One of the headaches of working on limerence is that scholarly research on love suffers from a problem of definitions. Lots of the words we use in everyday life to talk about love have been used (and misused) in specific technical senses in academic research, which inevitably leads to confusion.
I’m a neuroscientist, and have always approached limerence from the biological direction, as it were. I’m not nearly so familiar with the social psychology literature.
To try make sense of some of this confusion, I asked David (who goes by Shivery Peaks online) to write a guest post on a brief history of love research and how limerence fits in. David has written many of the wikipedia articles about love and is deeply immersed in the literature.
So, over to David…
The state of romantic love
What is “romantic” love…? Is limerence “passionate” love…?
What is the relation supposed to be, exactly?
About ten years ago, I started studying psychology as a hobby (I’m not a psychologist); back then I was watching lectures online and reading books by people like Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt. Recently, I started writing Wikipedia articles about romantic love as a personal project, including “Limerence”, “Obsessive love”, “Love addiction”, “Biology of romantic love” and “Reward theory of attraction”.
It turns out it’s a very confusing topic to research!
Throughout written history, concepts of love are a multitude, to illustrate all kinds of ideas. In fact, so much has been written about love that there are actually more concepts invented than there are words to express them.
Instead of new terms being invented, it’s more often the case that existing terms have simply been repurposed or reinvented at various points in history. Semantic ambiguity and confusion abounds, especially to a naive reader.
“Romantic love” is probably the most notorious example. What does it mean?
Limerence has been called “romantic love” as opposed to “real love” because to a vocal and often very articulate segment of the population it is unreal. But even when limerence is not believed in, or believed in only secretly, it still makes a good tale.
… Writers have been philosophizing, moralizing, and eulogizing on the subject of “erotic,” “passionate,” “romantic” love (i.e. limerence) since Plato (and surely long before that). … Limerent persons, sufferers of an unallowable condition, find themselves speechless save for the ambiguity of “poetic” expression.
Dorothy Tennov (1999, pp. 161, 172)
(‘As opposed to “real love”’? What does she mean?)
I think that to the uninitiated today, they might guess that “romantic love” refers to a pair bond, or maybe to the kind of love felt between partners in the early stage of a relationship.
Funny story about this, however…
Romantic love
This term originally referred to a type of literature and philosophy, with a connotation of referring to literary depictions of the kind of phenomenon now referred to as “limerence”. Tristan and Iseult and Romeo and Juliet are perhaps the most mentioned “romantic love” stories of this genre—the ones people remember, anyhow, in discussions where this particular conception of “romantic love” is referred to.
This came to have a connotation of referring to tragic, unfulfilled love and longing, although probably more because of the critics’ characterizations than how that body of work was originally intended.
In any case, this literature and philosophy came to influence Western attitudes on love in an important way. That history is complicated (Singer, 2009), but it’s accepted that Western culture came to emphasize more personal freedom when it comes to love via this “romantic” tradition (Tallis, 2005, ch. 4).
It’s probably an exaggeration to say “limerents freed the West from arranged marriage”, but you would get that impression from some accounts. (My understanding is that the reason why some, e.g. Tallis, convey this is actually because of an oft-repeated cherry picking of history among 20th-century critics—people who were probably criticizing what we now call limerence or limerent relationships, so they pluck out the exemplary stories.)
In the 20th century then, an important connotation of “romantic love” also referred to people pursuing relationships for “passionate” feelings over more “practical” concerns.
Romantic love is an unrealistic, irrational, and idealized type of love. … Romantic lovers prefer to live in their idealized world of fantasies and aspirations. They tend to idealize their partner and their relationship. Their romantic imaginations embrace their minds.
Victor Karandashev (2022)
However…note that the given (sociological) definition does not distinguish between limerence and nonlimerence.
It’s in reference to this when Dorothy Tennov appears (in the 1960s), finding that some people who were experiencing this “romantic love” were in fact not just imitating a cultural idea, but rather experiencing a certain mental state (limerence), while others were not.
