I have a wife and family I love dearly — why was I obsessing about another woman?

Falling head over heels for someone you barely know sounds like the stuff of a rom-com movie, but it could point to deeper, unresolved emotional issues. A neuroscientist delves into his experience of an intense office crush to explore the psychological condition known as limerence

Neuroscientist Dr Tom Bellamy: "I have a wife and family I love dearly — why was I obsessing about this other woman? By then, I’d found Dorothy Tennov’s book, so I was able to tell my wife what I was going through.”

When you fall for someone, even if they barely know you exist, is it all-consuming? Do you ache for them, obsess over them, believe that you are meant to be together? Does an innocuous text from them make —or ruin — your day? Does your nervous system go haywire in their presence, reducing you to a stammering wreck?

Do you have an acute need for them to reciprocate your feelings? Do you deify their good points, while ignoring their more mortal aspects?

There are two common reactions to the above scenario, says neuroscientist Dr Tom Bellamy : “That’s not normal, these people are neurotic”; or “That’s just love”. If you identify with the second reaction, you could be, like Bellamy, a limerent — someone who falls in love obsessively.

‘These people are a broad demographic — “male, female, young, old, gay, straight, bi, asexual, poly, religious, atheist” — and Bellamy, having studied the area in depth, believes they make up about half of the general population: “All ages, personality types, genders, sexualities, and ethnicities are susceptible.”

Around 25% of those who have experienced limerence have found it “so disruptive that it affected their enjoyment of life”.

So is limerence a fancy word for love-sick? It was coined by psychology professor Dorothy Tennov in her 1979 book Love & Limerence: The Experience of Being In Love, and she defined limerence as “a mental state of profound, involuntary, obsessive romantic infatuation with another person (termed the ‘limerent object’)”.

For eight years, Bellamy, an honorary associate professor at the University of Nottingham, has been blogging anonymously about limerence, creating a community where others share similar experiences. The 49-year-old has recently published a book Smitten: Romantic Obsession, The Neuroscience of Limerence, & How to Make Love Last. It’s dedicated to his wife — here’s why.

“When my wife and I first met, we fell in to mutual limerence very strongly,” he says. “We both had that consuming desire and intimate connection. Inevitably, the limerence wore off, and we navigated through that — we’re very compatible, with companionate, affectionate love replacing the fireworks. We got married, had children, and were very happy.”

Until Bellamy developed unwanted feelings for a colleague.

Around 25% of those who have experienced limerence have found it “so disruptive that it affected their enjoyment of life”.

“It was such a shock to me to become limerent for someone else,” he says. “It wasn’t born of dissatisfaction. I was — and am — happily married.

“So it was a problem for me to solve. I have a wife and family I love dearly — why was I obsessing about this other woman? By then, I’d found Dorothy Tennov’s book, so I was able to tell my wife what I was going through.”

She related, identifying with the feelings of limerence she had experienced during the early stage of their relationship.

“That was transformative,” he says. “It meant we were solving the problem together, as a team. 

"Obviously, it was painful, a difficult conversation, but she was able to understand the feelings, because she’d gone through it herself and recognised I was seeking support to deal with it, rather than doubting the marriage. I was being accountable.

“We were dealing with it from a mature and sober perspective. We got through it, the marriage continued, and we are still happy and in many ways stronger. We have a deeper understanding of how love changes and develops over time. It doesn’t have to be giddy fireworks all the time.”

Bellamy says that “through benign neglect, you can make yourself vulnerable” to developing infatuations outside of your partnership.

But he also acknowledges a “midlife element” to his experience. “It’s not exactly a revelation that you have to look after a relationship,” he says. Nor did he ever disclose his feelings to the object of his limerence, but recognised them for what they were: One-sided and in his head.

“I realised very early on [these feelings] were a threat to my happiness rather than a thrilling, exciting adventure,” he says. “But because it was a colleague, I couldn’t go ‘no contact’ — I had to find a way to manage the limerence feelings.”

Limerence is a mental state. “You need to address it at that level,” Bellamy says. “You’re probably not going to be able to solve an unwanted limerence episode by engineering your environment or getting other people to fix the problem for you — it really is down to you to understand why you’re responding to this person. They’re obviously touching something deep in you to provoke this powerful response, this romantic infatuation.”

He sees limerence as a person addiction: “So it’s about figuring out what you’re doing that reinforces that addiction, and then disrupting it. That’s what I was doing — finding ways to have a good professional relationship, and reverse the romantic infatuation, get things back on track.”

