and then WAIT for the embers to burn out completely. Once you’ve done everything on your own part to get rid of every sliver of connection, then it is just a waiting game. And if it is limerence, and no-contact is possible, the good thing is that it can and will go away.
💙
@Limerent Nurse.
Thank you for your lovely words.
I think, just before I drifted into limerence unknowingly, I was in eighth grade at high school, and I was definitely a well-behaved kid who followed all the rules. (So much so that I got teased for being ” a square” aka the walking, talking human embodiment of “conventional morality”).
I did have a ready-made, available “we” to join i.e. the other boys in my year. But somehow I didn’t quite “fit” with the other boys in my year. Without external prompting, they all kind of banded together to give the teachers a hard time – both the male teachers and the female teachers, but the female teachers in particular.
Let’s avoid all fancy labels such as “gay” or “autistic” and just say I was an outsider. Let’s simplify further and say I wasn’t necessarily an outsider in terms of my actual social standing, but I felt on a subjective level like an outsider. I think feeling like an outsider probably pushed me into limerence. Feeling like an outsider also made me resistant to seeking help for my limerence (because how can non-outsiders possibly understand outsiders? And what outsider wants to give away outsider secrets?) 😆
Like you, I discovered that when I was alone in my thoughts I could create this “hot, ecstatic, raging fire” within myself. This fire was very comforting at times. This fire was also intensely pleasurable. I knew this fire had something vaguely to do with my LO, but I couldn’t fully explain the connection. (He was the inspiration I guess for feelings that were spontaneously arising within myself?) The very comforting, very pleasurable “fire” did eventually turn into a rollercoaster of highs and lows, although I didn’t really understand back then what was going on. (I guess I moved from Honeymoon Phase of limerence into Addiction Phase?)
My LO? He was an odd case. He was an insider but he was also an outsider. He was accepted by the other boys, and mucked around in much the same manner they did, but he was also a bit aloof and unconventional. He was very good-looking, even from a young age, so he was beloved by the girls. But he sometimes made dirty jokes/remarks that made it seem like he was aware of his universal attractiveness. He knew he was always going to be something of a catch, at least in terms of good looks and self-confidence.
I think he was a little bit neurodivergent, but not fully neurodivergent. He definitely had an ear for music. So I think, like me, he was a male born with an artistic gene. However, he was a male born with an artistic gene who went on to develop a healthy interest in girls. He was a “normal boy”, but I also felt we just had a mental connection right off the bat that I found hard to create with the other boys. It was interesting to meet someone who was both “conventional” and “unconventional” at the same time. The fact he sometimes showed interest in my interests was just the icing on the cake. I sometimes noticed him all alone. In those moments, I felt sorry for him and wanted to reach out to him and draw him into the bosom of the group.
Prior to my limerence, I actually had a super-strong emotional bond with my mother. After falling into limerence, I very intentionally started pulling away from my mother, and felt angered at her continued attempts to be close to me. I’m not saying my mother did anything wrong. However, my surly behaviour reminds me of something Tennov wrote – about how limerence might weaken the bonds between parents and offspring, so the offspring have the drive to go off and establish their own genetic lines.
I don’t have a citation, but Tennov apparently also called limerence (in its unrequited form I guess?) a “tragic daydream”. Isn’t that lovely? Looking back at my limerent episode, I can definitely see it in terms of a “tragic daydream”. What a shame there is only one word in the English language for “bittersweet”. It sort of felt like an “impossible romance” to me…
I personally think the whole experience would have been entirely harmless if hormones weren’t involved. I think the only real drawback of limerence is that limerence causes hormonal changes in the brain. Without those hormonal changes in play, I feel I would have been just fine, physically and psychologically. I don’t think my “attraction” would have troubled me. There would be no pain to heal from and no “cold, raging storm” to survive.
