Do you possess a neural makeup that primes you for unrequited infatuations that spiral out of control and cannot be extinguished?
Limerence is pure biochemical chaos, and I have lived through many intense, manic-depressive infatuations. Despite my brain’s tendency to equate interesting people with sharp spikes in intrasynaptic dopamine, however, I have been limerence-free for years. My background in neuroscience and clinical psychology and my spiritual mindset have allowed me to reach such a point of clarity that I doubt I will ever fall into a difficult limerent episode again.
I am writing this article to share with you some truths that dawned on me after my last (and hardest) bout of limerence. I am certain that they will resonate with you and give you the final push you need to commit to leaving this behavioral addiction behind.
1. Just Like The Flu, Limerence Cannot Last Forever
Since limerence comprises such an intense array of all-encompassing emotions, our cerebral cortex equates this to the concept that “it will last forever”. Loving someone secretly or impossibly is painful enough, but much of the emotional turmoil that we experience when madly in love with a LO grows from the unnecessary sentimentality and meaning that we introduce to the situation.
We cannot date this person, which hurts, but we are also terrified that no one else will ever seem so exciting and beautiful. Full of despair and confused about what that means, we picture the life of “second bests” that is surely going to unfold in front of us from this day onwards.
In your depressive haze, these fears and intrusive thoughts will seem indisputably significant and believable, and the importance of this current LO will seem insurmountable. If I achieve that one person reads this article, undergoes a process of introspection and comes to see that these ideas are instinctual, hormonal falsehoods, my job will be done.
You see, the most profound lesson that limerence has taught me is to not buy into crazily strong emotions and worry that they will last forever; intensity doesn’t promise permanence. The reasoning centers of your brain will try with all their might to convince you that you will never forget someone irresistible enough to send you through ecstasy and depression, but that is completely untrue.
Biologically and psychologically-speaking, strong, paradoxical phenomena occur and then they pass. Limerence, psychotic episodes, severe vomiting flus and bouts of anger all have one thing in common: they involve highly destabilized physiological states, and therefore do not and cannot last. The body strives for equilibrium at all times, and in unrequited love, this can be traced down to the synaptic level; functional reorganizing of neuronal connections occurs after a few months, so that this person (a stimulus) no longer triggers the same cocktail of neurotransmitters.
While their sporadic text messages initially stimulated flurries of uncontrollable euphoria in you that sparkled in your eyes and made your day perfect, you start to realize that their behavior is erratic and immature, not mysterious. Read more about unpredictable LOs and why limerence is harmful (rather than romantic) here.
2. You Will Always Be Prone to Infatuations
However, despite each limerent episode having an expiry date (a fact that can fill you with hope when pining over this current “love of your life”), your neural makeup will not change. Your limerent tendencies will linger until you extensively research the neuroscientific and psychological underpinnings of the state, and learn how to pull your own mind out of it.
It is very illuminating to consider:
a). the purely biological basis of limerence (e.g. what dopaminergic genes do you possess that actually allow you to experience such highs and lows?). Any mental experience that you have is the direct reflection of your particular expression of genes related to neurotransmission. Your quotient for obsessive tendencies, empathy, systemizing capabilities, limerence, and any other mental modality that you can conceive is a pure reflection of how your brain is uniquely orchestrated. Many people die never having experienced the levels of euphoria, depression and obsession that a limerent is subjected to. Isn’t elucidating this neurobiological basis in a concrete way and starting to look at your own troubling feelings as the consequence of some mere biological building blocks fascinating, and oddly reassuring?
b). the psychological basis of limerence. Your genes dictate your balance between different forms of neurotransmission such as GABA, glutamate, dopamine, serotonin, and hence dictate much of what you can and cannot experience. Since the brain is immensely plastic, however, experiences that alter our thinking patterns (the basis of learning) and belief systems that we accumulate over the years equally influence our lives. What beliefs do you hold in your subconscious brain regarding romance, people and yourself that allow you to latch onto unstable and damaging LOs for months when your connection with them is in the realm of the fantasy?
While I’ve compartmentalized the two to highlight the two prominent facets of unrequited infatuation, I strongly believe that the state and feelings involved are best attacked from multiple angles. Looking at disorders like limerence through a lens tinged by both neuroscience and psychology allows you to observe your thoughts and feelings, analyze them through first principle thinking and only delve deep into the land of proteins and neurotransmission when it will translate to real life, noticeable improvements in your mental health.
3. You Will Never Relate to Your Friends’ Romantic Attitudes
If limerent episodes were not chaotic and isolating enough, you will also most likely find yourself wondering why no one else around you seems to experience romance and relationships like you. This is best conceptualized through the various personality types that can be observed: we all know many people who are level-headed, not depression or mania-prone, and who never falls for people intensely. When asked about their love life and, they reply flatly that the girl they’re seeing “is nice”; you wonder how on earth they can be so resistant to feeling love-drugged and limerent. How aren’t they responding like you would if you had the chance to be in a relationship with you LO: delighted, hypomanic and frantically telling the world how they’re certainly your soulmate because your minds work so beautifully together?