People who behave as if by the principles of “romantic love” but who don’t actually experience limerence Tennov calls “pseudo-limerent nonlimerent”. (The sociological idea, by comparison, lumps limerents and pseudo-limerents together.)
Now, honestly, many people had written about “romantic love” before Tennov came along. Some authors were clearly aware that the cultural phenomenon of chasing “passion” is partly driven by a certain mental state (which Tennov later identified as limerence). Some of them could be understood as arguing that what we call limerence should be allowed by culture (for example) or that limerence is a “true love”, but they did not have a term yet to properly identify it. However, other authors were not aware of the state, and only talk about culture.
There was already a cultural conversation about this, particularly in the early to mid-20th century it seems (see e.g. Russell, 1970, ch. 6; originally 1929).
The issue (as Tennov complains about) is that it’s often simply unclear who is talking about what.
In any case, the romantic love cultural phenomenon became so pervasive over time that Westerners actually came to think of the cultural practice as synonymous with pair bonding. This is how it came to be that Westerners forgot the true meaning of “romantic love”.
The state of “being in love”
Limerence is defined as a “state” of being in love (Tennov, 1999, p. 16). Tom and I seem to agree that limerence (according to a proper interpretation of Tennov’s intent) should be defined as a way to fall in love which follows a process like addiction.
Now, there is in fact a somewhat large research literature on “romantic love” as a “state” of being in love.
This includes a “partner addiction hypothesis” (Burkett & Young, 2013), comparing pair bonding to drug addiction. According to a relatively recent review by Bode & Kushnick (2021), ‘Seminal work called it “limerence” (Tennov, 1979).’
What is the relation?
Historically, along with “romantic love”, the term “passionate love” has also been used to refer to the state we call limerence (e.g. by Stendhal, in translation), with a different etymology. This term is favored by the influential researcher Elaine Hatfield, who developed “passionate and companionate love” theory.
Hatfield (1988) has also stated that limerence is the same as passionate love (in her theory).
The difference is that while Tennov (1999, p. 42) believed there were other ways to be “in love” besides limerence, Hatfield conceives of only one way to be “in love”—synonymous with “passionate love” (her concept), which varies by intensity.
Based on her other writings, Hatfield was probably a limerent herself…who was simply unaware of what being in love is really like outside of limerence. Or at least, she did not understand Tennov’s claim about this.
Passionate love, for Hatfield (1988), is a “state of intense longing for union with another” with idealization, intrusive thoughts and emotional dependency. This is contrasted with companionate love, which she defines as deep affection or friendship.
Later research, however, found the mistake (Acevedo & Aron, 2009), showing that love feelings can actually exist without an obsessional state. In fact, Tennov was right about this.
In any case, it became customary in love research to associate a litany of terms (romantic love, infatuation, limerence, being in love, etc.) as synonyms for the concept of passionate love in Elaine Hatfield’s theory, and this semantic error is never corrected.
It’s from this lineage which leads to the present day, where Bode & Kushnick (2021) propose a biological definition for “romantic love”.
Romantic love is a motivational state typically associated with a desire for long-term mating with a particular individual. It occurs across the lifespan and is associated with distinctive cognitive, emotional, behavioral, social, genetic, neural, and endocrine activity in both sexes. Throughout much of the life course, it serves mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding functions. It is a suite of adaptations and by-products that arose sometime during the recent evolutionary history of humans.
Bode & Kushnick (2021)
This “passionate/romantic love” construct found in modern literature can be understood as a kind of umbrella term, being used to refer to any/all states of being in love, according to their commonality. In this way, research (or theory formation) is done for all possible states, all at the same time.
A history of this issue is honestly deserving of its own article, because the differences are also important, but this research literature is in fact relevant and useful for understanding limerence.
