Thus far I have emphasized what it feels like to be limerent. But what does limerence look like to others? What does a limerent person do? How does limerence influence interactions with others, and how does it affect practices and institutions in society? First, of course, limerence exerts profound—although often unrecognized—effects on any relationship in which it exists, whether in one or in both individuals. But because limerence interacts with other aspects of a person’s life, its significance extends beyond the relationship with LO. Limerence figures in human tragedies, in the arts, and in historical events that affect the entire society, as well, inevitably, as in the progress of commercial developments.
The goal of the specific state called limerence has confused writers down through the ages. What does “return of feelings” really mean? Some have assumed that the limerent yearns to “possess” LO, but in what sense? A king might own his subject or slave; if he is also in love with her, he might give her her freedom so that she can express mutuality “freely.” The consummation of limerent fantasy, that thing the limerent fervently desires, is not mere copulation, not mere cohabitation, not even mere marriage, but something so elusive of precise definition it is sometimes deemed “spiritual.” We have also seen it called inherently impossible. If I want you to want me as I want you when what I want from you is that very wanting, we end up, if not with a paradox, with a very elusive idea. Sartre’s image of a “mirror game” of “infinite reflections” is not so outlandish. No wonder limerence seems to observers a wish to be loved, rather than love itself.
The goal of limerence is not possession, but a kind of merging, a “oneness,” the ecstatic bliss of mutual reciprocation. In fully developed limerence, you feel additionally what is, in other contexts as well, called love—an extreme degree of feeling that you want LO to be safe, cared for, happy, and all those other positive and noble feelings that you might feel for your children, your parents, and your dearest friends. That’s probably why limerence is called love in all languages.1 It feels like love, at least at the time. Lovers in the bliss of mutuality are affectionate; they are continuously doing things for each other, little (and big) acts of consideration that demand the appellation “love.” Surely limerence is love at its highest and most glorious peak.
But love and limerence are clearly distinguishable. Your feeling for LO is inordinate relative to that person’s actual value in your life (apart, of course, from the value as LO). As one woman wrote on the back of a questionnaire form:
“I recently reread my diary of 10 years ago, when I was in love with Brad, someone for whom I have no feelings at all anymore. It was very painful to read, not because of Brad, but because he was occupying so much of me at a time when there were other things in my life that I no longer have, but didn’t appreciate at the time because of my total focus on Brad. My father was still living then, and my children were adorable babies who needed their mother’s attention.”
. . . which is why we distinguish love from limerence, this “love” from other loves.
Every lover grows pale at the sight of the beloved. One trembles at the unexpected sight of the beloved. Those besieged by thoughts of love sleep less and eat less. A lover is always timorous.
—Andreas Capellanus2
The limerents I interviewed described both feelings and behavior, but until now I have not focused on the behavior, the external “symptoms” of limerence.
One of the strongest limerent feelings is a wish to hide the condition from LO (and from others) as an inevitable part of the “game,” until reciprocation is certain and some commitment has been made. One behavioral change however, that is also likely to be obvious to close friends and family is the limerent’s disappearance from customary places.
As limerent you want (1) to be with LO, or (2) to be where LO is likely to be, if the relationship fails to permit actual continual contact. In Combat in the Erogenous Zone, Ingrid Bengis speaks about how she would pace back and forth in front of her lover’s house without making her presence known to him.3 Poor substitutes for being in LO’s presence are (3) to be alone thinking about LO, and finally (4) to talk about LO. Jim doesn’t come around to the old hangout anymore. Bea’s friends never see her. Rose is always too busy with something or other to sit down for a relaxed talk with her neighbors the way she used to do. The effect of limerence may be almost anti-social.
One of the values that may come from better understanding of limerence is that you as the observer may become more sympathetic and less likely to take it as an affront when a formerly reliable friend disappears. You can preserve your relationship by not interpreting your friend’s sudden and strange disappearance as a rejection. When limerence strikes, your friend’s sudden aloofness has nothing to do with you. You are still a friend, and may be much needed during the recovery phase.
Another behavioral counterpart to limerence is extreme emotional lability, or “mood swings.” The shift from the elation of perceived reciprocation—real or not—to the despair of rejection—again real or imagined—can occur with such swiftness as to seem instantaneous. Most interviewees told of their own experiences, but some also described limerence as it appeared in someone close to them. Harriet Vernon, for example, had come to me as a client because of the strain between herself and her 20-year-old daughter Lily. Lily’s mood swings had worried her greatly. She thought that perhaps some form of neurosis was involved.
“For days at a time, she does nothing at all. I can tell she’s been crying, although she won’t discuss it with me. I worry and don’t know what to do, and just when I am about to go out of my mind, she gets a call on the phone and voilà: metamorphosis! There’s humming and dancing and even an offer to help with the housework. Of course, that only lasts for a while. She goes out once or twice, maybe, and then it is back to the old unhappy mood. It’s terrible. It affects the whole family. It’s very hard to be around someone as unhappy as she is when she’s down. It’s easier, of course, when the mood turns positive, except that by now I know it won’t last.”
The behavioral aspects of limerence, with certain exceptions, tend to be undesirable. As well as interference with other relationships, they include interference with work, destruction of peace of mind, and even violence. With these effects it is not surprising that certain societies have held the general view that the limerent state is a madness to be avoided if at all possible, or else simply denied.
Many societies have attempted to prevent love or, more often, to control it in some way, as Columbia University Sociologist William J. Goode has pointed out.4 In traditional China, romantic love was viewed as dangerous.5 The important decision of who would marry whom was made with the cooperation of family and matchmaker. Nietzsche is said to have regarded love as the enemy of achievement and power.6 Love has been accused of disrupting the equanimity of communal life, and one often hears of decisive action taken by the leaders of collective communities to break up attachments between couples and generally try to control members’ love lives.7 Limerence, however, cannot be controlled by the unhappy limerent who wants to end it, nor does it bow to the dictates of society.
The greatest of heaven’s blessings
—Plato8
They say that through its agency everything in life is transformed, everything is illuminated.
—Nelly Ptaschkina9
The pleasures of limerence, though they may not be evident to an external and impartial observer, must be counted among limerence’s positive attributes. Many interviewed insisted that there were other advantages as well. Although it was not quite a unanimous judgment, the vast majority of limerent informants waxed eloquent in descriptions of the benefits of limerence, even when they had suffered greatly.
One of the signs of limerent behavior that is hardest to hide is the effort at self-improvement, especially in physical appearance. As the intensity of limerence rises, the initial happy conclusion of the limerent that he or she must be admirable to LO to have evoked the first glimmer of positive reaction gives way to doubt. The first hope, a necessary ingredient, may then be lost, and the limerent strives to regain it by more attention to personal details. Fred changed his hairstyle several times and took more care with his dress for the daily casual encounters of his long unrequited limerence. (I once recommended to an unhappy limerent that she find a way to render herself ugly in some way so that she could extinguish the hope that she continued to have for reciprocation. I was not serious, but there was an unfortunate truth to my comment.) Since an attractive appearance has value in the culture apart from that of capturing the interest of LO, the limerent drive to increase attractiveness can be counted as an advantageous by-product of the state.
Glenda had been a file clerk in a law firm for two years before she met Jack, her first LO. When Jack said he found her “really basically very pretty,” she began looking in the mirror almost for the first time. Gradually, she made little changes. A touch of eye makeup, a new scarf, a softer hairstyle, more becoming clothes, and she was transformed. Her co-workers noticed and so did the boss, who gave her a new job in the reception area at a substantial salary increase.
In the movie Rocky, Adrienne undergoes a similar transformation. Although many might interpret that as the filmmakers’ impatience at having to portray a plain young woman, or simply the increased availability of money for new clothes that came with Rocky’s good fortune, it is a very realistic aspect in a basically accurate portrayal of limerence.
The effects of love on physical appearance were also depicted some years ago in a Hollywood film called The Enchanted Cottage, in which two homely individuals fall in love and become beautiful, at least in each other’s eyes (and to the eye of the camera). In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes a transformation that was only partly, as with the actors in the movie, the result of cosmetics. Expectation also helped:
I had left her two hours before, badly made up, carelessly dressed, her eyes dull; but now she was expecting him. When she saw me, she resumed her ordinary expression, but for an instant I had time to see her, in readiness for him. . . . Her hair was carefully done, her lips and cheeks had unaccustomed coloring, she was dressed up in a lace blouse of sparkling white.10
Desmond Morris finds the physical transformation wrought by love not entirely conscious. He considers a love affair to be “as good as a diet and a corset combined” and suggests that when sexual activity is also included “exercise comes built in.” When lovers are “under the influence of their passionate emotions, their stomach muscles . . . automatically contract and stay contracted.”11
One woman was emphatic about the effect of love on appearance. She said:
“During those suburban years, life was husband, children, housework, and the gossip of the morning coffee klatch. Whenever someone in the group was having an affair, it was immediately obvious. She didn’t have to say a word. Usually she discontinued attending the daily gossip sessions, because now there were more interesting things on her mind as well as the problem of making up for time spent with her lover and lost to household chores. We could tell the moment we looked at her. False eyelashes and loss of weight were dead giveaways, but even if she were wearing an old sack that hid her figure, took the eyelashes off for our benefit, and managed to continue to attend regularly, there was still something about her that we could all agree on, even if we couldn’t quite define it.
