My mission is to provide content that resonates with you during your overwhelming life chapters, because I know all too well that the majority of content you find will fall short at hitting you convincingly. When truly limerent, the feelings you experience are so strong, nuanced and tumultuous that you intuitively feel that there is a barrier between your experience and the “average experience”.

Enough people report obsessionality, manic highs and debilitating lows all centred around the behavior of their limerent object (LO). However, not enough people talk about the potential binge-eating, loss of interest in friends, the faking of interests to be like your LO and the deep philosophical thoughts that accompany limerence.

Not enough people lay everything out on the table to be seen and felt. Not enough people describe how it feels to actually be addicted to, pedestalling and obsessing over someone else. It is for this reason that I have taken it upon myself to depict, to a vulnerable degree of detail, what a bad limerent episode looks like. Additionally, I like to think that this will help settle the doubts and intrusive thoughts circling around your brain such as:

• What’s the worst that can happen if I just… stay in this limerence, and deal with the lows? Hint: a lot of bad things!

• I can’t go no contact (NC), because what if my LO loves me secretly and I’m shooting myself in the foot?

• Why should I treat limerence as a disease, when the highs make me so euphoric and spiritually-aligned?

• (Or, for the self-aware but magical-ideation-prone limerents): I understand that limerence is pathological, and I want to be free and move on, but I don’t quite believe you when you say that limerence is temporary. My LO is magical, god-like, and a relationship with them would be like basking in a permanent golden glow. I’ve never met someone who makes me feel like they do.

• Life is short; should we not grab onto what makes us feel alive?

I have been there. And, after studying neuroscience and elucidating the precise neural correlates of limerence, I have freed myself and am now as immune to limerence as anyone can be.

Here is the story of my last and most severe limerent episode that I unknowingly allowed to spiral out of control, in turn sending me through the wildest, most razor-sharp emotions for 1.5 years. Years have passed since this chapter of my life, but it will forever be carved into my internalized autobiography due to the lasting power of emotionally-evocative episodic memories.

Wow, This Person Is Already A Concept

Limerence starts with what we refer to as “the glimmer”. Different people have different conjectures regarding what renders someone capable of triggering that initial jolt of dopamine and admiration in us, but I am pretty certain I have elucidated the core factors. To trigger limerence in you, someone needs to be:

• unpredictable, sometimes seeming to have no boundaries and want to bond with you and other times resuming a cold stance

• the specific trigger archetype that your genetics and childhood has curated for you, i.e. adventurous, commanding, domineering, mischievous.

• physically attractive to you. However, limerence is mainly psychological, separating it from pure infatuation; sometimes, you become limerent, obsessed with and very attracted to someone who would not stand out to you in a crowd if they did not impact you emotionally. In limerence, the ‘drug’; is their way of relating to you and the meaning that they give to your life; sex is far from being the prime driver.

Check out my book The Limerent Mind here, for a rich breakdown of limerence from every possible angle and the precise steps that will permanently rewire your subconscious mind.

The Surreal and Intoxicating Start

I came across this particular LO, who we are going to call Misha, when I was studying for my masters degree. I had taken a year out prior to starting, travelled alone and allowed myself to recharge after my undergrad.

We first locked eyes when we were working on a neural tissue dissection together with three other classmates. Now, I was in no way naive to limerence at this stage of my life, having experienced seriously traumatic person-addiction episodes all throughout my teens, each one lasting from around 7-20 months. That is not to say, however, that I was immune; I had not yet mastered the art of programming my subconscious mind, and hitherto my coping strategy had always been transference to a new LO. I did not know how to sit with limerence and to ride the waves, nor how to spot a potential LO and shut down the episode before it even started.

In other words, I fell hook, line and sinker for this girl in the space of about a month. Our first conversation is still imprinted into my mind, but, as with all memories of her and my other LOs, it’s now something I can observe in a detached way, a cinematic glimpse into a crazy past I no longer identify with. Out of the blue, she shattered the slightly stilted and tense group aura by flashing her piercing blue eyes at me and smirking:

“What a smooth technique you’ve got going on there; it’s as if you’re carving a baby pumpkin!”

Her voice was impertinent, but warm, and she clearly wanted to connect. She sensed that I would both roll with her energy and serve as a mirror to reflect her best and boldest self back at her, which is what many intelligent and unstable individuals want from others.

