There’s just something about this person that triggers you at a profoundly deep level. Whenever you’re around them, you find yourself consumed with all these intense and overwhelmingly powerful feelings of attraction. Your heart beats faster, and you feel as if you have butterflies in your stomach.

You’ve never felt like this for anyone else before. You feel this is the person you have been searching for your entire life.

But take a moment to pause. Feel yourself connecting to your body as you breathe softly and deeply. It may not be love at all that you’re feeling. Rather than love, you may be falling deep into limerence.

Distinguishing between limerence and love can be confusing because they appear similar in many ways. When you're falling into limerence with someone, you can easily mistake them for “the one.” The attraction you're feeling is so intense, and the infatuation you're experiencing resembles the early stages of falling in love, when you're obsessively thinking about this person.

And, like falling in love, it can be so unpredictable. You never know with whom you're going to fall in love or experience limerence.

Limerence and love differ vastly. Limerence is all about chasing and lusting after and obsessing over someone. Love requires a real, meaningful connection with another person.

Limerent attachments are about idealization. You’re so caught up in your fantasy that you’re not seeing the person for who they truly are. You ignore this person’s flaws and therefore miss the red flags that would alert you to potential dangers.

Limerence is based on illusion. The person you’ve constructed in your head is a fantasy made specifically to represent the fulfillment of your unmet needs.

Limerent attachments involve an element of desperation. You’re so desperate to have this person and you want them, whether they are good for you or not. Limerent attachments are based on the notion that another person is going to somehow complete or come along and save you.

You find yourself trapped in a relentless cycle of intrusive thoughts that dominates your daily life and hinder your ability to truly experience life in the present moment. These thoughts often revolve around the prospect of a future with someone you have no genuine connection to or established relationship.

This imagined future can consume significant amounts of your time and energy, causing you to lose sight of your authentic desires and aspirations, ultimately preventing you from fully engaging in the present and embracing the opportunities that surround you.

When a limerent attachment takes over you, it becomes all-consuming. Other aspects of your life lose their significance. Your fixation on this person makes it a struggle for you to concentrate on anything else, resulting in diminished connections with friends, reduced effectiveness at work, and a general disinterest in the real world. As the limerent attachment becomes the center of your universe, functionality in other relationships and areas of life suffers, leaving you disconnected from the very things that once brought you joy and fulfillment.

At the heart of your limerent attachment lies emotional dependency, as you yearn for the reciprocation of your affection. Their presence has become your lifeline. The absence of this person evokes anxiety within you, akin to someone in the throes of drug withdrawal.

In your quest for reciprocation, you obsessively analyze your beloved's every word and action. Your search for any signs of reciprocated affection subjects you to mood swings, oscillating between euphoric highs when you perceive your feelings are reciprocated, and plummeting into depression, anxiety, or anger when faced with even the slightest hint of rejection.

You find yourself inadvertently overstepping personal boundaries, especially when the individual you are drawn to expresses a desire for distance or asserts their own boundaries. Rather than recognizing their actions as independent from you, you struggle to detach yourself and instead personalize their actions, filtering them through your own lens of fear and abandonment.

You desperately seek validation from the object of your desire, interpreting their every word and action as either complete acceptance or rejection. Excessively needy of their reciprocation, you hunger for their approval, hanging on every word and gesture. When they don't respond or fail to give the response you're wanting, it throws you so far off balance that you question your self-worth.

The intense longing for reciprocation often leads to an unbalanced, one-sided relationship. This emotional hunger stems from an idealized image of the other person, with little regard for their genuine qualities, both positive and negative.

While love embraces the totality of an individual, limerence fixates on the idea of receiving the desired person's attention and approval, without truly understanding or accepting them as they are. As a result, limerence leaves you in a state of emotional turmoil, perpetually seeking validation and a sense of belonging that may never come to fruition.

If you’re caught up in a limerent attachment, it's crucial for you to take a step back and notice just how much this dynamic is affecting you.

In a healthy loving relationship, both people can recognize each other's flaws and still care deeply for one another. There's a sense of safety and a real give-and-take in the relationship. There's also open communication and an equal balance of giving and receiving between the two people.

If you're afraid of genuine connection and intimate dialogue, there's a high likelihood that your default mode of forming attachments is limerent. Deep down, you might be scared of authentic connection and may feel more at ease with distance. There could be profound psychological reasons and fears that account for why you prefer obsessing over the fantasy you’ve created rather than truly connecting with another human being.

Perhaps you have experienced such severe emotional wounding that, even though you desire a deeply meaningful connection, you've been “hardwired” to form attachments to potential partners who are unavailable. If that's the case, you need to be making use of the most powerful therapeutic interventions to heal the trauma so that you can begin to form healthy intimate connections.

How can you tell if you or someone else is limerent?

While the way limerence manifests can vary from one individual to another, there are several common factors. The person who is limerent tends to act and believe as if the other person will either make them whole or come along and save them. They're so caught up in the fantasy they've constructed of the other person that they fail to see red flags that would alert them to signs of potential danger.

Who is prone to limerence?

Anyone can experience limerence. However, individuals who have suffered due to childhood neglect, trauma, or specific developmental issues, because their basic childhood needs were not met as their parents were emotionally or otherwise unavailable, are especially vulnerable to these self-destructive states of infatuation.

Unresolved attachment issues from childhood can contribute to the development of limerence in adulthood. For example, individuals with insecure attachment styles may be more prone to experiencing limerence as they seek the emotional security and validation they did not receive in their early relationships.

What are the three stages of limerence?

