In the last post, I argued that there is an initiating “glimmer”: a frisson of excitement, that acts as an indicator that a particular person you have just encountered has the potential to become an LO. It seems that there is some sort of blueprint deeply integrated into each limerent’s psyche that the subconscious mind is able to rapidly access, and (if it spots a match) activate the limerent circuitry.
[quick side note: I’m going to be occasionally using unscientific terms like “psyche” and “subconscious” in the vernacular sense that most people understand them, to help illuminate ideas. I am not actually a mind-body dualist – these felt experiences emerge from underlying neuroscience]
An ultrafast connection is made that links all the various pieces of sensory input (physical appearance, body language, scent, tone of voice, laugh etc.) and triggers an response: arousal. I don’t mean here sexual arousal (although that is often present), but physiological arousal – similar to the fight-or-flight adrenaline response. This causes heightened awareness and symptoms of sympathetic nervous system activation (increased heart beat rate, pupil dilation, sweating etc.). In my experience, the nature of this limerent glimmer is distinct from simple attraction. When meeting someone especially beautiful or athletic or famous, for example, one also often feels nervous, tongue-tied and “over-aroused” in their presence. This is different. The glimmer feels more personal, more significant, and more charged with emotional power – as though the atmosphere has suddenly electrified.
How the limerent responds to this spark of recognition is likely to be the major determinant as to whether they progress to limerence. This is the moment to nip things in the bud if you do not want to succumb. An active decision to avoid the company of the potential LO is a wise move. An immediate decision to consider this person a potential danger rather than a potential friend is a useful mental device. This probably sounds a little dreary. Friends are good, but not friends who are going to turn your life upside down the more time you spend in their company. It’s a cost-benefit calculation.
The reason most limerents don’t follow this very sensible advice, of course, is that limerence is a bastard. Just as the subconscious is fast at spotting a limerence match, it is also fast at justifying why it’s a good idea to get to know this interesting person, and learn more about them and their insightful ideas. It’s the same arousal circuitry again, enhancing the salience of the person (making them seem to be the most important stimulus in the environment), triggering nice reward feedback that gives you warm fuzzies when interacting positively with them, and generally making you feel more alive and more motivated to seek that sensation again in the future.
Fortunately, as a species, we have an impressively swollen cerebral cortex, meaning our executive centres can override our lizard brains. The trick is to get the executive to implement good pattern recognition and initiate avoidance behaviour. More commonly the lizard brain persuades the executive to use its impressive powers of rationalisation to construct a pleasing narrative to justify giving the limerence everything it wants.
If you decide to indulge that pleasant reinforcement, you risk escalation of the glimmer to full-blown limerence. Finding the balance is the art. Like any potential addict, you are best placed to determine how much is too much. Many alcoholics swear off booze for good. Not a single drink. Only safe way. Many “social drinkers” convince themselves that everything is fine, and a bottle of wine or two a night is normal. Self-awareness is the heart of this. If experience has taught you that indulging limerence leads to massive emotional turmoil, you should probably try practicing a period of going teetotal and treating the glimmer like nectar-flavoured poison. If you can surf the frisson-wave for the thrill of the ride, then give it a go (and hope you don’t wipeout).
For me: I’ve settled on a strategy of passive exposure. I do not seek the company of potential LOs (and am vigilant about self-serving justifications), but if circumstances lead to an encounter, I try and enjoy it responsibly. Otherwise I might become a humourless misery-guts.
The glimmer, that first inkling that you are interested in another and that may be in you. Limerence aside, it is a beautiful thing.
It can be, but then again, so is “swamp gas,” aka “will-o’the-wisp,” aka methane.
” Wirt Sikes in his book British Goblins mentions the following Welsh tale about púca.
