Anna Runkle
speaker
240 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 19 Nov
Anna Runkle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 5.
Appearances
Well, technically speaking, yes. But then it sort of morphs into, especially if that person is in your life and maybe reciprocates your feelings, it'll turn into a more ordinary kind of love where, you know, because of the toothpaste cap and the toilet seat and just regular stuff of life, the magic spell starts to dissipate and real love can start to form.
So technically you can call that early love limerence. But these days I think we're talking about it as something else and is very, very common as a trauma symptom.
think infatuation is the right word it's just that infatuation ends before it turns sick and so you know limerence when it just gallops forward it's really like up on a level of heroin addiction i would say i've known heroin addicts i've known limerence i've experienced limerence and i've had people limerent on me and it's like that people don't get over it unless they like really go take take strong steps to get over it limerence doesn't go away infatuation does
Well, unrequited love is kind of a condition of limerence. And it's like this addiction to hope. Hope has a lot of chemicals in it. I've heard some researchers say there may be a genetic predisposition to it. It's... It's something that springs up. Well, I want to tell you about the relationship to neglect in childhood. I'm in this unique position.
I'm not a therapist, but I'm a YouTuber who gets hundreds and hundreds of letters every week from people. And there's a letter that I kept getting over and over again about the same phenomenon where somebody said, I grew up in a house with an alcoholic parent. And now I'm in love with this guy and I can't really tell him. I know he wouldn't be into me in any way.
He's married and I can't stop thinking about him. And now my whole life is falling apart and I, I should leave my job, but I can't. And so somebody is really just like going down and, When you're in love with somebody who's good for you, you'll see signs that your life is kind of coming up. That's a sign.
I heard on one of your recent interviews that you're in a relationship, and when you feel good and happy and you notice, you know what, I'm getting better as a person, that's love. That's a good partnership. When you're starting to check out
When you're starting to go down, I've sort of defined this whole, this downward ladder of stuff that happens to you when it's taking over your brain and your life. You start avoiding people. You're not emotionally available. You can't love. So it's really a different thing. And it feels like it's about the other person, but it's clearly not.
I think it starts like, oh, what a wonderful person, and I like them. But after a while, with all the secrecy, you can never tell somebody you're limerent over how you feel. And the reason is, I think some people do, it's one way that you can break the spell, because almost certainly the reason it's secret and unrequited is because they're not into you. That's what it is.
And so if you avoid telling them how you feel so that you never get that disappointment... You're holding on to this escape mechanism and people need a way to relieve, to get out of here sometimes, to get out of dodge emotionally. But this is a really malfunctioning way to do it because it almost guarantees you're not going to have anybody real in your life.
I think so. That's my opinion. I think there's a little bit of a continuum between what we call trauma bonding, which is intermittent reinforcement that you would have in an anxious, avoidant relationship. One person's like, come on, give me attention. And the other person's like, I'm not speaking to you now, you're overwhelming me. And it activates something. And people get anxious for a reason.
The anxious attachment style, it springs up after a childhood of neglect, emotional neglect. And neglect isn't just psychological. You know, there are things that happen neurologically because of that that are pretty hard to control. So it's tricky to manage. So that activating that chasing instinct. Now, I noticed
When I got over my trauma-driven dating patterns, which is a formidable thing, I met my husband when I was 42. And I played things very differently. And what worked for me for the first time was I just let him kind of come after me. I was, you know, mentally, I was just like, you know, I wanted so bad to like go, are we going to see each other? Are you going to call me? Do you like me?
How do you feel? Where's all this going? But I just allowed him to sort of like do the work of that and it it was so powerful and I figured that out very quickly early in the relationship it pushed him off when I was chasing and he could come towards me when I stopped chasing and I think you know we've all heard this but for women today uh And men, men have their own version of it.
We want to believe, oh, that's not true. That's just some sort of old fashioned thing. But there's something in our brains that we do need to chase a little bit. It does activate something good. But like every good thing in a human being, there can be this sort of disordered side of it where there's a dark side to it, where it goes too far. And the chasing becomes stalking.
Yeah. A limerent.
They're occasionally elated and thrilled. They got a text or they caught a glimpse or they got a kind word. And then there's just a lot of depression in between. It's like getting a hit. It's getting a hit of heroin. It's like that, where it lifts you up and there's hope and you think, this is it. I think they're reciprocating.
And then they don't follow up and you can't really hold on to hope anymore. So there's this pursuit. I just want to get that little high, that little high of, I think maybe I'm going to get them to reveal that they feel the same way about me, but I'm going to do it without tipping my hand. I don't want to tell them because if I tell them and they don't feel that way, they won't be in my life.
They'll be creeped out. It's cringy, right? When somebody obsesses on you, it's not a pleasant thing when you're not into it. So they don't disclose, but they're always trying to think of like, what's the perfect thing I could say that would sort of go, you know, make a little space where you could say something and give me that clue. And that's what flirting is.
When it's reciprocal, people are flirting. So you sort of say, I just don't have anything to do this Saturday. And then you say, oh, that's funny. I don't either. Well, you know, it's like this very subtle exchange, but the exchange isn't happening the way you want. So your imagination takes over because I think there was something code, a secret code in what they were saying.
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