Limerence & Love "Addiction"

How can something that feels so good begin to feel so bad? When you’re in limerence with someone who can’t or doesn’t reciprocate, you can find yourself in a living nightmare.

Limerence can be the beginning feelings of love - and when it is reciprocated, there is no other feeling quite like it on earth. When limerence is NOT reciprocated, or there is confusion, mixed signals or ambiguity, you become caught in the negative limerence cycle, which is both damaging to your self esteem as well as your heart. You can become addicted to the highs - when you feel as though the person you are in love with reciprocates. If you feel this sporadically, or intermittently, you are then in a pattern of intermittent reinforcement, which is the most addictive kind of psychological conditioning. This is why people get addicted to gambling and slot machines. Sometimes you might “win” big and the flood of dopamine and feel good hormones and neurotransmitters tells your body to keep going.

The truth is, you’re in pain. You don’t want to “win big sometimes” in love. You want to feel secure, grounded, and that you can lean into the person you love and trust with your heart and soul.

Limerence and love addiction can fall into the same category because of the cycle of self-abandonment that happens in both. When you begin to only rely on another person for your sense of steadiness and feeling good, you will always be at the mercy of someone else. You begin to lose sight of yourself, your talents. Passions. Goals. What you like about yourself. Your strengths. Everything revolves around getting a hit of your LO’s attention to feel OK.

This is not love. This is a grasping for something that you long ago felt like you couldn’t get or didn’t deserve. This feels familiar, like something just out of reach. This feels like “love means longing” or “I can never be fully loved.”

These are the narratives your mind made up a long time ago and you are still playing out now, as an attempt at a do over. Limerence can be a way of feeling these feelings in a safe way. You don’t risk the same vulnerability that a mutually involved relationship demands. You get to feel the same feelings you are probably used to: feeling rejected and feeling like you are not worthy. This is no longer the truth, but you may cling to this because it’s been part of your identity.

The cure? Facing what you’re afraid of - a mutual relationship where you have to be vulnerable and intimate with someone who has the capacity to love you back in the same way you know that you are capable of. Limerence has shown you the depths of how much you can love… that’s not the deficit. Learning to be more comfortable in the face of real intimacy and vulnerability, this is the next step on the way.