A peasant travelling home at dusk sees a bright light traveling along ahead of him. Looking closer, he sees that the light is a lantern held by a “dusky little figure” [aka your LO], which he follows for several miles. All of a sudden he finds himself standing on the edge of a vast chasm with a roaring torrent of water rushing below him. At that precise moment the lantern-carrier leaps across the gap, lifts the light high over its head, lets out a malicious laugh and blows out the light, leaving the poor peasant a long way from home, standing in pitch darkness at the edge of a precipice.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will-o%27-the-wisp
Scharnhorst, ““dusky little figure” [aka your LO]” Excellent..
And thus the terror ensues when the LO proves to be not the dream come true we once thought they were. The light blown out…for all of us peasant limerents.
I’m very interested in this comment, how do you assess what are “self-serving justifications”?
I’ve settled on a strategy of passive exposure. I do not seek the company of potential LOs (and am vigilant about self-serving justifications)
I remember the first time I saw LO3 at work on my first day. I was at the coffee machine in the office kitchen trying to find a coffee cup in the cabinets. She walked in, opened the dishwasher next to me, and squatted down to take out a mug. I looked down and thought, “Hey, she’s cute, maybe I’ll just say something to her.”
So I asked her, “Excuse me, but do you know where the coffee cups are?” She looked up with a somewhat perplexed and embarrassed smile that told me she was thinking, “Why is this man talking to me?”, as if the idea of a person asking her where coffee cups were in the office was just something you didn’t do. But she just said, “No, I don’t,” and left it at that. I thanked her and thought, “That was a little weird.”
That was it. No glimmer. No flirtation. Just me thinking she was cute at first, not unlike many other women I see during the day, asking her a normal question, and then ending the conversation. With my first two LOs I was struck immediately, just bowled over. I felt nothing for LO3. In fact, she left me with a weird feeling like there wasn’t something quite right with her.
Over the next three weeks I would pass her in the halls and do the polite corporate “smile and hello” that we do with coworkers that we don’t really know. It’s not an attempt to talk, just a polite acknowledgement. But she would walk right by me as if I didn’t exist. Wouldn’t even glance in my direction and certainly wouldn’t utter a polite “good morning” back. I could have been on fire and she wouldn’t have noticed I was there. So I figured she was just rude, and if she was going to do that to me, then I would just ignore her right back. No reason to waste my breath.
A month into the job, my assessment now of LO3 was that she was just some rude young lady who didn’t have the maturity to be in an adult corporate office. In my younger life I had put up with so much BS from young women who thought they were God’s gift to mankind that I just refused to put up with their antics anymore, and LO3 was no different.
A few days after that, I happened to turn a corner and almost ran flat into her. She looked up at me and nervously said, “Excuse me.” Not giving two shits what this stuck up brat thought, I didn’t say anything, I just looked at her like “whatever, go away,” and walked back to my desk
And then… there was a very subtle change in her after that. She still didn’t say anything to me and vice versa, but it was this kind of nervousness in her. It was like her attitude towards me went from “Matt’s just another guy trying to bizarrely flirt by asking where the coffee cups were” to “I want to know why this guy Matt doesn’t like me.”
It was like there was this new nervousness in her towards me that I was expecting to subside over a few days as she came to the conclusion that I was just another asshole she should ignore. But the nervousness didn’t subside like I expected it to.
I started realizing that I had seen this nervousness in women before when they “noticed” me and didn’t know how to act around me. I started realizing… “this young lady… could be interested in me?”
And that’s when this rude, stuck up young woman morphed into LO3.
Soon afterwards I noticed I had this urge to search for her on Facebook… and I managed to keep myself from doing it for two days or so, but the urge became too great to resist. And it’s just gone downhill from there.
Such a long post… it was like therapy to me to write this out and remember exactly how it emerged, especially since it wasn’t the “love at first sight” experience as the previous 2 LOs were.
It sounds like you have a bit of a love/mostly hate dynamic going on with your LO, which can be equally – if not more – intense. I have that with my current (and longest standing) LO, although mine didn’t start at all with hate like yours. Mine has ended in hate, or what I would more accurately describe as “doing everything in my power to deny my feelings for him.” I sometimes think the deep craving us L’s have for reciprocation can be enough to either pick up on extreme subtleties or read into things that aren’t really there. How long has your LE been going on for? Have you had any interactions with your LO since the episode began besides sensing her nervousness? Words exchanged? Eye contact? Eye contact was a huge thing for me as a teen. I lived for eye contact with my unattainable LOs. That was enough reciprocation for me haha.