The clinical state
A further semantic confusion is over whether “limerence” is supposed to refer to something normal (how Tennov coined it) or if the term should be repurposed for something “clinical” instead, and how either of these are even supposed to be defined relative to each other. (What exactly is “normal” when it comes to romantic love? What if it turned out “clinical” limerence was common, for example, or if it led to relationships often enough to be adaptive in evolutionary terms?)
“Love addiction” is the mainstream term being used in modern clinical discussions, and limerence is supposed to fall under this. Love addiction is an umbrella label (a tentative diagnosis) being used to refer to any “dysregulated” or “maladaptive” love.
In fact, Stanton Peele, the architect of love addiction, has a book chapter espousing his opinions on limerence.
Tennov (1999, pp. 180–181) had referred to him previously. Peele is a hater of the “romantic” ideal, who criticized pretty much all the researchers in that era for confounding the difference between healthy and unhealthy love (as he defines it).
Indeed, Tennov’s concern is with a severe emotional disability, one that leads people (primarily women) desperately to pursue often inappropriate love objects, frequently to fail at relationships, and to be incapable of learning from such experiences so that their ardor and desperation are often increased by their failures at love. Overall, they experience love as painful and futile, a clinical condition…
Romeo and Juliet stand as a summary of individual and environmental forces in love addiction.
… Love addiction is then a primary manifestation of individual aberrance in a society whose values “hold out the possibility of falling in love as a life solution, where love is seen as a transcendent experience and as a rite of passage into adulthood, and where social life is organized almost entirely around being with the one you love”…
Stanton Peele (1988, pp. 164–165, 168, 173)
Susan Peabody (2011, pp. viii–ix, 15–17) includes “obsessing about an unavailable person” in her typology. Brenda Schaeffer (2009, pp. 15, 102) calls limerence a “romance addiction”.
Steve Sussman (2010) includes “pathological limerence” in his search criteria. Others have written about “passionate” love addiction, including addicts “rejected or broken up with” (Bolshakova et al., 2020), and proposed diagnostic criteria (Reynaud et al., 2010), later including “Frequent preoccupation, thoughts, or desire to ask questions, have conversations, to care for, to worry about, to maintain contact or have an imagined future before and maybe after an end to the relationship” (Redcay & Simonetti, 2018).
The problem is that the different authors don’t have universal definitions yet. Love addiction is not in the DSM because ethicists don’t agree on how it can be defined (Earp et al., 2017).
There are also clearly authors (nonlimerents?) who must be unaware that limerence exists to include it in their definition.
Limerence has been written about as “lovesickness” as well, a term used by Tennov (and Hatfield).
…the all consuming preoccupation with unrequited limerence persists, at the expense of scholastic achievement or job performance. In the case of a college student, he/she can’t get out of bed on time, can’t keep on schedule for class instruction, can’t concentrate on studying, can’t finish assignments, and can’t halt failing grades, but mopes around alone, too often unable to socialize, and falls into tears if trying to account for what has gone wrong.
Among college and university students, lovesickness of this incapacitating type is a good candidate for the syndrome that most frequently escapes diagnosis. It has no officially recognized name, and is not listed in textbooks or diagnostic manuals.
John Money (1997, p. 133)
Money was a controversial figure in sexology, but it turns out that he also had some writings on limerence where he (seemingly) understood what Tennov was referring to.
Lovesickness was recognized in medical textbooks throughout history, but disappeared by the 20th century (Tallis, 2005). Frank Tallis, a clinical psychologist who specializes in OCD, has argued that lovesickness should be taken more seriously (see his article in The Psychologist).
Tallis has not demarcated a definition of “abnormal” lovesickness. By his estimation, all love resembles mental illness, including normal love. I don’t believe it’s productive to obsess over “normal” and “abnormal” either.
Is the point to actually help people, or is it to demarcate what is “abnormal” (create stigma)?
We know that distressing limerence is common, and there are actually quite a few other studies which are consistent with Tom’s survey. Tennov (1999, p. 180; also see Tallis, 2005, p. 43) believed limerence is normal. I think what confuses people is that normal limerence is distressing.
