Dr. Alok Kanuja (Dr. K)

But there's just something about the amount of time that your mind spends thinking about this person, craving this person's reciprocation, craving this person's attention, fantasizing about it,

internal the amount of copium that you're huffing when they don't give it to you.

So it really disrupts your motivational hierarchy, and then a lot of your thoughts and actions become related to the limerent object.

And then the last feature that Tenov describes is a remarkable ability to emphasize what is truly admirable in the limerent object, and to avoid dwelling on the negative.

even to respond with a compassion for the negative and render it, emotionally if not perceptually, into another positive attribute.

So this is why I love Tanoff's work.

So when you have a limerent object, you idealize them a lot, and you take the parts of them that could be demonized, and you manage to idealize them too.

You turn their flaws into perfections in your mind.

So this is some weird, once again, kind of mental gymnastics.

And we'll get into why your mind does this in a little bit.

But this is another feature that is very common with limerence, which is that you kind of see like all these amazing, oh, this person's great.

They're compassionate.

They're caring.

They're so wonderful.

And oh, yeah, the reason they're such an asshole to the people at work is because they're just so intensely brilliant.

Their mind can't...

hold the space for normal human interactions, which is why they don't say hi to me every morning, even though I say hi to them.

In those few moments that they do say hi, it feels so amazing for me.

So limerence has this deep obsessional quality where your mind, I don't know how else to say this, but like, I'm hoping y'all are understanding that it's really mental, right?

So it's not entirely based in reality, but there's an obsessional intrusive quality to it that dominates your thinking, performs mental gymnastics,