“Later on, when gossiping became ‘consciousness raising,’ we talked about it more analytically. A less immediately visible effect was the typical reaction of the husband. Usually he was so delighted with his new pretty wife that instead of analyzing, he just enjoyed! Sometimes marriages improved during affairs, and that may have been one of the reasons. It turned out in my own case that the improvement continued even after the affair was over, but not everyone was that lucky.
“Yes, my appearance changed, too. Just like the others. I think I lost 10 pounds the first week simply because food became unimportant and because each pound taken off increased my conviction that I was both lovable and loved.
“But there were also—I had not thought about this before—ways in which I felt inclined to change because I believed they would make me someone he might like better, even when he wasn’t actually there to observe. I’d have been a fraud if I had been one person for him and someone else as soon as his back was turned. It would have detracted from the experience, spoiled it somehow.
“Maybe it was just guilt over the double life I was leading, but I really think it was more that I tried to fit myself into the sort of person I felt deserved to be loved. I think the standards were mine, not his. When I was patient and helpful with Timmy at night when he was complaining about his homework, instead of being my former bored, distracted, and easily angered self, it was because that was what I felt a mother ought to be like. Some of that changed later when things became unsettled, but much of it either remained or returned after my emotions had calmed down again.”
This theme of having benefited, even from a love affair that did not last, was frequently expressed.
One of the classic pieces of literature on love, The Dove’s Neck Ring, was written in the early eleventh century by the Arabian scholar, Ibn Hazm, who noted:
And how many a stingy one became generous, and a gloomy one became bright faced, and a coward became brave, and a grouchy-dispositioned one became gay, and an ignoramus became clever, and a slovenly one in . . . personal appearance ‘dolled up,’ and an ill-shaped one became handsome.12
Stendhal felt that love made him a better person—more moral, more congenial, more generous, and more pleasant to others as well as to himself.13 And psychiatrist Robert Seidenberg said that someone who is in the hopeful or elated phase of love “generally has a warm feeling toward the world.14 The goal of the limerent is to inspire a similar reaction in LO. Favorable characteristics are developed and displayed to try to achieve that longed-for objective. The result of this process is that the limerent is more attractive to others as well. More than half of The Group indicated that they “like to be in the company of” people who are in love.
Some people were very specific about what they had gained, others more vague, although just as insistent. Steven, a young university instructor, said of his relationship with Helen, a student:
“I had the usual, and reasonable, I think, hang-ups about having an affair with a student. On top of those, which were bad enough, I had my own personal brand of hang-ups about having any kind of relationship with anyone. To say I was shy is a gross understatement. I was terrified in the presence of women. Of people! Every class session was a trauma. Only Helen could have broken through. She had a kind of unrelenting, yet gentle, persistence. She literally drew me out of myself. Of course I was attracted, but I had almost become accustomed to living with frustrated attractions. She’d come up to the office to see me about a paper she was working on and I’d answer her questions, but unless she took the initiative there were a lot of silences.
“Still, I began to hope she’d come back, and I found excuses to spend a lot of time in my office, something I’d never done before. In the end, despite everything, all the pain and torment and tragedy, when it was all over, I was a different person. In a sense, it was almost worth it. Even though Helen rejected me, and even considering the severe way I reacted to that, if it hadn’t been for Helen, I might still be sitting alone in my apartment every night playing those godawful jazzy albums and wondering if life was ever going to happen. I don’t mean to say that I’ve turned into a flaming extrovert. I’m still likely to hold back more than most people, but not like before. Nothing like before.”
The positive effects of a love affair do not necessarily vanish when the relationship ends. Nor do they necessarily vanish when it turns out to have been an unhappy one, as Steven’s was.
Another enduring positive effect occurred often enough among my informants to deserve mention: the person in love often developed intense interest in and knowledge about whatever it was that deeply involved LO. The limerent might also adopt some of the attitudes, personality, and behavior of the other person.15 Whether or not this was an advantage depended on the situation. Steven listened to Baroque music with Helen and found a permanent addition to his aesthetic pleasures; Beatrice picked up Gordon’s interest in photography and later became a professional photographer herself. In other cases “transfusions” were not positive. For example, initiation into drug taking by LO was mentioned occasionally by college students on questionaires and in interviews. Drugs were also viewed as relieving some of the distress caused by limerence. Usually these interests were transitory, lasting only as long as the limerence itself. Whether or not an interest persists after passion subsides seems to depend on whether it really fits in with later life. Virginia, whose happiness in her first days with Sid was described earlier also told about a particularly fortunate transfusion:
“I was one of these ordinary people who do ordinary things. Not that I thought about it that way. But I was always too busy wondering what to watch on TV or deciding whether to buy a new coat or planning to take a course to improve my steno to really develop a consistent interest in anything. I had learned to knit and I enjoyed it at times, but it was at a level of a sweater every year or so at most. I went bowling once or twice a month with a group from the office. One year I made my own Christmas cards. That was about it aside from the daily routine.
“With Sid, that really changed. That aspect of his personality was one of the first things that attracted me to him. We met on an airplane, you know. He was attending a professional convention and was loaded down with books and papers and a clipboard. I, of course, had my Agatha Christie. (I did read occasionally.) During the first part of the flight, I was deep into my mystery and he was busying writing and shuffling through papers and looking things up in a thick book he kept between his feet. Neither of us was particularly aware of the other until dinner was served and he asked me to hold one of his notebooks while he hastily packed the others away to make room for the food. God, that was like him! He had a way of getting so wrapped up in things that minor social etiquette just didn’t enter in. And I never minded. Neither did anyone else. It was so obvious he really needed the assistance. It was a special kind of rare charm, and it only worked because the dedication was real.
“Later, when we began to spend a lot of time together, I got a really close look at that dedication; and not only did I admire it, I emulated it. It wasn’t that he made me feel less of a person, and it wasn’t to keep me busy when he was busy. He inspired me. He set an example of how to do it and also how much pleasure it brings. He really loved his work, and although I’ll never match him in total absorption to the point of asking favors of strangers without even noticing that they are strangers, I know what it is to spend an entire weekend working happily away on a story. I also carry materials with me on airplanes, and I sincerely believe that I have found a talent in myself and a joy in life that might never have happened if it had not been for Sid.”
From the interviews and other sources of information, certain fundamental combinations are apparent in human relationships. First, of course, there is the relationship between two mutually limerent individuals, the reciprocal relationship. Although there may, indeed must be obstacles along the way, this is the relationship of the limerent’s fervent desires and of the dramatist’s happy ending. We have already seen that its intensity depends, for each individual, on the intensity produced by the particular combination of circumstances during its development. Excessive fear on both persons’ parts can prevent the establishment of reciprocity, even when each is limerent toward the other. Furthermore, although limerence increases with uncertainty, we have seen that externally imposed obstacles of sufficient magnitude, including those imposed by parents or by society, can delay or prevent limerent consummation.
Even when reciprocity has occurred and commitment to a formal relationship (such as marriage) has been established, reciprocity is usually followed by a decline in limerence, and a blissful period may be followed by later dissension. But before considering the difficulties that intially mutual limerent partners may later run into, there are at least two other types of relationships to be identified.
The first of these is an affectional and sexual relationship between two people in the absence of limerence on either person’s part, either for each other or for anyone outside the partnership. It is a primary relationship, described frequently enough in the interviews to warrant clear recognition. Informants who described what I came to call “affectional bonding” usually replied affirmatively to my initial question about whether they felt themselves to be in love. But unlike those whose relationship was based on limerence, they did not report continuous and unwanted intrusive thinking, feel intense need for exclusivity, describe their goals in terms of reciprocity, or speak of ecstasy. Instead, they emphasized compatibility of interests, mutual preferences in leisure activities, ability to work together, pleasurable sexual experiences, and, in some cases, a degree of relative contentment that was rare (even impossible) among persons experiencing limerence.
Some of these relationships had begun with limerence; others seemed to have been affectional bonding from the outset. It should be recalled, however, that I was rarely able to interview both members of a partnership.16 In several cases in which I did speak to both partners, what was described as affectional bonding by one person was matched by hidden limerence in the other.
Affectional bonding, not limerence, often represents the cultural idea. It is rational by comparison with limerence, and loving in what many feel is the “true sense of the term,” i.e., having concern about, or caring. It is what is described as the hoped-for relationship between limerents after the honeymoon when the serious business of charting a common and compatible life course begins. Many whose descriptions of their relationships fitted this category were “old marrieds,” whose interactions seemed both stable and mutually gratifying, at least from the perspective of the partner who served as my informant. Relationships based on affectional bonding were usually monogamous, although not for the reasons given by limerent persons. “Faithfulness” stemmed from convenience and consideration of the other’s feelings, or even from what appeared to be almost purely practical considerations. Zorina, for example, said of her relationship with Carl:
“We’re both “clean,” and that’s something we want to keep. Neither of us would want to sleep with anyone else for the same reason we watch our diet. VD is no joke. We’ve been together five years now, and will probably get married and have children. We know and like each other, and, really, what else is there?”