Love is confusing
“Romantic” came to mean so many things that “by itself, it means nothing” (Arthur Lovejoy, quoted in Singer, 2009, p. 283), but limerence and “romantic love” are intrinsically connected ideas, with a rich history. According to Tallis (2005, p. 88), properly understanding “romantic love” requires an examination of the cultural history, in addition to the evolutionary history.
I find people today often believe limerence couldn’t be “romantic love”, when there’s actually a long history of people criticizing “romantic love” for the same reasons people criticize “limerence”. Tennov reviews it, but does not explain the history well. (It may have been understood more as a given in her era.) Chapter 4 of Love Sick (Tallis, 2005) was specifically meant as an introduction to this.
Few also seem aware that “clinical” limerence falls under a (proposed) love addiction diagnosis.
I think a proper explanation of how limerence relates to “passionate love” (Elaine Hatfield’s idea—that proliferated in academia) may be worthy of its own article…
References
- Acevedo & Aron. (2009). Does a Long-Term Relationship Kill Romantic Love? (Article)
- Bode & Kushnick. (2021). Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives on Romantic Love. (Article)
- Bolshakova et al. (2020). Passionate Love Addiction: An Evolutionary Survival Mechanism That Can Go Terribly Wrong. (Book)
- Burkett & Young. (2013). The behavioral, anatomical and pharmacological parallels between social attachment, love and addiction. (Article)
- Earp et al. (2017). Addicted to love: What is love addiction and when should it be treated? (Article)
- Hatfield. (1988). “Passionate and Companionate Love”. The Psychology of Love. (Book)
- Karandashev. (2022). What Is Romantic Love? (Article)
- Money. (1997). Principles of Developmental Sexology. (Book)
- Peabody. (2011). Addiction to Love: Overcoming Obsession and Dependency in Relationships. (Book)
- Peele. (1988). “Fools for Love”. The Psychology of Love. (Book)
- Redcay & Simonetti. (2018). Criteria for Love and Relationship Addiction: Distinguishing Love Addiction from Other Substance and Behavioral Addictions. (Abstract)
- Reynaud et al. (2010). Is Love Passion an Addictive Disorder? (Article)
- Russell. (1970). Marriage and Morals. (Book)
- Schaeffer. (2009). Is It Love or Is It Addiction: The book that changed the way we think about romance and intimacy. (Book)
- Singer. (2009). The Nature of Love, Volume 2: Courtly and Romantic. (Book)
- Sussman. (2010). Love Addiction: Definition, Etiology, Treatment. (Abstract)
- Tallis. (2005). Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness. (Book)
- Tennov. (1999). Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. (Book)
Interesting article. Thank you for compiling your research into digestible material, David. This is obviously a subject of passion for you, and I’m curious where your interest comes from. I don’t think you’ve shared your story on LwL. I’m curious if you’re here because of a personal experience or if it’s purely academic for you.
I started life as a musician (I’m 36) and an independent recording engineer. I basically quit music around 2014, when Kesha’s allegations against Dr. Luke surfaced. At the time, I was a Dr. Luke fan, and was thinking of moving to LA to try to get into that music production scene (not coincidentally, where my LO at the time lived). I was already not so much a fan of what the LA scene was promoting, but this left me in a place where I was questioning a lot of things in life.
At the time, I started studying psychology and moral philosophy instead (as a hobby), I suppose to figure out what the good life is really supposed to be.
I would consider myself to be a kind of poet, I guess, but I became interested in getting things “right”. Traditionally, art, literature and mythology has been a source of values. Songwriters are in the business of influencing psychological states (by reinforcing certain emotions, giving advice, or at least influencing self-talk), yet it’s rare nowadays to see anyone putting any real effort into what they’re doing with that. Most music now promotes either one or another (vacuous) ideal, because the artists don’t actually know anything. It’s either unhealthy, unrealistic, or overly preachy.
The current environment doesn’t incentivize my musical interests with this, so I don’t really publish anything anymore.
