Limerence, and why you cannot stop thinking about them

Somebody wrote to me last month with a sentence I have been thinking about since: I am not in love with him, I am just in him, all the time, like a radio I cannot turn off. What is limerence, in the plainest words available, is that radio: one person occupying hours of your thinking without your permission, and the thinking arriving nowhere.

There is a word for that, and finding it helps more than it should. The word is limerence, and it was coined in 1979 by a psychologist called Dorothy Tennov, who interviewed several hundred people about being in love and noticed that a large group of them were describing something rather different.

What she actually found

The people Tennov listened to were not describing affection or partnership. They were describing intrusive thinking, hours of it, arriving uninvited during meetings and washing up and other people’s stories. They described a sensitivity to any scrap of evidence, two weeks of interpretation built on a single message, and a physical response to the sight of a car that looked like his.

The two details that matter most in her account are these. The thinking is involuntary, which is why being told to stop is useless and slightly insulting. And it feeds on uncertainty rather than on affection, which is why it so often attaches to the person who is half available rather than the one who would like to see you on Saturday.

Why uncertainty is the fuel

This is the part I would want somebody to have told me at twenty two. Warmth that arrives unpredictably binds harder than warmth that arrives reliably. It is one of the better established findings about how any animal learns, it applies to slot machines and to text messages equally, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with your intelligence or your self respect.

Which means the intensity you are feeling is not evidence of how right this person is for you. It is closer to evidence of how inconsistent they have been. Those two things feel identical from the inside, and telling them apart is most of the work.

You can test it, quietly, without telling anyone. Think of the last time he was completely, unambiguously warm for a whole week. For a lot of people the answer is that the feeling drops slightly during those weeks, and that drop is the most useful piece of information in this entire article.

How it is different from love

Love, in the ordinary domestic sense, is mostly boring and it survives certainty. It gets stronger when the person is reliably there. Limerence tends to thin out under the same conditions, which is why some people find that a person they longed for became strangely uninteresting once they had them, and then blame themselves for it.

I am not saying what you are feeling is not real. It is extremely real, it takes up your afternoons, and it can hurt as much as grief. What I am saying is that its intensity is not a measurement of anything about the other person.

How long it lasts

Tennov’s own figures ran from a few months to a couple of years, with an average somewhere in between, and the honest summary is that it lasts a long time and it does end. It ends faster with less contact, and it ends slower with intermittent contact, which is why the occasional friendly message from someone who is not going to choose you is more expensive than silence.

It also ends unevenly. People describe a couple of weeks of relief followed by a Sunday that puts them back at the start, and then, much later, noticing they had gone three days without the thought and feeling almost bereaved about it.

What actually shortens it

Reducing the check. Not the thinking, which you cannot control, but the checking: the profile, the last seen, the photograph you have already looked at. Every check is a small deposit into the same account, and the number of checks is one of the few things in this that is genuinely in your hands.

Naming it out loud to one person also helps, in the plain words rather than the romantic ones. I think about him for four hours a day and it is costing me my work is a sentence that changes the shape of the thing simply by being said to somebody with a face.

And filling the hours matters more than it sounds, because limerence expands into empty time the way water finds a level. Nobody in the middle of this wants to hear about a hobby, and I am not suggesting a hobby. I am suggesting that the two hours between eight and ten are the ones doing the damage, and that anything at all in them helps.

When it is worth more than an article

If this has gone on for years, or it is aimed at somebody who cannot know, or it has taken your sleep and your work with it, that is worth saying to a doctor or a therapist rather than to the internet. Not because there is something wrong with you. Because you have been carrying a heavy thing on your own for a long time and there are people whose whole job is the carrying.

If you want the cards for this, ask them about your own hours rather than about him, since the hours are the part that is yours. The is he thinking about me page is honest about the other half.

Come back and tell me how the hour went, including if you caved at minute forty.