I can now look back and realize that she wholly embodied my trigger archetype of those days: she was free, spoke her mind and saw life as a complete and utter game. Rather than claiming to not care what people thought about her, she truly was entirely unbothered. She’d alternate fishnet tights, black leather skirts and crop tops with oversized grey jumpers covered in paint, and she’d speak up in class and say what everyone else was thinking. She also had electric blue hair to match her eyes, and spoke Russian frantically and melodically, which contrasted intriguingly with her general nonchalant air.

We initially conversed in the lab, somehow detached from labels of budding friends, love interests or even acquaintances. I found her and her feline features absolutely mesmerizing, and sensed that she was a bisexual woman like me due to the depth of her desire to “peer into” my soul.

The Crystallization of Limerence

Since the brain perceives anything mentally orchestrated as real, some people establish a limerence through fantasizing about imagined interactions alone. However, my Misha did eventually make a move while we were out with mutual friends, and we started what turned out to be a torrid and short-lived relationship.

Dating her was absolutely euphoric, but never felt safe; I never quite had her, and a few months down the line, it did all come to an end as she returned to her ex-boyfriend.

With her by my side, the world had seemed to convert into a surreal sort of child’s playground in which anything was possible. I felt free, bright, and more intelligent and articulate than usual. Her manic and unconventional nature gave rise to constant debates, us competing for grades in exams, us exploring virtually every town near where we were studying and the general sense that life was in color.

What I did not sense at the time, however, was that someone providing you with this “in color” feeling is a flashing-red signal that you must change your life and attract new experiences into your reality that excite you. Misha fulfilled many of the unmet psychological needs I was harboring and that is why she hit me so hard like a drug. Relationships should be special and appreciated, but they are meant to feel natural after a while, not like you have been handled a bundle of liquid gold from the gods above every morning that you have to cling onto for the rest of the day. Not like you are languishly surfing the waves of an ocean you do not deserve to be in, about to be plucked out and forcibly returned to a meaningless, void former existence.

Allowing your subconscious to sustain beliefs that your partner is too good for you, and that you are lucky to have been given a chance, will drive them away. You manifest exactly what you believe that you can have; believe you can get to know someone special but never be enough for them and short, painful affairs and unrequited love will materialize into your 3D reality and experience of life. Deifying them will also keep you in limerence for as many months as it takes you to break the addiction cycle and go cold turkey on them entirely.

The Red-Hot Nightmare of Infatuation

Our response in the face of a romantic rupture depends entirely on our neural makeup and psychology, and us limerents obviously do not do well when we either receive or intuit rejection from a LO.

A combination of my bipolar and OCD tendencies primed me for falling into limerence with Misha, but her unpredictable borderline-personality disorder (BPD) behavior following our split pushed me into insanity. I now know that employing the correct neural programming strategies can make you entirely immune to the pull of adults who run hot-and-cold, but her alternation between telling me I was “still her soulmate” and then ignoring me for weeks kept me beyond addicted.

Now, I can tell you the following with utter conviction and zero doubt: when it comes to unrequited love, anything in between confessing your feelings and deciding to move on is utter madness. What a shame that, when overpowered by the sentimentality and power of your own limernet feelings, this line is often murky and hard to make out!

The brain seeks pleasure, in the form of dopamine release. It wants to guide you towards anything that feels good to keep you alive, and once an addiction pathway is allowed to form, you will be pushed down it like a boat down a river at the expense of anything. Limerence will, therefore, flood you with delusions that your LO is “mulling over their feelings for you” and that they will soon “realize they are, too, in love”, keeping you analyzing all shared exchanges. Keeping you hopeful and enjoying sugary jolts as you feel you are advancing with them. Keeping you mad.

This is precisely what occurred following my real romantic stint with Misha. Instead of drawing a line under the relationship, I allowed myself to stay lovesick over her for months, living out an imaginary partnership in my head where she saw me for the true twin flame of hers that I really believed I was.

From Ecstasy to Agony to Apathy

I’m going to have to ask you to be as imaginative as possible when reading this following section, as human language could never do justice to peaks and troughs of horror, wonder and desperation that this limerent episode sent me through.

I did not just mourn the relation on an objective level, realizing I was losing someone extremely likeminded and writing a few angsty diary entries. No, I was plunged (edit: I plunged myself, for we have FULL control) into a serious, unglamorous, whole-body state of shutdown. Surprisingly, I stoically ploughed through my academic work in a trance the entire year, scoring the highest grade out of everyone. To get me out of bed and keep me in the library I relied heavily on a). intermittent fasting (which I recommend highly), N-Acetyl Cysteine (which is an amazing supplement for us limerents) and, regrettably, the zingy jolts of black coffee.