Some of those who described affectional bonding appeared to be persons who had never known the state of limerence. But others reported a past history that included limerence. Frances, for example, said:
“I’ve been what you call limerent. That was me about Richard for three miserable years. When he left me with the twins (who were only six months old at the time) and Ronnie, who was two, I had to spend the next 10 years on pure survival, during which there was no time for me to look around and no one seeking out a not terribly attractive woman in her mid-thirties with three dependents.
“Today, the children are doing fine, and I have managed to get a job that keeps us from constant near poverty. Many times I’ve thought about how nice it would have been if someone had come along to ease the terrible burden when it was terrible; now I just want an easy life and that’s what I have with Henry. I like him, I love him by any reasonable meaning of the word, and we have fun together. Most important, he and the kids have really hit it off. I think that if I started to fall in love again—and I don’t say it couldn’t happen—I’d run like hell. I don’t need that again.”
Richard and Marion, who were both interviewed, also claimed never to have felt the fears and emotional need for exclusivity or to have been afflicted by the prepossessiveness and intrusive thinking that are aspects of limerence. As Richard said:
“I have never felt the way you describe about anyone, and from what you say, as well as what I have seen with my own eyes, I would not want to. My feelings for Marion are, well, as strong as the feelings I have ever had for anyone, and as far as I am concerned, I can see no reason to look elsewhere. She and I are friends, companions, and sexual partners, although the last is not as frequent as it used to be. But that’s not a problem. It’s just that we have been so busy these past few months, me on my work, she on hers.”
Marion’s description of the relationship, obtained in a separate interview, fit with Richard’s very well:
“Richard is the finest and truest friend I ever had, and I believe that we will probably marry. It’s just that there isn’t that intensity that other people get into. I don’t know why not, but that’s the way it is. Frankly, I think we both like it better this way.”
With the current incidence of couples deciding to live together without being married, the question arises as to whether limerence or nonlimerence is more likely to spur the arrangement. It might be supposed that affectionally bonded pairs, in which neither partner was limerent, would be most inclined to cohabit rather than undertake the deeper commitment of marriage. My findings on this issue are equivocal. According to Bunny’s report, she and Lou fit the expected pattern:
“We were serious enough about our relationship to decide that we’d both be better off together rather than apart, but it wasn’t a matter of life and death for either of us as it sometimes seemed to be with other people. Living together as roommates and a little more was perfect. If our families had put pressure on us, we would probably have gotten married, but they didn’t. If I ever get pregnant, I guess we will, but it’s not a big issue with us.
But Marilyn told a very different tale, despite outside appearances that resembled Bunny’s:
“I wanted to get married. What I mean is that I was in love and am still in love with Arthur, and that means I want a commitment. The stronger the better. But Arthur didn’t want to get married. He was all too clear on that. Living together was all I could get, so I grabbed it. I’m still hoping.”
The third, and probably most prevalent, sort of relationship between two people, at least during some stages of their interaction, occurs between a limerent person and an LO who does not reciprocate with limerence. The bulk of those interviewed, whose stories are related in these pages, fall into this category. In a sense, there is some lack of reciprocation in all limerent relationships, since limerence intensity continually wavers. Although I would categorize the following relationship between Bruce and Emma as primarily between two persons limerent about each other, the limerent need for total reciprocity often produces, as it did in their case, intervals of dissatisfaction on one or both parts. As Bruce said:
“Throughout our entire relationship, it was always apparent to me, and I believe equally apparent to Emma, that one or the other of us was more in love. Sometimes she was the one; sometimes it was me. We always seemed to know who it was. It was a very unstable situation, because as soon as she seemed interested in me, my anxiety lessened, and that nervousness that I lost turned out to be a part of the love. Or so it seemed. It was dumb. I know it was dumb, but that’s the way it went, just the same, for the whole two years before we finally broke up.”
Relationships between two people who are committed to one another but in which only one of them is experiencing limerence should be differentiated from the fully unrequited condition in which no commitment exists (Fred and Laura, for example).
In addition to the three types of relationships—both limerent (mutual reciprocation), neither limerent (affectional bonding), and one limerent, the other not—if the level of each person’s sexual activity is considered, there are many more types.17 In heterosexual relationships we can also pair each of the four possibilities (sexually active limerent; not sexually active, but limerent; sexually active, but not limerent; and not sexually active, not limerent) for the women with each of the four possibilities for the men. One can imagine the bliss of the relationship in which both partners are sexually active and limerent, or the frustration of the relationship in which one partner (of whichever sex) is sexually active and limerent while the other is neither. With both partners sexually active and nonlimerent, the relationship might be affectional bonding. The chaste but limerent woman paired with a sexually active but nonlimerent male is a classic of fiction and of sex-role stereotyping. This situation was described by several female interviewees.
Since the culture evaluates behavior differently depending on the sex of the person, and more specifically, has traditionally favored the expression of sexuality in men over that in women, the relationship in which the woman is limerent but not sexually motivated and the man sexually active but not limerent may be quite different from the relationship in which these roles are reversed.
It should be pointed out that a number of informants felt that their degree of sexual interest was related to their limerence. Some found that the anxiety and fear of rejection that was part of the limerent state interfered with sexual functioning. Others said that their interest in sex was heightened by their limerence.
For this reason, the sexuality classification should not be used to refer to fundamental characteristics of individuals, but to examine a given relationship at a particular time. Martin, in the following example describes a shift in his relationship with Betty:
“In the early days of our marriage, there was no question that both of us were highly interested in sex and both of us were very much in love. It was what you might call a honeymoon. Then it stopped. I don’t know why it stopped or even when it stopped, but one day I had to recognize that the honeymoon was over and things were different. Neither of us were as interested in sex as we had been during the early days, and I suppose that is nothing unusual, but the problem was my interest in sex remained higher than Betty’s. So there we were. We were commited to each other, married, with a baby on the way, but I don’t think either of us were in love anymore and we had a sex problem.”
At the beginning, Martin and Betty were sexually active limerents, but they had shifted to a relationship in which neither was limerent and only one retained a marked interest in sex.
With all the possible categories of relationships, can any general statements be made about which are preferable, most likely to be stable, or in danger of erupting into clearly undesirable states? Are relationships in which the partners share similar feelings less troublesome to their participants? The mutually limerent relationship already mentioned is blissful; the relationship with neither partner sexually active but both limerent might resemble a fictional ideal of “untainted love”; and the relationship in which neither is limerent but both sexually attracted might be characteristic of the swinging set. The relationships are not all equally stable, since limerence itself is an unstable state. The mutually limerent and highly sexual relationship would not be expected to remain so for long. Indeed, the differences in sexual interest in a relationship between two people who are both limerent might actually serve to sustain limerence longer than would be the case if both partners had the same sexual interest. We have already seen cases in which limerence was sustained for a long period of time within a relationship under the condition that the partner was not perceived as limerent, for example, Gregory’s marriage to Beatrice, described earlier. In fact, mixed relationships probably last longer than relationships in which both members are limerent. The nonlimerence of one partner may provide the degree of uncertainty and the degree of hope that may permit the perpetuation of the other person’s limerence and commitment to the relationship.
Whether nonlimerent lovers maintain sexual liaison with more than one person seems primarily a matter of physical desires and convenience. As one person put it:
“I could easily have several lovers and would like to, in a way, but it gets rather sticky when you are living with someone who objects. I am not jealous but my lover is. Besides, there are only so many hours in a day, and if it’s going to cause an uproar, there isn’t much point in it. I don’t need it.”
In other words, the nonexclusivity that nonlimerents often feel may permit freedom from the discord that the need for exclusiveness can bring about. Especially if not terribly interested in sex, the nonlimerent finds it easy to sustain a comradely relationship that is also intimate in many dimensions and sexually faithful as well.
But nonlimerents often find themselves the unwitting causes of suffering that seems real but that they are at a loss to comprehend. A young woman described her relationship with several men:
“It seemed that I was more in love, at least at first. I would become attracted, want to spend a lot of time with them, enjoyed the process of discovering common interests, and even found myself creatively inspired by the relationship. But after a while, things would suddenly change and I would be asked where I thought the relationship was ‘going.’ This was a question that always puzzled me, because I was quite happy about where it was and didn’t feel any need for it to be more than what it was.”
In such cases (I found that there were many), the partner seemed stricken with a kind of insatiability; it seemed that no degree of attentiveness was ever sufficient.
“For example, they would call and wonder what I was doing when I really had something to do that was important to me and had nothing to do with them. They acted as if everything I did absolutely had to involve them all the time, at every turn.
“But it is not as bad as it used to be because I have learned to be very clear and definite. I recognize the signs of trouble, and when it starts, I simply leave. After a while, maybe four or five months, I can go back and things will be civil. They simply have to learn that if they want my companionship at all, they must let me breathe.”
