How To Recognise and Avoid Limerence When Dating
A guide to staying grounded and making better dating decisions
Limerence:
"an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object (LO) involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation"1
Lynn Wilmott
You’ve experienced limerence if after briefly meeting someone attractive, you find your thoughts haunted by them, and your imagination fabricating entire narratives projecting your life romantically entwined with theirs. This is not a momentary idle fantasy, but rather a pervasive train of thought that leads you to become infatuated with this person (your “limerent object” - LO), to the point where thoughts of them consume all your spare attention, and even intrude when you’re trying to focus on other topics.
What’s Wrong With Feeling Giddy About A Potential Love Interest?
It’s great to feel a thrill or sense of excitement about being with someone you find attractive, but limerence is more than just excitement. Limerence has a nasty way of undermining your romantic prospects and raising false expectations about the wrong people. It even causes some people to experience physiological symptoms such as anxiety, excessive perspiration and heart palpitations, and psychological responses such as stuttering, confusion, awkwardness, and shyness. It also carries an emotional rollercoaster of highs and lows triggered by the over-analysis of the limerent object’s words and actions in search of signs of reciprocated desire against the underlying terror of possible rejection.
The other problem with limerence is that it blinds you to the reality of your limerent object. The fantasy projected by your imagination whilst captivated by limerence overrides any actual perception of the LOs shortcomings. Once the limerence fades (e.g. in response to the other person reciprocating romantic interest), the illusion of perfection fades with it. This phenomenon closely relates to the issues we explored in:
In severe cases we often see distraught people lamenting a “breakup” of a relationship that consisted of only a few hours of face-to-face time spanning a couple of dates. Whilst it’s normal to feel a sense of disappointment when things don't work out after a few dates. However for the person suffering limerence, the emotional impact of rejection after only a couple of dates can be felt as deeply as the dissolution of a relationship of many years. I would speculate that this has something to do with the strength of their fantasy, and the amount of mental energy that they have invested in the fantasy (i.e. all their waking hours, and likely their dreams too).
In any case, unless both you and your LO are suffering limerence at the same time, the chances are that it will cause you to behave in ways that undermine your attractiveness. Your craving for your LO’s attention will come across as neediness, and your limerence-induced instability will lead her to worrying about your baseline stability and dependability.
5 Signs You Might Be Experiencing Limerence
Individually, the following clues might be signs of other things, but if you’re experiencing several at the same time, you’re probably experiencing limerence.
You experience symptoms in the presence of someone you find attractive (shortness of breath, heart palpitations, perspiration, excessive anxiety, awkwardness, stuttering, and/or confusion in the presence of someone you find attractive
You cannot stop thinking about a person you find attractive, even when you’re trying to concentrate on important things
Uncertainty about the other person’s feelings towards you cause a sense of deep anguish or despair, replaced by a sense of ecstasy whenever they pay attention to you in such a way to rekindle hope.
After spending time with the other person, you analyse everything they said or did, looking for hidden cues of attraction or rejection. At the same time, fear of rejection prevents you from asking them on a date or otherwise seeking clarity in relation to their feelings towards you.
You are already planning your wedding and choosing baby names despite only having been on a few dates
How to Avoid Falling Into Limerence
Limerence thrives on hope, loneliness, and fear of rejection. To avoid it, you can apply the following strategy:
1. Ensure Your Social Needs Are Satisfied Before Dating
"If people have a large number of unmet social needs, and are not aware of this, then a sign that someone else might be interested is easily built up in that person's imagination into far more than the friendly social contact that it might have been. By dwelling on the memory of that social contact, the lonely person comes to magnify it into a deep emotional experience, which may be quite different from the reality of the event."2
Nicky Hayes
In this previous article
we discussed the flawed notion that many lonely men have that finding a girlfriend is the best approach to satisfying their social needs as well as their desire for sex and intimacy. We also discussed how a lack of friends and social life can undermine a man’s attractiveness to women, and how this approach can lead to relationships that are unsustainable. Now we can add the increased propensity for limerence caused by loneliness to the equation to provide further argument in favour of sorting out your social needs before approaching dating.
2. Mixed Signals = Lack of Interest
Limerence depends on hope to survive. The hope of “mixed signals” of interest from someone you find attractive is enough to send someone susceptible to limerence down a never-ending whirlpool of ecstasy and despair. If someone is actually interested in you romantically, they will proactively seek your company, seek opportunity to be alone with you, and try to be physically close or actually touching you. If this happens in the context of dating, it should be pretty clear that this is a burgeoning relationship. On the other hand, if one or more of these cues is missing, she’s “just not that into you”.
Where confusion can creep in is the social or work context where some of these cues may be present, but the context makes romantic intent less certain. In these situations, stick to the following guidelines:
Unless all three cues are present, she is just a friend.
Even if all three cues are present, she is still just a friend until you unequivocally ask her on a date and she accepts
3. Fail Fast & Move On
Over the past decade the world of tech innovation has changed its relationship with failure to embrace it. The philosophy is simple: when trying something new and uncertain, it is better to find out quickly that it doesn’t work so you can alter course and try something else until you succeed. The same applies to dating and avoiding limerence. In addition to hope, limerence requires ambiguity - outright rejection from the LO will starve it into non-existence. In other words, if you’re attracted to someone, let them know by promptly asking them out on a date. The sooner they turn you down, the sooner you can make yourself available for other relationship opportunities. The faster you reach this level of clarity, the less time you allow for limerence to develop and sabotage your imagination.
Final Thoughts
Whilst this article focuses on recognising and avoiding limerence in yourself, it also pays to be aware of its presence in the people around you. Limerence occurs in both men and women, and can explain “crazy” behaviour towards you from dates as well as from friends or coworkers who might find you attractive. If you suspect that you have become someone else’s limerent object, you can defuse the situation by making it unequivocally clear to them that you are not romantically interested and withholding your attention from them until they recover.
Willmott, Lynn (2012). Love and Limerence: Harness the Limbicbrain. Lathbury House. ISBN 978-1481215312.
Hayes, Nicky (2000), Foundations of Psychology(3rd ed.), London: Thomson Learning, ISBN 1861525893
Good article. Generally you get better at avoiding limerence as you get older and have had more experience with relationships. As a young man it can be a minefield.