But anyhow, I would consider myself a knowledgeable artist.
I took on a project of writing Wikipedia articles on love, because I found that internet articles about it are quite bad. They’re almost always written by people who don’t actually know anything, so they’re just confusing and useless. The few articles which are written by actual experts (people with romantic love degrees) tend to be buried in search results. People who don’t know anything about romantic love (even if they have a psychology degree) tend to say very silly things about it.
Wikipedia articles are written differently from academic papers, so editors aren’t really “supposed” to be scholars. A Wikipedia article is supposed to just paraphrase more or less exactly what the citations say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:EXPERT
I wrote this article here for Tom, because there just aren’t very many articles on the internet talking about this kind of thing. Most of what I learned about it, I read in books. I’ve been researching romantic love for two years now.
Realizing what the semantic issues are turns out to actually be important to understand what anyone is talking about, both in terms of scholarly sources, and also what regular people are talking about online. If somebody has a different conception of what a term like “romantic love” or “infatuation” means, then we might really have no idea what anyone is talking about before trying to understand the meaning of their words.
Dorothy Tennov talks about it in her book, but she doesn’t do a great job explaining the full backstory.
Thank you for sharing your story, David. I see that you had at least one LO which I guess was the spark that triggered your interest in limerence.
I enjoyed getting to know you and I wish you luck with your adventures outside of music (or inside of music if you go back to it).
I remember the book The Psychology of Romantic Love by Nathaniel Branden. Some of my college classmates read it for a course, so I bought my own copy and read it at least once or twice.
But then the Internet came along and nowadays, Google—instead of pulling up lots of relevant search results—will give you “10 ways to know someone is in love with you” that are actually regurgitated by AI from some other webpage, which is buried several pages into the results.
There’s a whole crowd of websites which popped up over about the last ten years I think (Simply Psychology, Psych Central, Verywell Mind, etc.) which are featured prominently on Google results, but their content tends to actually be low quality. They tend to be banned as citations on Wikipedia, along with websites like Healthline and Cleveland Clinic which aren’t reliable either. People outside Wikipedia don’t usually know this.
It’s unfortunate that psychology content on the internet tends to actually be unreliable. The authors of these articles tend to have only read just a few things, and miscommunicate or promote an ideological position. (Only domain experts are reliable for a given subject in psychology.)
I don’t know if it’s an SEO thing, or that search engines prioritize these websites on the backend, or that people just click on them often without knowing they’re low quality.
I have Nathaniel Branden’s book as well, although I prefer the account of history in Love Sick by Frank Tallis. Branden has some extra details, but Tallis isn’t a social constructionist. Tallis is more of an account of how people came to think limerence is a ‘true love’ that should lead to a relationship, and he also has evolutionary theories.
Branden makes the claim that romantic love doesn’t exist in certain tribal societies, but there was a famous study (Jankowiak & Fischer, 1992) which many/most scholars agree refuted that.
The cultural stuff is important to talk about though. I see it often lurking in the hidden assumptions behind limerence content. For example, I see critics try to distinguish limerence from “healthy” infatuation, as if there is a “healthy” form of infatuation. (Even if there was a clear difference, any infatuation could become limerence if it’s reinforced the right way by the situation. It’s like trying to distinguish between “healthy” and “unhealthy” drug addiction.) “Romantic” ideas are so embedded that hardly anybody understands the difference between fact and fiction. In Tennov’s era, the criticism was actually more intelligible, because critics of falling in love did not have romantic beliefs. Their argument was more that we should not think that “love” means “being in love”, and culture was an early developmental theory.
Is there any current discussion of defining limerence in the DSM? Maybe Tenov’s criteria could be modified to get the usual “5 of 9” standard for a diagnosis.
Limerents would get their own code therapists could use to bill insurance companies!
Some people have tried to propose diagnostic criteria, but the problem is they don’t do enough research and they don’t understand how something like that could really be defined.
