It’s Not Love, It’s Limerence

This isn’t a love story. It’s a fever dream.

A half lit hallway of hearts that mistook obsession for intimacy, yearning for union, and chemistry for clarity. Limerence wears love’s perfume... but not its patience.

It sings like infatuation in a minor key, urgent, breathless, and haunted by the echo of a maybe.

If you’ve ever stayed up rereading a text like it was scripture, if your heartbeat danced to the rhythm of “did they reply to my message yet?” if you’ve rewritten your worth in the language of their attention, this guide is for you.

Limerence is not a flaw in your character. It is a glitch in the chemistry, a storm in the psyche, a trauma drenched longing dressed up in devotion.

I won’t pretend to be above it, not for one second. I’ve walked naked and fully exposed across that fire myself these last couple years. I’ve called it destiny when it was dopamine. I’ve chased ghosts through digital hallways, mistaking breadcrumbs for banquet tables.

But there’s a certain freedom in naming things. There’s healing in the unseen truth, and so we begin.

This is not a manual on how to win them.

It’s a mirror. A reckoning. A soft landing for the part of you that just wanted to be chosen.

Not by them so much, but by you.

Part One: The Spark That Isn't Love

It starts with a spark. . . Not the slow burning ember of earned affection, but a wildfire that comes on sudden, consuming all, and irrationally bright.

You lock eyes, or maybe just usernames online. Your stomach flips and you constantly feel sick. As if you are stuck on a twirling ride you can't get off of. But also, you don't want to. It is the closest to flying you ever felt.

Your brain starts to flood with possibility. Your heart doesn’t know the difference between chemistry and the danger it is now in. It only knows it’s hungry for that feeling the fire inside brings.

They smile at you and it feels like being seen for the first time. Like all the jagged parts inside you suddenly rearranged into something beautiful, something whole.

This is the moment where most people say . . . “I think I’m falling in love.”

But if you listen closely, beneath the butterflies and beneath the buzz you’ll hear something else. A craving. . . A need.

It doesn’t whisper, I love them. It begs, "do they love me back"?

What Limerence Is (and Isn’t)

Limerence is like love wearing a mask, you never get to see its true face, only imagine what it looks like. It's an obsession dressed as devotion. It’s a fantasy painted with the colors of a fairy tale, but the closer you get, the more you see all the cracks and chipped paint. I know this feeling intimately. I’ve mistaken it for a soulmate, for my destiny, for the one thing I thought would make me whole. I’ve broken my own heart more times than I can count, chasing a man who only ever existed in my imagination.

This guide is a mirror, to show you what you're made of. A map to guide you on your way of realization. I want to take you on a journey, from the wild highs of longing to the quiet, grounded peace of what real love can be. Along the way, we’ll talk psychology, memory, childhood wounds, culture, and yes, even a bit of magic. Healing from limerence is more than self help. It’s soul retrieval.

Limerence is not love. It is not built on knowing. It is not rooted in trust or time.

It is a psychological state, a cocktail of neurochemicals shaken hard by hope and history. Coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in the 1970s, “limerence” describes the involuntary, obsessive infatuation with another person, usually one who is emotionally unavailable or ambiguous, as I had experienced.

It’s not love as much as the need to be loved. Urgently, overwhelmingly, and most often unrealistically. Every unanswered text is a cliffhanger. Every glance feels like prophecy. Your nervous system becomes a slot machine, pulling the lever on their attention.

Limerence vs Infatuation: What’s the Difference?

Infatuation is light and brief, like those butterflies we get when crushing, fun flirtation, a slight chemical buzz. It's wanting to know more about someone because you're curious and attracted.

Limerence is heavier and lasts much longer. It's a thunderstorm inside your chest and head. It’s fantasizing about marriage with someone you haven’t even kissed yet. It’s seeing red flags and painting them pretty pastel colors to deliberately overlook those danger signs. It’s feeling like your life hinges on a single text message.

Infatuation is fleeting and fun. You might crush on a coworker or a barista, but the feeling fades naturally if it’s not fed.

Limerence, on the other hand, sticks. It digs its nails deep into you until your soul bleeds. If the connection is ambiguous or inconsistent, it only feeds the obsession more, rather than extinguishing it. You start to read meaning into everything: a glance, a “like” on a post, a vague sentence that could mean anything. You're building a castle on a cloud.

Emotional Regulation: The Calm in the Storm

One of the most telling differences between love and limerence is emotional regulation.

Limerence often hijacks your nervous system. You’re elated when they text, devastated when they don’t. You’re triggered by every silence, every ambiguity. It mimics withdrawal, because it is withdrawal, complete with dopamine crashes, cortisol spikes, heart in your throat.

