Limerence enters your life pleasantly. Someone takes on a special meaning. It may be an old friend unexpectedly seen in a new way. Or it may be a new person, someone who only a week before, perhaps just yesterday, was unknown to you.
Many of my interviewees recalled the first moment of limerent feeling. Sometimes the reaction was so clear that it is no wonder the ancients believed it was brought about through the intervention of a magical or supernatural force—a love potion, a dart from Cupid’s bow, the enchantment cast by a sorcerer. When I asked those who had experienced the state, they could only say when it began; on the score of why, the answer was “I must have been ready for it,” or, even more often, “I have no idea.” I don’t mean to imply that they were uninterested in the answer. As Marvin, a mathematics student from a major university in the Northeastern United States said:
“I guess it was time. For one thing, it was spring. Maybe that really does affect things. I’ve heard there are more suicides in April. I had been literally submerged in work all winter, I had pretty much got over the affair with Joyce, and I looked up from my books and there was Marilyn. It was an immediate reaction—on both parts, or so it seemed at the time. I would say that within a week—less than that, within three days—my whole world had been transformed. It had a new center, and that center was Marilyn.”
Why limerence occurs at one time and place and has one person rather than another as its object could not be determined either by questionnaires or by retrospective accounts given in interviews. Some informants found themselves in love at a time when, by their accounts, it was furthest from their thoughts or expectations or even hopes. Some act on the part of the other person, some look or word or gesture that is interpreted to indicate possible responsiveness, seems necessary, even if it is only imagined. Limerence is, above all else, mental activity. It is an interpretation of events, rather than the events themselves. You admire, you are physically attracted, you see, or think you see (or deem it possible to see under “suitable” conditions), the hint of possible reciprocity, and the process is set in motion.
A young man whom I will call Teddy told of the first evening of his limerence for Sue:
“I think I noticed Sue and felt physically attracted the minute I entered the room that evening. When I saw her dance, I was also impressed with her extraordinary talent. At that point I was ripe, and when she gave me that look, I succumbed totally. We danced together several times and I was in seventh heaven. At the time, I wasn’t thinking, I’m in love with Sue. I was just thoroughly enjoying the situation. I was also noticing everything about her. And everything was beautiful, especially the fact that she seemed to be having the same experience.”
You suddenly feel a sparkle of interest in somebody else, an interest fed by the image of returned feeling. Maybe the eyes lock. The eyes, as we shall see again and again, are so important in limerence that they, not the genitals or even the heart, may be called the organs of love. In any case, the beginning is a transformation that is sometimes so distinct that the French use the term coup de foudre, or thunderbolt.
Sometimes, on the other hand, limerence sneaks up on you. At the time, you insist that it has not in fact occurred, and it is only later, in ever repeated retrospection, that the moment is recognized for what it was: the beginning of a state of consciousness that, if experienced for the first time, is utterly unlike anything else that has ever happened.
A middle-aged professor, whom I will call Dr. Vesteroy, recounted the following:
“Dr. Ashton had remained in my office after the faculty meeting, apparently writing out some of her thoughts. I thought absolutely nothing of it at the time except to note, in an entirely detached manner, the way one regards a painting or an impressive landscape, that she was an attractive woman and we were quite fortunate to have her as a new addition to the department, not only because of her superb professional credentials but because of the aesthetic uplift she provides as well. I was amused at the thought but that was all. I was much more interested in her research findings than in the way the sunlight caused those little sparkles in her hair. (Obviously I had noticed them.) And I was rather taken by the intensity of her concentration as she wrote. That was all. I mean I wasn’t actually staring at her. I was merely waiting for her to finish so I could put through a telephone call to that publisher whose textbooks in American history still had not come in. It was already the third week of the semester.
“Suddenly, Dr. Ashton—Elena her name is—looked up and seemed startled to find herself the only leftover from the meeting. She flushed a bit and gathered her things saying that she hoped she had not kept me. Then just before she went out, she looked at me and smiled! It was that smile and that look that started the whole thing off, and I still find the whole thing embarrassing to speak of; but I had this flash, this thrill, a running sensation of excitement, and I don’t even remember what I said. It was not, and I emphasize, it was not a matter of actually believing either then or now that she had on that occasion deliberately delayed her departure or had any romantic ideas of me. It was ridiculous to think anything at all, but the fact was that I felt strongly at the time, even that first time, that some spark of communication had passed between us and that it was communication of a very personal and delightful sort. But I forgot it. By the time I had the publishers on the line, Dr. Ashton was entirely out of my mind, at least for the moment. It was only much later that I recognized that that smile had actually been the beginning.”
Although I can only speculate on the mystery of what makes limerence strike here rather than there, or at this time rather than another, what happens during limerence, what it feels like, and what it makes you do and desire are clear. A constellation of features constitute an experience that has a certain “wholeness” about it. One thing is certain. Limerence is not mere sexual attraction. Although something you may interpret as sexual attraction may be, or seem to be, the first feeling, sometimes nothing you would label sexual interest is ever consciously felt. Sex is neither essential nor, in itself, adequate to satisfy the limerent need. But sex is never entirely excluded in the limerent passion, either. Limerence is a desire for more than sex, and a desire in which the sexual act may represent the symbol of its highest achievement: reciprocation. Reciprocation expressed through physical union creates the ecstatic and blissful condition called “the greatest happiness,” and the most profound glorification of the achievement of limerent aims.
It is surely limerence that has caused writers to expound in passages like these:
And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her.
—Genesis 1:6–141
The speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love.
—Francis Bacon2
[Love is] the greatest happiness that can exist.
—Stendhal3
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh still, beside me, as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,
Was caught up into love, and taught the whole
Of a new rhythm.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning4
Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in.
—Robert Seidenberg5
I felt as though the clouds were not on the horizon but under my feet. How sweet it was.
—Liv Ullmann6
Yearned for, dreamed about, and, for the fortunate, reveled in, limerence inspires even ordinary persons to verbal excess. It is called the “supreme delight,” “the pleasure that makes life worth living,” “the experience that takes the sting from dying.” It has been said to power the very revolution of the planet.
A young woman who allowed me to tape-record our talk said:
“I remember that Simone de Beauvoir used the term ‘ecstatic union’ and I kept thinking those words at the time. Almost from the very first moment when Rick looked into my eyes—so deeply, he didn’t merely look at me—I thought that word. ‘Ecstasy.’ After our first night together, I woke up with this strange and wonderful feeling like nothing describable or nothing I had ever felt before. Problems, troubles, inconveniences of living that would normally have occupied my thoughts became unimportant. I looked at them over a huge gulf of sheer happiness. I even enjoyed the prospect of dealing with them—with Rick. The landlord had given me notice and the bank loan had not gone through, and I could not bring myself to care! Whatever happened, it would be wonderful somehow.
“My delight in simply existing eclipsed everything else, and I literally could scarcely feel the ground as I walked. In some ways, my perceptions grew stronger. Colors seemed more brilliant. The warmth of the sunlight on my arm as I drove to work was so acutely pleasurable that I marveled at never before appreciating it. I relived our moments of intimacy as I drove—the loving pressure of Rick’s arms around me, the softness of his lips, and, most of all, his eyes. His look was an embrace.
“I could recall every word he had said, even the most ordinary things. I glowed and the world glowed back at me. When I stopped for a red light, I waved at children playing in the street and they waved back. It was as if they somehow shared my experience, almost as if in some way, they—everyone—knew.
“At the office, I could hardly keep from shouting out how deliriously happy I felt. The work was easy; things that had annoyed me on previous occasions were taken in stride. And I had strong impulses to help others; I wanted to share my joy. When Mary’s typewriter broke down, I virtually sprang to my feet to assist. Mary! My former ‘enemy’! No one was an enemy anymore! My affection included the universe. I loved every single creature. A fly landed on my desk, I hadn’t the heart to brush it away.”
A similar reaction viewed by another was reported in an interview with a client whose son’s severe depression had been one of her chief concerns. Now he had become “involved” with a woman. Ms. Verne described the situation:
“Mary was a little dumpy 35-year-old with two children, just about the last person I would have wanted or expected Ted to have anything to do with. I didn’t see what they could have in common. I didn’t even ask. Whatever it was he liked about her, she was obviously responsible for a highly beneficial change in him. It was undeniable. For the first time in years, he was actually cheerful! He whistled as he got dressed in the morning, and when he came into the kitchen he almost bounced. He’d put his arm around me and say, ‘What’s good for breakfast, Mom? I’m famished.’ ”
“While he ate, he chatted about the garden, the cat, what he planned to do that day. It was a metamorphosis. He changed almost overnight from a morose and sullen child to a happy, mature, and responsible adult. And how could I be jealous when he treated me so lovingly? It was like magic.”
The Group tended to agree with this inflated evaluation of “love.” Ninety-five percent called love “a beautiful experience.” Eighty-six percent said that “the support and companionship of a member of the opposite sex is very important to me,” and “I enjoy being in love.” Eighty-three percent felt that “anyone who has never been in love is missing one of life’s most pleasurable experiences,” and 61 percent were “happiest” when in love. Even 42 percent were willing to go as far as agreeing that “being in love is like living on top of a cloud.”
Limerence may begin as a barely perceptible feeling of increased interest in a particular person but one which if nurtured by appropriate conditions can grow to enormous intensity. In most cases, it also declines, eventually to zero or to a low level. At this low level, limerence is either transformed through reciprocation or it is transferred to another person, who then becomes the object of a new limerent passion. Under the best of conditions, the waning of limerence through mutuality is accompanied by the growth of the emotional response more suitably described as love. In either case, as the poets have acknowledged, the state is an inconstant one.
Limerence has certain basic components:
• intrusive thinking about the object of your passionate desire (the limerent object or “LO”), who is a possible sexual partner
• acute longing for reciprocation
• dependency of mood on LO’s actions or, more accurately, your interpretation of LO’s actions with respect to the probability of reciprocation
• inability to react limerently to more than one person at a time (exceptions occur only when limerence is at low ebb—early on or in the last fading)
• some fleeting and transient relief from unrequited limerent passion through vivid imagination of action by LO that means reciprocation
• fear of rejection and sometimes incapacitating but always unsettling shyness in LO’s presence, especially in the beginning and whenever uncertainty strikes
• intensification through adversity (at least, up to a point)
• acute sensitivity to any act or thought or condition that can be interpreted favorably, and an extraordinary ability to devise or invent “reasonable” explanations for why the neutrality that the disinterested observer might see is in fact a sign of hidden passion in the LO
• an aching of the “heart” (a region in the center front of the chest) when uncertainty is strong
• buoyancy (a feeling of walking on air) when reciprocation seems evident
• a general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background
• a remarkable ability to emphasize what is truly admirable in LO and to avoid dwelling on the negative, even to respond with a compassion for the negative and render it, emotionally if not perceptually, into another positive attribute.
It occasionally occurred, although rarely, that an attraction was described to me which seemed to fit the limerent pattern in all ways except that the informant felt no initial inclination toward physical union. Despite those few exceptions, I am inclined toward the generalization that sexual attraction is an essential component of limerence. This sexual feeling may be combined with shyness, impotence or some form of sexual dysfunction or disinclination, or with some social unsuitability. But LO, in order to become LO, must stand in relation to the limerent as one for whom the limerent is a potential sex partner.
Sexual attraction is not “enough,” to be sure. Selection standards for limerence are, according to informants, not identical to those by which “mere” sexual partners are evaluated, and sex is seldom the main focus of limerence. Either the potential for sexual mating is felt to be there, however, or the state described is not limerence.
Limerents (those who are experiencing the state at a given time) sometimes vacillate between two or more possible LOs during the earliest stages. Jill, for example, thought for a time that she might be in love with both Al and Rudi:
“Whether ‘it’ was Al or Rudi depended on their actions. Like the song goes, I preferred the one I was with. There was definitely something special with both of them, but they were running neck and neck for a long time, a time which was really quite pleasant. But one weekend, the situation was shifted. Al was out and Rudi was in. The scales had tipped. After that, it was a matter of only about two weeks before I really had it bad.
“On Friday I was supposed to go out with Al, but he called to say he couldn’t make it. He sounded strange and didn’t give a reason. I was a little disappointed, but that was okay. I spent the evening watching TV with Mom and Dad. Then around eleven o’clock—we were watching the news—the doorbell rang. Al was there with his brother, and both were very drunk. They seemed to have no idea of the time and acted as if it were perfectly okay to come to the house at that hour. I was glad I was the one to answer the door, because it would have embarrassed me to have my parents see them.