Back to the state of utter sickness I experienced for months while trying, and failing, to temper the beast that is an untreated limerent episode. In short, it was harrowing. There was not a single day that I did not cry my eyes out for over two hours, wailing as if someone had died, into a pillow. Dizzy and sick to my stomach, I could not bear speaking to anyone about anything romantic. Anything would trigger me, but I found myself particularly tearful when I had gone a few days without speaking to or texting Misha. My brain had become accustomed to the dopamine release that she precipitated in me, and I experienced the consequent withdrawal when I did not hear from her.

Life In Black and White

As the months passed, it became increasingly clear to me that Misha would only pop up to me and show interest in rekindling our bond when she was bored or struggling with her boyfriend. However, I resisted the concept of detaching from her, knowing going turkey would be nothing short of torture, which caused my feelings to snowball even further.

You see, the ecstasy that washed over my body and mind when she texted me out of the blue allowed me to experience a richness of life and an emotional spectrum I had never experienced before. As limerence leads you to believe, I was certain that throwing away whatever I had with her (hint: I had nothing outside of the realm of fantasy!) would be, on a spiritual level, wrong for me. That it would pervert my life course and prevent me from reaching the ultimate state of bliss and enlightenment, i.e. a shared life with Misha, that destiny clearly had in store for me.

How I Cured My Insanity

While a tough limerent episode may feel like it is destroying you, it also tends to catalyze immense, profound self-growth and drastically improve your insight into the workings of your own mind. Once I reached the year mark of this fantasy bond with Misha, I had already assimilated a huge amount of information related to personality disorders and mental health from my studies, allowing me to a). identify her as someone rather disordered and toxic and b). understand the neural basis of my own affliction.

One day, I decided to see her through a lens of contempt instead of admiration and attraction. This felt artificial at first, but this strategy gave me a little spiritual distance from her and allowed me to embark on my much-needed psychological transformation. I started to pay an immense amount of attention to which deeply-rooted beliefs regarding romance, myself and others I was allowing to populate my subconscious, because these thoughts are quite literally reflected in your external world constantly.

Whether we look at the laws of psychology, metaphysics, quantum physics or neuroscience, the following always applies: we live in a reality that is governed by the law of mirroring. We attract more of what we are, because we can only perceive and interact with that which vibrates at the same frequency that we are tuned to.

I promise you that this is not wishy-washy conjecturing that should be confined to spirituality. If you commit to carrying out the necessary self-work and target your subconscious mind, which dictates the vast majority of your habits, feelings and inclinations, magic will happen. Your reality will transform itself in ways that will thrill you and seem absolutely unbelieveable and implausible, as you attract different people, opportunities, jobs and experiences.

Your Mentality And Beliefs Are Manifesting Limerence

Nothing you are currently experiencing is a coincidence. Your energy, mindset and actions have lured any job offer, any disappointment, any requited relationship and any limerent episode that you have ever experienced into your life. By being in complete control of your thoughts, you are in control of the energy you tune into and give out to the world, and subsequentially the people who a). click with you and b). stick around in your life, either as mutual and committed lovers or people who treat you like you’re a doll.

You, and you alone, have unknowingly created your tendency to attract inappropriate LOs of a certain vibe and demeanor. If you feel resistance rising now upon reading this, identify it and let it develop so that you can tackle and squash it, because there should be none. It is an unequivocal truth that this universe only gives you things that you, in part, embody; you are only resonating with these people because you share some aspect of their own tumultuous energy.

You are attracted to what is different about this person, as these are the qualities of theirs that fill your voids, but they stick around in your life and erratically orbit you because you are both resonating at the frequency of pain and insecurity to a certain degree. Someone completely identical to you would not make you limerent, but someone with nothing in common with you whatsoever would not induce the type of mania in you that only LOs who pick you up and drop you can do.

What emotional wounds could you and this person have in common? And, conversely, what is unique about this person that attracts you? What could you change about your experience of life and your own attitude to even these factors out, bridging the gap between you and them and shattering the attraction and mystery?

Please take your time to process everything in this article, be gentle with yourself, and drop me a message if you so wish.