Ironically, in grade eleven, one of the teachers wanted to know who the class rebels were and my LO (sarcastically) pointed to me. 🙄 That makes me wonder: did he see me as some kind of goodie-two-shoes? Also, it makes me think we were sort of two sides of the same coin – light and dark. (He was an angel of darkness and I was an angel of light. Then I decided I wanted to switch sides and become an angel of darkness too. Perhaps, all along, my animus was luring me into exploring the “dark” side of myself?)
In my early 20s, I did become very interested in the concept of “rebellion”. I’m not sure why. I think I associated rebellion not with romantic love but with masculinity. I was trying to understand why I’m not like other males. I was trying to understand what masculinity is (biological masculinity, the kind of masculinity that culture must control/harness/domesticate). And, for a time, I thought I might find the answer in “rebellion”. My efforts at rebellion, however, were not very creative e.g. smoking, drinking, using occasional “unparliamentary language” in the presence of elders. I was like a six-year-old doing an impression of a rebellious adult man. 😜
If gay men are gay because they’re “caught in their mother’s eros”, I’m still trying to understand what that means. From what i can gather, the emotions and chemicals of limerence are identical in males and females. So does “mother’s eros” in gay men just alter the sex of the object of desire? I hope that wandering around in a cloud of female eros is actually fun for females, because wandering around in a cloud of (second-hand?) female eros hasn’t always been fun for me as a biological male. Am I able to empathise with women due to shared sensibilities or am I just a freak that nobody understands? There are days the “freak category” seems by far the more pertinent one. 😁
Regarding my gay friend who teaches Sunday school – I’ve just remembered he does that in the Uniting Church, not the Baptist Church. I think, in Australia, the Uniting Church decided it would open its doors to gay people.
Camille Paglia says that when gay men drop their macho facades (which they may wear in public for their own protection), they’re often very effeminate (i.e. not masculine). Their effeminacy manifests itself in the “artistic sensitivity” gay men often have, and their “rich vulnerable emotionality”. Camille Paglia thinks that masculine men aren’t sensitive (and nor should they be). In fact, she thinks a man that is sensitive isn’t a man at all, and she is correct to a degree, although there certainly are heterosexual men who are also great artists. (Tolstoy? Dostoevsky?)
These days, I have many casual friendships with beautiful younger straight women. It amuses me – the way these women trust me. How do they know I’m not a sexual threat? How do they know they can relax around me? I don’t tell people I’m gay. I don’t go out of my way to be feminine or effeminate. I think I am just naturally interested in many of the same things women are e.g. should I or should I not eat that slice of lemon pistachio cake? 😆
It IS still painful, however, to be forever branded as different from other members of one’s biological sex. When males like me, they probably like me because they think I’m being intentionally funny. They see me as their brother who’s always up for a laugh. But I’m not always being intentionally funny. I really do whole-heartedly believe in some of the oddball stuff I say.
I think straight men don’t realise I’m funny BECAUSE I’m gay, and not funny DESPITE being gay. They just think I’m funny, and don’t seek fancy explanations for my humour. I get along best with heterosexual men who have a feminine streak – they appreciate me for the fact I don’t judge them for their own failure to fit the mould of the perfectly masculine macho man.
Two entertaining things I’ve noticed recently about straight men. First, although stereotypically women possess “the gift of the gab” and men are “strong, silent types”, there are a surprisingly large number of straight men who love to talk. Second, while straight men may sometimes worship women, straight men often hold surprisingly low opinions of other straight men. A classic case is my own father. While I’m watching some male character on TV and thinking “Isn’t he dreamy?”, my father is sitting across from me and shouting: “He’s a turnip! He’s a turnip! He’s a turnip! He should go to turnip school and learn how to be less of a turnip!” 😆
I’m relieved limerence is over after waiting for it to end for over twenty years. My own school did send me to counselling after my grades started to slip due to limerence. But there’s only so much a (young and inexperienced) female school counsellor can do. I also attempted to talk to my school principal about it and I did talk to (and get a sympathetic response from) my advanced Maths teacher/Senior Discipline Master.
