In 2002, the bachata musical group Aventura released a single that hit the charts in Spain. And after more than 20 years it is still one of the best known bachatas. so much so that Rosalía sang it together with Romeo Santos. Its beginning surely sounds familiar to you because “it’s five in the morning and I haven’t slept at all…”
“No ohhhhh, it’s not love, what you feel. It’s called obsession. An illusion in your thinking that makes you do things. That’s how the heart works.” I speak of Obsession and I do it because it has a lot to do with the term about relationships that I am going to explain to you today, limerence. With this small fragment of the song we enter a disorder that makes it difficult for us to find a partner.
What is limerence
The word limerence comes from the English “limerence”, a term coined by the American psychologist Dorothy Tennov. This concept appeared in the book Love and Limerence – The experience of being in lovewhich he published in 1979. Over the years, people began to talk about it as the “love sickness”.
Love And Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, 2nd Edition
And it is that limerence is an involuntary state of mind that results from a romantic attraction to someone in which you feel an obsessive need to be reciprocatedas explained by Marta Garrido González, clinical psychologist at the center Psychologists Malaga PsicoAbreu. It is the obsession of being loved. In fact, it is an obsessive compulsive disorder focused on love.
As explained to us in WorldPsychologists, limerence is “a form of obsessive love that can start from a crush but that shows its most extreme form, becoming a real problem both for the person who suffers it and for the object of the obsession.” It is not that we feel so in love that our hearts explode, it is that the person suffering from limerence has obsessive thoughts with the person he loves.
Love or limerence?
Although in the book Tennov associated limerence with romantic love.a concept that psychologist María Esclapez rightly demystifies in her book on healthy relationships I love me, I love you, the truth is that there are critical voices who think otherwise. Albert Wakin and Duyen B. Vo affirmed in this study that “love and limerence are not interchangeable concepts and that neither of them is a subset of the other”, also pointing out that the limerence is a necessarily negative and detrimental involuntary condition”.
I love myself, I love you: A guide to developing healthy relationships (and improving the ones you already have) (Bruguera Tendencies)
Although love and limerence could be confused in the early phases of a romantic relationship, which are attraction, falling in love, disappointment and real love as Esclapez explains, over time they have unique and differentiated profiles. No, love and limerence are not the same.
And beware, an important detail: limerence can be awakened both in a love relationship, and with someone we have never even metlike a famous singer like Harry Styles, for example.
In fact, for some specialists, to talk about limerence there must be a component of hope in something that you cannot have. anna runklefounder of Crappy Childhood Fairy, explains on her TikTok account that limerence is directly related to childhood trauma.
@childhood_fairy ♬ original sound – Crappy Childhood Fairy 🧚♀️
According to MundoPsicologos, “limerence or a limerence attitude occurs in the case of people who have a tendency to become obsessed” and sometimes the causes of this behavior can be found in childhood, with child abandonment or children with low self-esteem “than in adulthood they lead to the anxious search to be loved and reciprocated, becoming obsessed with it.”
The differences between infatuation and limerence
The great The difference between falling in love and limerence is that the latter is not reciprocal and is accompanied by feelings of obsession, loneliness, and fear of rejection. But at the beginning of the phases of love they can have some behaviors in common.
María Esclapez explains that falling in love or honeymoon is the phase in which the myths of romantic love appear to stay. You think that the person you are in love with is the love of your life. No flaws, or minor if you can see any.
Dr. Stephani Ortigue, neuropsychiatrist and author of I love you with all my brain, detected that in this phase of love, 12 brain areas are activated according to their brain map of love. According to studies, this phase of falling in love can last up to three or four years. Esclapez herself calls this phase “that of transitory madness”, because in her own words in this process of falling in love “our body secretes a cocktail of substances that makes us see and feel things that are not really.”
Oxytocin, also known as the love hormone; the adrenaline that is released in periods of stress and anxiety and also during falling in love causing the pulse to accelerate; serotonin, a neurotransmitter that when its levels decrease during falling in love causes you to be constantly thinking about your crush; either the dopamine that we already talked about in this article. They are just some of the hormones secreted during falling in love.
all together generate eustress, positive stress, and physically it is not possible to maintain this phase forever because as Esclapez explains, “with time, we would get sick because falling in love is for our body, a state of chaos and activation.” OROnce falling in love passes, the relationship stabilizes and so does our brain. Not with limerence.
The person with limerence also idealizes the person they love as in the infatuation phase, but is added a constant anxiety to know and see the other person and great difficulty controlling emotions, which can lead to pathological jealousy, for example. .
How to detect that we suffer from limerence: symptoms and behaviors
The Aventura song is limerence in its purest form. An obsession with the other person, control of where they are at all times, emotional dependence, and it may even be the case of manipulation to get their attention with techniques such as love bombingand even bullying.
As they explain to us in MundoPsicologos, “people who suffer from limerence want the well-being of the other person above all else, although they may put being together above all else.”
On a physical level, limerence generates some symptoms similar to falling in love, such as tachycardia, stuttering and shyness, sweating, nervousness before the proximity of the other person or loss of appetite. In his book, Tennov analyzes the psychological and physical effects that limerence has on people who suffer from it and adds a few more to the long list above: intrusive thoughts, fear of rejection, anxietytremors and even effects on sexuality.
Limerency affects all aspects of our life and can cause us depression. Beyond love, it affects work, social and family life, as well as causing enormous suffering to those who suffer from it.
Being a psychological disorder, it is necessary to go to a specialist to treat it when we detect itin order to solve this problem and prevent this type of disorder from ending up in a toxic relationship, with emotional dependence on our partner or that causes us anxiety.
Taking care of our mental health it is vital if we want to have healthy relationships. If you think that you suffer from it, or that someone close to you may be experiencing this disorder, it is best to see a specialist to detect why it is happening and try to solve it.
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Photos | You (Netflix) and Obsession (Netflix)
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