The stuff of literature

From childhood fairy tales to classic literature to contemporary cinema, our culture is built on stories that capture this intense yearning for blissful union. The foundation is limerence. From Rapunzel to Sleeping Beauty to Cinderella, handsome princes risk all for damsels in distress; from Cathy and Heathcliff to Connell and Marianne, we share the romantic agony of characters who pine for each other — often disastrously, in the case of Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Butterfly, and Lolita’s Humbert Humbert.

Limerence drives movies from Brokeback Mountain to Notting Hill, Dr Zhivago to Truly Madly Deeply. The Martha character in Baby Reindeer, played by Jessica Gunning, embodies limerence gone badly wrong.

Bellamy emphasises that “limerence is an altered state of mind”. It is a psychological phenomenon, not a behaviour.

Smitten by Dr Tom Bellamy

“Probably about half the population has the capacity to fall in to this altered mental state of addictive desire that changes the way they perceive the world,” Bellamy says. “How any individual person responds to [limerent feelings] depends on their personality, their life experience, their relationship history, and childhood bonding experiences.”

So while some people experiencing limerence may act upon their feelings (anything from instigating a positive relationship based on mutual limerence to stalking), others may pine from a distance, sometimes for decades. Bellamy terms this “limerence limbo” — spending years stuck in an unrequited obsession, unable to move forward, but not wishing to relinquish hope.

“There isn’t an archetypal limerent behaviour; it depends on the person going through it,” he says. “The universal aspect of limerence is the neuroscience basis of it — our reward system, bonding system, arousal system can get pushed in to this hyperactivated state.”

Most remember their first crush — exhausting, exhilarating, all-consuming. Pure limerence. Is it essentially juvenile, something we outgrow?

“Limerence usually first manifests in adolescence, so if you have this capacity, it’s when you first feel it,” says Bellamy. “It’s more than a crush. Crushes tend not to flip over in to an involuntary, intrusive state, like an addiction. 

"Not everyone can self-regulate, because the reward is so powerful — with addiction, the brain’s reward circuit gets strengthened, while at the same time the brain’s executive feedback, which should be regulating and moderating our desire, gets weakened.

“So maybe people who maintain limerence in to adulthood never adapt, never manage moderation. But if you are emotionally mature and secure, you can weather limerence.”

Initially, this was not his experience. “I wasn’t entirely in control — I was in an addiction, and it was a struggle to resist and moderate it. Another contradiction is that you can realise intellectually that you don’t want to be with that person and yet are drawn to them with a powerful sense of attraction and connection.”

Casual sex or something more?

Despite limerence sounding like the drawing-room pining of 19th-century literature, it can be exacerbated by contemporary online dating culture.

“It’s a lot easier to connect with people and then ghost them, and that kind of emotional whiplash can make limerence worse,” says Bellamy. “The thing that drives limerence in to that state of addiction and fixation is a combination of hope and uncertainty. 

"If you’ve got hope that the other person may reciprocate, then you’ll continue to seek that reward — and if there’s uncertainty, you can’t psychologically adapt to the situation, because you’re never quite sure about the strength of the connection, which can drive you in to rumination.”

The hook-up culture is a powerful reinforcement, “especially if you have sex and all the physiological things happen — oxytocin release and so on”, he says. “But if they then treat you casually or ghost you, you end up in a situationship. Is this a special bond or a booty call?

“You’ll be getting periodic hope, reinforcement and reward, but it’s unpredictable and mixed with occasional disappointment.

“That’s almost the perfect combination of factors to drive you in to a state of addiction — you can’t adapt to it, your reward system never habituates, so you feel anxious and uncertain.”

So, how to stop developing limerent feelings for others? A third of Bellamy’s book is devoted to getting rid of limerence, breaking the habit, overcoming it with a specific person, and moving on.

He suggests cognitive behavioural therapy for individuals, and couples therapy if the limerence spills in to your relationship. “First solve the crisis, then figure out why it happened,” he says.

Getting rid of limerence involves remembering that it is happening in your head, not real life; that you are making your limerent object special (it’s all about you, not them). So manage your instincts — your rational brain needs to step in and take charge — and don’t self-medicate, he advises.

You’re in charge. Anticipate some pain during the recovery process, and believe that a better life awaits. Remember, it’s all in your head.

• For a deeper dive, visit Bellamy’s blog, where you’ll find other limerent people,  at www.livingwithlimerence.com/blog. Or check out limerence.net or the private Facebook support group exa.mn/Limerence-Support-Group