LIVING WITH LIMERENCE

It’s normal to have a crush — that one person you can’t stop thinking about and can’t help but smile around. However, when these thoughts become obsessive, a simple crush can turn into something more harmful: limerence.

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov first coined the term in her 1979 book “Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love.” Tennov defines limerence as a mental state of profound romantic infatuation, which causes individuals to enter “an involuntary interpersonal state that involves an acute longing for emotional reciprocation, obsessivecompulsive thoughts, feelings and behaviors and emotional dependence on another person.” Limerence is far different from a crush; even a big crush can come and go and doesn’t seriously affect the individual. Limerence, on the other hand, is an emotional obsession for an individual that controls the thought process.

Samara O’Shea, licensed social worker and author, discusses limerence in her book “Loves Me... Not: How to Survive (and Thrive!) in the Face of Unrequited Love.” O’Shea has experienced the effects of limerence throughout her early life, saying, “I was in 7th grade and had a crush on a 15-yearold. That crush lasted for 2 years.” WORDS: MICHAEL CASEY & LUCY VANREGENMORTER PHOTO: LAUREN SNYDER GLAM: EVELYN CAMPAU STYLIST: BARAKA MACHARIA

From this experience, O’Shea says she now has the ability to recognize when others may have fallen victim to limerence, including fictional characters such as Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” and Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind.” O’Shea said, “Of course these folks are fictional, but the fact that they spend years trying to win someone’s affection, to no avail, makes me think the authors experienced limerence themselves or knew someone who went through it.” O’Shea believes limerence goes beyond obsession, into the sphere of mental illness. “I believe limerence is a mental health disorder that can be likened to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD),” she said. “A limerent person’s actions may not be compulsive, the way a person with OCD’s actions are, but his or her thoughts are intrusive and involuntary ... the condition affects the way a person’s emotions are processed.”

As hookup culture grows more common in today’s society, this raises questions of what limerence looks like in modern relationships such as casual flings or “friends with benefits.” Since O’Shea believes that there is a biological predisposition to limerence, she does not believe that hookup culture necessarily increases or decreases limerence. Rather, it means that those predisposed to limerence find it more difficult to let go of their one night stand.

“Person A might have a friends-with-benefits experience, end up having romantic feelings for the ‘friend’ and move on when they realize the feelings aren’t reciprocated,” O’Shea describes. “Person B, on the other hand, might be in the exact same situation but end up in limerence when all is said and done. Person A moved on within weeks while Person B obsessed for a much longer period of time —not because of anything they did, but because they are hardwired that way.”

Limerence takes control of an individual’s thought process and can be difficult to move past. The first step to overcoming limerence is self-awareness. Once someone identifies this pattern and accepts that it affects them, they can better combat the intrusive thoughts and obsession that come with limerence. Like any mental struggle, it requires honesty, patience and practice—but that doesn’t make it impossible.