Tom Bellamy

So limerence is best described, I think, as an altered state of mind.

So it's a state, a psychological state that people can fall into in the early stages of romantic love.

So it's an intense desire to form a pair bond with another person.

It's a state of very kind of profound infatuation.

So the word itself, limerence, was invented.

So a psychologist in the 1970s, Dorothy Tenoff, came up with this word to describe this particular altered mental state.

And she did that very deliberately because, of course, words like

you know, romance or addiction or obsession, they've got a lot of sort of psychological baggage around them.

People understand those terms differently.

So she very deliberately coined this phrase, limerence, to try and identify a particular emotional state.

It is.

So about half the population experienced limerence in the early phases of love.

So I carried out a survey where I asked people who hadn't been primed, have you ever experienced this state?

And I gave a kind of brief description of what limerence feels like.

And about half of the people who took that survey said, yes, they had, which of course means that half have not ever experienced that state in the early phase of love.

So one of the common things, you know, talking about limerence and sharing limerence experience with other people,

Half the world think, well, that's just love.

You don't need a special word for that.

That's just what love feels like.

The other half of the world thinks, well, no, that sounds crazy.