Their apathy towards romance is eerie; you are disturbed by as well as jealous of their composure. “Everyone around me must be fundamentally different to me”, you realize, and this is the truth; you become limerent because your dopaminergic and serotonergic systems (primarily) allows for such rich and vibrant experiences, as I have explained in point number 2. This tendency will stay with you for the rest of your life, but learning to master your own psychology (so as to avoid it controlling you) can make you fulfilled, stable and limerence-resistant. If I can manage it, I assure you that you can too!
4. You Either Learn to Cope With The Soulmate Delusion Or You Go Insane
I have experienced five full-blown limerent episodes in my life, the last and most devastating of which occurred four years ago. During each of these, I naturally felt that that particular limerent object (LO) was my twin flame, that we were energetically connected and that my entire life trajectory had been tilting towards me meeting them. “No one else will ever truly attract me again”, I would write in my online diary with hot tears seeping into my computer keyboard. Of course, little did I know that I was repeatedly buying into the complete falsehoods that the reptilian centers of my brain were telling me. Over and over again, I would fall for another LO months later who seemed just as a). mentally aligned with me and b). physically captivating.
Infatuation will, by default, produce fiercely persuasive beliefs that your feelings are ‘different this time’, and that ‘no one else has ever truly connected with you on your mental level before’. Remember that this overwhelming assurance cannot and should not be paid any mind, for it is a mere artifact of the pro-reproduction and pair-bonding chemicals that your brain is currently releasing.
The cleverly-orchestrated release of oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine will have you calling someone your soulmate and wanting nothing more than for them to be in your life forever, but do not subscribe to this primitive, illusory pull. You can afford to lose yourself in such magical ideation when you are in mutual, requited love, but this branch of spirituality will cause you agony when you are infatuated with someone you cannot be with.
For the precise recovery plan that will heal you from limerence (and permanently immunise you against future episodes), grab my book here.
5. Limerence Should Be Thought of Like A Sugar Addiction
I have come back to provide you with a fascinating final truth that limerence has provided me with. If considering the evolutionary role of love addiction has not convinced you that your limerent haze of adoration will fade and is not spiritual, this analogy will hopefully help you pull the blinkers off for once and for all.
We are going to temporarily digress and consider another strong biological drive, other than romance, that also involves reinforcing dopamine release. The desire to eat is something heavily influenced by the reward regions of the primitive brain.
Obtaining food is as important as securing a mate and ‘falling in love’, biologically speaking, and only animals with a strong drive to quickly consume whatever they came across survived in the past. Hence, a multitude of genes conferring us with both the ability to enjoy the taste of high-fat, high-sugar foods and the drive to seek them out exist in any population of humans you will find on the planet.
In other words, most of us are prone to overeating; the majority of people in the USA and the UK are slightly to extremely overweight, succumbing to the pull towards junk food that is ingrained in us on such a primitive level. Many of us who are not fat are only a healthy weight because we possess a keen streak of self-discipline, renouncing refined sugar and huge bowls of pasta.
Since us humans have evolved to be cerebral beings who work for a living, write poetry for fun and (in the western world) have an abundance of refined, artificial foods available to us, craving sugar hinders us rather than benefits us.
While everyone will agree that chocolate tastes palatable, however, we possess such different neural phenotypes that some people experience this pull less intensely. Are you someone dashes to the fridge in a trance every 20 minutes when at home, or are you able to “look forward to your dinner” and plow through work on the computer without consuming a mere snack?
As with limerence, your response to the unnecessary amount of food you are exposed to will depend on your genes in addition to many psychological factors (stress, attitudes to food that you were exposed to as a child, self-esteem, current body weight).
Regardless of whether you are prone to binge-eating (NB: you most likely are, as the genetic basis is very similar to that of limerence – a fascinating area of neuroscience!), I’ve inserted this example to remind you that the desire to get your LO’s attention is just as scientifically-explicable as overeating. Rather than your desire to text your LO being the result of a numinous energy force trying to align you with your twin flame, it is a temporary and primitive drive that can almost be laughed at. You should strive to take interest in this analytical line of thinking, as it will shatter the mysterious and seductive bubble that limerence can encapsulate you with over time, keeping you a slave to the delusions that it imposes on you.
So, reject the soulmate illusion and the desire to write about how this love is “written in the stars” just as someone must reject the implausibly delicious, mouth-watering allure of a chocolate cupcake while trying to quit refined sugar. I remember watching an episode of 600 Pound Life which involved a lovely woman saying that, to her, eating chocolate was a “rollercoaster experience in itself”. Just as us limerent often fall into the trap of sentimentalizing our feelings unnecessarily and, in doing so, stay engaged with the addiction and allow it to overwhelm our identity, many people who are dependent on nutrient-barren foods give up similarly and resign themselves to a life of obesity and compromise.
Is this not a tragic shame, given that there is a lean, brain-fog-free and radiant version of them only one decision away? Both limerence and binge eating disorder are, in essence, the same: strong, primitive responses to salient stimuli that no longer serve us now that our lives consist of more than struggling to survive only to reproduce. These toxic, cyclic thinking patterns must be shut down and overcome to allow us to reconnect with what we were as children, and still truly are: playful, magical and free.