Limerence typically occurs in three stages: infatuation, crystallization, and deterioration. As you begin to develop feelings of attraction for a new person who catches your interest, you might recognize the stages of this familiar process:

Infatuation

There's something about the unavailability or unattainability of this individual that makes them insanely addictive. You're consumed by an uncontrollable desire. You compulsively think about this person every waking moment of the day and night, imagining yourself in all kinds of situations where you're together. You dream about being together while you sleep.

Crystallization

The initial infatuation you feel can be intense and long-lasting, but it's during the second stage of limerence that you become even more hooked. You begin to idealize this person, believing they magically complete you and see them as the solution to all of your problems. In this stage, it's easy to see them as flawless and incapable of doing any wrong. The danger here is that you become so caught up in your projections that you lose touch with reality.

Deterioration

Reality starts to catch up with you. After wasting weeks, months, years, or even decades, you finally realize that you will never get to be with this person. In this third stage of limerence, you experience a profound sense of disappointment, loss, resignation, and exhaustion from having tried so hard for so long to make it work.

The negative Impact of Limerence

Limerence can have an absolutely devastating impact not only on your love life, but also on other aspects of your existence. Its destructive effects spill over into multiple facets of your life, often causing you to waste years that could have been spent establishing healthy connections with others. As a result, friendships and familial relationships may suffer, leading to the loss of vital support systems.

This obsession and emotional upheaval wears on both your body and mind, eroding core strengths and capacities necessary for functioning as a fully realized individual. Amidst the turmoil, you can easily lose sight of your own goals and aspirations, causing your career to falter.

Ultimately, limerence can leave you stagnating, unable to take the steps necessary to facilitate your healing and growth. With your judgment clouded by obsessive thinking and emotional upheaval, you’re also more likely to make decisions and engage in questionable behaviors that you will later come to regret.

Healing limerence and other forms of unhealthy attachments require you to look within. This will help you uncover any wounds, insecurities, vulnerabilities, and traumas that may have led you to feel tethered to a love that might not be reciprocal or could even be toxic.

Keep in mind that limerence exists on a spectrum, ranging from mild to pathological. You need to evaluate whether this is merely a crush or if it has developed into a crippling pattern manifesting in the way you form attachments, necessitating therapeutic intervention.

If you feel you’re caught up in an obsession, assess why you feel so drawn to this person and what they’re representing for you. It may not be that you’re so obsessed with this individual, but what they represent to you. In some instances, they may be the personification of unmet childhood needs.

Perhaps engaging in imaginary relationships is a more convenient method of managing your emotional detachment, as opposed to addressing the root cause. After all, the appeal of a fantasy partnership frequently surpasses the challenges involved in sustaining a genuine connection.

Even though it may feel amazing right now, you might actually be protecting the vulnerable parts of yourself. The person you're fantasizing about seems safe because, in all likelihood, nothing can really happen, and you might not be in a grounded enough place to handle a real relationship. So, in a way, being in this limerent state allows you to have these fantasies without any actual risk of getting too close to someone.

Limerence frequently arises from not being fully present in your body, possibly due to trauma or specific developmental challenges that occur during childhood. On the other hand, you might encounter it when you’re feeling exhausted, such as when you haven't had sufficient sleep and experience a serotonin deficiency. As a result, you may daydream about someone else rescuing you and solidify those thoughts into an idealized image of “the one.”

Limerence is based on the fantasies you project onto another person. As these fantasies consume you, you become even more untethered from reality. When that happens, there’s the potential to engage in some rather disturbing behavior.  It is important for you to ground yourself in reality by coming to terms with the fact that you are caught up in an obsession rather than a real-world connection with another individual.

Freeing ourselves from these patterns can require hard work. We need to acknowledge that we’re caught up in a fantasy projection and bring our awareness back to our own body and its feelings and sensations, our immediate environment and the reality of our present moment.

I would often find myself daydreaming about the woman I had formed an attachment to, and my mind would construct elaborate scenarios where I would imagine a future together. I had to break the pattern by repeatedly bringing myself back to the reality of my present moment. I often did that by acknowledging that I didn’t really have any significant connection with this person. I would then breathe into my own bodily sensations along with the loneliness, hurt, sadness, sense of loss and rejection, and any other feelings that arose.

Deeply entrenched patterns of forming limerent attachments can be extraordinarily difficult to heal. We cannot do it all on our own. We need to be making use of the most powerful therapeutic interventions available. We especially need to incorporate the interventions that will enable us to heal and transform the deep emotional wounding that causes us to form these limerent attachments. We need interventions that will get us more firmly rooted in our bodies.

Deep tissue body work has helped to connect me with my body. Of all the interventions I’ve done, the sessions with gifted healers and the vision quest, a traditional Native American healing practice that involves fasting for four days and nights without food or water alone in the mountain have been the most powerful.

As the deeply embedded traumas healed and the backlog of painful emotions were digested, my projections dissolved, and I was able to let go of my own limerent attachments. As that happened, I began to attract healthier companions and co-create more meaningful and deeply fulfilling relationships.    

Are you finding it difficult to distinguish between love and limerence?

The intensive journey I have undergone to heal my own emotional wounding has enabled me to facilitate the healing of these same patterns within others. As deep emotional wounds heal, you develop the capacity to truly love and be loved in return. Your relationships can then progress to a deeper and more mature form of love.

Reach out to me when you're ready to do what it takes to heal and embrace the love you truly deserve.

©Copyright 2023 Ben Oofana. All Rights Reserved.
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