Limerence and Breaking the Romantic Obsession Cycle
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For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper.
When you get that electric can't eat, can't sleep obsession with someone, is it actually love or is it sort of a dopamine loop hijacking your brain? The rush of romantic fireworks might be less about fate and more about your brain and its neurochemistry. So when that happens to you, how can you break the loop? I'm here to discuss all of this with Tom Bellamy, a neuroscientist and writer. Check out his new book, Smitten, Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence and How to Make Love Last. That's available wherever books are sold. Tom, welcome in. I'm excited to chat with you. Great to be with you, David. We got to start with a definition. What exactly is limerence? Is it just having a crush on someone?
What is limerence and how does it differ from love?
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.
I've been there. I've had that feeling like the world will end if I can't talk to someone, be with someone, be in bed with someone. Is it fairly common? Do most people experience this? 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. That sounds like an irrational crush. It sounds very unstable and a bit unhealthy. And that mismatch in expectations about what love is and what people in love behave like, I think is an explanation for quite a lot of a heartache in the world because people have such different expectations of how, you know, their potential lover will behave that, you know, those misunderstandings unfortunately lead to a sort of romantic folly. Yeah, you know, honestly, I felt unwell when I've had limerence. Like I've also struggled with some mental health issues in my past and limerence can feel a lot like mania.
And I've wondered, is it some sort of disorder? Or perhaps, and I think you make this argument, it's kind of just a biological trait. It's something that just happens to some people. Yes. So I don't think that limerence is a mental disorder. It can, like many other psychological states, it can get out of control. And so you can get into limerence and it can be because of circumstances, either kind of your own personal circumstances or just the way that you and this person that you're infatuated with behave with one another it can escalate so you can move from that sort of massive sense of elation and euphoria and excitement about being with the other person and all that kind of romantic promise and the rush the like massive natural high that's kind of like nothing else in life really and
that can progress and it can get into a state that is very like an addiction. So you can essentially become addicted to the other person.
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