I recently came across a new academic paper about limerence, titled:
Limerence, Hidden Obsession, Fixation, and Rumination: A Scoping Review of Human Behaviour
In it, the authors argue that limerence could be a precursor to stalking.
The case stands on similarities in symptoms – obsessive thinking, dependence of mood on access to the limerent object, and the idea that rumination and online monitoring (and what the authors identify as solipsistic introjection) can lead to an escalation of behaviour to the point that the limerent crosses a boundary and begins to engage in “breach acts”.
If I’m honest, it read like the speculations of someone who had not personally experienced limerence, and so was making sense of it in terms of obsessive, unhealthy love.
That prejudice comes in part from having had lots of conversations with non-limerents and trying to explain what limerence is, and being met with “oh, you mean like stalking?”
The most hilariously baffling conversation came from me not keeping up with pop culture, and wondering how on earth romantic love was linked in their mind to Rudolph.
Anyway, my attempts at mind reading the authors aside, I think there is a real danger of conflating limerence with delusional or vengeful behaviour, so I wrote a blog post on Psychology Today setting out a counterview.
You can read it here:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/everyday-neuroscience/202511/does-limerence-lead-to-stalking
This turned out to be useful to me on Wikipedia as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Obsessive_love&diff=prev&oldid=1323505614
Thanks for making that edit, David. I do think it’s important that people recognise the obsession of limerence has a very different origin from the more toxic forms of obsessive love.
The article was baffling.
I am not on social media and my relationship with LO is entirely in person. The idea of someone who is online 24/7, pursuing someone, is completely foreign to me.
When LO is snappish with me, I retreat. I cannot imagine stalking him.
I don’t understand Tom’s reference to Rudolph and reindeer? I read the article twice, and I don’t pretend to completely understand it.
Hi Norma D,
Quite understandable you are finding the references confusing.
Baby Reindeer is a very successful British drama series of a woman who stalked a male comedian. I believe it’s based on a true story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Reindeer
I need to find time to read the original article Dr L referenced and his response to be maybe comment further
To Imho:
Oh, I have heard of “Baby Reindeer.” It’s won a bunch of awards.
I had forgotten about it, thank you for reminding me.
I still don’t get the stalking thing. I just now signed up for Instagram, against my better judgment, and LO popped up as a recommended person to follow.
First of all, I didn’t even recognize him in his photo, I guess because he is smiling in a way that I am not familiar with, despite knowing him for three years. It doesn’t even look like him. When I saw the photo and the box that says “follow,” I had a sense of recoiling and wanting nothing to do with LO’s Instagram.
I turned my phone off and felt very uncomfortable. I would NOT like to follow LO, no thanks. Opposite of stalking.
Most limerents don’t get the connection to stalking, Norma. The impulse to stalk has very different origins to limerence in my opinion.
Stalkers could coincidentally be limerents (half of all of us are, after all), but experiencing limerence is very unlikely to turn someone who is horrified by the idea of stalking into a stalker.
But where does cyber-stalking fit with the wider concept of stalking? Lots of limerents (though not all) seem to cyber-stalk their LOs, but compared to physical stalking, that’s without consequence to the LO (and often also unknown to LO).
A real curiosity is that in an article about stalking, its authors didn’t really define stalking.
None of the evidence they cited seemed strong enough to warrant their claim that limerence led to stalking. It read quite ‘we have a hunch…’ to me. And they talk about conditions like ASD, ADHD and how they relate to stalking, but then don’t find evidence connecting those same conditions to limerence.
Yeah, a real problem with the scoping review (which, in fairness they do acknowledge clearly in the paper) is that it relies on a very limited number of published papers on limerence. In particular, a 2015 paper that summarises the lived experience of limerence based on self-reports from a cohort of 6 people (4 men, 2 women), and a second paper on the use of CBT in treatment of limerence in one person (the author!).
That’s obviously a very limited sample to draw strong conclusions about the nature and causes of limerence from.
I was wrong to say the authors didn’t define stalking, so I will eat humble pie and correct myself there. They define it as:
“Stalking encompasses a variety of persistent behaviours that are unwanted and intrude on the life of another to a degree that causes them emotional distress and fear (Mullen et al. 2009; Reyns and Engelbrecht 2013).”
I find these two quoted sections interesting talking points from the article:
“Another area of research which should be explored is the extent to which [limerents] engage in stalking behaviours that are unknown to their LO and what factors enable these behaviours. Legal classifications of stalking only come into play once a victim has voiced that they are feeling alarmed, are distressed, and have met a ‘standard of fear’ because of the unwanted contact that they are experiencing. This raises the question of how to account for a pattern of covert behaviours that a victim is unaware of, but where they are nevertheless being observed and fixated upon.”
