Have you ever been so absorbed by someone that it felt like an illness? Compulsively reading their texts, analysing their every word and feeling like your entire sense of self-worth hinges on their attention? Popular culture romanticises this kind of emotional intensity – think Romeo and Juliet, Olivia Rodrigo’s driver’s license, or even Mr Darcy’s fixation on Elizabeth Bennet. But these aren’t just heightened crushes or poetic passions. More often, they’re actually something else entirely: limerence – a deeply potent state of obsessive romantic infatuation that blurs the line between love and fixation.
Until recently, limerence has been a little-known phenomenon, perhaps because it can easily be mistaken for ‘normal’ infatuation. But now, more and more people have started to self-identify as limerents after seeing conversations about it online. On TikTok, #limerence has over 129k hits, while the subreddit r/limerence has over 17,000 members sharing their experiences and advice. It was only through reading these stories and seeing similarities in my overwhelming romantic fixations that I was able to diagnose myself as a limerent, too. During the early days of relationships, I’ve regularly stayed up late into the night scouring the internet for tiny scraps of information about the person I’m seeing. I’ll re-read texts from them until I can recite the messages word for word. At times, my fixations have been so overwhelming that it has been near-impossible to do anything but think about them.
This month, neuroscientist Dr Tom Bellamy unpacks the tangled chemistry of infatuation in his new book Smitten – a deep dive into the science behind one of dating’s most electric emotion. Dr Bellamy doesn’t just study limerence; he’s lived it. His fascination with the subject began after he unexpectedly developed intense feelings for a co-worker, despite being happily married. “It was the first time in my life I had started to feel limerence for someone I didn’t want to feel limerence for,” he says. “It became a problem that I needed to solve.”
That problem sparked a deep scientific inquiry. Drawing on his background in contemporary neuroscience, Dr Bellamy began to decode limerence from the inside out. “Limerence gives you an enormous natural high at the beginning,” he explains. While in a state of limerence, the brain’s arousal, reward and bonding systems will be activated. “If it goes on for too long, it can turn into what is essentially an addiction,” Dr Bellamy says. “It can change from a pleasing reward to compulsive obsession.”
“Limerence gives you an enormous natural high at the beginning. If it goes on for too long, it can turn into what is essentially an addiction”
“Limerence has a direction to it, a kind of irresistible momentum,” writes Dr Bellamy in Smitten. “It starts well, as a highly pleasurable state that seems to be all upside, and with little incentive for the limerent to question what’s going on. Unwittingly, though, they succumb to obsessive infatuation in subtle stages they hardly notice”. The time spent in each phrase “varies between people”, but Dr Bellamy believes it useful to mark the transitions: “It allows us to understand how the changing psychological experience relates to what is going on in the brain”.
Dr Bellamy separates limerence into five distinct periods: initiation, euphoria, psychological fixation, desperation and recovery. During these stages, your “mood can swing from euphoric highs to sickening lows,” he explains. “The first flush of limerent exhilaration transforms our mental and physical selves: our moods will lift, we’ll feel more optimistic and our bodies might even feel lighter. But this “desire can develop into an irresistible craving... dominating all other concerns”.
From his research, Dr Bellamy has found that many limerents relate this experience to drug addiction: feeling high, craving more and suffering from withdrawal. “The arousal, reward and bonding systems that produce the ecstatic connection of limerence are also central to the development of addiction,” he says. “When driven too hard and for too long, these systems adapt and remodel. Reward-seeking becomes unbalanced and difficult to resist.”
The average estimate of a limerent experience is “around 18 months,” he continues. But the time it takes to reach the recovery stage depends on a “complex set of factors”, which include the limerent’s behaviour, the limerent object’s behaviour, how much time the limerent spends with the limerent object, whether they’ve ever been intimate and the limerent’s psychological history. “Limerence can be more likely if you are sad, or lonely, or grieving, or bored,” says Dr Bellamy. “There is an unpredictable alchemy that depends on where you are in your life and where your limerent object is in theirs, and the circumstances under which you meet.”
This is different to our classical understanding of love and is widely understood as a “person addiction”. While non-limerants might be comfortable keeping a healthy distance with someone they’re romantically engaged with, for limerents, they become the centre of their world. “Your thoughts and feelings are at the complete mercy of this person, who has entered your life and upended it,” describes Dr Bellamy. “The attraction is so strong it feels uncanny. If you are in the same room as them, you are hyper-aware of their presence.”