“It seems that Al had lost a lot of money gambling and had had an opportunity, he thought, to win some of it back. That was why he had broken the date. Instead, he lost even more. He was very upset over this—as well as drunk—and he pleaded with me to say it was okay and that I’d marry him anyway.”
Jill recoiled.
“Standing there looking at him, suddenly all I could think of was Rudi. I finally got them to leave, and as I closed the door, I knew that I was no longer attracted to Al at all. The next night, Rudi and I had an especially lovely evening.”
Actually, the lovely evening had, as if by the design of a malevolent fate, included running into one of Rudi’s old girlfriends, Meriam.
“I had never seen her before, although I knew about her. Rudi had told me that their relationship had been ‘important’ to him. I was unprepared, however, for her beauty. I noticed her instantly when we entered the room because she was so attractive. It really shook me up, and it might have had something to do with the intensity of the reaction I began to have.”
For the process to develop fully, some form of uncertainty or doubt, or even some threat to reciprocation appears necessary. There is considerable evidence that an externally imposed obstacle, such as Romeo and Juliet met in the resistance of family and society, may also serve.
Several persons described the rejections they encountered when “throwing caution to the wind” and “wearing their hearts on their sleeves,” they took the honest course of immediate, open declaration. Said one:
“I should have held back. I can see that now all too clearly. I was scared, but I felt I owed it to Fran to be honest. I was honest, and it was a mistake.”
Indeed, too early a declaration on the limerent’s part or, on the other hand, too early evidence of reciprocation on LO’s part may prevent the development of the full limerent reaction. Something must happen to break a totally positive interaction. Not that totally positive reactions are without highly redeeming features in themselves; it is only that they stop the progression to full or maximum limerence.
In a situation similar to Jill’s, Teddy’s reaction intensified when Sue’s lover, Gerald, arrived at the dance later that same evening.
“We were dancing together when I felt Sue sort of stiffen in my arms. She was looking at a tall blond and rather good-looking man who had just arrived. He marched right over to us with an air of ownership which seemed to make Sue feel conflicted. She introduced us, then excused herself to dance with him, and I was left for most of the rest of the evening to watch her from a distance. Every once in a while she seemed to search out my eyes, and just before they left, she gave me this long look which could only mean that her interest had not died completely just because Gerald had arrived on the scene.”
That look was the flicker of hope that sustained, and even intensified, Teddy’s limerent response to Sue; without Gerald’s presence and the threat he posed, the initial pleasantness might have remained just that.
The degree of objective attractiveness necessary to initiate limerence varies considerably. The relative admiration you feel for your LO as compared with others may be based on peripheral, even trivial factors, which, however, like the moment of initial interest, tend to be remembered. The question “What did you especially admire in______?” or “What particularly attracted you?” generally yielded a definite and specific response. Here are some samples:
“I liked Betty’s hair. It was long and very dark brown with waves, the kind of hair that moved when she turned her head. I was always in love with her. That was love at first sight, even before I knew anything else about her. Then, and don’t laugh, I know this will sound even more ridiculous, but I liked her white blouses. She was always wearing white, which was terrific against her hair. Of course, there were a lot of other things. The more I got to know her, the more things I found to like. She has a great sense of humor. She’s poised and confident, even in tough situations. She’s really bright. But when you asked just now, the first picture that came into my mind was that wonderful hair and those white tops she always wore.”
“This is going to make me sound a bit daft, I know, but the first thing that attracted me—and I never stopped being attracted by it—was his height. Barry was exactly the same height I was, and I loved it. I don’t care what they say about ‘the man’s supposed to be taller,’ etc. I think being the same size—of course, he’s heavier—is nice. It feels so close and, I don’t know, equal. I also liked the fact that he played jazz piano and had a lot of friends who were musicians.”
“I think I was attracted to Ruth because she, well, she isn’t ugly, but she isn’t what you’d call pretty, either. I guess you’ll think I’m one in a million to feel that way, but it wasn’t that I was attracted to her looks. Here was a woman who had made her way up the ladder to a pretty important position, and obviously she didn’t do it on the basis of a pretty face. That meant there had to be a lot more to her than what met the eye, and I was intrigued. I wasn’t disappointed, either. And maybe—after all, I’m no Clark Gable—I hoped that there was a better chance she’d go for me, too. That may have been part of it. It’s hard to tell.”
And so on. Some mentioned general character traits like “honesty,” “forthrightness,” or “intelligence”; others stressed physical characteristics. The certainty and specificity of many of the replies were impressive.
What features of LO are truly important? Can you become limerent about someone who is objectively not attractive? Although my interviewees tended to speak in glowing terms of their LOs, physical attractiveness was not always mentioned.
“I had known Phil for almost seven years without ever thinking of him as more than a friend, and not even as a close friend. But I had a good feeling about him as far as it went. He was cheerful and dependable—the kind of person you felt you could go screaming to if the world started crashing in. Knowing him, even slightly, was something of a comfort, Phil was what you’d call a natural leader. Everybody looked to him whenever they didn’t know what to do. ‘Lets go see what Phil thinks,’ they’d say. I thought that was a marvelous trait. It really impressed me.”
Typically, I did not meet my informants’ LOs. But the importance of “visible features of the loved one” has frequently been discussed in the literature on love. Researchers John Money and Anke Ehrhardt found that sight of the face may alone elicit the reaction but that no aspect of a potential LO is indispensable, This, they note, helps to make human beings flexible so that attractiveness may be differently defined from society to society and from time to time—as well as from person to person.7 Some psychologists stress the evidence that it is not absolute attractiveness but the match between you and your potential LO that matters.8 In fact, Hilary claimed that it was his ugliness that attracted her to Bernard.
“It wasn’t that I liked his homeliness per se. I didn’t. Or, rather, I didn’t see it as homeliness, but as an indication that he might become attracted to me. I fell in love with Bernard because I thought he might love me in return. I must also admit that his money and success and all the power that seemed to go with them probably also played a role.”
In 1822, French novelist Marie Henri Beyle, better known by his favorite pseudonym, Stendhal, published his highly personal, yet precisely analytical collection of essays on love, De l’Amour. Despite his attempts to disguise the actual people of whom he wrote, scholars easily discovered that Stendhal produced the work amid an enduring and hopeless passion for a Milanese woman named Métilde. His aim was to describe the experience of what he called “passionate love,” partly in a search for explanation, partly perhaps to exorcise the painful emotion through literary dissection. The most renowned conceptualization from De l’Amour was of the manner in which the object of passionate love was perceived, a process to which he gave the metaphorical term, “crystallization.”
A branch of a tree, he said, if tossed into a salt mine and allowed to remain there for several months undergoes a metamorphosis. It remains a branch, or even just a twig, but the salt crystals transform it “into an object of shimmering beauty.” In an analogous manner, although more quickly, the characteristics of the LO are crystallized by mental events in which LO’s attractive characteristics are exaggerated and unattractive characteristics given little or no attention. According to Stendhal, you interpret LO in the most favorable light. You do not exactly misperceive, but rather focus your attention on the positive.9 You seem unconcerned about the defects in what appears to the concerned outsider—friends and family—to be quite an unsuitable individual. Popular tradition has attributed this process to blindness (as in “love is blind”); it is really a matter of emphasis. The good qualities endlessly revisualized in the limerent consciousness are not pure inventions, but as the salt crystals on a twig magnify the attractive features of the twig,
. . . the original naked branch is no longer recognizable by indifferent eyes, because it now sparkles with perfections, or diamonds, which [others] do not see or which they simply do not consider to be perfections.10
Similarly you may seize on objectively trivial aspects of LO’s appearance or behavior—a look in the eye, a way of walking, a hesitation in speech or a dialect, an article of clothing—and imbue it with meaning. LO’s eyes reflect “intense concentration,” “impassioned concern for the welfare of others,” “empathie sorrow,” “lively wit,” “extreme intelligence,” or “deep understanding.” LO’s walk suggests “gaiety,” “seriousness of purpose,” or “savoir faire.” LO’s manner of speech may seem aesthetically pleasurable; the way LO is attired reveals favorable aspects of character that might range from sophistication to disdain for current fashion or else it might suggest or reveal pleasing aspects of the underlying anatomy. However LO may appear to others, the limerent bias brings forth the positive and plays down the unfavorable.
Not only does limerence overemphasize and exaggerate what is actually positive, but neutral aspects of the person are perceived as charming and delightful. Said Terry:
“Once I fall, really fall, everything about her becomes wonderful, even things that would otherwise mean nothing at all are suddenly capable of evoking curiously positive reactions. I love her clothes, her walk, her handwriting (its illegibility would seem charming, or if it were clear and readable, that would be equally admirable), her car, her cat, her mother. Anything that she liked, I liked; anything that belonged to her acquired a certain magic. Her handbag, her notebook, her pencil. I abhor the sight of toothmarks on a pencil; they disgust me. But not her toothmarks. Hers were sacred; her wonderful mouth had been there. Did I worship the ground on which the woman I loved walked? You know, it’s almost that bad!”
The “misperception” of the person experiencing romantic passion has been discussed by writers prior to and following Stendhal, who most often refer to “idealization.”11 But idealization differs from crystallization in its implication that the image is molded to fit a preformed, externally derived, or emotionally needed conception. In crystallization, the actual and existing features of LO merely undergo enhancement. Idealization implies that unattractive features are literally overlooked; in limerence these features are usually seen, but emotionally ignored. In a study of 2,000 couples, two-thirds of the men and three-fourths of the women were able to indicate their partner’s character defects, physical defects and bad habits, e.g., nail-biting. Obviously, perception of these defects was not an impediment.12 As Lenore said of Michael:
“Yes I knew he gambled, I knew he sometimes drank too much, and I knew he didn’t read a book from one year to the next. I knew and I didn’t know. I knew it but I didn’t incorporate it into the overall image. I dwelt on his wavy hair, the way he looked at me, the thought of his driving to work in the morning, his charm (that I believed must surely affect everyone he met), the flowers he sent, the considerations he had shown to my sister’s children at the picnic last summer, the feeling I had when we were in close physical contact, the way he mixed a martini, his laugh, the hair on the back of his hand. Okay! I know it’s crazy, that my list of ‘positives’ sounds silly, but those are the things I think of, remember, and, yes, want back again!”
When crystallization has occurred, says Stendhal, “even the asperities of [LO] have an infinite grace.”13 It is not, as some contend, a blindness or self-deception,14 but rather a taking of the person whole, even “loving in advance every disclosure which awaits there.”15 Because LO is LO, every feature is “divinely perfect,”16 not perhaps in objective terms, but as measured by the emotional reaction. A character in one of Stendhal’s novels felt sorry for LO’s deficiencies as time went on.17 The point is not how the deficiencies are perceived; they might be seen quite readily. It is the limerent’s capacity to react positively to them once the limerence is in full swing and the gates of the mind have been closed to the possibility of a limerent reaction to anyone else.
Bill, a creative writing instructor, struggled with his images of Greta, a student:
“She is essentially invisible to me. I see my own construction, and sometimes my image of Greta alters without her doing anything, without my even seeing her or hearing anything new about her. I cannot assess the reasonableness or unreasonableness of my reactions to her literary compositions. How can I continue to feel so strongly when it seems apparent by objective standards, by the standards I would apply to anyone else, that her work is mediocre? But as soon as I say that, my head fills with objections to the idea. I make excuses—she has had an inadequate background, and the potential is there. I take anything that is less than terrible and blow it up into something of genius. But part of me knows that this glowing image is my own construction.”
Those of you who have been an object of limerence, especially if you were unable to return the feeling, and those of you who have “recovered” from limerence only to find that the former objects of your passion had acquired previously underappreciated imperfections, realize that the limerent reaction may miss by a wide mark the truly important features of LO.
In the beginning I expected a degree of understandable resistance to referring to a person as an “object,” although “love object” seems far less objectionable than does “sex object.” I once mentioned my concern about using the word “object” in presenting limerence theory to a workshop group. One of the participants said that if ever the word “object” was appropriate it was here, because to the degree that your reaction to a person is limerent, you respond to your construction of LO’s qualities.