The word “suffocation” was used repeatedly in reports by interviewees fitting the nonlimerent pattern. As one said about “in love” lovers:
“They are always being ‘hurt,’ and it’s impossible to predict what will hurt them. I’ll have a good time at a party only to be hit on the way home with something like, ‘Why did you ignore me all evening?’ Really, it’s exasperating!”
David Norton, writing in An Epistemology of Romantic Love, is no different from those I interviewed in his dislike of the role of the nonlimerent LO:
“First, let us inquire whether the state of passion is objectively good or beautiful. The answer will be evident to anyone who has been an object of it [but did] not love in return. Nothing is more tedious and oppressive; for the one who has eyes for none but us has lost the world and, having nothing to talk about, can only repeat a handful of tiresome phrases—tiresome because they are shorn of the medium in which our interests are engaged. From our situation within the spacious world, the other’s obsession appears hermetically sealed, a stifling closet. Moreover it debilitates us, making us clumsy; for the eyes forever upon us make us hyperaware of our own simple acts—like walking—which we do best without thought. No, this ‘inferior state of mind,’ this ‘form of transitory imbecility’ is neither objectively good nor beautiful.”18
Quite often, however, it is the limerent, rather than the nonlimerent partner who terminates the relationship. Very often the break is accompanied by a “scene,” which leaves the nonlimerent person saddened, distraught, and lonely. Leonard described his relationship with Marg:
“Marg and I had been seeing each other for maybe about three months, quite regularly, and as far as I was concerned the situation was ideal. We read the same books, enjoyed the same movies, and sex, at least for me, was perfect. One of the main things I liked about our relationship was that Marg was there for companionship and recreation, and I wasn’t forced to spend a lot of money and boring time just trying to ‘make it’ with someone. I am the sort of person who would rather have one dependable relationship than a lot of hassles. Myself, I could have other lovers, and I would not mind if Marg did, but she’d mind even knowing I feel this way, so I went along, which is why it really surprised me when the pressure began anyway.
“No matter how many times I tried to explain to Marg that she was the only person I was interested in, she kept going on about how I was not interested enough. I really did not know what she meant. I liked her, we saw each other two, maybe three, times a week, and it was I who first brought up the idea of marrying her (at 36, I was more than ready to settle down).
“To this day, I cannot explain what happened. We had spent the day with my family. Dad and I watched the game while Marge talked to my sister and mother. I really didn’t notice what she did the whole time. It was a perfectly ordinary day as far as I was concerned. The first hint I had about what was going to happen was on the way home. Marg was very quiet. I thought she was tired and I let her alone. Then, when we got to her house, she lit out of the car slamming the door and didn’t even say anything. It was crazy. I had no idea of what was going on. I parked the car and rang the doorbell and she wouldn’t answer. It was late, I was tired, I didn’t understand, and so after a while I left and tried to telephone when I got home. The phone must have rung about 40 times when she finally answered. All she said was, ‘It’s over,’ and hung up. By this time I was really getting annoyed. I had a heavy schedule lined up for the next day, and it was after two in the morning. I went to bed.
“The next day when I had a moment free, it was dinner time. This time no answer after 10 rings, so I drove over to her house. To my surprise, she let me in. By that time I didn’t know what to expect. Obviously, she had been crying, and even though I had no idea what was causing her to act like this, I felt bad and tried to comfort her. But when I put my arm around her, she jerked away and became hysterical. She told me I had not been fair to leave her alone all day, and furthermore that my mother didn’t like her and kept telling her about how popular I was with other women.
“Now, I know how Mom is, and she was talking about high school, not about now. Marg was upset. I seemed to be making her more upset. Everything I said that tried to help ended up making it worse. So I left. The next day I got a note saying not to call her again and that she would send certain items by messenger, some of my clothes I had left there and some jewelry I had given her. That was that. I still don’t understand it. Mom told me that she liked Marg, but that Marg had seemed strange during their conversation.
“I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t able to feel about her the way she wanted me to, but except for insane scenes like that—it wasn’t the first, I must admit—I really liked Marg.”
Members of The Group had been troubled by the pressures placed on them as the nonlimerent partner in a relationship with a limerent. Both limerents and nonlimerents object to the role of LO, especially when they do not return the feeling. In all, 91 percent of The Group found it unpleasant in some way, 84 percent found it very uncomfortable, or worse, and a full third checked “oppressive.” About 40 percent agreed with the statements, “We were not getting along, and I knew we would have to end our relationship, but I did not want to hurt______;” and “As far as I was concerned we were finished. The only problem was how to break it to______.” Half and more than half of The Group, respectively said, “I tried to break off with______in the least painful way”; and “Breaking off was very hard because I could see it was hurting______.” Twenty-five percent of The Group also said, “I kept seeing______much longer than I really wanted to because of______’s jealousy and dependency on me”; and “I always seem to be the one to have to break off the relationship.”
Of course, the acceptance of such statements does not permit the conclusion that the person is always a nonlimerent. They may be descriptions of “nonlimerent relationships” by a person who had been or would be limerent over someone else, or they may refer to the person in a relationship whose limerence is not synchronized with that of the partner, in other words, whose limerence has not fully crystallized or who may be shifting toward a new LO. It must be borne in mind that there are two forms of nonlimerence: the nonlimerence of the person who has never experienced limerence (but who might in the future) and the nonlimerence of a particular partnership, one that might resemble affectional bonding but to the person ready for limerence is never more than a stand-in for the “real thing.” As Beryl said:
“I really liked Bill, but I always knew that the lights weren’t flashing and the bells were not ringing. It was a good, wholesome, fun, and happy relationship. But after Arthur, I still wanted the other glorious and foolish kind of love. Bill helped fill the time while I waited. I loved him as one loves a friend one cares very much about, but I kept hoping for the magic once again, and I knew it would never come with Bill.”
It is important to remember that both states, limerence and nonlimerence, tend to endure, although the reasons are different. Limerence is sustained because one of its aspects is the desire for limerence itself. This desire transcends the feelings directed toward a particular LO and persists even after preoccupation with that LO has diminished to a low level. This is that state previously discussed under “Readiness and Longing.” In the writings of other observers, it seems to appear from time to time as the notion of being “in love with love,” a state assumed to come about “naturally” at the time of adolescence.19 This longing for “someone” should be clearly distinguished from a realistic or practical desire to engage in a mating relationship for economic or procreational purposes, or even for the companionship of affectional bonding. Those inclinations seem largely to lack the involuntarily obsessional quality of the limerent state.
Hubert expressed his desire for a relationship that would meet certain practical needs:
“I am tired of running around. I want someone there when I come home at night. I would like to have children. No, I really don’t feel it as an emotional necessity, but I do feel it as something that would make my life more pleasant—more worthwhile. People are social and I am social, and I really get lonely and would like to have someone to talk over the day’s events. It is not the feeling that you have described as limerent, but it is a very strong and definite and logical feeling of need.”
Interviewees like Hubert expressed the desire for a mate in much the same emotional terms as they might express desire for children, for a home, or for participation in a favorite hobby. I don’t mean by that to imply that this interest is insufficient to establish a sound and permanent relationship. It is just that the issue concerns more “rational” goals, not involuntary, passionate yearning. For the limerent, the longing for a partner is so intense as to be experienced as a necessity; for those not in the state of limerence it may be very much desired, but failure of attainment does not produce the type of intense misery that may be unique to limerence.
Many persons, including many of my informants, have commented on the transitory nature of limerence, and various estimates have been given of its average duration. As noted in the previous chapter, the upper limit of intensity appears to be set by perceived reciprocity. This results in some limerences arriving at a more intense state than do others. A limerence nipped in the bud for one reason or another may be of relatively brief duration. Arlene told of a relationship that contained all the elements of limerence as I described them to her but that endured for only a total of three days. The couple had met in Venice, he being an architect from Switzerland and she a social worker from the United States and both long married. From the outset they were aware of the impossibility of a permanent union, a factor which may have permitted a certain short-circuiting of the more usual ploys, plays, and fears. Shipboard romances and other temporary liaisons are widely reported, and it may be that under the weight of the overwhelming obstacle of an impossible situation, these affairs sometimes manage to contain many if not all of the limerent characteristics, albeit in an attenuated fashion.
Leaving aside such extreme, and possibly dubious, romances, my estimation of average limerent duration is approximately two years. It is based on both questionnaire and interview data. The duration of the experience covers the period from “the moment” of initiation of limerence until a feeling of neutrality is reached for a given LO. The extremes may be as brief as a few weeks or as long as a lifetime. Few full-blown limerences calm down in less than six months. When limerence is really brief, maximum intensity may not have been attained. The most frequent interval, as well as the average, is between approximately 18 months and three years. Lifetime limerences are rare, but they do occur. Some people continue to experience limerence at different times throughout their lives, so that there appears to be no age unaffected. If the state of readiness or longing were also included, the total number of cases would be greater.