Healthy love, on the other hand, stabilizes you, grounds you, your nervous system feels safe in their presence. You can disagree without fearing abandonment. You can be apart without unraveling.

You don’t have to earn their attention. You don’t live in a state of fear or fantasy. You can just... be.

How Long Does It Last?

Infatuation typically fades in weeks to a few months.

Limerence can last months to years, especially if there’s no clear closure or if the object of your obsession stays emotionally unavailable but intermittently responsive. The uncertainty feeds the fire.

Limerence vs Love: The Myth of Mutual Madness

Where limerence thrives on uncertainty, love is built on clarity.

Love grows in safety, in reality, in knowing each other deeply over time. Love is reciprocal, grounded, and often imperfect. It is a slow burn, not a wildfire.

Love is patient. Limerence is urgent.

Love makes room for the other to be real, a flawed, messy human. Limerence puts them on a pedestal and worships the illusion you created. Love says, “I choose you, even with your humanness.” You really see them. Limerence says, “If you choose me, I’ll finally be enough.”

Who’s Most Likely to Experience Limerence?

While anyone can fall into limerence, certain people are more vulnerable, especially if your emotional blueprint was shaped by trauma.

You may be more likely to experience limerence if:

• You have CPTSD, especially from relational trauma or neglect
• You live with ADHD, which affects dopamine regulation and emotional impulsivity
• You're a survivor of childhood emotional neglect or abuse
• You have an anxious attachment style
• You were taught that love is something to earn, not something you deserve
• People with (OCD). The obsessive thought patterns and compulsive behaviors that define OCD can attach themselves to a person just as easily as they can to fears, rituals, or routines.

Many of us didn’t get consistent love growing up. We got mixed signals. We learned to chase, to perform, to obsess over “what went wrong.” Limerence feels familiar because it mirrors the inconsistency of our early relationships.

In a strange, painful way, limerence is your nervous system’s way of trying to complete an old story. To finally win the affection you were denied as a child. But it’s a trap, because it’s never really about the person you have limerence for. It’s about your wound.

Part Two: The Anatomy of Love

Love is not chaos. It’s not fireworks every day or the ache of absence. It’s not chasing, begging, or wondering where you stand.

Love is the warm sun after a long winter. Love is safe.

We throw the word love around so easily . . .

“I love this song,” or “I loved them so much it hurt.”

But love doesn’t have to hurt. In fact, it shouldn't.

Some of us grew up mistaking emotional intensity for love. We were raised in chaos, so peace feels suspicious. We’re drawn to people who keep us guessing, not because we like it, but because our nervous system thinks unpredictability = passion.

But healthy love isn’t boring. It’s secure. It’s the kind of love where you can exhale. Where your heart doesn’t have to sprint just to feel wanted.

Love isn’t meant to be a storm. It’s the shelter.

Romantic Love

This is the one most often confused with limerence. But true romantic love isn't built on obsession. It’s about partnership, not pedestal-building. It includes:

• Mutual attraction and affection
• Shared values and goals
• Emotional safety and support
• Desire for each other’s growth and wellbeing
• Romantic love can include passion, but its foundation is trust.

Platonic Love

This is the soul deep connection between friends. It’s laughter over coffee, crying on the phone at midnight, knowing someone sees you and stays anyway. Platonic love is often overlooked, but it's every bit as powerful, and sometimes more consistent, than romantic love.

Familial Love

Love within families can be complex, sometimes nurturing, sometimes tangled in trauma. Healthy familial love is unconditional, supportive, and protective. But for many of us, our first experiences of love were in families that taught us love must be earned, not freely given. That lesson shapes how we love as adults.

Self-Love

The one we neglect the most. True self-love is not about bubble baths or affirmations alone. It's about how you speak to yourself in silence. It's setting boundaries. Saying no. Saying yes. It’s refusing to abandon yourself for the approval of others.

Self love is the soil that all other loves grow from.

Part Three: How Limerence Hooks Us

(The Psychology Behind the Obsession)

This section dives into the why behind limerence. How it forms, what it feeds on, and why it can feel so impossible to break free from.

You didn’t choose limerence. You didn’t just wake up one day and say, “I think I’ll obsess over someone who may never fully choose me.” But here you are, heart on fire, mind on loop, stuck in a story that just won’t end.

So... what’s happening?

The Chemistry of Craving

At its core, limerence is part biology, part psychology, part trauma response. When you become limerent, your brain bathes in a cocktail of chemicals like dopamine, norepinephrine, and sometimes oxytocin. Every time you interact with or even think about the person.