Limerence is first and foremost a condition of cognitive obsession. Stendhal wrote:
The most surprising thing of all about love is the first step, the violence of the change that takes place in [the] mind. . . . A person in love is unremittingly and uninterruptedly occupied with the image of [the] beloved.18
During the earliest stages of limerence, those who are experiencing it may sense only a general longing for love and may vacillate between two or more possible LOs. For example, Isabella, one of my interviewees, estimated that she spent almost two-thirds of her time desiring a “love.” But the kind of speculation this desire produced was spread over five different men. She was “very attracted” to both Gary and Bill and thought she might be falling in love with either of them. She also admired Jim and Al in a special way, although she was not really attracted romantically. She was somewhat more interested in Lou. A week later, after a special moment with Bill, her limerence for him developed fully. Bill was now the only one of the five to occupy her mind, and he did so almost totally. She no longer thought of the others as potential partners; in fact, she rarely thought of them.
Just as all roads once led to Rome, when your limerence for someone has crystallized, all events, associations, stimuli, experience return your thoughts to LO with unnerving consistency. At the moment of awakening after the night’s sleep, an image of LO springs into your consciousness. And you find yourself inclined to remain in bed pursuing that image and the fantasies that surround and grow out of it. Your daydreams persist throughout the day and are involuntary. Extreme effort of will to stop them produces only temporary surcease.
In a diary I was given, someone complained,
“This obsession has infected my brain. I cannot shake those constantly intruding thoughts of you. Every thought winds back to you no matter how hard I try to direct its course in other directions.”
It is not entirely pleasant, this obsession. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in a letter to William Godwin, “Get ye gone, Intruder!”19
If you encounter objects, people, places or situations associated with LO, those associations are vivid. “There was the park bench we sat on.” An ad in the newspaper recalls the department store in which you met. “That was the song we danced to last year.” “Ah, yes, that was [LO]’s favorite topic, wine, composer, sport or perfume.”
The connections need not be logical or even close. It is not the “other thing” that reminds one of LO, but rather that the perpetual presence of LO in your head defines all other experience in relationship to that presence. If a certain thought has no previous connection with LO, you immediately make one. You wonder or imagine what LO would think of the book in your hand, the scene you are witnessing, the fortune or misfortune that is befalling you. You find yourself visualizing how you will tell about it, how LO will respond, what will be said between you, and what actions will—or might—take place in relation to it. As you engage in the ordinary tasks that constitute your daily activities, you invent intricate scenarios for possibly upcoming events. Endlessly, you plan the next encounter going over every detail of exactly what you will do in order to improve your image in LO’s eyes. You imagine LO’s reaction and your further responses. The widely acclaimed movie Rocky portrays this feature of limerence well in the scene in which actor Sylvestor Stallone stands before a mirror in his room rehearsing a joke about turtles he has invented to impress Adrienne, the young woman who works in the pet shop.
You hope and you anticipate. You recall with vividness what LO said and did. You search out alternative meanings of those behaviors. It’s as if each word and gesture is permanently available for review, especially those which can be interpreted as evidence in favor of “return of feeling.”
When Larry walked Margaret home one evening, they paused for a few moments before her door while she searched for her key. He observed her mild frustration as she rummaged among the jumble of items in her handbag. Finally successful, she looked at him, held the key up for him to see, and complained, “I’m so disorganized. Tomorrow I am going to get rid of some of this junk that’s getting in my way all the time.” Then she grinned and playfully poked him in the side with her elbow. “Hey,” she said, “it was a great concert. I really enjoyed it.” And then she turned and left him.
All during the following day, Larry found himself reviewing the events of the night before. Margaret’s face was almost as clear to him in his daydreams as it had been in the reality of her presence. He could smell her perfume. But above all, he recalled that final moment, that wonderful touch of her arm in his ribs, and the way she looked at him when she found the key. He tried to analyze the feelings behind her comments. Why had she not asked him in for a cup of coffee or a drink? She had to go in to work early. Her mother had not been feeling well, and she wanted to telephone. She was afraid of appearing too forward, too eager. Every thought of Margaret made her more beautiful, more admirable, more desirable in Larry’s eyes.
To others, his behavior that next day appeared quite normal, but in fact Larry’s mind was so totally occupied with thoughts of Margaret, with reviewing and analyzing the events of the previous evening, and with anticipating events that might occur in the future, that only his external actions could in any sense be considered ordinary.
In his limerence, Larry’s preoccupation was almost 100 percent. Only the most habitual actions were easily accomplished. It was near torture to wrench his mind free of Margaret in order to deal effectively with his work. As soon as he could, he returned to his limerent mooning. He sought out moments of solitude in which he could pursue his daydreams undisturbed.
The compulsive daydreams that dominate the limerent’s consciousness are clearly directed toward a goal. You imagine a possible meeting, the conversation that might take place and your fantasies all lead toward a moment of mutuality, of the expression of returned feelings, and it is this and not any particular action that is the goal or “moment of consummation” of the limerent fantasy.
Because limerent fantasy depends on how you actually perceive reality, its content, which leads up to and renders plausible the ecstatic finale, varies not only from person to person, but from day to day as new knowledge becomes available. A young man told of his limerent reaction to a co-worker, Evelyn:
“It was like you read about but I never thought really happened. Her first day on the job and boom! Just like that. I took one look, as they say . . . Oh, well, maybe that is not entirely accurate. That’s how it seems as I look back on it. Maybe at first it was just, wow, what a doll! Maybe it took a couple of looks. Maybe a couple of days, but it wasn’t long. It was certainly a fixed thing by the time she’d been working in the office a week. I couldn’t believe it and I tried to deny it. I’d had attractions before, but this thing was something that was in my head every minute—even before we had ever spoken to each other.
“Every night I planned a whole campaign for the next day. Evelyn sat three desks away, and I could see her without being too obvious when I turned sideways to my file cabinet. You wouldn’t believe what a file keeper I became! And after I had watched her for a while, I calculated just when to get up and leisurely arrive at the coffee machine just before she got there. I was very concerned about not appearing stupid and overeager.
“After the third or fourth day, we had our first conversation when the machine ran out of cream and I recommended the hot chocolate. The next day, she asked me if I had any spare change because she only had dollar bills, and it continued that way for a few weeks—casual, but friendly.
“That was on the outside. In my mind I was rehearsing the big moment when I’d suggest we have dinner together and imagine these complex situations that would bring it off. Every time I learned something more about her, I’d incorporate that into my daydream. For example, I first thought of, you know, inviting her to my place to listen to jazz records, and we’d be off and running from there. Then I found out she was a classical musical student and I went into this big idea about getting a pair of super concert tickets through my brother-in-law whose uncle plays the oboe in some orchestra.”
Limerent fantasies do not necessarily cease when an actual relationship begins. They may diminish or increase in frequency, depending on circumstances. Hilda and Stu had been seeing each other for several months, during which her limerence had not diminished at all.
“Really, it got worse. Stu and I would usually spend the weekend together at his place, and he’d call on Wednesday or Thursday to finalize the plans. My week was spent thinking about what had happened during the previous weekend and trying to plan what would happen during the next one. I don’t mean that all I did was lie around thinking about it, but it was a constant part of my thinking no matter what else was going on.
“A lot of it was planning conversations. If I saw a movie or read a book, I’d think about telling Stu about it, actually work out impressive sentences which I’d try to memorize. As I drove to work, I’d imagine that he was in the seat next to me and I’d comment on the scenery, on how I felt about various things. Sometimes I’d sing—I really have a good voice, I think, but I’ve never sung when anyone else could hear me—and I’d pretend that Stu was listening and admiring and falling more in love with me every minute.”
During limerent’s height of intensity, thoughts of LO are both persistent and intrusive. Martin, a business executive in his early fifties, found himself enamored of a young woman in the office. It was an unwanted condition. Not only was he married, even happily so, although no longer “in love” with his wife, but his good sense told him that however desirable and lovely Emily might be, their lives could not be joined. She was 25 years younger and surely wanted to have her own family. In addition, she had not responded with any indication of romantic interest in him. He wrote in his diary, the only outlet for his turmoil at the time:
“I am advancing toward the thesis that this attraction for Emily is a kind of biological, instinct-like action that is not under voluntary or logical control. I don’t mean to imply that it is a purely sexual attraction. I only wish it were! That would be easy—well, relatively easy—to take care of.
“But I don’t direct this thing, this attraction, to Emily. It directs me. I try desperately to argue with it, to limit its influence, to channel it (into sex, for example), to deny it, to enjoy it and, yes, dammit, to make her respond! Even though I know that Emily and I have absolutely no chance of making a life together, the thought of her is an obsession. I am in the position of passionately wanting someone I don’t want at all and could find no use for if I had her.
“And as irrational as is my desire, it is then compounded by her doing little things that drag me even deeper into the quagmire. Her look when we pass each other in the hallway can send me into an ecstasy of belief that she feels as I do. Then I begin to long for her so intensely that only fantasy, that thief of work and time, that treacherous devil, can give me the barest moment of relief. And so I moon about when I should be conducting the serious affairs of my position. On top of this incessant desire is guilt. I can’t shake the feeling that I have a choice even though I persist in not exercising it. The illogic of my state screams at me, but the force of it always overpowers my feeble attempts at resistance. How dumb it all is! How imperative!
“And when I read back in my diary and am forced to recall how much hopefulness and energy I had put into upcoming events that turned out to be without significance, I embarrass myself in my own eyes. I am forced to see Emily realistically. A nice young woman, but not for me. But it does no good. A few minutes later I am lost again in romantic daydreams.
“And a very strange aspect of my fantasies, beside their persistence against my will, is that they often leave me suspended, paralyzed, as it were, just at the very moment before my goal is achieved. I never quite “get there.” Although I enjoy the fantasy enormously, it is not necessary to imagine, for example, sex with Emily (in fact, it is almost distasteful, as if it would be disrespectful of her). My pleasure in the daydream reaches its culmination at the point at which some word or look or touch indicates that all else is possible, that it will happen. It is not necessary that I imagine its actually occurring.”
This was repeatedly expressed during the interviews. The “moment of consummation,” the goal, the climax of the limerence fantasy, is not sexual union but emotional commitment on the part of LO. Even when the limerent fantasy included sexual elements, it retained characteristics that distinguished it clearly from a sexual fantasy per se.
A classic limerent fantasy involves an unusual, often tragic, event. The following are the thoughts of a high school sophomore in love with Vera, a girl he has secretly been limerent about all year, a week before the annual spring picnic:
“At the picnic a bunch of the guys decide to scare the girls with their motorbikes. About six of them come barreling down in the direction of the picnic area. At this moment, Vera is returning from a walk with her five-year-old cousin, Nancy. Just as the bikes approach, the child runs in the direction of the picnic area and into the path of the bikes. Vera screams and I rush forward, pick up Nancy, and run. Before I reach Vera, I step into a snake’s nest and am fatally injured. With Nancy still in my arms, I limp toward Vera. I put Nancy on the ground with care and then collapse at Vera’s feet. She takes my head in her lap while others rush for aid. Tears are streaming down her face. Although I am in great pain, and know it is hopeless to try to save me because doctors have told me that any snake bite would kill me because of an allergy, I manage just one sentence: ‘Vera, I love you.’ As I breathe my last breath, I hear her answer, ‘I love you, too, Jim, I always have.’ ”
It is very hard to explain to one who has never been limerent how such a tragic daydream can provide a kind of pleasure, but it can. In another recurrent limerent fantasy, the limerent receives news that death is near. LO learns of this and rushes to the limerent’s side to confess mutuality. In more sophisticated form, such fantasies are the stuff of fiction. Cathy and Heathcliff are mutual limerents prevented a life together by circumstances. Her death scene recalls the limerent fantasy given above. A similar death scene occurs in the opera La Traviata.
In summary, limerent fantasy is, most of all, intrusive and inescapable. It seems not to be something you do, but something that happens. Most involuntary are the flash visions in which LO is reciprocating. Compelling, seductive, tempting, or even, as one man described them, “tantalizing,” the longer limerent fantasy is a deliberate attempt to achieve relief of the limerent yearning through imagining consummation in a context of possible events. Limerent fantasy is unsatisfactory unless firmly rooted in reality. Sometimes it is retrospective; actual events are replayed in memory. This form predominates when what is viewed as evidence of possible reciprocation can be reexperienced. Otherwise, the long fantasy is anticipatory; it begins in your everyday world and climaxes at the attainment of the limerent goal. The intrusive “flashes” may be symbolic; you find LO’s indication of returned feelings expressed by a look, a word, a handclasp, or embrace. The long fantasies form a bridge between your ordinary life and that intensely desired ecstatic moment. The two types of fantasy are ends of a continuum, not mutually exclusive. The duration and complexity of a fantasy often seem to depend on how much time and freedom from distraction is available. The bliss of the imagined moment of consummation is greater when events imagined to precede it are believed in. In fact, of course, they often represent grave departures from the probable, as an outside observer might estimate them.