I suspect that the duration of relationships in which limerence on the part of one or both partners played a role in its initial formation is much longer than the duration of limerence itself. Although limerence may initiate a relationship, it is not essential to its persistence, especially, when some formal commitment between the two people is made, either privately or publicly. If a relationship does persist after the limerence of one or both partners has ended, it is because some other kind of bonding has taken place or because circumstances make it difficult to disengage.
On the other hand, many relationships are of briefer duration than the limerence of one partner—sometimes the limerence of both partners. Your limerence may begin long before a relationship can be said to exist except in your own feelings (maybe in the feelings of LO as well, but it still takes overtly indicated commitment to make it a “relationship”), long before the first “date,” as we have seen in numerous cases, it can persist long after LO has departed. Other relationships continue without limerence on either side.20
The danger in otherwise stable relationships is that one of the partners will suddenly become limerent over someone else, a turn of events that may shake the relationship at its foundations. Although nonlimerent lovers do not experience the emotional need for exclusivity that characterizes limerence, this is no safeguard against jealousy. In what may be a stable relationship only by external observation, one partner (especially one who has been previously limerent) may actually be in a state of readiness or longing for some time before finding a new LO. When the ideal is to marry for “love,” it is publicly frowned upon to have a series of love affairs, or limerences, outside marriage. Hence, a series of marriages and divorces.
Smetena’s opera, The Bartered Bride, first performed in 1866, is one of many works of fiction in which the plot turns on the issue of marrying for love versus marrying to bring financial advantage to the parent. The nineteenth century saw a romantic revolt against marriages arranged by families, in which the talented and beautiful could be matched with the wealthy, or adjacent lands could be joined by family ties. Indeed, many of the practices which separated the sexes and thus facilitated arranged marriages could be interpreted as aids to the prevention of limerence and, especially, to the prevention of limerence-inspired decisions that disrupt the social order.21 That divorce should increase, as it has in this century, may be an inevitable consequence of the selection of marriage partners by limerence—not merely because the limerent eye overfocuses on the attractive features of LO, but also because the same logic that says marry where your heart leads also says divorce and remarry where your heart leads. The conflict between the direction in which one is impelled by limerence and the actions dictated by parents and other social forces is still much in evidence. Heads of state experience the traditional pressure to choose according to religious, economic, and political issues, but even when the initial choice is left strictly to personal feelings, as it is in the United States and some countries of Western Europe, freedom to change marriage partners is always at least somewhat restricted. Thus the love affair of the twentieth century is that of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which continues to inspire one popular dramatization after another.
The romantic ideal holds that for every person there is on earth the “right” other person, and you know when that person comes along because your feelings tell you. To marry your LO is to experience the ecstasy of ultimate reciprocation. Or so you feel. In fact, not even marriage may constitute sufficient proof that the feelings are returned. Evelyn’s experience is an example:
“Okay, so we were married. I still didn’t believe Ed loved me. There was something about the way he acted, little things he did, or forgot to do. He walked around the house with an air of distraction, as if I weren’t there. It was worse than when we were not married, because then he’d talk to me. Now he just expects things of me. If he gets them, there’s silence; if he doesn’t, there’s still silence plus a look of annoyance.”
On the other hand, the greater uncertainty intrinsic to the state of being unmarried, no matter how entangled the pair might be in terms of joint friendships, possessions, and activities, can more often keep alive the limerent state in a way in which marriage cannot. It might well be the decrease in uncertainty that produces the occasional upsets that follow a change to the marital status after a period of cohabitation. Greg spoke of his relationship with Judy before and after they became legally bound in matrimony:
“Something happened to me after we got married. It was a real shock. I had thought that we knew everything about each other and that nothing could possibly break us up. I don’t know how to explain the difference, but it was dramatic. We recovered after a while, we didn’t actually break up, but we went through a pretty rough period that lasted almost a year. It’s over now, I guess, I hope, but what a terrible time we had! It was as if we really didn’t know each other before, not even after three years.”
In other cases, limerence seems gradually, and less stressfully to be transformed into the genuine love of affectional bonding. Mary and Frank were among the best examples of this pattern. They had been married for 15 years when I interviewed Mary. “We were completely in love when we married and, the honeymoon was something out of a storybook. The intensity faded of course. After a year or so, we could tolerate brief separations, but Frank still phones me every day from the office just to see how I am, and I would still rather be with him than anyone else in the world. If I don’t love him exactly the way I did those first few months and years, I don’t love him any less. The love is different and still intense. I can’t imagine it ever being less. We are different people now, but we have grown together in ways that have actually brought us closer than when we started.”
Descriptions of such happy marriages occurred regularly among older interviewees. They suggest that love can replace limerence given the right circumstances.
But nonlimerent veterans of limerence may take some convincing. Some frown on any connection of limerence and marriage. As one well-known magazine editor was reported to have said:
“I was lucky always to have fallen in love with men who didn’t love me. It was tough being rejected, and my torch-carrying years were no picnic, but at least I didn’t marry any of them. I shudder to think what I might have had to look at over the breakfast table today if I had gotten one of my wishes.”
Nancy, a science reporter in her fifties, told me something similar:
“I loved Nelson for almost 10 years. It had all the earmarks of what you call ‘limerence.’ I would have given up my job or traveled to the four corners of the earth if he had wanted me to. Fortunately for me today, he insisted on remaining married and I eventually had sense enough to take advantage of an employment opportunity a few thousand miles away.”
Recently, some of the discussion about what can be called the nonlimerent ideal of marriage, a union based on mutual compatibility and affection and on a sensible partnership of common interests, has been focused on the idea of sexual nonexclusivity, such as the idea of “open marriage.”22 The major problem seems to be that both people do not feel the same way at the same time. One of my informants told of the concessions she made during a three-year period of limerent involvement with a man who made frequent public reference to the desirability of “free relationships.” But in Karen’s view:
“There was nothing at all free about it. I was not only not free to leave Saul, but I was not even free to be faithful. He practically made it a condition of continuing to see him that I go out with other men and even sleep with them. He’d then brag about our situation to others in a way that told me I had better conform or he’d find someone else with whom to carry out his fantasy of ‘intelligent involvement,’ as he called it.”
Sociologist Mirra Komarovsky’s study of the emotional and sexual life of college youth supports the tendency for the majority to require fidelity and exclusivity in their mates despite the rationality of “free” relationships. She reported that in open relationships, the less-involved partner in fact gained the degree of freedom because the more-involved individual accepted it “as the price of continuing or renewing the relationship.”23 Several interviewees complained about how their partner suggested to them that if they objected to the partner’s having other affairs, the best solution was to have other affairs themselves—a solution that to a limerent is clearly not a solution.
The ecstatic bliss of mutual love is sometimes carrried to frightening extremes as in the following statement made by a 22-year-old poet.
One glorious sunny morning, Camilla and I went out into the country to study, and while we lay on the grass I gently stroked her hair. I felt so wonderfully happy that I wanted to kill us both, so that there should be no anticlimax!24
This particular reaction to love at its zenith was also portrayed in the film Elvira Madigan, based on the suicides of two actual European lovers. In Japan, such double suicides are called shin ju. In earlier centuries, shin ju was considered an act of great beauty and nobility. Today, although it still occasionally occurs, it receives less public favor, and when suicide is involved in a love relationship, it is more likely to be the expression of despair on the part of one person.
Louise, one of my interviewees who was also a member of The Group, described a reaction to rejection much like Marilyn Weber’s, one of the students whose tales led me to begin my investigations.
“When I found Danny’s letter in the mail box, I actually staggered. I was afraid to read it; my premonition was strong. My hands literally shook as I opened it, and I don’t know whether anyone noticed or not because everything except that piece of paper in my hand was a blur. It was just one short sentence saying, ‘Let’s call it quits because it’s really over for me.’ It was total, final, the end.
I don’t remember how I made it upstairs except that I was in a state of true shock. I don’t mean surprise. I had more or less expected it. I mean real, physical shock, it was as if I had been struck on the head with a hammer. I lay down on the bed and for a long time I didn’t move. I hardly breathed. It was as if, if I remained absolutely motionless, it would in some magical way not be true. In a sense I didn’t believe it. My head whirled for a while (with my body still) considering possible logical ways to keep it from being true. (I couldn’t find any, but I tried.) Then I considered actions—really far-out things like going after Barbara (the woman toward whom Danny’s interest had shifted) with a knife or throwing myself out the window. Many other things just as bad.
“I don’t remember how long that went on, but when my roommate came in, it was dark and she turned on the light not realizing I was there. That threw me out of the kind of trance I was in, and I must have looked strange because she asked what was the matter. I tried to talk but couldn’t. I started to sob and handed her Danny’s note. From that moment, I sobbed continuously and near hysterically for about five hours until Mary made me take some aspirin and I went to sleep. But when I woke up a few hours later it began all over.
“By the next day I was a complete mess—my eyes were swollen and I looked like I had been stung by a hive of bees. It went on like that for about three days—sobbing, sleeping, remembering, more sobbing, and not eating. I drank some tea Mary made and later some beer. After about a week, I tried to go back to classes but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t care. I didn’t care enough about anything to move from the bed to the chair. I finally just went home. We told everyone I had a severe ‘allergic reaction.’
