Dr. Alok Kanuja (Dr. K)

It's been described in Tenov's book as buoyancy.

When the limerent object responds to you in some positive way, you feel buoyant.

You feel amazing.

And when they don't respond in a positive way or they respond in a neutral way, you're left with this incredible sense of achiness, like aching deep inside

So your life becomes kind of tethered to your perception of their responses, and it feels like an incredible roller coaster.

So another big feature of this is some fleeting and transient relief from unrequited limerent passion through vivid imagination of action by the LO that means reciprocation.

The other thing that happens is not only are you hypersensitive to what they do and what they say and overinterpret their actions, but when you are aching inside, there is oftentimes a fantasy life that you will construct.

You will fantasize about this person touching your arm or this person doing this or texting you back or finally noticing the way that you feel about them.

reciprocating your love saying oh I've been longing for you as well so there's a big component of limerence is actually like the amount of time you spend in your head fantasizing usually about small things sometimes they can be things like sexual fantasies and what that means to you so another big feature of limerence is that

There are small actions that have big implications in your head.

Another feature is a fear of rejection and sometimes incapacitating but always unsettling shyness in the LO's presence, especially in the beginning and whenever uncertainty strikes.

There's also an intensification of the feeling through adversity.

So this can be them not responding to you.

Or when challenges arise in your life that are not related to the limerent object, oftentimes the limerence can intensify.

There is an acute sensitivity to any act or thought or condition that can be interpreted favorably.

and an extraordinary ability to devise or invent reasonable explanations for why the neutrality that the disinterested observer might see is in fact a sign of a hidden passion in the limerent object.

So the first is that there is a hypersensitivity to small signals from the limerent object.

So that touch on the arm we kind of talked about.

The other thing that tends to happen is that in your mind, you will notice a lot of mental gymnastics to interpret all kinds of things.

So if they don't respond to you, and the weird thing about limerent objects is that oftentimes you don't necessarily know them well.