The course of true love never did run smooth20
Scientific analysis is greatly aided by quantification, even when numbers are merely used to indicate subjective evaluations.21 People are surprisingly good at making such evaluations and at expressing them numerically. Try, for example, greeting people with the following question: “On a ten-point scale, where perfect health, maximum vitality, and ecstatic joyfulness are represented by the number ten and suicidal depression by the number one, how do you feel today?” You will undoubtedly find as I have that although the question gives rise to amusement, an answer is often given readily, sometimes with instantaneous refinement of the scale, as in “Oh, I would say, maybe, six-and-a-half.”
Using a similar approach, I have asked people to describe their current degree of limerent intensity: “If every moment of your waking day not by necessity consumed by other matters is spent in limerent fantasy, let that be 100 percent. At the other end of the scale, call it zero if regardless of how much free thinking time you have in a day, not one moment of it is so engaged.” From the results of such inquiries, it appears that limerence percentage is as readily assessed as is a feeling of general well-being.
During most of the period from the beginning of his limerence for a young Frenchwoman, Laura, until his departure for the United States, one of my first interviewees estimated that his limerence consistently averaged 85 percent. As Fred put it:
“Thinking thoughts of Laura intruded while I was working, and it was that struggle with myself that, I suppose, was one of the most unpleasant aspects of the thing. As far as free time was concerned, while shaving, walking about, waiting for sleep to come at night—this was often at 100 percent. On a couple of occasions, especially after Laura had been particularly unfriendly, my limerence would take a sharp, unfortunately temporary, drop, sometimes going as low as 20 percent. When I got back home, the average went down, gradually, to maybe 60 percent the first month, 50 percent the second, and it leveled off, by the time I met Linda, to 10 percent or less. But don’t get the impression that it was a consistent downward progression. Sometimes, even after I had been back in the United States for four months, I would occasionally have days at 90 percent.”
Other informants also had no trouble at all describing their limerence intensity in numbers. Limerence’s most reliable attribute, the characteristic that more than any other differentiates it from other states of attraction and affection that are also described by the phrase “being in love,” is the intrusiveness of the preoccupation with LO. Judging by my interviewees’ estimate of how much time they spent thinking about LO, I could describe their limerence as varying from zero to 100 percent.22 It appears that although the direction of feeling—happy vs. unhappy—shifts rapidly, the intensity of limerence, measured through intensive reverie, alters less rapidly, and alters only in response to an accumulation of experiences with the particular LO.
For example, Margrit, a 36-year-old sportswriter, met Bert on March 6th, and by the next day, her preoccupation percentage had gone up to 15 percent (she thought about him 15 percent of the time). He telephoned her that day. The day after that, on the 8th, it rose to 20 percent. That evening they had their first date, which was successful enough to bring her preoccupation up to 55 percent the next day and to 65 percent on the three days after that.
The second date, on the 12th, raised her preoccupation percentage even higher, to 80 percent. However, Bert broke the date they had scheduled for the 15th. At this point, Margrit’s preoccuaption percentage was still at 80 percent. After he broke the date, it went even higher.
Up to this point, everything had been on the plus side; Margrit had been not only preoccupied, but pleasantly so. After the broken date, she found her attraction had intensified and her preoccupation increased to 90 percent, but the next three days consisted of unhappy intense limerence. These were days in which she did not hear from him. Then he called again and sounded really interested in her after all, at which time her preoccupation went up to 100 percent, this time a happy 100 percent.
Bert, in fact, was vacillating. On the 21st he broke the next date leaving her this time in more intense misery than she had felt before. During the next three days, both her preoccupation level and her intensity of unhappiness diminished but did not reach neutrality.
Then while driving on her way to an interview, she happened to see Bert on the street walking arm in arm with Ginny. She immediately returned to intense and miserable limerent longing. Her recovery had been based on hopes that were smashed by the sight on Main Street, and she suffered several days of unhappiness at the 100 percent level. On the 31st of March her limerence level dropped slightly (to 90 percent), then even more (to 75 percent) on the 1st of April. Following that, her limerence declined even further and felt less unpleasant.
But Bert called again, and the result of this renewed attention from him was to send her higher on the limerent scale and also to make her happy, a state which lasted for two days, when, true to form, he disappointed her again by breaking a date. Her limerence spiked to a negative 100 percent, where it stayed for about four days until she attended a professional convention. Although she did not feel up to going, and even tried to get out of it, to Margrit’s surprise, her negative preoccupation went down to about 30 percent, seemingly because of the distractions from other people and activities at the convention.
Margrit’s feelings fluctuated in relation to whether Bert’s behavior was interpreted as indicating interest or rejection. The intensity of her feelings—at least as measured by preoccupation percentage—and the direction of her feelings—positive or negative—represent two different aspects of her experience. When Bert was rejecting Margrit, the intensity of her limerence would sometimes actually increase.
The course of limerence is, then, a rise, often very rapid, to a more intrusive thinking pattern than you may ever have experienced. This is invariably an expectant, even joyous period. It is what Stendahl termed the first crystallization, the initial focusing on LO’s admirable qualities. Then, under appropriate conditions of hope and uncertainty, the limerence intensifies further. At the peak reached by the first crystallization, perhaps 30 percent of your waking thoughts revolve around LO; at the height of limerence, after what Stendhal called the second crystallization, the figure soars to virtually 100 percent. Subsequently your reaction may remain at that height for days or weeks, with only small and temporary respite, or it may begin to undergo a final decline, or, as is most typical, it may drop and then rise again one or more times before the decline that almost always follows sooner or later. The astounding thing is that the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the state seems almost unrelated to the intensity of the reaction. Limerence at 100 percent may be ecstasy or it may be despair, and it may change from positive to negative at any level of intensity. Joan described her experience:
“When I was intensely in love with Barry, I was intensely in love. When I felt he loved me, I was intensely in love and deliriously happy; when he seemed rejecting, I was still intensely in love, only miserable beyond words.
“Later, when my feelings were less intense, I could still flip-flop depending on how I perceived his feelings for me, only I’d go from mildly in love, and therefore happy, but not ecstatic, when I thought he cared, to unhappy, but not overcome with grief, when he seemed cool.”
The transitions may be so abrupt that people seem emotionally volatile although they may be generally of stable temperament. Phil’s reaction was similar to that described by a number of informants:
“Just when everything was going really well, Jane’s letter arrived telling me she wanted to break the engagement, and my world fell apart. Just like that.”
I don’t mean to imply that limerence is the sole determiner of the person’s emotional well-being. Even at its height, you carry on your ordinary activities and are affected by other events in expected ways. But a portion of your mentality is in its control. When limerence is at its peak, the other things in life are shunted off to the side and thought about only to the extent that limerence leaves room for them.
As it was repeatedly described to me, the course of limerence is as follows:
1. The limerent reaction begins, usually at a point discernible at the time and later recalled. Sexual attraction as such need not be experienced, although (a) the person is someone you view as a possible sexual partner, and (b) the initial “admiration” may be, or seem to be, primarily physical attraction.
2. Once limerence begins, you find yourself thinking about LO and receiving considerable pleasure from the process. There is an initial phase in which you feel buoyant, elated, and, ironically, for this appears to be the beginning of an essentially involuntary process, free. Free not only from the usual restraints of gravity, but emotionally unburdened. You may be attracted to more than one potential LO. You feel that your response is a result of LO’s fine qualities.
3. With evidence of reciprocation from LO, you enjoy a state of extreme pleasure, even euphoria. Your thoughts are mainly occupied with considering and reconsidering what you may find attractive in LO, replaying whatever events may have thus far transpired between you and LO, and appreciating qualities in yourself which you perceive as possibly having sparked interest in you on the part of LO. (It is at this point in West Side Story that Maria, the contemporary Juliet, sings I Feel Pretty.)
4. Your degree of involvement increases if obstacles are externally imposed or if you doubt LO’s feelings for you. Only if LO were to be revealed as highly undesirable might your limerence subside. Usually, with some degree of doubt its intensity rises further, and you reach the stage at which the reaction is virtually impossible to dislodge, either by your own act of will, or by further evidence of LO’s undesirable qualities. This is what Stendhal called crystallization. The doubt and increased intensity of limerence undermine your former satisfaction with yourself. You acquire new clothes, change your hairstyle, and are receptive to any suggestion by which you might increase your own desirability in LO’s eyes. You are inordinately fearful of rejection.
5. With increases in doubt interspersed with reason to hope that reciprocation may indeed occur, everything becomes intensified, especially your preoccupation percentage. At 100 percent you are mooning about, in either a joyful or a despairing state, preferring your fantasies to virtually any other activity unless it is (a) acting in ways that you believe will help you attain your limerent objective, such as beautifying yourself and, therefore increasing the probability that you will impress LO favorably during your interaction, or (b) actually being in the presence of LO. Your motivation to attain a “relationship” (mating, or pair bond) continues to intensify so long as a “proper” mix of hope and uncertainty exist, as it did for Margrit when Bert showed interest but seemed to act on it unpredictably.
6. At any point in the process, if you perceive reciprocation, your degree of involvement ceases to rise—until, of course, you become uncertain again. Usually, however, what might be an obvious sign of interest to an observer is not so obvious to you. “Lover’s spats,” games in which the timid partners attempt to conceal from each other the full nature of the reaction that has seized them, as well as the inevitable differences between their interests, prevent full reciprocation in each other’s eyes and allow the intensity to continue to increase.
Philip’s limerence toward Harriet lasted several months and included their engagement. Philip experienced longer periods of happiness than did Margrit because Harriet did show some return of feelings for him. During the first weeks of Philip’s attraction, his limerence level rose slowly but steadily, with only minor fluctuations, and by the fourth week his preoccupation averaged 55 percent, a level at which it remained for only two weeks before they became engaged and a decline began. Over the next six weeks, Philip’s preoccupation percentage declined to 30 percent. Thus far Philip’s mood in relation to Harriet has been consistently positive; i.e., no fluctuation downward was so extreme or persistent that a single day could be counted as negative.
During the tenth week, this picture of contentment was altered when Harriet announced that she was considering breaking their engagement, something that Philip was totally unprepared for. He had two negative days (the days after the announcement) that week, and his average preoccupation level shot up. Over the next month, Philip did not manage a single good day, and his average preoccupation level rose steadily. This was the period of “taking a break from each other for a while” that Harriet insisted on. When he saw her again and she appeared less rejecting than he had feared, up went his involvement and his joy. The next two months were blissful, and all days were positive as preoccupation declined. Preoccupation is not quite the same thing as intensity of feeling. During this time, Philip felt that he loved Harriet consistently; but he did not find thoughts of her intruding constantly. Still the low point of this period, 40 percent is a lot of thinking about one person.
Then disaster struck in the form of Harriet’s unexpected and abrupt termination of the relationship. (Unexpected to Philip; others might have seen it coming.) For a month he was distraught (no plus days and 100 percent involvement). This was the sort of misery Marilyn had been experiencing that day in my office on campus.
More than two months after Harriet walked totally out of his life, Philip had still not succeeded in getting her out of his mind. In fact, he had reached a level at which his preoccupation was down and his mood was generally positive. He sorely wished that someone would come along to bring him to the heights of ecstasy he had known during the intensely positive days with Harriet. Indeed, Jane came into his life, and nine and a half months after his first attraction for Harriet, he began to transfer his limerence to a new person.
The pleasures of love are always in proportion to the fear.23
Along with the emphasis of positive qualities perceived in LO, and preoccupation with the hoped for return of feelings, you fear that your limerence will be met by the very opposite of reciprocity: rejection. Physiological reactions associated with fear were described 2,500 years ago in a famous poetic fragment attributed to Sappho:
For should I see thee a little moment,
Straight is my voice hushed;
Yea, my tongue is broken, and
through and through me
’Neath the flesh, impalpable fire
runs tingling;
Nothing see mine eyes, and a
voice of roaring
Waves in my ear sounds;
Sweat runs down in rivers, a
tremor seizes
grass in autumn,
Caught by pains of menacing
death, I falter,
Lost in the love-trance.24
The most frequently reported physiological correlates of limerence are heart palpitations, trembling, pallor, flushing, and general weakness. Awkwardness, stammering, and confusion predominate at the behavioral level. And shyness. When limerent, you are fearful, apprehensive, nervous, anxious—terribly worried that your own actions may bring about disaster. Many of the commonly associated physiological reactions are the result of this fear, and there are other consequences as well. Stendhal, who speaks of himself in the third person, describes some of these:
[The man in love] is aware of the enormous weight attaching to every word he speaks to his beloved, and feels that a word may decide his fate. He can hardly avoid trying to express himself well, . . . From that moment candour is lost.