“Well, that took care of one semester. My folks were good about the whole thing. I didn’t tell them exactly what happened (it seemed insane), but I think they more or less suspected. I would weep at the drop of an association (to Danny) for months. But the worst thing was the immobility, the not caring about anything.”
Louise had had a reaction of grief; it was very similar to that described by people who suffer the death of someone close to them. As severe as her reaction was, however, Louise did recover. Later she said,
“I think it was the timing and the shock. Actually, it probably was better that way—bad as it was—than if he had tried to let me down gently. At least I knew it was over and there was nothing I could do. I don’t know why it took so long except that I was so completely in love. It was as if I had invested my entire being in the relationship. Then in the weeks before the letter, when I was beginning to see signs of trouble, I just refused to believe—until he did what I guess he had to do. About six months later I heard that he and Barbara were getting married, and I was glad in a way. It meant there would never be a relapse.”
Members of The Group showed a surprising, even alarming, willingness to use the term “depressed” in describing their feelings. Apparently normal college students, forty-two percent had been “severely depressed,” almost a third were “often depressed,” and half reported depression “about a love affair.” Thirty-five percent of The Group agreed with the following statement: “It would have been easier for me if______had broken off abruptly instead of dragging it out when it was hopeless.” Despite her shock, and the severity of the state that followed, Louise agreed.
Prolonged unhappiness following rejection is not rare nor is it confined to college students. Literary critic William Hazlitt suffered despondency, disorganization, and inability to work at his former level of productivity for almost two years after being rejected by the chambermaid he loved (mostly in silence) for a year and a half.25 Stendhal, during one of his times of grieving over an unrequited limerence, said that had an assassin shot him he’d have thanked his murderer before expiring.26 In his Memoirs of Egotism he reports: “and I often set the book down to think about Métilde. The interior of my solitary room was dreadful to me.” He once wrote, “I need, I thirst to see you. I think that I should give the rest of my life to speak to you for a quarter of an hour about the most trivial things.”27
Suicides and accidents (which often result from a kind of suicidal carelessness) are leading causes of death among those in whom limerence is also most frequent—young persons from the teens to the mid-twenties. Seventeen percent of The Group indicated they had “often thought of committing suicide,” and 64 percent of those claimed to “have seriously attempted to commit suicide.” That figure represents more than one out of every 10 (11 percent) of a set of college students who otherwise appeared perfectly normal!
Furthermore, this figure is consistent with the high suicide and accident rates among American and British students reported at least since the mid-sixties. Explanations by professionals have typically stressed such factors as pressure to succeed, fear of failure, and “identity confusion,” but careful reading of the possible causes listed reveals that many of these tragedies might in fact have involved limerence.28 For example, among other contributory factors listed are crisis, anxiety, “depression, neglect, sense of rejection, “real or imagined loss of the love object,” and the ending of a marriage through divorce, separation, or death of the mate.29 More recently, a number of writers on suicide have conceded unhappy love affairs a more prominent position in their lists of possible causes.30
As important as limerence is as an aspect of the circumstances precipitating many suicides, even this aspect of limerence has been neglected except in the arts. Major publications on suicide have either omitted a discussion of romantic love as a factor in suicide, or have buried it under general categories of “loss of a loved one,” where “loved one” might also refer to a parent, child, or close friend or relative. One recent work on suicide by psychologists did not include disappointment in love among its 44 chapters.31
Some of my interviewees had also thought of suicide, and several made serious attempts. Sometimes the attempt seemed a thinly disguised plea. Sally took a great many pills, then telephoned Irv.
“I was feeling the effects sooner than I thought I would and I could hardly dial the number. Somewhere in the back of the dimness into which my mind was fast sinking was the thought that he might already have left for lunch or be on another line! When he answered, I could hardly speak. I said, ‘Irv, I’ve taken pills.’ He later said he told his secretary to call an ambulance and was with me in minutes. I didn’t see that part. I was unconscious still holding the phone when he arrived.
“The procedure was horrible. I’d never have another ‘close call’ like that again. It was almost two weeks before I was back to normal.
“I know the doctors—one psychiatrist, in particular—said it was a ‘manipulation’ on my part and I suppose it was, in a way. Irv proposed in the hospital as soon as I came to. I really scared him, but I didn’t feel it as a manipulation. I saw it more as a test. If he loved me he’d save me, and if he didn’t, I wanted to die. I really did.
“Well, we were married for four years, and I was the one to insist on the divorce. I shudder to think of what a close call it was.”
Unfortunately, others are not “saved in time,” and some have been known to endure repeated “close calls,” stomach pumping, and other unpleasantness, including commitment to mental institutions.
Attempted suicide may have also been involved in relationships that on the surface appeared to be stable affectional bonding. Pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis and novelist Edith Lees participated in what seemed at least from Ellis’s viewpoint an idealized nonlimerent marriage. They would live together for half the year, apart for the other half, and assuming that she did not mind, he told her of his affairs with other women.
Although sex between them was discontinued after a few years, Edith—according to Ellis—found both love and security in the arrangement. But evidence of Edith’s intense suffering appears in her personal journal. She wrote that she realized her love was far greater than his, and that he made her suffer “hideously.” Edith made several suicide attempts by swallowing morphine and by trying to jump out a window. Nor was Ellis himself able to live according to his own philosophy. He was surprised at the deep hurt he experienced when later a lover rejected him.32
Suicide is only one of many types of self-injury described to me. Informants also told of suicide attempts disguised in the form of accidents. In a questionnaire administered to 65 professional and layperson adults at a scientific conference, 29 percent “considered suicide,” 6 percent admitted to a serious attempt, and 26 percent said that although they had not actually tried to kill themselves, they had driven their automobiles with “less caution than usual.”33 Self-maiming is rarely reported as such, but several interviewees’ stories incline me to suspect that the phenomenon itself is not rare. William told me about cutting his hand in a moment of limerent agony.
“No one knows how it happened. Why should they? I’m telling you in strictest confidence. It was insane, a moment of insanity I will never be allowed to forget.
“It had been back and forth for two years. She wanted me, she didn’t want me. She was finished forever, she just needed time to think. Now I think I understand what was going on. She liked me, but my extreme limerence turned her off. If I had only played it right. . . .
“Anyway, I was going literally crazy, and one note in particular threw me. All I could think of was that I wanted to stop the feelings; I thought that I could distract myself with a bigger pain. I didn’t think. It was very sudden. I walked into the kitchen and took the meat cleaver.
“Did I get distraction? Not really. I got a lot of temporary excitement, a tremendous amount of blood in the sink, a brief period of intense pain, and now I have to tell everybody I meet some tale about how a meat cleaver slipped and cut off a finger. I’m only thankful it wasn’t my thumb. I was going to cut that off, but at the last moment sheer survival intervened and I settled for the little finger of my left hand.”
In light of its effect on the rest of his life, Martin’s behavior was even more drastic than William’s.
“Sarah was stringing me along. It became clear that she was only using me as an escort when no one else was available. She really didn’t care for me the way I needed her to and I began to look elsewhere. But Sarah couldn’t leave well enough alone, so she’d come around to the store on a flimsy excuse, roll her eyes at me and hint that she was interested in having me take her out, and there would go all my progress and I was back under her spell. It was a temptation I could never resist. After an evening in which I paid the bills and she flirted with every man she saw, I was left high and dry all over again. I was an emotional slave. I thought about her constantly and lived in hope that she’d start feeling about me the way I felt about her.
“Finally, I couldn’t take it any more. You might say I broke. I did break. Another person in my state might have committed murder, but what I did was bad enough. I took a sledge hammer from the back of the shop and stormed outside. I had no plan. I just picked up the hammer and marched out into the street and began hammering the first object I came to, which happened to be a neighbor’s car. I smashed the roof in. Then I smashed the window-pane of the shop next door, Harry’s Haberdashery. I had broken about 30 store windows before they stopped me, and the funny thing is, I don’t think I was crazy. I knew what I was doing. I was trying to stop the pain and I succeeded. I spent six weeks in jail, paid $10,000 in fines, and had to face all those guys whose property I had damaged.
“The one good result was that I never saw Sarah again. I guess she heard about it. Every blow of the hammer was a blow to my insanity. It’s funny to have gained sanity from a crazy rampage like that. Not that relief came immediately. At first I was so taken up by the results of my destructiveness—the police, the guys in the neighborhood and all. Then not seeing her anymore helped a lot. Of course, no one knew what was behind it. I made up something about headaches. You’re the only one I’m telling the real story to.”
This confession, like William’s, suggests that the attempt to find relief from the agony of acute unhappy limerence is not uncommon, nor is it confined to persons considered unbalanced in a psychiatric sense. At the moment the act is committed, they are, by their own evaluation, “crazy,” but I was repeatedly impressed with the absence of psychological or emotional “symptoms” they displayed after limerence and its agonies had subsided and good sense returned.
