Dr. Alok Kanuja (Dr. K)

causes you to really be longing for them, and then how you feel on a particular day depends on how they respond to you.

As one person put it, their limerent object is their hobby, their passion, and their obsession.

And oftentimes, limerence leads to a disintegration of your identity.

And if we sort of understand, like, if we kind of integrate what we know about the features of limerence with sort of, like, thinking how it really affects their lives, this will make a lot of sense.

So here you are living your normal life, right?

And then there's a substitute professor who's filling in one day for your professor.

And something in you clicks.

And this person is so amazing.

They're so much better than your professor.

They looked at you and then they nodded at you when you came in and you sat down in the class.

And now you're thinking about them all the time.

An episode of limerence can last.

There are studies that show that it lasts somewhere between one and seven years.

OK, so once you start thinking about this person, they are dominating your thoughts potentially for years at a time.

And now I want y'all to really appreciate this, that it's hard to build a life around them, right?

So these aren't necessarily real interactions.

There are interactions that are real, but then your mind amplifies them.

So you have your normal life over here where you're a student, maybe married, maybe have kids, like super wild.

And then for maybe minutes or hours of the day, there's this intrusive limer beast that comes in and dominates your thinking.

So now this becomes really, really confusing to live through because you have all of this stuff over here.