Oh goody. An article on The Glimmer. I was wondering if one such article existed, and found it by accident when using the “categories” search feature.
The glimmer, as a concept, fascinates me because I think if we can get to the root of the glimmer, we can probably understand what limerence is all about.
Personally, I experienced my first unambiguous “glimmer” when I was 17. I had a very sheltered childhood and wasn’t exposed to a lot of outside influences such as TV and non-Christian books, music, etc. So my theory is the glimmer is an emotional attraction as much as a physical one, and is possibly inspired by people who remind me of my parents. Alternatively, the glimmer could be narcissistic. (Am I emotionally attracted to people who remind me of myself?)
Freud would probably agree with the notion (indeed pioneered the notion) that boys marry their mothers and girls marry their fathers, metaphorically speaking of course. Certainly, I’ve been attracted to women who are similar to my mother. (Mummy issues much?) I think as we deal with issues relating to our families of origin, the glimmer we get from these particular LOs becomes much less potent. However, this is just my theory on the matter. Other people may have other equally valid ideas.
One possible implication of this theory is you shouldn’t be too offended if someone rejects you romantically – maybe you just don’t remind them subconsciously of their own parents?
@Sammy
Once I was on a blind date and at dinner the fellow said “Oh my goodness! You have the same profile as my mother! And we didn’t have a good relationship!”. After dinner we stopped by the home a couple I am close friends with and my date proceeded to make friends with the husband of the couple. He asked to talk to him privately and proceeded to WEEP about his bad relationship with his mother.
Needless to say, there was no second date.
I am not sure what Freud would have made of that!
@Jaideux. Oh gosh, that is so funny. Maybe it works in reverse too! Maybe there’s an anti-glimmer people can give off! Haha!
Awkward date for you, though!
Just out curiosity, did you pull the string on what that profile was?
How could you not pull that string?
LO #2’s parents were pieces of work, especially her mother. When I started watching “The Sopranos,” Tony’s mother reminded me of LO #2’s mother. LO #2’s mother had all the charm of a North Korean prison guard. In the 5 years we crossed paths, I don’t remember that woman ever cracking a smile or laughing. LO #2 had an affinity for cheaters and allegedly got pregnant by a married man.
LO #3 was a clone of LO #2 but I don’t know anything about her parents. She was a nurse and claimed that she’d gotten pregnant from some married doctor. Things can be a lot easier to deal with if you’ve seen it before.
LO #4 told me that someone had told her she had “daddy issues.” As she opened up to me over time, it was pretty clear that she did. LO #4 had an affinity for Narcs. I don’t think she ever met a Narc she didn’t try to rehabilitate. She could have been the poster child for “trying to get it right with the wrong people.”
My parents had a dismal 0-5 track record for marriages. Toss in my aunts and uncles, it becomes 3-12 maybe worse. Extrapolating that, my “glimmer” is an unhappy woman with lousy taste in men. My father knew a lot about women but had marginal taste in them.
So, if someone had floated one like what the guy told you over the plate, I think I would have swung for the bleachers. I don’t think I could have helped myself.
@Scharn. I just assumed Jaideux’s blind date was referring to his mother’s physical profile i.e. the outline of her face. The physical similarity sent him into tears. Of course, as you point out, “profile” can also mean a person’s psychological history. Either kind of profile would be fascinating I guess if resulting in a glimmer.
@Sammy and Scharny,
It was my physical profile. I turned my head to the side and he gasped and then explained why. He reassured me that he thought it was a very nice profile, but that it was identical to his mum’s which was problematic. I was polite, but my shields went way up and we went over to my friends after dinner and while he was weeping about his mommy issues in the back room with the husband, the wife and and I were in the front room with a drinkie, marveling and laughing at how I had, once again, got myself into yet another bizarro dating mishap.