Ways of affecting conscious experience through “mind chasing” substances were often associated with limerence, according to both interviews and questionnaire responses. Several spoke of actions toward LO under the influence of alcohol. Dee so embarrassed herself that she strictly limited her drinking ever after:
“During that one night I behaved like a different person. First, I went into the bar by myself. I’m not talking about today’s type of singles bar, but a real neighborhood saloon in which if you were there and female you were either with an escort or you were advertising your sexual availability. This was 25 years ago, you must remember.
“Anyway, just going into the place was already not me. Then to add to that, I went right up to Earl and the woman he was with and tried to get him to leave her and go with me. I don’t know what happened or what he said, but I do remember that he was really firm when he told me to leave him alone. I felt horrible. When I woke up the next morning I felt thoroughly humiliated. Without the alcohol, I never would have acted that way. It was a lesson I never forgot.”
Some evidence exists that after the first experience (s), usually in youth and early adulthood, certain coping strategies may be learned that reduce the risks.
Tess felt that although she was still vulnerable both to limerence and to its potential for inflicting great suffering, she now knew ways of handling herself that would prevent her from committing drastic action.
“I can still suffer, but I know that recovery comes in time. When I was younger, I truly thought it was the end of the world. I’ve learned not to feel that this one person is the total key to my happiness, even though, in a large sense, he is. It’s hard to explain but when I was embroiled in those first romances back in high school, each one was almost a life-or-death matter. Now I can still fall in love hard, but I feel a certain cautiousness about it, as if part of me is waiting for the situation to return to normal and part of me knows that it will someday.”
On the other hand, some of the most harrowing tales I heard were those of older persons for whom the experience was not new. Perhaps one learns to interpret the feelings somewhat differently with experience, but experience alone seems no safeguard against vulnerability.
When a limerent person is in an actual relationship with LO, LO may show sexual interest in someone else. The limerent may react intensely, even desperately, because sex seems inextricably tied to the “return of feeling.” The exceptions occur when “return of feeling” is shown explicitly by some other means. For example, a pimp may be in love with a prostitute, and while he may not find the image of her sexual interactions with others particularly pleasing, their meaning makes them acceptable to him. She might even express her love (limerence) for him by providing others with sexual “favors” and thereby advancing his financial cause.
Thus prostitute and procurer can be in love despite the unsavory (and seemingly incompatible with love) nature of their sexual transactions with others. A prostitute explained how Percy separated her sexual activities with customers from evidence of her returned limerence:
“He didn’t care what I did—really, anything that paid was okay so long as I took good physical care of myself—washing up afterward, regular medical treatments, etc., and so long as I did not kiss them on the neck. That was his, he insisted. That was what marked the difference between what brought in the money and what was out of bounds.”
Thus those exotic societies in which copulation serves “other” functions—hospitality among Eskimos, for example—and arouses no jealousy, are not so enigmatic after all.
Closer to home is the ability of participants in extramarital love affairs to tolerate continued sexual relations between spouses. I am not speaking here of the nonlimerent lover who is not concerned about mutuality or exclusivity, but about a limerent lover who does not interpret the act as a violation of exclusivity. John told me how he felt about Marie’s continuing conjugal relationships with her husband, Bill:
“I had no money and no job. Marie meant everything in the world to me. My only real goal in life was for us to be together. But in order to achieve that goal, I had first to go to school, find a way of supporting myself, and all the rest. If Marie left Bill now, we were doomed and our love with it. As totally in love as I was, I could not be blind to that. If Marie left Bill then, she would get nothing, well, not enough, no matter how she fought the case. If she came to live with me, he’d really nail her, and, besides, I’ve only got a room and can scarcely pay for that. I loved her too much to do that to her.
“Bill loved her, too, and was jealous as hell. Fortunately, his sexual demands on her were not extraordinary, and there was no other way, for the time being anyway, except that she sleep with him. I didn’t like it. It made my flesh crawl to think of it, except that I knew it meant nothing to her. I even encouraged her after a while to pretend it was me, which she said she did, when it was necessary for her to endure it.”
In other cases when both partners were married and unwilling to leave their spouses (for financial reasons or out of consideration for social position or for the ill-effects of divorce on the children) some degree of sexual interaction between spouses was sometimes tolerated.
It is in relation to exclusivity that the limerence madness appears on occasion to transcend the boundaries of silent suffering, such as Fred endured, and find expression in actions of violence and cruelty.34 What spells the difference between the long suffering diary keeper and the wielder of weapons against a roaming LO may relate to how limerent individuals interpret not only actions of their LO, but limerence itself. I spoke with many trapped in a limerence they would like to end. When tiny, intermittent flickers of hope for reciprocation become chains of enduring bondage to a passion which provides no joy and unmitigated pain, some become enraged. Brad described his feelings to me in a long session which he allowed me to tape.
“It had gone on for three years. I felt victimized, a casualty of her beauty and self-assurance and of a society that encourages the madness. Of course I was angry at myself. Every time I called her and received her combination of feigned concern and cool independence, every time I let myself hope only to have her wave me away from her as if I were an insect whenever something of greater interest came along, or every time I found I had given up a day or a week to that old demon, Revery, I would counterreact with fury.
“Sometimes I savor in my mind’s eye the most minute details of committing acts of violence to human flesh. Sometimes the victim was whoever it was I thought she was seeing at the time. Sometimes Barbara was herself the victim.
“Usually it was an instance of what seemed to be her lack of consideration, her deliberate, as I saw it, need to keep me as her willing slave, or some such nonsense, that started me off.”
Henry VIII of England, a flagrant limerent both in his reported behavior and in the poetry he left behind, was suspicious of signs of nonlimerence in his LO and furiously jealous. He combined his limerences with self-deprecation (and quite possibly mind-deranging physical ills) that resulted in the famous rages and acts of vengeance for which he will always be remembered. Perhaps his influence extended to the setting of a negative example for his daughter, Elizabeth I, “The Virgin Queen.”
The reaction of rage seems to be more frequent in men than in women.35 There were more anger reactions reported by males on the questionnaires. There are more Othellos than Salomes in the classics of fiction. The number of murders committed each year by men is many-fold greater than the number of murders committed by women.
As it was for Henry VIII’s wives, the role of LO can be hazardous to your health and welfare. Open any newspaper for evidence. For example, in 1977, 25 people in the Bronx died because of a “lover’s quarrel,” in which a rejected lover sought vengeance. The rage of a 40-year-old man whose LO left him alone to attend a dance with her sister led to the death by fire of the two women and 23 other persons—after the man poured gasoline on the stairs to the dance hall and ignited it.
In the opera Carmen, the limerent she has rejected (Don Jose) appears in the final act to murder her for her fickleness. Bonnie Joan Garland, a 20-year-old Yale music student from White Plains, New York, became a modern-day Carmen when her rejected lover, 24-year-old Richard Herrin, bludgeoned her to death in her sleep.
Just as the audience to the opera is moved to feel pity for the anguished Don José, according to news accounts, there was a certain discernible attitude of community sympathy for Herrin, who was said to have made certain that Bonnie was asleep before striking her, and to have driven about for several hours (during which she might have been saved) before confessing his crime of passion to a priest in a church a hundred miles away.36
Even among my informants, there were some rather vicious incidents—battered wives and children, ugly assaults on property, legal actions taken regarding property, suffering on the part of children whose parents’ wish to cause pain to a former mate overcame their concern to spare the feelings of children tormented by conflicting demands and divided loyalties. One woman was forced to stand by while her husband threw three years’ work in the form of a book manuscript into the fire because he found the story “proved” her betrayal. Another woman described how she had torn up the only existing, and much treasured picture of her lover’s dead mother. A mother told me of the tragic death of her son whose “girlfriend” drove her car into him in a fit of jealous rage. Others followed the example of Alfredo in La Traviata and publicly insulted their LOs. Phil was one:
“I was a friend of the student newspaper editor and I gave him some phony information in which I claimed that Sally was one of the women behind some letters that had been circulating on campus about certain faculty members and certain students. The women were angry because they claimed that women students were being harassed sexually. What I did was a literal crime. I don’t know if it is a crime, but it is certainly something I’m not proud of. Sally was one of the women, but what I said wasn’t true. The point is I was in such a dumb and blind condition of frustration and anger that in a way it’s lucky I could get it out of my system that way. Fortunately, there was no real damage.”
Although most homicides are not even indirectly linked to limerence, a little more than a third of them in this country concern sexual partners or rivals. Some of these seem very likely to be associated with limerence. Marvin E. Wolfgang notes that the “area of heterosexual relationships is one exceptionally fraught with potential violence whether within the marriage or outside it.” Of homicide victims studied, 34.5 percent were spouses, paramours, mistresses, rivals, or paramours of the offenders’ mates or homosexual partners, with sexual infidelity frequently a precipitating factor. In any case limerence is at times implicated in violence to self, to property, or to others, including serious assault and even murder.37
Intensity of jealousy is not a measure of limerence, since I talked with people who gave every indication of being limerent and who reported minimal or no jealousy. As grief-stricken as they may have been at LO’s inconstancy, they did not respond in anger either at LO, or at LO’s LO, but only in sadness over the loss. As Lilly said,
“How could I be angry? Of course I was emotionally upset, as well as wounded and desperate, but still I knew he couldn’t help it, and I could even see her good points much as I felt I’d have loved to hate her, if I could let myself. I felt terrible, worse than I had ever felt about anything in my life, but my sense didn’t let me take it out on them.
