Is It Love or Limerence? How to Tell the Difference

15 Jun

Is it love or limerence? A clinical psychologist on the difference between love and obsessive desire and the questions that help you tell which you're feeling.

This week's newsletter came from one of you - a question about how to tell the difference between love and limerence. So before anything else, let me say thank you. It took some courage to ask it.

Here's what they wrote:

"How can I tell if it's love or limerence I have for someone? I'm finding it difficult to stop thinking about someone I thought I had a relationship with, but now I wonder if I was just obsessed."

Before I answer, limerence, in case it’s a word new to you, is a state of obsessive romantic longing for another person. It describes the state of intense, involuntary romantic fixation, characterised by intrusive thoughts, longing for reciprocation, and emotional highs/lows depending on signs from the other person.

In order to answer the question, I’ll share what I know and my thoughts on the psychology of love, desire and fixation.

We have been falling dangerously in love for a very long time

If you've been with me for a while, you'll know I often come back to our ancient roots - to help understand the psychology of human nature.

So, let's go back to our distant past, and to our ancient origins.

As I’ve said before, we cannot escape our fundamental wiring for survival. And we can survive by firstly avoiding and protecting from danger (staying alive), but also through passing on our DNA, continuing life through our progeny.

As a result, your brain has evolved to be drawn to another - often powerfully, urgently, and sometimes against every shred of good sense you have. There is within us, a very primal calling to reproduce, and the means we achieve that - as mammals - is through physical desire.

That pull we call desire, lust, love, longing… is one of the oldest pieces of our ancient wiring we carry - a mate-seeking, pair-bonding, gene-passing drive that kept the whole long chain of your ancestors going, one generation at a time.

The Greeks were frightened of it, and they were right to be

Long before anyone could scan a brain, the people who thought hardest about love already understood that it came in very different forms. The Greeks had at least eight words for it. There was philia, the deep loyalty of friendship, and storge, the easy affection of family. There was pragma, the weathered love of a couple who've lasted decades, and agape, the love you extend even to strangers. And there was eros.

Eros, which we use in popular language (think erotica, erogenous), was a force the Greeks treated with real caution. Plato thought it could overpower reason completely, dragging the whole soul downward through the body's hunger. Erotic desire in this form, to them, was a power to be feared. And at the very far edge of their map of love, they also spoke of mania (obsessive love). Mania was their word for love as a kind of madness. The kind that was brimming with jealous, consuming, devotion slowly curdling into possession. They wrote about it as 'reason dethroned'.

The ancient greeks (in line with what we think in modern psychology) separated love from desire. And they concluded what marries up with current knowledge:

The wanting and the liking are not the same thing

For a long time we thought of the brain's dopamine system as the pleasure system, and it follows then, that under that understanding wanting something and enjoying something were just two names for the same process.

However, research by the neuroscientist Kent Berridge has helped us tease these two concepts apart, discovering they aren't the same process at all. They're two separate systems. There's a system that does the wanting (the pull, the craving, the reaching-toward) and it runs on dopamine. As I've written about before in my article on social media (read here), dopamine is better understood as our anticipatory system.

And separately, there's the liking - the actual pleasure, the enjoyment of the thing once it's finally yours.

The reason this matters so much is that the two can come apart. You can want something intensely that you barely like at all.

It is entirely capable of wanting someone who, on all the available evidence, leaves you feeling deeply unhappy and unsettled.

This is why the strength of the pull tells you almost nothing about whether the thing you're pulling toward is any good for you (and whether you even like it). Intensity of desire, as much as we hate to hear it, simply isn't evidence (it just feels like it).

What does psychology say about love and desire?

Freud had this idea that desire is, underneath it all, the mind reaching back toward a remembered satisfaction it can never quite reproduce, some early experience of being soothed, and then the long, endless attempt to find it again. It's desire as a kind of homesickness for something half-remembered. Which means that what we reach for in the present is rarely just the person standing in front of us; it's shaped, well below awareness, by a longing that was already there long before they arrived.

Jung believed we each carry an unconscious image of the ideal other, assembled out of our parents and our earliest relationships and the whole inherited template of what "the one" would look like. And when we meet someone who fits that image closely enough, we fall for them with that uncanny sense of recognition, of somehow having always known them. Jung would argue that we cast our internal image onto a real human being the way a projector throws a film onto a screen, and then we fall in love with the film. It's why limerence so often burns hottest toward people we barely know, because there's less of the real person there to interrupt the projection, and the less you actually know them, the more freely you can make your love-interest the answer you've been searching for. Seen this way, the obsession so often turns out not to be about the other person at all. It's the self, reaching for something missing, and mistaking the other as someone who may finally complete it.

Love or limerence: the real difference

Love wants closeness, but desire wants distance.

Love is fed by closeness, both emotional and physical. It is the slow work of getting to the heart of another person and letting them get to the heart of you. It grows through knowing and being known, through the accumulation of trust and familiarity, through the security (and vulnerability) of being fully seen and wanted anyway (warts and all).

Desire, in its obsessive form - lust, limerence, the chase - runs on the exact opposite. It is fed by distance, and by mystery. It thrives on the on-and-off, the hot-and-cold, the not-quite-having. The moment it gets too close, the moment the other person becomes fully, ordinarily known, the spell tends to break. This is why limerence cannot survive real intimacy, and love cannot survive without it.

And… desire is so much more exciting than love. It has all the intensity, all the urgency, all the sleepless electricity. It feels like the realest thing you've ever felt. But this is exactly what the Greeks were warning us about. That intensity is thrilling, and it is dangerous, and above all it is misleading - because it asks nothing of closeness, and closeness is the very thing love is made of.

So, love or limerence? Perhaps, dear reader, this exploration helps frame your question. And here are a few more to help you work it through for yourself.

How to tell if it's love or limerence: questions to ask yourself

Do I feel calmer around them, or more anxious - more myself, or less?
Does the feeling grow when we're close, or when they pull away?
How much of them do I really know? And how much do they truly know of me?
I know I want them. But do I like them? And do I like myself when I'm with them?
If they were fully, certainly mine, with no chase left in it, would I still want them and what we’d have together?

Thank you again for writing in and to everyone who has sent in questions, I will be working my way through them. Keep them coming.

Until next week,

Matt