What is limerence

Most people remember the feeling of meeting someone who adds new meaning to their life. Suddenly, your thoughts are full of that new person, you can’t help thinking of them, and the time you spend together is worth more than anything in the world.

The butterflies and the rent-free living in one’s mind, and the obsession with the smallest things someone does are the initial stages of attraction. The anxiety can be torture, the desire to see the object of your affection is so strong is painful - but most of us would not have it any other way.

Eventually, if the other person reciprocates, this initial attraction matures into a healthy relationship and frees headspace for thoughts that don’t revolve around the one you’re in love with. If the partner does not reciprocate, the pain hits like a shockwave and can send you on a heartbreak spiral. Luckily, time does heal, and eventually, the hurt and wishful thinking of them coming around passes.

Except what do you do if it doesn’t?

Welcome to limerence: an obsession that doesn’t go away

Dorothy Tennov, the godmother of the term, defines limerence as a state of mind that results from romantic or non-romantic feelings and manifests in intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and emotional dependence on the object of attraction.

It’s fascinating that limerence is not selective about its targets. It hits people of all ages, education levels, professional backgrounds, and from every walk of life. It’s equally manifested in men and women, common in the single and the married.

And once it hits, it costs you.

The long-term impact of limerence

According to a Reddit community on limerence, here are just a few things people lost to limerence:

• Mental health. For many, limerence opened the floodgate to depression, OCD, and anxiety.
• Self-esteem: the condition sends those who suffer from it on a downward spiral of thinking they are not good enough (surely, if they were, their feelings would have been returned).
• Good friendships. Many people are limerent for their friends and, looking for an escape route, they have to break contact with the closest people in their lives.
• Professional and academic success: a limerent is as concentrated on their project as a child would be on deriving a calculus theorem. Their mind is fully occupied by the object of their intense attraction and personal projects fade into the background.
• Money. Limerence is expensive because limerents feel constant pressure to impress their limerence objects or, sometimes, give them money just to please them. It can lead to irrational financial decisions, like moving or uprooting your life just so that you can be closer to the object of your desire.

On a personal note: I struggled with limerence for almost two years now. It is an ongoing battle but, as I am putting it behind me, I see its biggest hidden cost: freedom. When stuck in the maze, a limerent is not free in making decisions or managing their time.

Our lives revolve around mapping our days in a way that brings us closer to the limerence object, and when we can’t be together, a loop of daydreaming and fantasies takes hold in one’s mind.

The freedom, confidence, and feeling of “self” is gone.

Still a gray area in psychology and psychiatry

Limerence takes a heavy toll on people’s minds, lives, and families. There’s no telling when it stops: some see it last for decades. It is a silent agony, through which most suffer alone - because the term itself is not part of medical practice the way depression, anxiety, and other conditions are.

Research on limerence is scarce: on PubMed, the biggest library of papers on life sciences and medicine, there are not a dozen of papers on the topic.

It is not part of DSM-V: a disorder classification manual used in psychiatry for diagnosis. In fact, the condition is studied so poorly we cannot tell how many people are affected.

The scale of the problem only recently started revealing itself thanks to social media. #limerence on TikTok has almost 600K views, r/limerence on Reddit has over 26k subscribers at the time of writing.

These numbers alone show how many people are suffering: and there are more except they did not yet put a name to their condition.

GetOver: a way to proactively address the problem

Through my own journey with limerence, I realized that going out of touch with the object of your desire is helpful but insufficient. Limerents know how long limerent objects linger in our minds even when we don’t see them - sometimes for months, sometimes for years.

I realized that limerence is not about specific people we are attracted to, it’s about the search for meaning. To a limerent, a limerence object is a way to fill in the gap in a joyless reality, find a reason to keep going, a hope to cling to.

So I set out to find a way to move the spotlight to other ways in which we can find meaning. That led to the idea of GetOver: a platform that helps you focus on what you can give the world and what, in turn, life can offer.

The app breaks limerence recovery into daily bite-sized missions that make you think about yourself and slowly uncover your value. I also added tools that help control the remnants of our obsession: a limerent ritual tracker and a trigger tracker.

I designed GetOver to be a science-based guide to overcoming limerence. To see what the app has to offer, download it for iOS and Android.