“In other words, I was thinking about all those stories you hear about people taking revenge, murdering or something equally gruesome; and I thought not very friendly things, too, but along the line of ‘Some day they’d have a falling out, he’ll realize what he lost when he rejected me,’ etc. Really, no impulses in the direction of violence. Or even anger—except at myself for wasting so much hopeless time.”
Lilly does experience anger, however slight, and somehow it ends up being directed toward herself rather than toward LO or even the rival. She knows she has no reason to be angry at others who cannot help doing what they’re doing, but she feels anger anyway.
Suppose Lilly didn’t know they could not “help” reacting as they did? Can we explain Lilly’s inaction, compared to the murderous vengeance shown by some people, by differences in what their “intellects” tell them? Is the intellect a source of differences that are not basic to the limerent reaction? Both Lilly and the man who caused the dance hall fire are similar in that both were rejected. Were both limerent? If so, was there any difference between them other than their sex? The violence that seems associated with limerence, and that Lilly’s story and those of other interviewees tend to confirm, varies greatly from one person to another. I have not interviewed any I knew to be murderers; those whose tales I was privileged to hear tended toward Lilly’s end of the scale—a discernible feeling kept, however, well within bounds.
And to think that I have wasted several years of my life, and that I have wanted to die, that I have had my greatest love, for a woman who was not my kind.
—Marcel Proust38
The personal journals which were made available to me, including the story of Fred and Laura, were examples of but one of the major forms of unpublished limerent writing. The other two are poetry and personal correspondence with LO. It appears to be characteristic of the state of limerence that you are inclined to express your feelings in writing. But since the limerent state is unknown to or denied by many, and since it so often involves behavior not in accord with the best interests of the actor, shame prevents public display. The fullest expression of limerence in published writing occurs in fiction and in song. Stendhal hesitated about publishing his diaries with their revealing self-disclosures. Instead he published novels. The statement quoted above was what Proust had his character Swann say about himself, not what Proust said about himself. The impulse, described by many interviewees, to tell all, is often stifled in anticipation of dire social consequence.
What cannot be told as reality may be acceptable as fantasy, as romance, or as adventure. Some years after the breakthrough transatlantic flight with Helen Payne, the first person I had heard confess to lifelong nonlimerence, I asked her why the nonlimerent person not only can tolerate but apparently enjoy the portrayal of the limerent state in drama and fiction. Her response was that she had always viewed it as romance, as opposed to reality. She explained that just as a person who has never set foot on an oceangoing vessel may enjoy an imaginative account of high seas’ adventure, the person who has never experienced limerence may enjoy what to them is an entirely unreal and imaginary account of enchantment by another person and the “noble suffering” of the romantic lover. The same material, of course, elicits different reactions depending on the reader’s state. Limerence has been called “romantic love” as opposed to “real love” because to a vocal and often very articulate segment of the population it is unreal. But even when limerence is not believed in, or believed in only secretly, it still makes a good tale.
Morton Hunt reported that the East Germans attempted for 20 years to rid the society of romantic love, which they called “bourgeois trash.” But their attacks proved futile, and they encouraged their writers to produce again the love stories the people appeared to need.39 Writers who, like Communist officials maintain a culturally determinist position that the experience of being in love results from its ubiquitous portrayal, find it hard to believe that the reverse may in fact be true.40
Story writers use a multitude of devices to keep their characters from experiencing premature reciprocity, at which point the story would end and the lovers go off into mutual bliss that might be ecstastic for the participants, but would not hold the interest of the reader for very long. That one or the other of the two individuals is committed to a third person is perhaps the most common device, and Hollywood has erected many a light comedy on various sorts of misunderstanding.
When the factor that inhibits full expression of limerent mutuality is the previous commitment of one or both parties to someone else, the story traditionally ends in tragedy rather than mutual reciprocation. This plot is so frequent that I’m sure every reader can think immediately of several examples, particularly among the more “serious” dramas of grand opera, ballet, and classical literature. A random set of examples include Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, among novels, the ballet Giselle, and the opera Madame Butterfly.
Limerents have certainly written a lot of poetry, and a lot of it has been published. Sappho’s poems or Shakespeare’s sonnets or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s come immediately to mind; most of the great poets, such as Yeats, have written poems about love. Some poems give very accurate descriptions of the limerent state. For example, Samuel Daniel’s poem expresses in a few lines how hard it is to cure, how it grows with adversity and diminishes with reciprocation, and, generally, the puzzlement it evokes:
Love is a sickness full of woes,
All remedies refusing;
A plant that with most cutting grows,
Most barren with best using.
Why so?
More we enjoy it, more it dies,
If not enjoy’d, it sighing cries,
Hey ho.41
Literature is not, of course, the only art affected by limerence. There may be a relationship between limerence and music that is more intimate, even physiological, than any that can be produced by words alone. Musical tempo varies, but it does so roughly within the range of the human heartbeat. Is music therefore a means of accentuating and transforming the heartbeat?
Although many poems concern limerence, a larger proportion of songs do. It has been reported that approximately 85 percent of popular music concerns love.42 Similarly, although many plays concern limerence, a larger proportion of dramas set to music do. The celebration of limerence in opera can be understood as an aspect of the nineteenth century shift from arranged marriage to marriage by inclination. The plots of many operas are tales of limerence. If the lovers are permitted to mate at the end, the opera, is “light,” but the best-loved operas are “tragic”; for example, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Manon, La Traviata, and Rigoletto.
Limerent interviewees frequently told of their “use of music” during limerent unhappiness. Several said that it “doesn’t hurt as much” when accompanied by music. Relief did not seem to depend on the type of music. Some used rock; others used classics. A connection between music and limerence is also suggested by the fact that adolescence is a time when interest both in music and in limerence is greater than what it had been during childhood and, in many cases, what it will be in adulthood.
One thing is clear: The relationship between love and music is strong for many of us. Stendhal went so far as to say that “perfect music has the same effect on the heart as the presence of the beloved.”43 Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night opens with the Duke’s complaint about his attraction for Olivia:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.44
Perhaps the relationship between limerence and the arts is best described as expressive: the feelings of limerence are expressed in the artistic product, and the limerent person seems to achieve a degree of emotional satisfaction from exposure to limerence-inspired artistic productions. But limerents, in their intense drive for relief from limerent yearnings, are also likely to become a sort of prey. The limerent state weakens certain sensibilities much as it strengthens others, since the limerent is particularly vulnerable to anything that may increase hope.
Any discussion of the significance of limerence to the culture in general should include its role in commerce. There are many ways in which profits can and have been made from appealing to limerent vulnerability. Although we may think of the arts primarily as a means of self-expression, we cannot ignore the fact that both the commissioning and distribution of artistic products are business enterprises. Money is involved with art whether it be theater, book publishing, the managing of concert tours, ballet companies, or the more flagrant commercialism of popular music and television. To judge from the subject matter of many such productions on the market, limerence sells.
It sells specific products that promise the limerent man or woman a better likelihood of achieving limerent aims. There is an enormous market for items and services that help people beautify themselves, attain general self-improvement, and develop expertise in everything from the preparation of gourmet cuisine to the playing of a musical instrument. Fervent concern for improvement of attractiveness to LO reduces sales resistance to cosmetics, shampoo, and hair coloring, diets, exercise programs, clothing, fancy automobiles, and innumerable other consumer items, including those sold as gifts to LOs—books, jewelry, and, of course, flowers. A wedding, the culimination of romance in some circles, is a business bonanza; there is no end to what can be sold, from insurance and washing machines to bone china and sterling silver.
Commercial establishments and services purport to aid the search for limerent reciprocity. These run the gamut from bars, restaurants, cocktail lounges, and private clubs to cruises and other vacations which appeal primarily to “singles.” Other commercial enterprises of particular appeal to people in a state of limerent readiness are personal advertisements in the columns of newsstand and other periodicals. Some are aimed at sexual liaisons, but computer dating services in particular attempt to match people with regard to their potential for more enduring relationships, thereby supplementing the many traditional social functions of civic and church organizations in providing a meeting ground for persons in search of LOs and, of course, marital partners.
Do such cultural phenomena influence the incidence of limerence in the society? It seems financially profitable to hold limerence as the ideal. Such commercial use of limerence may also exert an important influence on people not in a state of limerence themselves, making them inclined to behave in ways that resemble limerence.
It should not be inferred that an interest in more purely sexual liaisons is not also of commercial importance. In recent years the proliferation of pornography and large-circulation periodicals devoted to sexuality containing not the slightest trace of limerence attests to limerence having no exclusive hold on the motivations of those who spend money.