In your beloved’s presence even physical movements almost cease to be natural, although the habit of them is so deeply ingrained in the muscles. Whenever I gave my arm to Leonore, I always felt I was about to fall, and I had to think how to walk.25
Philip, a 28-year-old truck driver summed up what many others had said:
“I’d be jumpy out of my head. It was like what you might call stage fright, like going up in front of an audience. My hand would be shaking when I rang the doorbell. When I called her on the phone I felt like I could hear the pulse in my temple louder than the ringing of the phone, and I’d get into such a panic listening to the ring and expecting Nelly’s voice at the other end that I’d have a moment of relief if no one answered. And when she did answer, I wouldn’t know what to say even if I’d gone over the whole thing in my head beforehand. And then whatever I did say never seemed to come out right.
“I was awkward as hell. It really got to me. And I don’t mean the kind of nervousness that any man feels asking for a date. I’d got over that in my teens. There’s maybe always a bit of that whenever it’s somebody new, but this was different. It was much worse, and it lasted a long time, as long as I knew her. I had a really bad case, I guess, because I never felt sure of her or sure of myself.”
Or as Ginny, a married woman having an extramarital affair with Herb, described it:
“About 90 percent of the whole affair was by mail. In the interest of secrecy, we obtained postal boxes just for each other. When I wrote to him I weighed every word. Sometimes I’d go through a dozen drafts until I got it right, and then I still wasn’t sure. I had a vague image of wanting to appear gay, knowledgeable, intelligent, witty—everything that would make him love me more. Sometimes I’d get weak as I placed the letter in the box, and then go all jittery after I’d dropped it in and wish I could get it back to read over one more time.
“And when he’d telephone and I’d hear his voice on the other end, I’d get this sinking feeling in my stomach. Sometimes it would happen when the telephone rang even when I knew it couldn’t be him. When it was him I’d breathe faster and my hands would get cold and start to perspire. I had trouble controlling my voice.”
When I gave the first 175-item questionnaire to The Group, I had not developed questions that made a distinction between love and limerence, and the respondents answered according to their own, subjective definition of being “in love.” Although a confident 68 percent of The Group claimed they felt “free, un-self-conscious, and uninhibited in the presence of their lovers,” responses to other statements indicated that a substantial minority of them became distinctly nervous when LO was around. More than a third agreed that “I do (did) not want______to see me when I am (was) not looking well.” One quarter said, “I am afraid to have______see any flaw in me,” and “I am afraid of making mistakes when I am with______.”Sixteen percent said,
“I am afraid to be myself with______.”
Ingrid Bengis, in her book, Combat in the Erogenous Zone, portrays the limerent dilemma of “dependency and immobilization.”
“Despite the fact that I could live alone for years at a time, support myself in banal as well as curious ways, travel alone all over the world, drive a motorcycle at 70 miles an hour, have sex with whomever I chose, I was still capable of sitting by a telephone, unable to think of anything beyond whether or not a man I loved was going to call and feeling the most common hurt and frustration when he didn’t.”26
She would wander about her apartment unable to sustain interest in the usual pleasures and friends, literature or music, having little interest in any activity. This was particularly likely to occur when she felt that she had overstepped the boundaries of the permissable and made an “excessive or inappropriate” request that she feared might lead to rejection. She bewailed her loss of freedom as she found herself waiting endlessly.
Certainly it was not a question of being liberated enough to make phone calls myself. I had made those calls many times. It was a question of security (a word I have always looked upon with contempt). No Female Bill of Rights could give me that kind of security. What I needed to know at those particular moments was whether it mattered enough to the man for him to do the calling.27
Some informants reported that their limerent fear of rejection was not confined to shyness in the presence of LO, but also spread to situations involving other potential LOs. Twenty-year-old Danny described the problem:
“I used to be fairly confident about my ability to attract and handle myself with girls. I was not especially nervous or fearful. But with Rachel that completely changed. Not only was I a wreck when she was around, but I lost my former confidence with other girls as well. After Rachel and I had stopped seeing each other, I called Nan to ask for a date and found my voice stuck in my throat. I pretended something was wrong with the phone. This went on for a long time, and it occurred in almost all situations in which I felt on the spot like that. I am just now beginning to regain some of my old confidence.
“Fortunately, the nervousness was confined to those situations. I have never been particularly shy. In fact, I’m something of a ham. I like speaking or performing in front of a group. It’s only in the presence of someone I’m attracted to that it happens, and it never happened before Rachel. It’s really strange.”
Unlike Danny, most people are shy in LO’s presence without it affecting other spheres of their lives (unless LO appears unexpectedly—or expectedly—in one of those “other” spheres).
Sherie tried to control her actions and not let the anxiety interfere with carrying out what the “rational part” of her mind dictated.
“I decided I was being silly and that I would simply stop being silly. Here I was, all worked up and indecisive, and, worst of all, Jim would never see the real me if I was always acting like a scared rabbit whenever I was around him. I decided to take myself in hand and let the chips fall where they would. Instead of being the timid soul I always turned into in his presence, I would behave the way I did with others—talkative, assertive, even maybe a little bold. If he didn’t like me that way, well. . . .
“But it was all in vain. When the time came I froze. I lost all my will. My preparations did no good. The truth was, and I hated myself for it, I just couldn’t take the chance. Not yet. I decided to give it a little more time. I set a deadline for myself. Three more weeks. Six more weeks. But I never went through with it, not even when I was pretty sure it was “over” and I had nothing to lose.
“But I never believed I had nothing to lose. It’s hard to explain. I knew it logically, but my emotions never accepted the fact. But I don’t think it was something in me. I’m not that way now with Gary. It was something about the way Richard acted, feeding out just enough attentiveness to keep me on the hook, but never quite enough to let me relax. I don’t say that was his intention, although at the time I even imagined that his unreliability was a deliberate plot. I saw his lack of real interest in me, but kept believing that all that would change if he “really” knew me. Since I was always too up-tight when he was around to be myself, he never really knew me at all. It was extraordinary the way I went around in circles like that. I’d see him and freeze. At least I was still seeing him once in a while. If I made any sort of move, or change, or demand, I might lose even that.”
A surprising proportion of persons who wanted to be interviewed were caught in a similar state, and sometimes the situation would remain relatively unchanged for long periods of time. Gregory had been married to Beatrice for 25 years and had feared that she would leave him at any moment throughout almost the entire period. This uncertainty perpetuated his limerence, providing both fear—and joy.
“I lived in constant fear of divorce. The only times I even felt at all safe were when she was pregnant or had a small child. It just didn’t seem likely that she would walk out under these conditions. Not that walking out was really the issue. I’d feel uncertain and “put out” even when there was nothing I could quite put my finger on, nothing I could actually accuse her of. I would do everything I could think of to try and win her affection. I’d buy flowers, take the kids out, mow the lawn, paint the kitchen, just about anything I thought she’d like. Sometimes she’d give me a look of real appreciation; other times she’d get angry. She was unpredictable. I could never be sure of how she’d react, whether something I’d do to please her would have the right effect or its opposite.
“And it was all done very subtly, no fighting or screaming or anything crude like that. And another thing, she was always beautiful. From the day I met her until the day she died, she was the most beautiful woman on earth. And she really was. Other men thought so, too. She never got fat or let herself go, and she wore clothes with elegance. She was a real queen and she ruled my emotions for a quarter of a century. It’s completely different now with Beth. She and I are more like equals, like really good friends.
“I would have to say I’m more content with Beth than I ever was during those years with Beatrice. But I also have to admit that with all the worry she caused me, she also gave me some great moments. They call it ecstasy, and I’d agree with the term. My feelings for Beth—and hers for me—are more solid and dependable. I’m not saying I wish she were like Beatrice, but maybe if just a little bit, it would put some spark into it. It’s only five years, and things are comfortable, as I said, and I love her, but maybe they’re getting just a little dull. I’m afraid I take her for granted.”
Once again, limerence appears to develop and be sustained when there is a certain balance of hope and uncertainty. However unappealing it may be in a universe conceived as orderly and humane, the fact is undeniable; fear of rejection may cause pain, but it also enhances desire. A man who kidnapped his girlfriend tearfully explained that her rejection of him made him want and love her more. Stendhal described the conflict of desiring above all to be in the presence of LO and at the same time fearing what will happen:
If you are sensitive you know very well that, in the contest about to begin as soon as you see her, the least negligence, the least lack of attention or of courage will be punished by a snub which would poison your imagination for some time, and indeed would be humiliating outside the realm of passion, if you were tempted to withdraw there. You reproach yourself for lack of wit or boldness; but the only way to show courage would be to love her less.28
Or in the words of one of my interviewees:
“It was just a little thing. Except it wasn’t a little thing. She forgot to wear the pin I had given her, even though I had asked her to be sure to wear it. I wouldn’t have minded so much if she had been angry and left it home to get even with me over something. But to forget? There’s no way I could have forgotten if she had asked me for anything. It meant I wasn’t in her thoughts the way she was in mine. I hoped that she was teasing, that she really was mad at me. Anything but forgetting. Being forgotten was like being dead. I wanted to die. I felt it was all over in that second. I prayed for a sign that she was playing with me. She wasn’t. It was ended, but it took me about six more months before I could tolerate believing it.”
When you are limerent, you experience considerable self-doubt and uncertainty about your own reactions. You wonder “Am I ‘paranoid’ to be so concerned about trivia?” And yet you find you cannot help noticing “little things” and endlessly analyzing them for meanings that are not apparent. The explanation is that reciprocation requires a reaction by LO similar to yours. As Heather said:
“If Joe forgets to call, it means I am not in his thoughts the way he is in mine. That’s why it hurts so. It’s not ‘logical.’ It’s the way it is, however, and I can’t help it. Into perfectly ordinary actions on his part, I read an indication that he’s losing interest—and I panic.”
Although it appears that love blossoms under some forms of adversity, extreme caution, even immobility, and shyness based on fear of giving LO an undesirable view can prevent a relationship from occurring even when both people are interested. According to Ted, an accountant in his mid-thirties:
“Joan and I knew each other slightly in high school, and here’s the incredible part: We were in love with each other but were both too shy to make the first move or to do anything that would lead the other to suspect what was going on inside us. I wouldn’t ask for a date, because she didn’t seem to act as if she liked being with me. She’d walk off when she’d rather have stayed so as not to appear unduly interested. Even more incredible was that we had been married several years before we even found out about how we had felt back then. After high school, we didn’t hear anything about one another for five years. Then we met again, after college, through mutual friends. We each still felt like idiots about our great adolescent infatuation and almost never even mentioned the high school days.
“How did we ever find out? It was strictly by sheer accident. Joan found an old school notebook of mine in which I had scribbled her name. She thought that was just an accident, but it gave her the courage to tell me about her big crush. At least I knew her. She thought I hadn’t noticed her at all! Well, when she confessed, I did, too.”
What is important here is that the uncertainty required by the limerent reaction may often be merely a matter of perception—either of one’s own inadequacies or of a lack of response in LO. In the case of Ted and Joan, there were no external obstacles to their relationship, and the perception of each of them that the other was not interested was not accurate. On the other hand, their inaccurate perceptions probably increased their limerent reaction to each other.
The recognition that some uncertainty must exist has been commented on and complained about by virtually everyone who has undertaken a serious study of the phenomenon of romantic love. Psychologists Ellen Bersheid and Elaine Walster discussed this common observation made, they note, by Socrates, Ovid, the Kama Sutra, and “Dear Abby,” that the presentation of a hard-to-get as opposed to an immediately yielding exterior is a help in eliciting passion. Ovid remarked that nobody wants what is easily acquired. And twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell, was even more emphatic. According to Russell, “The belief in the immense value of the lady is the psychologic effect of the difficulty of obtaining her, and I think it may be laid down that when a man has no difficulty in obtaining a woman, his feeling toward her does not take the form of romantic love.”29 He was only stating what mothers have passed down to their daughters for centuries.