The constant anxiety is really the main (only) feature of limerence I find objectionable. I don’t want to live in a state of constant anxiety. I have a lot of free time on my hands now that limerence is over, and nothing terribly important to think about. I’m tempted to go back to reading novels. It is spooky to me after limerence how ALL the memories of the limerent episode remain intact, but with none of the original joy/pain attached. It’s like owning a photo album full of pictures of a life no one actually lived. 😉
„ It is spooky to me after limerence how ALL the memories of the limerent episode remain intact, but with none of the original joy/pain attached. It’s like owning a photo album full of pictures of a life no one actually lived. 😉“
Strong imagery Sammy!
@Sammy,
Gosh, I could just read your words all day. Love them.
In many ways, I too have felt like an outsider, especially in elementary school, middle school, and high school. I felt I garnered my true friends in college and after becoming a Christian in my early twenties. I mean, I had friends and was extremely involved, but internally always felt different.
Where you had mother issues, I had a daddy issues. He was a good man, but unbeknownst to me at the time, had struggled with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and wasn’t super emotionally attached to me and my sister. That could be part of the reason that I had crushes on boys all the time, or maybe I was just prone to crushes on boys all the time. Some reciprocated, and some didn’t show any interest.
We are both INFJs, Sammy. Enough said, right? It’s a confusing personality until you get the hang of it. 😃
It must’ve been difficult being an outsider with your unique set of personality traits, and being raised in a super-religious household. I also can’t imagine what it must have been like to be limerent for 20 years, when my experiences (while married) only ever lasted two years. I think the actual heart ache/physical pain was just as miserable as the anxiety. But at least I know now that the heartache was the start of the downward/healing phase of that season.
For me, the thoughts in my limerence caused the cognitive dissonance of feeling like “I am an adultress! I feel like an adultress! I don’t want to be an adultress!” I know in reality I didn’t commit adultery, but I know that the thoughts lead to feelings that can lead to adultery… and I couldn’t stop the thoughts! I am so thankful my faith anchored me from going off and doing anything more than what was already done. But even if I did, there would still be forgiveness if I had asked for it.
Sammy, do you believe people are born being gay? Or is it life circumstances? Or is it a choice? Or is it different for everybody? I tend to think people who know when they are children are probably born that way. But then again, I think people are just born with different tendencies, and that’s just one of them.
What are your spiritual beliefs as an adult? How does that play out in your life? I had a friend who lived as a lesbian before recommitting her life to Jesus, and I think she chooses to not live that lifestyle in preference for Him. But I don’t imagine it’s something that goes away… it’s probably a daily choice to not live that lifestyle. Thoughts?
💙
Oh my gosh, the biggest gossips at church are a couple of retired men, lol. Sometimes I hear them going on and on and it’s shocking what they say. As for orientation—I know one of them is straight, but have my doubts about the other one. It’s not like that sort of thing would be openly stated at a a conservative church, so I can’t be sure.
My friend knew when he was a child that he was “different.” I didn’t realize it until he told me that he was gay, but after I knew, it made a lot of sense. I’d “out” him if I described his traits, but he does have some traditionally “feminine” traits.
Hello everyone. The topic of this thread really resonates with me. I get the feeling that I am doing better in my LE partly because I am working on my relationships, especially with my SO, kids, parents. It looks like if these relationships improve, I get my joy from them, and then do not really need to look towards LO for happiness. What happened in my case was that one family member was in depression, and now they are doing better. Because of this, perhaps I am feeling better, and LO effect is reduced.
Do you think this theory makes sense?
To add to this, I spotted LO on a couple of occasions. We did not cross paths. However, these events did not bother me, so this is a great development.
ABCD,
I think it makes absolute sense, together with what Dr L wrote in his answer to Lovisa, your mind maybe casting around to find relief from the situation with your family member?
Great to hear about your progress! Sounds like you are doing extremely well!