@Jaideux. I thought that’s what you meant. However, Scharn’s abstract interpretation of your story delights me too. Haha! I.e. might limerents get a glimmer from people who are emotionally similar to parents? Or, possibly, do we learn “how to love” from our parents (and must unlearn any dysfunctional patterns of behaviour they may have instilled in us)?
My glimmer happened completely online over messenger. It was like we left this dimension and met in some place beyond time and space. After that encounter I had a kundalini awakening. My whole world turned upside down and I cried in fetal position for 8 days straight. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I felt completely insane. He had reciprocated his feelings to me, but there was adversity in that he was still married. He ended up not responding to me for some time, and then came back… and we did that dance for awhile. We would get close, he would push me away. In February of 2020, I went to see him and it was the most magickal experience of both our lives. Then, things got more complicated with his divorce and we ended up getting into an argument and he ended it. That was 6 months ago. I still think about him constantly. There are periods where I don’t think about him as much, and I was able to find fulfillment and happiness in our separation by doing what I love. I feel like I have learned and grown so much from having had this experience, but like… I still believe he loves me and make excuses for why he hasn’t contacted me in 6 months, and still day dream and hold the vision of us being together. Which, mostly makes me feel delusional and crazy… but also persistent and not one to easily give up on people I love. I’ve never loved anyone like this. It’s so beyond this world. It feels like destiny, like fate, like… yeah.. I’m sure we all feel that way though…. sigh. So like, if he could just confess his undying love to me now that would be great. Ok, thanks.
Just re-read this article. I wonder – does the physiological arousal of limerence engage a different part of the brain to mere sexual arousal? From the article, it sounds like physiological/limerent arousal must have a strong emotional component for the limerent. I.e. the LO must awaken some deep emotional response and not just be somebody easy on the eyes.
I’ve certainly felt nerves in the presence of beautiful people of both sexes. It might be a wee bit difficult to distinguish “fan-girl, fan-boy” response from limerent arousal if LO happens to be very attractive. If LO isn’t spectacularly attractive, I guess it’s easier to identify them as LO or potential LO material.
The more I read about limerence, the more I think that maybe I’ve only had one LO, that is to say, only one limerent episode that involved the deep emotional response. The other experiences were “false alarms” in a way. I’ve felt really happy around tons of other people, for example, but I think that was just friendship or physical attraction or sexual/emotional chemistry minus limerence. Limerence really is a very specific thing, a special kind of animal. It would be a mistake every crush for a limerent episode.
I don’t know about my executive brain overriding my lizard brain. But I know I want to learn from past mistakes/very painful experiences. I know I don’t want to repeat very painful experience. Avoiding pain isn’t noble. But I guess it is a form of self-control.
Sometimes I feel like I used up all my limerent emotions on First Love, for want of a better term. A kind of “all passion spent” phenomenon. Having been through limerence once, and not having had it reciprocated, I don’t think I have much appetite to go through it a second time. I think my brain is “burnt out”. Can a really bad experience serve as a kind of inoculation against further episodes?
Sammy,
“From the article, it sounds like physiological/limerent arousal must have a strong emotional component for the limerent. I.e. the LO must awaken some deep emotional response and not just be somebody easy on the eyes.”
I think you hit the nail on the head. There’s a deep emotional component to limerence. I’ve had crushes on people and got over them pretty quickly, whereas the LE just hung on.
But I don’t agree with appearance being a deciding factor in picking an LO (or the LO being less attractive). I mean, the LO certainly can be less than spectacular looking, but I think limerence transcends appearance. An LO taps into your psyche. It’s a very hard thing to explain to a non-limerent because physical attraction is so tied in to physical appearance for them.
It would be a mistake to mistake every crush for a limerent episode I mean. **
If there isn’t that deep and deeply personal emotional response to a person the nascent connection must be something else, but not limerence, as all the right parts of the brain haven’t been engaged.
Not sure why my LO engaged my brain in an emotional way. Confusing!