Of course, the uncertainty necessary to limerence may indeed be the result of external obstacles visible to the disinterested observer, such as those stemming from parental objections, spouses, or social customs. The barriers faced by Romeo and Juliet were so crucial to their mutual limerence that psychologists speak of “the Romeo and Juliet effect,” in which parents who attempt to interfere in the romance of their children may in fact intensify it.30 Another traditional barrier that often plays a role in limerence is the deceived spouse who, according to Suzane Brøgger in Deliver Us from Love, can keep things at a boiling point.31
The objective that you as a limerent persistently pursue, as is clear in the fantasy that occupies virtually your every waking moment, is a “return of feelings.” The ecstatically blissful moment, toward which your long fantasies progress and your short fantasies depict in living color, is the moment in which LO gives what you accept as clear indication that the limerent goal has been achieved. But what actions on LO’s part are required? What, truly, does “return of feeling” mean?
Uncertainty about LO’s true reaction is an essential aspect of your own limerence. Removal of the uncertainty is the goal, and because your desire is so unrelenting, so imperative, you continually search for the meanings underlying events. This brings us to the matter of hopefulness, as essential to the development of a full limerent reaction as uncertainty. Since limerent fantasy is rooted in the limerent’s actual life situation, it would seem to follow that hopefulness must be similarly grounded. Well, yes and no. The problem is once again that it is not objective reality, but reality as it is perceived that provides the base for limerent hopefulness. Just as lack of confidence and fear of no response in LO may be based on misperceptions of reality, so hope of reciprocation of feeling turns out to require little foothold in actuality once the limerent reaction has fixed itself. It is primarily the true nature of LO’s reaction to yourself that is obscure to your limerent eye, and it is this confusion that causes so much stress and anxiety over how to behave, what to say, how much to reveal, or how fast to move.
The inclination to sift through nuances of speech and subtleties of behavior for evidence of limerent hope presented itself repeatedly in the interviews. Dr. Vesteroy, the professor mentioned earlier, recalled his increased sensitivity to his colleague’s behavior after that first smile:
“It might have ended there, too, if I had not thereafter felt I noticed other things in her behavior—the way she greeted me in the hall, always friendly but nothing out of line, except well, really, all I had to go on for the first few months was a certain look. Our eyes seemed to meet and linger together just a fraction of a second longer than they should. I puzzled over it. Was it really happening? And if so, which of us was the initiator? Was she going out of her way to meet me in the hall, or was I the one who was doing it? When that business came up over changing the grades of students who missed the exam because of the snowstorm, did she and I find ourselves on the same side of the issue accidentally, or was it an unconscious—or conscious—ploy, and on whose part, to throw us together?”
As he reported it, Dr. Vesteroy spent the entire academic year uncertain, increasingly limerent, and immobilized. He and his wife had been talking of divorce off and on for the past ten years, but he had never really considered the prospect seriously.
Dr. Ashton was married, too, but her husband had remained behind in Chicago when she accepted the new position and it seemed not unreasonable to infer that theirs was also a shaky relationship. It would therefore not have been entirely out of the bounds of propriety for him—or for her—to have made some tentative overt gesture. Yet neither did. Nor did their contacts with each other increase. Despite this, Dr. Vesteroy’s limerence remained strong.
“Despite all logic, I could not shake off the feeling—the hope as well—that Elena’s totally circumspect behavior was itself an indication that her feelings were not unlike my own. How could she know that my wife and I were having marital difficulties? Her very circumspection became proof of inner turmoil. When, unlike that first time, she hurried away with the others after a business meeting, could it have been lest she give herself away?
“In the meantime, my admiration of her work and appreciation of her beauty grew more and more intense. Without ever a word passing between us, I became—there’s no other way to put it—lovesick! My mind was filled with her, my knees trembled when I saw her, and I fashioned all manner of elaborate schemes whereby I could test the ground before taking a step. I felt I had to do something, but I was completely paralyzed by fear that the whole affair existed only in my imagination and that I would make an utter fool of myself and destroy any chance of success that might possibly exist.
“At first, I’d set up little tests. I’d say that if at the next meeting she elects to sit beside me or facing me, I will count it as proof that this madness is not unilateral. But when she chose a seat farthest from me, or one which made it very difficult for us to look at one another, I realized that the test was not a test at all. No matter what she did, I could interpret it in my favor. Her remote position in the room could serve the function of helping her to hide feelings as intense as my own. She was as afraid as I was of overt interaction! Of course, if I had been certain of that conclusion, I’d have found it possible to take a positive step, but my thinking on the matter oscillated like a seesaw. Up and down, back and forth, my reactions went, but always with the same final result: I dared not advance.”
Margot Strickland reports that Annabella admitted to extreme agitation at the sight of Lord Byron, the husband-to-be who never really loved her, taking his pallor as a sign that he was equally moved—which may have been romantic fancy, since he was normally pale.32 Similarly, biographer Matthew Josephson observes that when Stendhal was in love with Madame Daru, he believed that she chose her gown according to what would be particularly pleasing to him.33 To make an interpretation, especially a “tentative” one, is easy; to retain faith in it is another matter. Unless Dr. Vesteroy could be quite certain that his favorable interpretation was correct, his fear would prevent him from acting.
Hilda, the woman mentioned earlier who spent each week fantasizing about her upcoming weekends with Stu, was an example of a limerent who maintained her “hope against hope” long after objective behavior on the part of her LO should have made it clear that he did not return her feelings:
“The frustrating thing was that the scenes I’d play out in my imagination never worked out in reality. Something always went wrong. One time, just as a for instance, I worked out this whole Sunday morning brunch thing. I had bought this really fantastic orange dressing gown and I was going to absolutely knock him out with it over an omelet I had been perfecting. So what happened? Last thing he does before we go to sleep on Saturday night is set his alarm clock for six A.M.—it was already long after midnight—and say, ‘Sorry, Hilda, I knew you’d understand. I’ve got to put in a couple of business hours at the golf course tomorrow, but I’ll be back around two in the afternoon. At least you can get a good sleep!’
“Well, my great plan was out of the window, but I was undaunted. I spent the morning imagining that he was out pulling off the business deal of his life and finally clearing away the one barrier to our getting married, his financial future. I visualized him bursting in precisely at two with this glowing look in his eyes, rushing up to me, taking me in his arms and saying, ‘Hilda, darling, I just closed a fantastic deal. Let’s get married.’
“Actually, all the time Stu and I were lovers, it was like that. Even when we were together every week without fail, I’d be consumed with hopes and plans and visions of him really showing love, and he’d always pull something unexpected. If I gave up and planned to break it off, that would be the weekend he’d start off with flowers ‘just for my Hilda’ and be especially nice. The next week when I’d work myself up to expecting a big response from him, there would be the inevitable letdown.
“The only thing I could really count on from Stu was unpredictability. For the whole three years, I was filling up my head with plans and schemes and visions of hope, but all I got was disappointment.
“Actually, our idyllic weekends (idyllic in comparison with what was to come) lasted less than a year, and after that it was sheer, unrequited misery.”
This grasping for hope when by all rational indications hope is groundless is described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex:
I recall a friend who said in reference to a long silence on the part of her distant lover: “When one wants to break off, one writes to announce the break”; then, having finally received a quite unambiguous letter: “When one really wants to break off, one doesn’t write.”34
And in the same section of the book, Beauvoir discusses the psychiatric phenomenon of “erotomania” in a manner that blurs the distinction between the psychologically pathological and the psychologically nonpathological:
. . . one of the constant characteristics of erotomania is that the behavior of the lover seems enigmatic and paradoxical; on account of this quirk, the patient’s mania always succeeds in breaking through the resistance of reality. A normal woman sometimes yields in the end to the truth and finally recognizes the fact that she is no longer loved. But so long as she has not lost all hope and made this admission, she always cheats a little.35
Columbia sociologist William J. Goode comments:
On the psychological level, the motivating power of . . . love . . . is intensified by this curious fact (which I have not seen remarked on elsewhere): Love is the most projective of drives; only with great difficulty can the attracted person believe that the object . . . does not and will not reciprocate the feeling at all. Thus the person may carry [the] action quite far, before accepting a rejection as genuine.36
The limerent endures painfully intense suffering as daydreams smash against the rocks of events, until hope can only be built from the rubble through interpretation.
The limerent person develops a condition of sustained alertness, a heightening of awareness, and an enormous fund of energy to deploy in pursuit of the limerent aim. You are ever ready to perceive LO’s most minute actions at any time when it is conceivable that they have meaning in relation to the goal.
Such attentiveness is not unwarranted. It has been estimated that the larger proportion of communication between two people in a face-to-face situation takes place through nonverbal means. Scientific studies on “body language” have found that such seemingly inconsequential behaviors as the position of the limbs, the general stance of one person with respect to the other, the rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, movements of the hands and, particularly of the eyes, all have significance.37 If you are feeling favorably disposed and receptive, you are more likely to sit crossing your feet at the ankles rather than at the knees, to hold your palms outward rather than clenching your fists, occasionally to sigh (softly rather than sharply), to look at the person directly and openly rather than shiftily, and to allow your face to be fully exposed rather than partially hidden, either with a hand or by turning your face to the side.
Many actions of which you are quite unaware may communicate distaste for the person with whom you are conversing. These include clenching your teeth, holding your lips tight together, rubbing your nose or making brisk and repetitive movements such as flicking the ash of a cigarette or drumming your fingers. Thus the limerent’s seemingly excessive concern over trivia may not be entirely unfounded.
The receipt of mixed messages may in fact provide just the combination of hope and uncertainty that feeds the reaction. One young man described his conflict:
“I could find no fault with anything Gladys did. She was prompt, cooperative, and aggreeable. But there was something about the way she did things that I could not quite put my finger on, but that bothered the hell out of me. They were such little things that I tried to talk myself out of my reactions, except that they kept happening, and kept bothering me. Things like the way she would hold herself when we sat beside one another in the theater, or the slight hesitation that preceded her response to an affectionate gesture on my part, and the way she looked at me—or rather, the way she rarely did.”
Scientific research has emphatically confirmed the age-old suspicions concerning the importance of gaze.38 When we are experiencing intensely pleasurable emotions, our pupils dilate and become larger. Unconsciously and involuntarily, this pupillary reflex can betray feelings. In addition, a small increase in the secretion of the tear ducts causes the eyes to glisten producing “shining eyes of love,” which, when combined with dilation of the pupil, emit signals of amatory interest. Not only that, the eyebrows, once thought designed by nature to keep perspiration from running into our eyes, are now believed at least by some scientists to have as a basic function the indication of mood change. When we are surprised they rise; when we are angered, they lower; and when we are anxious, they knit together. To arch them means to question, and to flick them quickly once up and down is to acknowledge another person in an attitude of friendliness.39
One woman whom I interviewed based her belief that her limerent feelings were returned solely on her interpretation of the man’s eye movements.
“I knew he loved me because of the way he looked at me. No words could be as eloquent; words were not even necessary. If you could have seen his eyes, those two limpid pools. . . . They told all, and I drowned in them.”
It will surely surprise no one that a recent carefully conducted psychological experiment, using sophisticated recording apparatus, reported that couples whose questionnaire responses indicated greater intensity of love were found to look into each other’s eyes for durations significantly longer than did couples less in love.40
I found surprisingly consistent support for the ancient wisdom that associates love with the heart. When I asked interviewees in the throes of the limerent condition to tell where they felt the sensation of limerence, they pointed unerringly to the midpoint in their chest. So consistently did this occur that it would seem to be another indication that the state described is indeed limerence, not affection (described by some as located “all over,” or even in “the arms” when held out in a gesture of embrace) or in sexual feelings (located, appropriately enough, in the genitals).
Another recent study suggests the heart’s probable importance in the physiology of limerence. Examining what they call “two-way communication” between the heart and the brain, Beatrice and John Lacey found that the hearts of experimental subjects slowed down when they tried to detect signals or perform a simple motor task.41 It might be that the limerent’s intrusive thinking results from a process of mutual feedback between the heart and the brain. Perhaps thoughts of LO trigger a change in heart rate, which in turn augments or transforms the thought.
On the other hand, unfortunately, the supersensitivity that is heightened by fear of rejection can get in the way of interpreting LO’s body language and lead to inaction and wasted “opportunities,” such as the mutual, but secret attractions of Joan and Ted during high school, or the miscommunication encountered by the two people depicted in the following poem, given to me by an informant:
The tree-fringed lake stretched before them
And although her gaze was directed
Outward with the water,
She was more aware of the blurred figure
To her left
Which was all she could see
Of him.
Conscious that the edge of his sleeve brushed her hand
Lightly
While she pretended concern with the lake and the
trees as was usual
She was more aware
Of what she believed his behavior implied than
Did she hear his words.
“There’s really nothing else to it,”
He was saying
“It’s as simple as that. And all that was
left was for me
To explain it to them.