Any type of definition that revolves around distress or distraction turns out to be normal (or common), according to all the surveys. Tom’s survey (32%) is one example, but there are others.
Another survey looked at “unrequited love” and found that 20% of people had experienced it more than 5 times, according to the following definition:
“This study is concerned with the experience of romantic love. This experience is sometimes called “being in love,” “obsessive love,” “infatuation,” “lovesickness,” “puppy love,” or “having a crush.””
“***When one is experiencing this emotion, it has been described as having one’s emotions on a roller coaster, finding it difficult to concentrate, and thinking constantly about the person with whom you are in love. The person is said to have the power to produce extreme highs and lows of emotion in you, depending on how he or she acts towards you.***”
“Sometimes this feeling is reciprocated, and the two people may be considered to be “in love” with each other. Other times, a person may feel this way toward someone who doesn’t return the feeling (unrequited love). In this case, the object of one’s love is sometimes highly unlikely to return the feeling (e.g., one’s physician, teacher, professor or therapist, or a celebrity such as a movie star or a rock musician). and sometimes it is simply a member or your social group who simply doesn’t feel about you in the manner you feel about them.”
(The paper also begins with a discussion of limerence.)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229984645_Mutual_and_unrequited_love_in_adolescence_and_young_adulthood
That survey also found that the mean duration was 3-6 months (across all people, not just the 20%). Based on some other surveys as well, I would interpret it as meaning that a lot of people have “crushes” or “infatuations” that feel like limerence (they have a hard time concentrating, get extremely depressed, and so on), but it tends to dissipate.
All of these as well (crushes, infatuation, limerence, whichever we call them) can lead to relationships sometimes.
The problem I’ve always seen with people who try to argue limerence is a disorder (and define it in terms of “distress” or “impairment”) is that they never understand where these kinds of things are actually demarcated. They always claim they aren’t saying all “infatuation” is a disorder, but then actually end up arguing that it is, when they actually describe how they think “limerence” is defined.
Now, there’s also a phenomenon of “unwanted” or later stage limerence, where the character of the experience shifts, and the mechanics are more like OCD. https://livingwithlimerence.com/the-pain-of-long-term-limerence/
But Tom and I are the only people who seem to understand how this probably works and what it is. Nobody who is talking about putting limerence in the DSM is talking about this (or even seems to know about it at all), that I have seen.
Restricting the diagnostic criteria to just long-term limerence is also counterproductive in terms of helping people, in my opinion. I have definitely seen people on the subreddit who needed help right away (just a few days or weeks in). On the other hand as well, I have seen people describing being in limerence for a long time (17 years) and getting into a relationship with an LO and having it actually go well.
It’s complicated to define exactly what is supposed to be “pathology”, because while it seems like a mental illness, the purpose of it is to motivate forming a relationship. And that is actually adaptive (potentially). Another issue is that uncertainty theory predicts that people who were in limerence longer had some level of reciprocation, which would mean that longer limerence doesn’t necessarily equate to being more pathological.
It’s all a problem with the idea that anybody who could use help from a clinician must be considered “pathological” or “abnormal”. It is also a problem with the conflation between psychology and healthcare, because the insurance company only wants to bill for disease.
If clinical psychology could/would see just anybody who needed help with love, then there’s no need to argue pedantically over definitions like this.
David,
Great to read your post.
I’m going to grossly over-simplify some bits here for argument’s sake. I have long since come to a conjecture that (at least for the half of the population who are limerent tribe), limerence and love start as the same thing. And that this thing is motivated by a drive to pair bond, so is essentially biologically healthy.
(I mean the above point at a population level. At an individual level, some people undoubtedly have misguided radars where it comes to who to pair bond with. But that is just as likely to cause painful love, as to cause limerence.)
To me, the difference between love and limerence is how it then progresses from that initial infatuation state. Without barriers, and if both parties share the feelings, the relationship progresses and the love, with any luck, develops – then nobody talks of that situation as limerence anymore. But when couples stay deeply in romantic love with each other, they *could* be said to stay limerent for each other, even if for a very long time. It is just that the feeling is reciprocal.