“Whilst not all limerents are stalkers, it could be argued that all stalkers are limerents, to some extent.”
What do other people think about this last one?
“Extremely unlikely to be true” is my opinion of the last claim.
Psychopaths, and people with narcissistic or antisocial personality disorders are overrepresented in stalking. It’s improbable that such people would be limerent in the classic sense of euphoria at the idea of forming a loving pair bond.
Norma, you say you are not on social media. Good on you! Please take this advice and immediately take instagram off your phone. As you know limerence causes a lot of involuntary impulses and social media is a beast that actively works on destroying your well being when limerent. I come to this blog now to suppress my urges. Please take it from me, I’ve tried several times to get rid of it, delete it, unfollow, hide LO in my feed, but somehow my fingers are just a few buttons away from getting a glimpse of him again. It’s terrible. I archived all of our chat history, put my active status on invisible but when I feel miserable it’s surprisingly easy just with a few clicks to find the green dot below his profile picture (showing the exact time when he was last online) as proof of his existence when I need to soothe my nervous system with that knowledge. That’s all. I just want to know if he exists and I simply can’t stop myself from this meganism. It’s all made too easy with these apps. Anytime a new profile picture appears it will find you. I even get emails in my second account that I don’t use that suggest him as a friend. Now I need instagram for my work, but whenever I share anything I am highly aware that he may see it..and I even expect him to see it. When he doesn’t show up in the list of people who viewed my stories my heart sinks. He must have gotten over me. My mood shifts. It’s insanity. My limerence is sustained now by the smallest of microscopic crumbs. Please for the grace of god or whatever divinity exists if you’re not on any of those apps….as a limerent…don’t …ever…go…there.
To Kat:
Thank you for that advice. I only signed up because one of my friends sent me a video that I was unable to view otherwise. Once I saw the video, I wondered why I had bothered. Ugh.
I am old and retired and I am grateful that I don’t have to partake of Facebook or Instagram. LO of course has to be on these services because of his business.
I hear so many things on the news about how young people are being mentally destroyed by social media, and I can certainly understand. It all looks terrifying.
I will admit that I do have one photograph of LO on my phone that I look at from time to time. It’s a very flattering professional picture that accompanied a biography on a website promoting his work and his extraordinary house.
But that’s not the same thing as being startled by unwanted scary alerts popping up.
I didn’t even get a cell phone until three years ago. I really don’t need it. I have a desktop computer and a landline phone. I am home most of the time.
The cell phone is just for texting, really. Now that I think about it, if I hadn’t gotten the cell phone, I wouldn’t be limerent for LO. Because we started texting as soon as I got the phone and I inexplicably got a crush on him after that.
To Kat:
I took your advice and removed Instagram from my phone. You were so right.
I don’t ever want to see that scary picture of LO again.
Hi Norma D,
Good decision on Instagram and not to follow your LO.
the problem is Instagram constantly feeds ‘relevant’ content to each individual ALL the time ! There is no quiet time ever on it !
One has to be highly disciplined to use it as a tool that we are in control of rather than the other way.
You can easily let Instagram be the boss, as the algorithms just feed more stuff it thinks/ knows you will engage with, which ultimately detaches you more and more from real life. That is my experience anyway.
I strictly only follow genuinely strong and proven role models now, which brings a net positive effect to me. ( And not follow any influencers who are shaming me to be skinnier or pushing a 20 step expensive beauty regime etc etc )
To Imho:
Sounds like a rabbit hole of insanity.
Maybe because of my age, I don’t trust anyone.
I really don’t want to “follow” anyone on anything.
DrL,
“If I’m honest, it read like the speculations of someone who had not personally experienced limerence, and so was making sense of it in terms of obsessive, unhealthy love.”
To be fair, I get that same conclusion from reading your articles and some of the posts here too. Your personal views and experiences with limerence are different than mine. In the autism community, it’s very common to say, if you know one person with autism, you know one person with autism. Same applies here. What I’m getting at is that I found that academic article to be surprisingly spot on to me and my experience. As I’m reading it I was assuming this was AI assisted research as it’s really a survey and I’m simultaneously thinking that AI is pretty spot on. I guess it can replace us😂 Also I thought that if I was a researcher, I’d data mine your blogs. I’m assuming someone has done that or will do that. You yourself could send your blog feeds to AI. I’m curious what conclusions it would draw about “us”.