That wasn’t as easy as I had anticipated
But . . .”
He had warmed up
To his subject now and spoke rapidly.
She specifically noticed the rapidity with
which he spoke. Soon, now,
He would pause
And she would feel the terror that came when
It would be absolutely
Necessary
For her to
Say
Something.
To show her capacity to meet his expectations.
That she knew he would
Look at her
Increased her
Anxiety.
“Don’t you agree?” he said,
“Or maybe you see it differently. . . .”
“I . . . think . . . you are right,
No other explanation appears so reasonable . . .”
She thought she had been able to follow the gist
of his story
And, fortunately, his question
Appeared to permit an ambiguous answer.
But his looking at her questioningly told her
she had failed again.
The distance between them, all too perceptible
during the afternoon, had
Widened.
A child appeared.
She wanted to pick up the child and run with it,
to sit with it under a tree
And play peek-a-boo. To be barefoot with long hair
blowing and getting in the way.
The baby would grab at her hair and she would
scream and giggle and
They would roll over and over in the grass together
hair flying
Skirt flying
Legs flying
Laughing and laughing
And finally lying still on her back with only
his face in her
World
As he bent to kiss her beautiful smiling face
With beads of sweat and half-closed eyes.
But in the real world the panic and the fantasy
produced only a small
Change
In the elevation of her
Shoulders
Which he interpreted as indicating boredom. He
flushed at the thought of having
Forced her to listen to his boasting.
Thus the limerent person may emit bodily signals that confuse and interfere with attaining the object of desire. When the body speaks to others, it is not always understood.
When you are limerent, no matter how intensely you desire reciprocation you cannot simply ask for it. You cannot simply inquire as to whether or not it exists. To ask is to risk premature self-disclosure. The interplay is delicate, with the reactions of each person inextricably bound to the behavior of the other. Like a hunter for whom the crackle of a twig in the bush measures the presence of the hunted, you subject LO’s seemingly ordinary postures, movements, words, and glances to incessant analysis in quest of “true” meanings obscured beneath an ambiguous surface. Here, where the path is treacherous and possible consequence profound, face values cannot be trusted. Things may be what they seem or, again, they may in fact be just the opposite of what they seem. Despite ideals and philosophy, you find yourself a player in a process that bears unquestionable similarity to a game. The prize is not trifling; reciprocation produces ecstasy. Whether it will be won, whether it will be shared, and what the final outcome may be, depend on the effectiveness of your moves and those of your LO; indeed on skill.
The rocky course of progression toward ecstatic mutuality may involve not externally created difficulties, but the feinting and parrying, the minor deceptions, and the falsehoods of the lovers themselves that are so frequent as often to have been viewed as a “natural” aspect of the romantic love pattern.42 (They also occur in sexual seduction and in many other forms of human interaction.) The lovers’ fears lead them to proceed with a caution that they hope will protect them from disaster. Rather than commit themselves, they flirt. They send out ambiguous signals more or less as trial balloons. Reason to hope combined with reason to doubt keeps passion at fever pitch. Too-ready limerent availability cools them.43 Andreas Capellanus, medieval author of The Art of Courtly Love, was neither the first nor the last to advise lovers to. erect artificial barriers and if necessary conceal their true feelings. When Stendhal began to fall in love himself, he feared the failure that certainty could bring and so, for “effect,” he avoided his LO and walked about alone, brooding.44
You may lose your love through open declaration of your true feelings. As Ginny said:
“I was in love and I wanted to tell about it. I wanted to tell Vinny how I felt about him. I adored him, and it seemed only right that he should know. I wanted to give my love to him. And I didn’t want to play games!
“But now I can see that was how I lost out. I should have slowed up and hidden my feelings. I overwhelmed him, and he couldn’t take it, and that was the end. I’d probably have done the same thing in his place.”
Peter, whose “affair” was more successful, used a different tactic:
“I knew, I don’t know how, but I knew I had to be careful, that this was not the time to let her know how I was feeling. I deliberately canceled a date even though I wanted to be with her more than anything else in the world, and I spent the evening worrying—and even weeping—because I was afraid that she would be angry, that maybe this play would fail, that she’d go out and meet someone else. If I had been a nail biter, I’d have bitten off all my nails that night. I was going crazy inside but playing it cool outside, and I guess we have to say it worked. Maybe she would have fallen in love with me anyway, I’ll never know, but my instincts told me to watch out and I obeyed them for a change. With other women, I had been more open, and they always lost interest and left me.”
In the Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses this quandary in the chapter on “The Woman in Love.”
It is almost impossible for a woman in love to play this game well. . . . To the extent that she still has regard for her lover, she will feel it repugnant to dupe him; how could he remain a god in her eyes? If she wins the game, she destroys her idol; if she loses it, she loses herself. There is no salvation.45
A similar conflict was expressed by a young graduate student in love with her professor:
“I had begun by simply having incredible respect for his mind. Even before I felt anything else, I could sit for hours and listen to him talk about his research. He was so intelligent, so enthusiastic! After a while, I recognized that I had begun to feel attracted to him in other ways and I sensed from little things that would happen, the way he would stay in the cafeteria and continue to talk with me alone after the other students had left, or how he would remember to bring a copy of one of his research reports for me, that he might feel the same way I did.
“They were small things, but I couldn’t help reading a message in them. I was also experienced enough to know that the surest way to get someone to run away was to run after them. After a while, I was completely in love and more or less hanging on by a thread. I was so afraid of losing by showing my feelings that I actually did things that could be interpreted as uninterest.
“On the other hand, controlling myself as I was trying to do, took something away from my feelings for him. I really saw him as a kind of god, a perfect individual. That meant that if I could manipulate his feelings through my actions, he sank just a little lower in my eyes. There was no way to win.”
Another informant, Virginia, was unusually frank:
“The man I am in love with is really silly. If he knew how I felt, he’d leave instantly. He’d feel insulted, and I wouldn’t blame him in the least. What do you think I want him for? What scenes do I imagine with such delight? Do you think that I ponder his favorable qualities? Well, I do some of that, but my favorite fantasies have him struck dumb in rapt admiration of me! He is like a mirror that follows me about. I imagine him witnessing everything I do. I imagine his heart bursting with the delight that being in my presence brings. Every action of mine is cause for his rejoicing—the way I step into my bath, the wicked look in my eye as I apply my mascara, my intelligent contribution at the school board meeting.
“I find it strange that they say the person in love magnifies the qualities of the loved one; in my case I would say that the image of him magnifies my value. Being in love, for me is being very self-involved, at least at certain stages. At any stage, being in love means wanting his love. I may be hating him and wishing he would come back so I could reject him, but I still want him to come back. Wanting him to want me is what it’s all about. That’s what one yearns for. The agony—it’s so trite but it is agony, there’s no better word—comes with doubt. To think that he might not be interested is to feel as if I’ve been stabbed with a knife. It hurts so sharply and inescapably.”
Writing in 1964, totally from a male perspective, sociologist Peter Blau says:
The woman who impresses a man as a most desirable love possession that cannot easily be won and who simultaneously indicates sufficient interest to make ultimate conquest not completely beyond reach is likely to kindle his love.
To safeguard the value of her affection, a woman must be ungenerous in expressing it and make any evidence of her growing love a cherished prize that cannot be easily won . . . if she dispenses [sexual] favors readily—to many men or to a given man too soon—she depreciates their value and thus their power to arouse an enduring attachment.46
Simone de Beauvoir notes that a woman can lose her attraction to a man in the same way:
The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This is the torture of the impossible love. . . .47
Games, playacting, subterfuge, coyness, the sending of ambiguous messages and trial balloons that can be retracted or denied if such seems a wiser course: Such deviations from straightforward honesty become essential limerent strategies.
What is natural? The ploys of lovers are described in ancient writings; those whose modern philosophy dictates openness do so in a fear that sometimes proves to be justified by the turn of events. The limerent aim of return of feeling is an obsession that so overrides all other considerations that, as Ovid warned in the famous Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), written almost 2,000 years ago, the lover and beloved are “shy predator and wily prey” and the nature of their love is “conquest.”48
Is this deplorable state of affairs a necessary aspect of love? It does seem essential to limerence; hence the need for a new term. It appears, sadly enough, that limerent demands are contrary by nature when a limerent response in the other person can be killed by too early or blatant a display of affection. “Love,” in most of its meanings, involves concern for the other person’s welfare and feelings. Affection and fondness have no “objective”; they simply exist as feelings in which you are disposed toward actions to which the recipient might or might not respond. In contrast, limerence demands return. Other aspects of your life, including love, are sacrificed in behalf of the all-consuming need. While limerence has been called love, it is not love. Although the limerent feels a kind of love for LO at the time, from LO’s point of view limerence and love are quite different from each other.
It is limerence, not love, that increases when lovers are able to meet only infrequently or when there is anger between them.49 No wonder those who view limerence from an external vantage are baffled by what seems more a form of insanity than a form of love. Jean-Paul Sartre calls it a project with a “contradictory ideal.” He notes that each of the lovers seek the love of the other without realizing that what they want is to be loved. His conclusion is that the amorous relation is “a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror game which carries within itself its own frustration,” a kind of “dupery.”50
It should also be clear now that limerent uncertainly as well as projection can be viewed as the consequence of your limerent inclination to hide your own feelings: If you hide your true reactions, then LO, if indeed limerent, can be expected to do the same. When LO appears not to be eager, or even interested, it is not unreasonable to interpret that behavior as evidence itself of limerence; and a kind of “paranoia” becomes an entirely logical consequence of a situation that may indeed be what Simone de Beauvoir has called it: “impossible.”
Because one of the invariant characteristics of limerence is extreme emotional dependency on LO’s behavior, the actual course of the limerence must depend on the actions and reactions of both lovers. Uncertainty increases limerence; increased limerence dictates altered action which serves to increase or decrease limerence in the other according to the interpretation given. The interplay is delicate if the relationship hovers near mutuality; a subtle imbalance, constantly shifting, appears to maintain it. Each knows who “loves more.”
If limerence were measurable by an instrument that enabled its intensity to be read by the points on a dial, one could imagine that, if lovers sat together reading each other’s degree of reciprocation, the dials would rarely if ever set themselves at the same point on the scales. For instance, if you found yourself more limerent than your partner, then your limerence might decline through reduced hope, or if your partner’s were higher, it might decline through reduced uncertainty. Perhaps such true awareness would provide a means of controlling the reaction.
The relationship between limerence and sex is one of the most baffling aspects of the entire subject. It has already been suggested that awareness of physical attraction plays a role in the development of limerence. Indeed, many writers define passionate or romantic love as “love between members of the opposite sex,” or they use the terms “romantic love,” “sexual love,” and “erotic love” interchangeably. But the relationship is by no means a clear one.
Psychologists have observed a clear separation between sexuality on the one hand and “pure love,” or “aesthetic components,” on the other during adolescence, even speaking of a “collision between intimacy need and lust,” or between the “sensual” and the “spiritual” aspects of “sexuality.”51 It has also been asserted that although sexual play and falling in love may occur during the so-called latency (prepubescent) period, they are not likely to be associated with each other.52
A teenaged male, Frankie, described his feelings about the distinction between sex and limerence, where he and LO had not had a physical relationship.
“Although I was attracted to Jennifer in a love way—in fact, I would say I was in love with her—I did not think about her sexually. What I mean is, I did not have fantasies about what it would be like to have sex with her. I don’t mean that I didn’t want to—I did want to—but only as it would follow naturally if she were also in love with me. That was what I wanted and what I thought about (most of the time, I’m afraid).
“When I had a sex fantasy she was not the person I thought about. It would have been, well, almost disrespectful to imagine things about her that I didn’t know. I didn’t know what her breasts were like, for example, so I couldn’t imagine them. The female I used in sex fantasies could be almost anyone else—someone I had had sex with and remembered, someone I hardly knew, or even one person’s breasts and other parts of someone else’s body. But I think that would have changed if I had actually had a physical relationship with Jennifer. The trouble is, I never did.”
In 1770, the eighteenth century “natural” philosopher Rousseau wrote about the separation of sex from love in his relationship with his common-law wife, saying that throughout the years with her he felt no love, only a means of satisfying sensual desires. By “love,” one must assume he meant limerence, since there appeared to be considerable affection and companionship as well as sex between these two.53
That sexual attraction can exist without love has been abundantly documented, although the idea has been more culturally acceptable for males than it has for females.54 That this is changing is reflected by The Group’s reaction to the statement, “I have been sexually attracted without feeling the slightest trace of love”: a surprising 53 percent of the females as well as a more expected larger percentage (79 percent) of the males agreed. The converse, love without sex, was not as popular, but still included a substantial proportion of the respondents. More than half of the females (61 percent) and more than a third (35 percent) of the males agreed with the statement, “I have been in love without feeling any need for sex.”