For people in the throes of limerence, this can be all-encompassing. It hijacks your thoughts, amplifies every interaction and can feel as consuming as it is exhilarating: 29-year-old Lewis describes himself as a “serial offender.” Despite only recently hearing about the term limerence, Lewis says he’s had an “issue with obsession for as long as [he] can remember”: “When I was younger, I would pass it off as crushes and just being a kid. I would write bad poetry about them; give them gifts that were far in excess of the level our relationship was at.”
There have been times when Lewis has been so preoccupied with his limerent object that he hasn’t been able to eat or sleep. “I couldn’t focus on my work; I couldn’t enjoy being with my friends,” he says. While Lewis says it has been helpful to recognise that some of his feelings are “irrational”, he “still sometimes [does] things which are a little bit mad”. Last year, he flew “halfway across the world” to visit a woman he’d only met once before. “I’ve freaked people out – rightly so, –with my intensity and I’ve acted with a level of devotion that has far outstripped what any normal person would feel to do.”
This has meant that, for Lewis, dating has sometimes been “a struggle”. Now he’s experienced the highs of limerence, nothing else compares: “If it’s not all-encompassing and life-engulfing, I don’t want it. So I think there have been people I’ve dated in the past where it hasn’t worked out, not because I didn’t like them, but because they didn’t attain the status, so to speak, of being a limerent object,” he says.
Similarly, 28-year-old Clare has had recurring cases of limerence throughout her life. “Recently, I went on a first date and became romantically obsessed, despite only spending three hours with her... I just craved seeing her again,” she says. Once Clare feels this way, she often finds herself “daydreaming scenarios and situations” about their far-off future, as well as finding it impossible to stop talking about them to all of [her] friends. “It consumes my thoughts. I put them on a pedestal,” she concludes.
Certainly, these sorts of intense scenarios are things I recognise. I’ve regularly found myself drawing up a world with someone I barely know, imagining our next interaction in minute detail. While previous research from found that 4-5% of the population have admitted to experiencing limerence, Dr Bellamy actually thinks that figure is way higher. “From the research I’ve done, it seems that about 50% of people are capable of experiencing the wild euphoria and an altered state of mind in the early stages of love,” Dr Bellamy says, which he thinks is a key component of limerence. “People who don’t have that slightly out-of-control, over-the-top emotional response are non-limerants.”
“I’ve regularly found myself drawing up a world with someone I barely know, imagining our next interaction in minute detail”
Those who have an anxious attachment style are most likely to be limerants, with 79% saying they’ve encountered it at some point in their lives. “Anxious attachment isn’t required for limerence, but it seems to correlate with it very strongly,” Dr Bellamy adds. In today’s always-online world, however, social media can stretch those feelings out even longer. Social media offers a constant stream of reminders – photos, status updates, even casual interactions – that can keep the emotional fixation alive. “Most people have some sort of social media presence. You can follow them, see photos, even have conversations with them online. It provides an awful lot of opportunities to reinforce the glimmer and obsession,” he says.
And, for some, the experience can take a toll. “It has been really unhealthy,” says Lewis. While Clare admits that her mood has been completely “dictated by whether [her limerent object] replied or not and how the relationship was going”. I’ve previously found myself stuck in similar emotional loops – instinctively watching their Stories, analysing their replies for double meanings and mentally spiralling if they left me on read. It felt like my entire self-worth hinged on their attention and one wrong step could send me crashing. Indeed, “limerence can tip over into misery,” Dr Bellamy admits.
Still, he believes it’s not inherently harmful, and the issues usually arise when the feelings aren’t mutual. “It is possible to have limerence and for everything to work out – for those feelings to transform into stable, long-term love,” he says. But, for people who find themselves in unwanted periods of limerence, Dr Bellamy advises a strategic, “deprogramming” approach “to break the habits that reinforce addiction.”
Being aware that you’re in a state of limerence is a good first step, but “it will require behavioural change” to reach a state of recovery, he says. Practically, this means limiting contact with your limerent object, as “for any addict, having access to their supply is a constant temptation”. With the brain’s reward system lighting up in a state of limerence, he also advises “breaking the link between the limerent object and reward”, suggesting you replace happy memories you have with your limerent object with other, more painful recollections, such as “a time you felt ridiculous or humiliated”.
When it comes to professional support, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can be helpful, alongside setting firm boundaries with the limerent object. “It will be difficult,” says Dr Bellamy, but a sign of progress is when “the appeal of daydreaming about your limerent object begins to wear off.” As he puts it: “Limerence is a life-quake – but it can also be a chance for renewal.”