The sort of limerence we hear of on sites like this is nearly all of the other – barriered or unrequited -kind, that can’t develop into longer-term love. This is why limerence can seem problematic or as something worthy of a diagnosis. What limerents are really experiencing is barriered love. The limerence develops like a hunger in someone with no access to food. Or to put it better, they can see the food but can’t touch it.
I am not au fait with all the literature that you are, but are any of the people you’ve read making that claim, or anything near to it?
I can think of a couple things that might be relevant. You can tell me if this answers what you’re wondering, I guess.
With whether limerence develops into a relationship, there’s going to be two main factors: one is the probability that the attraction turns mutual, and the other is (in simple terms) whether the relationship turns secure over time.
I’ve written a few things about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_theory_of_attraction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence#Ecstatic_union
(And you might be surprised at how many sources I have tying these concepts to limerence, the way Tennov defined it.)
Another way to talk about the differences is in terms of Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory of love (a taxonomical theory), which says that types of love are composed by combining three components: passion, intimacy and commitment.
Sternberg relates his concept of “infatuation” (which is passion by itself, without intimacy or commitment) to limerence.
Sternberg refers to passion with intimacy, but without commitment as “romantic love” (using a classical type of definition), in relation to stories like Romeo and Juliet (who were passionately in love, with mutuality, but did not have a relationship).
(Tennov did not make a distinction like this, however, and considered Romeo and Juliet to be ‘mutual limerence’. Actually, Sternberg’s own comments about limerence are not entirely consistent either.)
When passion, intimacy and commitment all occur together it’s called “consummate love”, in Sternberg’s taxonomy.
How relationships go is complicated though. Whether love feelings linger in a positive way is more than just being reciprocated.
There’s an “obsessive” passion (e.g. limerence) but also a more “harmonious” kind of passion (where people say they’re “in love”, but they aren’t as obsessed), and they are known to follow different mechanics. Ideally limerence would turn into companionate love (friendship/liking) or harmonious love, but it can also stay as obsessive love if e.g. the relationship is insecure.
If you’re in limerence with a person before a relationship, it’s hard to predict what would happen if you got into one. The interactions you have with the person inside vs. outside a relationship are different, except maybe in a case like limerence for a close friend. Imagine falling into limerence with a coworker because of their delightful humor, but then you actually get into a relationship and it turns out they’re a slob at home and you argue over where to go for dinner. To predict if a limerent relationship would work, you would have to think about these things ahead of time, instead of examining feelings.
When it comes to clinical ideas, Susan Peabody has a taxonomy of ‘love addicts’ which specifies that a few fall for unavailable people. Peabody is a founder of LAA, rather than a scholar.
The diagnostic ideas I’ve seen for limerence always revolve around mental states (the level of obsession), which I think is not useful by itself because it’s actually tied to the situation, and this might or might not have potentiality. I’ve seen some people say they got into a relationship with an LO even after some time and it went perfectly well.
That description of college students being unable to do their assignments, get up on time, etc. basically describes how I would get right after a breakup with someone I loved. It also happened 15 years ago after the breakup of a friendship (which was also a LE). With my various LE’s over the years, I think usually I can get through the day without obsessing over the LO, but there will be periods—usually related to something going on in the relationship to the LO—where it waxes and wanes. Something disruptive will happen and I’ll be in that funk again. But most days don’t get that way, which is how I can manage it for years.
This is so true. Limerence can totally screw up your academic career if you’re not careful. The first time I experienced limerence was when I was in business school. I was majoring in accounting and I met a CPA who was just 5 years older than me through my church. I became obsessed with him and I thought I needed to marry him to get the right connections and to help me in my career. I dumped a PhD student for him, but the CPA ended up rejecting me. My grades started to suffer while I was lovesick for the CPA. And this is why I can never go to grad school.