There was opposition to this feeling that love and sex could be separated—almost a third (32 percent) of the women and only slightly fewer (29 percent) of the men—said that “in my experience, love and sex cannot be separated.” If The Group’s responses represent “cultural consensus,” the consensus is clearly not a firm one. Additional responses complicate the picture further: 73 percent of the females and 51 percent of the males agreed that “I enjoy sex best when I am in love with my partner.” And to top it off, only a tiny 2 percent of The Group (all male) agreed that “sex is best when love is not involved.” About a third (slightly more women) indicated that they “think about sex a lot more when . . . in love.” But a surprising 14 percent of The Group said, “Sex with______was disappointing, although I knew we were very much in love.”
To summarize this confusing mass of data, The Group seems to feel that love and sex can be separated, but would prefer to have them in combination. Very much so, if we are to believe the two-thirds of the women and slightly less than half of the men who maintained that “sex with the one I love is ecstasy”; the 71 percent of the entire Group who said, “Sex with the person I am in love with is intensely pleasurable”; and the wholesale rejection of the statement, “I have enjoyed sex more when it was with someone I was not in love with.”
It is useful to distinguish sexual fantasies from limerent ones. Limerent fantasy is rooted in reality—that is, in what the limerent person interprets as reality. Your limerent daydreams may be unlikely, even highly unlikely, but they retain fidelity to the possible. The image of the moment of consummation, in which your LO indicates to you by word or gesture that the feelings are returned, is the more blissful—even when only in fantasy—if the events imagined to lead up to it could actually occur. As beautiful as a scene on a Caribbean island may be with you and LO dancing together in the moonlight, the scene brings the glow of bliss only when you are able to fill in the gaps, as it were, between present circumstances and the desired event. In acute phases, limerent fantasies are intrusive rather than voluntary, and they often reach a peak of satisfaction in a situation that may or may not lead to a sexual embrace.
In contrast, sexual fantasies are for most persons under more or less voluntary control. Here, it is necessary to distinguish between fantasy and arousal—the latter being a physiological as well as psychological state accompanied by definite sensations in the genital region. Fantasy is mental activity which creates and or augments those sensations. Sexual fantasies may involve intrusive and involuntary desire, but they differ from limerent imaginings (at least for those whom I interviewed) in that sexual fantasizing may also involve strangers, imaginary individuals, and situations that could not take place—even ones that you would not wish to have take place. Group sex, rape, seduction by a mysterious stranger, intercourse with animals: Such fantasies can be arousing for people who would not actually wish to engage in them in real live. As one young woman said:
“Between you and me, and I would not want it to go any farther because it is pretty embarrassing, I can really get turned on by some pretty disgusting ideas—like gang rape with me as victim, or by the idea of being forced to engage in fellatio with a real brute. Now I don’t know why such images titillate me and make [masturbation to orgasm] possible, but sometimes they do. But let me tell you emphatically, I would never want such things actually to transpire! For some crazy and ridiculous reason, such images sometimes ‘work,’ but I don’t enjoy them. In fact sometimes I find the idea of using them so repugnant that I’d just as soon forget the whole thing and often do.”
Or a man, in speaking of his wife:
“In my head, I imagine us engaging in lewd acts together, but I haven’t the slightest impulse to enact such scenes in actuality. I might conjure them up in a hotel room out of town if I feel that jerking off will help to relax me, but that’s as far as it would ever go.
Of course, we know that these activities are sometimes actually enacted by some people, but the point here is only that many people can become aroused by the thought of sexual partners, acts, and situations that are not truly desired. The limerent, however, passionately desires that every detail of the limerent fantasy should actually take place. Furthermore, the moment of imagined consummation is often a handclasp, mutual gaze, words of endearment, or even a sigh.
Being limerent sometimes increases sexual interest in other partners when LO is unreceptive or unavailable. Consider Lucy:
“Mitch didn’t care. It was obvious and I could no longer convince myself otherwise. He had left me in bed at the hotel to go home to his wife for the night. The plan was that he would call me in the morning. I was delirious with missing him and with wanting to embrace him again, and I awoke after just a few hours sleep to shower and prepare for his return. As I dressed and applied my makeup, I imagined our embrace when he returned to the hotel room. I was ready two hours before his call came.
“The call brought disaster. He said he was very rushed and would just have time to join me for a few minutes for breakfast at the hotel coffee shop. Then he’d have to rush off to a business appointment. My heart sank. I struggled to keep my feelings out of my voice and to sound cheerful and unconcerned, but he knew.
“Breakfast was brief and grim. I could neither eat nor hold back the tears as we discussed trivia.
“After Mitch left, I made a few phone calls. I just couldn’t bear the thought of being alone. I wanted to be with a man, to prove to myself that not all men would reject me, that maybe Mitch would yet come to love me. Joe, whom I had met for a few minutes at Sybil’s party last week, invited me over when I called. Within two hours of that breakfast, I was in bed with Joe.
“Yet I know that if it had not been for my state of anguish over Mitch, going to bed with Joe, or even being with Joe, would have had no appeal. It was Mitch I wanted. It was Mitch I pretended to be with during sex with Joe.
Sometimes married people find sex with their spouses more pleasurable when they become limerent over someone else. Some informants said that being in love made them “more sexual” generally. Others seemed to substitute an available sexual partner for the unavailable LO. More often, of course, sex with the previous partner is not desired. As Maureen expressed it,
“It was not a matter of finding it more pleasurable with my husband after I fell in love with Max; it was that it wasn’t quite as unpleasant as it had been. I was generally more turned on. I pretended it was Max, sometimes successfully.”
Among history’s more illustrious love stories is the tragic relationship between French logician and scholastic philosopher, Peter Abelard, and his pupil, later a famous nun, Heloïse. The formidable obstacles to their love included Heloïse’s enraged uncle and guardian, Fulbert, as well as the theology with which Abelard was identified.
Abelard was castrated as punishment for his departure from behavior considered appropriate to his calling. But Heloïse’s limerence for Abelard, as depicted in her letters over the remaining years of their lives, remained intense. Despite the separation between them, she begged for at least verbal reassurance of his affection. Calling him the “sole cause” of her misery, she implored Abelard to console her.55 Her emotional well-being depended on his actions. Abelard’s letters to her after their separation can be viewed as classics in which a formerly reciprocating LO attempts to establish a limerently and sexually neutral relationship. His attitude can also be read as the psychologically mediated outcome of his neuterdom.
In one letter, she refers to sexuality with remarkable directness considering her day and her position of authority and dignity as the abbess of the convent of the Paraclete. She tells Abelard that she continues to think about him and about the pleasures that they formerly knew together. She complains of insomnia and of being distracted from the Mass by visions of sexual union when she should instead be contrite and ashamed. She recalls everything, she says, and relives their time together in her imagination.
Like Heloïse, the majority of 778 undergraduate college students who answered an anonymous questionnaire eight centuries later reported that love was intensified after a sexual relationship had begun. They also mentioned that the more in love they were, the greater was their desire for sexual intercourse; this was equally true for females and males.56
Whether or not sex destroys romantic love or limerence, as moralists have proclaimed vehemently, seems rather to depend on the meaning attached to sex by the two people involved, the limerent meaning. In former times, sexual surrender of a woman to a man also communicated complete social and emotional surrender. If this occurred prematurely so far as the development of the man’s limerence was concerned, the effect was quite different from what it might be among people today for whom sex carries no such connotation of commitment. In other words, sexual surrender once indicated the end of uncertainty in LO’s response, uncertainty that was as necessary then as now for limerence to reach its peak. Today it does not. In The Group, only 31 percent (32 percent of the women, 26 percent of the men) accepted the statement, “A man is more likely to fall in love with a woman he has not slept with.” Only 30 percent (32 percent of the women and 25 percent of the men) accepted the statement, “A woman is more likely to fall in love with a man she has not slept with.”
It must also be emphasized that there is a difference—if not an incompatibility—between sexual competence and limerence. The “missionary” position so denigrated by sexual sophisticates is in fact the position of limerence. Lewdness is out of place in the limerent’s fantasy, and female limerents have reported weeping during coitus when it seemed obvious that the partner’s feelings consisted primarily or exclusively of “impersonal” lust.
As Jane reported:
“There I was, finally, in Frank’s arms and in his bed. His attention was fully on me, and by all rights I ought to have been in the height of ecstasy, but it wasn’t like that at all. Every aspect of his sexual performance wounded me deeply. I searched for evidence of love in his actions but found only a kind of animal, automatic, impersonal lust.
“It was not that he was behaving badly. He wasn’t really. It was just that I wanted his love so badly that I was supersensitive to every move on his part that might possibly indicate love. I kept feeling that I and my love were, really, just a body to him. I kept worrying about it. When he entered me, I felt a terrible pang of simultaneous joy and grief—joy for his presence, grief for the fact that I couldn’t feel his love, only his sex drive. And his friendliness. He wasn’t being a brute, not in any way. It was me, but I couldn’t help it.
“And so I started to cry when he started to come. I knew the closeness would soon be over and I wanted it to go on. At the same time, I was not being a good sex partner. I realized that, and that just made it worse. Really, it was horrible.”
In The Group, 95 percent of the women and 91 percent of the men rejected the statement that “the best thing about love is sex.” Others told me in interviews that “whether sex occurred or not was irrelevant.” As Desmond Morris says:
. . . if two young people are in love today, they will laugh at the desperate athleticism of the copulating nonlovers. For them, as for true lovers at all points in history, a fleeting touch on the cheek from the one they adore will be worth more than six hours in thirty-seven positions with someone they do not.57
The anxieties and shyness experienced by the limerent person in the presence of LO may interfere with sexual functioning (which is notably not always identical to sexual desire for either sex).58 The limerents’ continual concern to appear at their very best is not always compatible with the “immodest” behaviors and poses that arise in sexual situations. Male interviewees told of the difficulties they experienced when interacting sexually with LO. Sometimes they found themselves unable to achieve or maintain an erection. Women were frequently caught in the kind of situation described by Louise:
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to do the things Lenny was demanding of me; they seemed immodest, even indecent. I had no rational objection. I realize sex is freer these days than it used to be, but I only wanted to be with him and feel he loved me. I didn’t even need sex, although I wanted to be close to him in every way. I wanted to have him love me and I loved him, so I tried to give him what he asked for, anything he asked for, but it didn’t come off. I wasn’t free. I was embarrassed. It seemed I couldn’t win no matter what I did.”
So while the woman is in conflict over trying to be “good in bed” to attract LO when what she really wants is mutuality, the man may be experiencing performance failure. Stendhal noted the problem that arises when a man “at the very instant of entering [his lover’s] bed is struck by the thought of how terrible is the judge before whom he is about to appear.” He recounts a discussion of such “fiascos” among a group of five young men:
With the exception of one popinjay, who was probably lying, we had all suffered a fiasco on our first occasion with our most notable mistresses.
I knew a handsome lieutenant of Hussars, twenty-three years old, who, from excess of love, as I understand the matter, could do no more than kiss her and weep for joy throughout the first three nights he spent with a mistress whom he had adored for six months and who had treated him very harshly while she grieved over another lover killed in the war.
The paymaster H. Monday, well known to the whole army, suffered a fiasco for three nights in succession with the young and seductive Countess Koller.
But the king of fiasco is the handsome and rational Colonel Horse, who suffered an unbroken succession of fiascos for three months on end with the mischievous and enticing Nina Vigano, and was finally compelled to part from her without ever having possessed her.59
Roughly 14 percent of The Group found that sex with LO “was disappointing, although I knew we were very much in love.” This was true for both sexes, and it also appeared during several of the interviews—for men, much as depicted by Stendhal (inability to maintain an erection); for women it was not disability but disinclination. As one said:
“Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I couldn’t get over my shyness. I thought the situation would change after a while because I was very much in love. I thought love would ‘conquer all,’ as they say, but unfortunately it didn’t. I was very much in love, but couldn’t ever ‘let myself go.’ ”
The relationship between limerence and sex remains extremely complicated. Despite virtually unanimous agreement among interviewees that sex with LO under the best circumstances provides the “greatest pleasure” knowable in human existence, it appears that the very nature of limerence and the very nature of sex conspire to undermine the happiness except under the luckiest and most extraordinary of circumstances.