The three stages of obsessive romantic thoughts

Have you ever been so infatuated with someone else that you literally can’t get them out of your head?

Even if you try to resist, intrusive thoughts push their way into your mind?

From the moment you wake, till the moment you go to sleep, they’re always there… and then they appear again in your dreams.

That experience is a common symptom of limerence – a romantic infatuation so strong it feels like addiction to another person.

But what causes that obsession? How does it begin, progress, and then become fixed as an inescapable mental trap?

Well, there are three main stages.

Let’s go through them.

Starting with stage 1.

Stage 1: Reverie

Romantic obsession is different to other forms of obsession – like OCD for example – in a very important way.

Early on, it feels good.

In the early stages of limerence, once we’ve met someone who excites us romantically at a deep level, thinking about them is pleasurable.

This phase is called limerent reverie – and it mostly consists of daydreaming about them, fantasising about being together with them, and generally just immersing yourself into the rapture of picturing their face, their smile, their laugh, and, well, everything else associated with their intoxicating presence.

Sometimes, these fantasies are erotic of course, but not always, and not even mostly. Really, it’s reciprocation of romantic feelings that is the real prize.

I started daydreaming of taking her to a nice dinner close-by, then walking down to go get ice cream after and finding a good spot along the lake to lay with her into the late night and watch the Independence Day fireworks show. This sweet fantasy, while being so simple and innocent, is also a cause to bring me to tears. –M.

I’ve experienced a lot of fantasy scenarios in my head… they culminate in some kind of mutual revealing of how we feel about each other, and then don’t move on from there. What I seem to crave is simply a reciprocation on some level. –S.

Reverie is a way of feeling mentally closer to your limerent object when you can’t actually be together.

It can be such a blissful experience that some limerents deliberately seek alone time so they can cut out external distractions and disappear into their warm and fuzzy internal fantasy world.

Where, of course, their limerent object behaves exactly as wanted, and everybody follows the romantic script that they’re writing for their life.

Limerents can instinctively fall into a habit of using reverie as a sort of emotional pick-me-up; a method for mood regulation, a way of seeking comfort from distress.

That habit can become deeply ingrained.

It can even become a way of life.

I do enjoy that limerent feeling every night as I fall asleep alone thinking about my current LO from afar. –B.

Unfortunately, while reverie seems like a private retreat—a personal safe space—it also reinforces the limerence.

It strengthens the link between that specific person and romantic reward.

Over time, the urge to seek that reward increases in intensity and a second stage of obsessive thinking begins – uncertainty about whether you can have that reward.

Stage 2: Rumination

Reality has a way of spoiling the carefully crafted script of limerent reverie.

If there are barriers in the way of you expressing your romantic feelings to your limerent object—either internal barriers like indecision or insecurity, or external barriers like you or your limerent object being married—then reverie can transition into rumination.

This is a lot less fun.

Rumination involves endlessly replaying old interactions with your limerent object to forensically examine them for clues of reciprocation. Or rehearsing future opportunities to be with them: clever things you might say to delight them, little hints that you might share to try and wheedle out their true feelings about you, or even planning ways that you might seduce them.

Another common form of rumination is revisiting “anchor memories” – times when they said or did something that gave you particular hope or particular despair.

I would get exhausted just going over again and again how she felt about me, what her words meant, why she was mean that one time. Inevitably, I’d always end up thinking about the first time when she held eye contact with me for a really long time and then smiled in a way that felt like she was sharing a special message with me. I still get goosebumps remembering that. –T.

Rumination feels less voluntary than reverie.

In particular, once the anxiety and uncertainty kicks in, the cycles of overanalysis can feel oppressive and intrusive.

I used to enjoy it a lot. But after a while I saw that it was ruining my life and I started to have all this guilt whenever I’d think about LO, but by that point the habit was ingrained and I couldn’t quit. –S.

Rumination keeps your limerent object central in your mind. They are the dominant psychological force in your life.

The evolutionary explanation behind this is likely to be that it provides an emotional spur for you to take action, to secure the overwhelmingly desirable reward before it’s lost.

But when you can’t (or won’t) take action, that drive doesn’t just give up and accept defeat. Your limerent brain is much more determined than that.

Instead, it can paradoxically cause the reward-seeking drive of dopamine signalling in the brain to become stronger, through a process known as incentive sensitization.