I am not a scientist by any means but I tend to favor Dunbar’s number as the realistic limit in the sense of “we”. It’s referred to quite often by the many social scientists that come on the Nate Hagen podcast, The Great Simplification. In fact.. I want to say I just heard it referenced again in the John Vernaeke interview posted last week “The Meaning Crisis, Wisdom, Purpose, and the Search for Coherence”. (might be an interesting discussion for you).
I feel like I’ve experienced this tribal/village concept twice in my life… the first was as Texas teenager engaging in “high school band” culture in the late 90’s. I know…
Sounds ridiculous… but I can name 10 couples that emerged -and are still married- from that shared experience. That number of “high school sweethearts” is not typical for my Gen X generation!
Now in my later 40’s I’m working at a retail store that employees about 80, but our district has 4 stores that are all a short drive from each other. The dynamics within the company are hilariously tribal: Many couplings and marriages are between people within the company. Many households have more than one person working at the company and others still are sharing housing. I would say over half the store currently fits neatly into one or more of these categories and probably another 25% has in the past. In my case I had my son working with me for a short while last year and I’m currently housing my former trainee and her grandmother (also employed with us). They are precariously legal immigrants (Venezuela) and I’m particularly concerned about the 19 year old falling into some sort of sex work. I believe this is what her mother -who is mentally unwell and living in a motel with two young sons- is doing to make ends meet.
It seems that most of the people in the store don’t have stellar situations. Mostly broken families, reformed families. I’m undoubtedly in the best financial situation than anyone, but my domestic circumstances are no different than anyone else. Despite a little wealth I belong with them and they feel that way too. I’ve crashed out probably half a dozen times and they tell me to come back each time.
We struggle in that store but we’ve somehow figured out how to struggle together and that’s how we’ve become the “we”.
Dr L, I’m excited about something and I want to tell you about it.
I just finished playing with my guinea pigs. I have 4 loaves of bread in the oven. I went back into the kitchen to wash my hands and check the bread. I noticed it would be a few minutes, so why not scroll through YouTube to find something to listen to? An interesting video came up in my feed… “What makes some people so addictive?” The video has an interesting thumbnail photo. I clicked it and was delighted to hear your accent! I was so excited that I paused the video to tell you about it. Here is why this delights me.
1. It’s like watching a friend talk about something interesting.
2. It came up in my feed even though I haven’t subscribed.
And the best part…. Drum roll….
3. You caught my attention even though I didn’t know it was you! That makes me so happy!
Now I must run because my oven is beeping at me.
Great work Dr L!
I watched the video. The content was interesting and helpful. I love that shirt on you!
Thanks, Lovisa! That video has taken off, and I’m pleased because the thumbnail was a conscious effort to do something different and eye-catching (if you’ll pardon the pun).
Still having fun experimenting with YouTube 🙂
To go slightly into the most political bit, Elon Musk is not a good example – I think people are bothered about him sticking his nose in, and making wildly inaccurate accusations, not someone talking about the grooming gangs.
Here in Germany he supports possibly the most extreme of the european right wing populist parties – The AfD are a genuine threat to a stable society and the rule of law in a way I certainly wouldn’t consider Reform to be. The AfD have a history of internal revolutionary radicalisation, had multiple convicted and have rumoured fascists in their ranks, and passive flirting with forced deportations of even 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants in certain cases.
When someone who has enough money to signficantly move an election is pushing that it is really scary.
I second that, Heebie-Jeebies. Scary times
I agree. I read an article in Der Spiegel a few years ago about the AfD. It sounds like a resurgence of Naziism. With all the safeguards against that in Germany, I’m surprised they’ve gotten so far.
I take your point, Heebie Jeebies, but my anger is with the UK politicians and media flipping out about Musk’s tone and continuing to minimise and deflect from the horrors of what was done to those vulnerable girls (both the awful abuse, and the subsequent indifference/hostility of the police and local authorities who should have been protecting them).
Elon Musk doing his usual chaotic stream-of-consciousness Tweeting doesn’t bother me nearly as much as our institutions failing in their duty of care in the most shocking ways imaginable.