I think your issue is with the therapeutic definition of stalking, which I don’t really know as I’m just a guy with limerence, but apparently violent and wanting to harm the victim. Yeah I hope we’re not crazy violent here. If you go to the Mullen et al. 2009 reference, Stalkers and their Victims, they mention the disconnect between what the clinical world sees as stalking versus what the common person sees, the technical definition being 10 (not 9 as they joke) separate incidences over a four week period… thankfully the courts don’t seem to issue restraining orders based on that. The problem is the common one I see throughout mental health, there is a huge gap between nothing and limmerence as well as a huge gap between nothing and stalking. There is a lot for an energetic, smart, ambitious person to explore within those spaces. I think we should be open to it. I assume you’re not familiar with this story. I knew the Navy SEAL. From my experience, there is a fine line between limmerence and stalking, between stalking and tragedy, https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1993/rt9312/931204/12040224.htm
I guess this comes down to definitions again, Hamlet.
If a stalker becomes limerent, then yes, their limerent object is likely to be in danger.
If a non-stalker becomes limerent, then they would likely feel terrible if they realised that their behaviour was upsetting their LO.
Plenty of limerents do things that could be characterised as “a bit stalkerish”, like constantly viewing their LO’s social media, hanging around in places where they hope they might bump into their LO, or changing their routines in the hope that they will increase the odds of chance meetings. But, most limerents also know that this is a bit unhealthy, and are often massively embarrassed if their clever scheme actually does result in them bumping into their LO (when they have to explain themselves).
Basically, I think an individual needs to have a pre-existing condition that means they don’t feel empathy, or don’t pick up on social cues, or don’t have a clear understanding of boundaries, for limerence to result in stalking behaviour in the “therapeutic sense”, as you put it.
So, the limerence is incidental, not causal.
Homicides almost invariably turn out to actually be jealous ex-partners of the victim (as in the Navy SEAL story). Pathological jealousy is a separate phenomenon from limerence.
Other examples are Jean Harris and Jodi Arias, both famous homicides who were ex-partners claimed to be jealous.
I agree with your article, Dr L. It reminds me of the difficulty I have now and then when I google something related to “obsessive love” and all I get are articles about threatening love. No, not a threat, just someone who thinks about a person constantly!
It also reminds me of the 90s, when popular culture really started conflating obsessive love (which filled 80s pop culture, such as Say Anything) with stalking. I’d think back to my own obsessive behaviors regarding LO’s when I was a teen/college kid, and feel offended and upset, because I never harmed my LO’s, and never would’ve wanted to, either. I had no desire to control or punish them. I was just inexperienced and brokenhearted, and had to learn how to get through the obsession and grief without annoying the LO. (I learned from my mistakes as I went into adulthood, despite having subsequent LE’s.) But now people were using the same word for that, that is used for a disordered and dangerous person who could actually try to kill their object.
Dr L, thank you for this article. When I think back to my teenage years in serial limerence, I am really ashamed at how annoying I must have been towards the poor recipients of my teenage longing. But it’s reassuring to know now that, embarrassing as it was, my behaviour was not stalking, which is altogether darker and more threatening and from a different place.
In the earlier days of this blog, there was a student who was limerent for a classmate and honestly – if she were MY daughter and I had even half a clue as to what this young person was writing and thinking about her – I would have been quite worried about her safety. In fact, I wrote to Dr. Tom and voiced that concern.
I would have felt and done the same if the genders had been switched.
So, was he limerent or was he some other flavor of obsessive that crossed a line? Did he? I hope not for his sake and particularly for hers. May he be in a much better place and far happier today.
As a limerent who has been the unfortunate target of a stalker, definitely not the same. I have obsessed over LO’s over the years but never have my actions caused the distress the stalker caused me. Stalking is darker, more sinister, and more dangerous than limerent obsession.
Throughout my LE, I have looked for LO at public gatherings, and have hoped to run into her on occasions. Not sure if it counts as stalking – probably not.
Norma, Car, Imho, I hear you on the social media. During the past couple of months, social media has been the biggest contributor to my feeling crappy. I did go ahead and deleted all our previous chats, that felt really good, and now there’s no way I can go back and read them again. As a next step, I am thinking about muting LO on social media. Hope I can follow through on this.
I don’t think it’s really “stalking” unless you mean harm of some kind to the person. After all, if you’re single and looking for someone to date, you have to be proactive, right? Can’t just sit at home hoping they’ll show up at your doorstep.
We jokingly call it “stalking” social media, but with a lot of people you can’t even look at their wall without being friends with them. And why else do they put up posts, than to be seen by their friends? Though of course, if you’re obsessed with someone you shouldn’t be, or it’s your ex, it doesn’t help you any to “stalk” their walls. 🙂