The limerent object becomes an extraordinarily powerful reward, and all other rewards lose their sparkle.

That transition sets up a sort of hair-trigger for starting the habitual thought cycles running the moment you see or hear something that makes you think of your limerent object.

And that leads into the final stage of obsessive thoughts.

Stage 3: Relentless repetition

This is the worst stage of obsessive romantic thoughts and it’s when they become involuntary.

You can’t turn them off.

You’re not daydreaming about delicious possibilities, or wondering whether their last instagram post was directed at you… you’re just unable to concentrate on anything else.

Reading books becomes impossible. Work suffers from constant distraction. You’re weary from relentless cycling through the same hopes and fears.

Or, you’re lying awake at night, desperate for sleep, but unable to stop your mind whirring in an endless loop of fruitless anxiety.

So this is the stage where negative motivation has overtaken the early rush of desire.

Antireward systems in the brain kick in, and make the fear of deprivation intense and stressful.

It hurts how much I love him. —G.

The process can become a vicious cycle.

Something in the environment (or even just a memory surfacing) triggers your subconscious to activate that super-sensitive dopamine signal, that “wanting” signal.

Desire intrudes into your conscious mind.

That urge starts the well-practiced habit of rumination going, in a process of elaboration.

So, an impulsive craving is followed by a cycle of desire thinking—a process that you’ve been refining through hundreds (maybe even thousands) of hours of reverie and rumination.

Your mind feels hijacked. It’s looping uncontrollably through the same old images, words and feelings.

This experience is known as perseveration, and in another unpleasant psychological twist of fate, it’s not only a symptom of romantic obsession, it can actually reinforce the obsession.

This is when “I just can’t get them out of my head” stops being a song lyric and starts to feel like a life sentence.

So: what can be done?

Stage 4: How to break the cycle

When it comes to breaking out of obsessive romantic thought loops, it’s important to remember the point I made right at the start: limerence is not like other obsessions.

For OCD, anxiety disorders, or phobias, techniques like exposure-response prevention work well, but they work by desensitizing a dysregulated anxiety response. You build up tolerance without using rituals for self-soothing.

That approach doesn’t work for obsessions that began in desire thinking and excessive wanting—in fact limerents who have followed these principles have had bad results.

It was written for people who find their intrusive thoughts disturbing. Mine do not disturb me at all, they are highly seductive and pleasurable, yet at the same time unwanted and intrusive. A very different problem. –A.

You won’t get over your addiction to another person by exposing yourself to more contact with them, any more than you can get over alcoholism by drinking till you’re sick of it.

Other methods are needed.

Now one, first, obvious step is to recognise that limerent reverie and rumination are not neutral.

They feel passive because they’re happening in your head, but in actual fact you’re actively digging a mental rut that is only going to get deeper.

So if you are in the earlier, voluntary stages of the process, intervene now to stop the reinforcement.

Whenever you are tempted to have a nice daydream to give yourself a quick emotional boost, don’t.

Stop following that instinctive mental program, and wake up your executive brain to try and resist the temptation.

Notice when your mind begins to wander, and interrupt the old habit cycle.

It’s a lot easier to resist at this early stage, because the shift into an involuntary, addictive state hasn’t set in yet. It’s just that most people don’t realise that they are unwittingly driving the obsession forwards.

Now, later on, things do get harder.

It’s very hard to stop the intrusive thoughts—intrusive urges really—that start a desire-thinking loop running, but it is possible to disrupt the cycle before it gets out of control.

The best approach here to use visualisation techniques to “crowd out” the images and words that you’re your romantic obsessions and excessive craving.

The key idea is that you fill up your working memory with alternative images that counteract the usual thoughts and perseverations that feed your romantic obsession.

Now if you are in this stage of obsession, I do have a workshop that goes through these methods in detail, along with the rationale for why they work.

It’s designed for anyone that needs that urgent help with breaking out of obsessive thought loops and recovering emotional stability.

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So, that’s the pattern.

Mind-wandering reverie, becomes mind-occupying rumination, that becomes mind-overpowering obsession.

And all of it driven by simply following our instincts about what feels good at the time.

That’s one of the most frustrating aspects of limerence—realising that we accidentally train ourselves into an altered state of mind that starts out feeling great, but can end up feeling awful.