“I’ve been wrestling with a dilemma,” said the email. “I have been blogging for seven years under a pseudonym, but the time has come for a change.” “Dr L” – as its author was known to thousands of visitors to his website, Living With Limerence – was finally “coming out”.
Tom Bellamy’s blog has for years served as a haven for anonymous, agonised souls living with the condition known as “limerence”, an infatuation with another person so debilitating it has been likened to an addiction. Limerence’s initial euphoria can descend into the isolation of being cognitively trapped in a state of craving. Without formal recognition by mental health professionals, those who experience limerence – they define themselves as “limerents” – tread a well-worn path to the door of Dr Google, and then to Dr L.
There are limerents in the UK and the US; in India and Germany; in the Philippines and Singapore. They are as young as teenagers and as old as octogenarians. They are single and married, men and women. What unites them, as seen in the thousands of comments on Bellamy’s blog, is their desire to escape from, in the words of one limerent, “total mental capture”.
Bellamy is a mild-mannered, salt-and-pepper-goateed associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Nottingham. What had compelled this neuroscientist, moonlighting as a writer about obsessive love, to go public? The first, slightly cynical answer is that a literary agent persuaded him to write a book on his findings. The more altruistic answer is that Bellamy genuinely wants to help limerents. He has seen marriages collapse. Jobs lost. Lives annihilated.
“It’s a general, background sense of despair,” he told me via video call from his book-lined home office. “There are a lot of people that have suffered.” Bellamy, 48, now wants to scientifically legitimise limerence, to bring the subject out of the cyber shadows and into public consciousness. “Limerence is an altered state of mind that some people slip into when they first begin to fall in love, or at least become infatuated with another person.”
Asked why we need a new word for the age-old heartache of infatuation, Bellamy explained: “It’s really a question of degree and the impact that it has. Limerence makes it almost impossible to concentrate on anything other than how much you want them. Another person dominates your mind so completely that you feel like you are addicted to them. Limerence is when a crush has taken over your life.”
Bellamy started the blog in 2017 while trying to navigate his own two-year limerence for a colleague at his lab in the life sciences department – a colleague who was not his wife. “I was clueless in the sense that I’d never heard of limerence.”
Bellamy, who grew up in Cheltenham with a biology lecturer for a father, always wanted to become a scientist. He now specialises in neurotransmission, the process of signals passing between neurons that underlies all cognitive processes.
But none of his scientific knowledge could save him from the turmoil he felt over his colleague. “I knew I still loved my wife very much, and I didn’t want to leave her,” Bellamy said. He could see that his altered state of mind was “a threat to my happiness”, rather than an adventure worth pursuing.
Bellamy’s quest for answers led him to the work of Dorothy Tennov, the psychologist whose 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, coined the term and advanced the theory of limerence. Her work was eclipsed, however, by attachment theory, which came to prominence at the same time. The concept of limerence soon faded into obscurity.
“Once I realised it was a problem, and once I realized I couldn’t just turn it off,” Bellamy disclosed his state to his wife of 20 years, Teika, also a scientist and a writer. Her response – to reframe the problem and tackle it with her husband – was perhaps more genial than many wives would be able to muster. That was in large part because Teika, too, has experienced limerence: when they met, she and Bellamy had what she calls “the unicorn situation of mutual limerence”.
Limerence occurs innocuously, and in stages. Its catalyst is what Bellamy refers to as “the glimmer”, the first meeting between the limerent and their person, referred to in limerence parlance as the “limerent object”, or LO.
“You recognise at a fairly deep level, a subconscious level, that they are unusually attractive to you. There’s some potency about this other person that makes them particularly romantically attractive to you.” At this point, explains Bellamy, the brain’s arousal and dopamine-driven reward systems are engaged, causing a faster heartrate, sweaty palms and racing thoughts.
Next comes euphoria. One of Bellamy’s readers describes it as “like living in a dream or a piece of music or a perpetual rainstorm that never let up. The flow of images and colours and emotions/sensations just never stopped.” Then a third neural system kicks in: the hormonal system of bonding, which floods the body with oxytocin and vasopressin.This feels so good that the limerent’s powerful dopamine-seeking system compels them to seek out another “hit” of their LO. This is when addiction can set in. The compulsion to be near the LO – even if just by checking their social media, messaging them, or daydreaming about them – “just ends up reinforcing the reward-seeking drive. And so you get stuck in that loop of constantly wanting the limerent object, but not being able to reliably secure them. That’s when the psychological distress begins to kick in, and you start getting things like intrusive thoughts that you can’t control anymore, and you want to turn them off and you just can’t.”
One of Bellamy’s readers writes: “I look for him and crave the feeling that I get when I see him, even as I know that I don’t want to go back to all the lying and hiding… I know I don’t want him – just the flood of chemicals that he triggers. It can be really discouraging and feel shameful to be this kind of junkie.” This purgatorious longing – which Bellamy calls “limerence limbo” – can last for months, years or, in the case of one of his readers, four decades.
The “killer combo of [the] glimmer, hope and uncertainty” is what allows limerence to fester. Hope can be in the form of genuine, mixed messages from the LO, or friendliness mistaken for reciprocal ardour. Uncertainty is often present thanks to religious, cultural or sexual orientation barriers, by physical distance or temporal obstacles, or because the limerent or their LO is married. A significant chunk of Bellamy’s readers are partners of people in the throes of affairs, or affair partners themselves.
I am surprised to learn that neither Bellamy nor his progenitor, Dorothy Tennov, view limerence as a pathology. Both argue that limerence is simply how many people fall in love. Some fall hard and all-consumingly, whereas other, non-limerent people descend steadily. They report that limerents and non-limerents tend to view the other’s experience of falling in love as alien to their own experience.
Bellamy believes that “at least half of the population” experiences limerence, and that half of those again experience it to a detrimental degree. “There are two tribes of people who experience early love in fundamentally different ways,” he said, “and that explains a lot of the heartache”.
“Smitten: Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence and How to Make Love Last” will be published in April (Watkins Press)
[See also: Why we’re stuck in Ancient Rome]
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