• Dopamine gives you that high. The reward. The rush.
• Norepinephrine amps up your alertness. That on-edge, fluttery, “can’t eat, can’t sleep” feeling? That’s it.
• Oxytocin might make an appearance if physical touch or bonding moments are involved—making it feel like deep intimacy, even if the connection is mostly one-sided.

It’s the same neurochemical pattern you see in addiction. You’re not “crazy.” You’re chemically hooked.

Intermittent Reinforcement: The Emotional Slot Machine

What really strengthens the hook is something psychologists call intermittent reinforcement.

If they gave you nothing? You’d move on.

If they gave you everything? You’d feel safe.

But when it’s sometimes yes, sometimes no, your brain lights up like a casino slot machine. You start chasing the high.

One sweet message can erase three weeks of silence. One “maybe” is enough to fuel six months of fantasy. This inconsistency feeds the obsession.

You start to believe they’re special, that this connection is meant to be, but really, your brain is just caught in a cycle of hope, reward, withdrawal, repeat.

Fantasy: The Fuel of Limerence

Here’s a tough truth: sometimes, it’s not the person you’re obsessed with, it’s the story.

Limerence thrives in fantasy and projection. You might imagine a future with them, assign them traits they’ve never shown, build whole worlds around glances and what ifs.

Often, these fantasies fill a void:

• You imagine being chosen, because you never were.
• You imagine being seen, because you were invisible.
• You imagine being loved completely, because you were taught love was conditional.

The person becomes a symbol. A stand in for healing. But symbols can’t love you back.

Childhood Trauma & Unmet Needs

People with childhood trauma are often more vulnerable to limerence. Especially those who:

• Grew up with inconsistent caregivers
• Had to “earn” love through performance or caretaking
• Were emotionally neglected or abandoned
• Felt invisible, unwanted, or unsafe

Why? Because limerence mimics the emotional pattern they learned as children: Longing. Hoping. Proving. Waiting.

Being close but never quite enough.

Limerence offers a second chance to win the love you were denied. But it’s not a real solution. It’s a repetition of the wound. A cycle that needs to be broken.

ADHD, CPTSD, OCD, BPD and Limerence

Neurodivergent and trauma-affected brains are more susceptible to limerence. Let’s break it down:

• ADHD: Rejection sensitivity, dopamine dysregulation, impulsivity, and hyperfocus, all make it easy to become fixated on someone who gives you emotional highs and lows.
• CPTSD: Emotional flashbacks, anxious attachment, and abandonment trauma mean you're wired to cling to people who trigger old patterns.
• OCD: Intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors make it difficult to let go. You may loop on the person, the meaning of every interaction, or your own feelings.
• BPD: People with BPD often experience intense fears of abandonment, unstable self image, and rapid shifts in idealization and devaluation. Limerence can feel like finally being seen, until emotional dysregulation or perceived rejection triggers deep panic.

If your brain struggles with regulation, uncertainty, or past abandonment, limerence can feel like both a lifeline and a trap.

The Hook is the Hope

What makes limerence so painful is that it feels like destiny.

You think:

• “If they just realized how good we’d be together…”
• “If I can just prove my worth…”
• “If I wait a little longer, maybe…”

But that hope becomes a cage. Because limerence isn’t love.

It’s longing. And longing, by nature, is rooted in lack.

You’re Not Broken. You Are Wired For Connection

Here’s the most important thing: Limerence isn’t proof that you’re broken.

It’s proof that you long to be loved deeply, seen fully, chosen without conditions. That longing is human.

It’s just been hijacked by your nervous system, your trauma, and a brain that got used to survival instead of stability.

But you can learn to tell the difference. You can choose reality over fantasy. You can find love that doesn’t hurt, and doesn’t hide. You deserve that.

Part Four: Attachment Styles and How They Feed Limerence

This section explores how our early emotional experiences shape the way we connect, and how that blueprint can make some of us more prone to falling into limerence.

Before you fell for them, you fell into a pattern.

Long before you obsessed, you learned how to survive love. We all carry a blueprint in our hearts. A silent guide, drawn from our earliest relationships, usually the ones with our caregivers.

This blueprint is called your attachment style, and it shapes how you love, trust, and connect. It can also explain why you might cling to someone who isn’t choosing you back.

Why you can’t stop thinking about them. Why you’re stuck in a loop of fantasy, hope, and heartbreak.

Let’s look at how attachment styles develop, and how each one interacts with limerence.

1. Secure Attachment: The Foundation of Healthy Love

A securely attached person grew up knowing that love is consistent, safe, and available. Their caregivers responded to their needs with warmth and reliability.

• As adults, these people:
• Communicate openly
• Trust easily
• Handle rejection without spiraling
• Don’t need constant reassurance to feel loved

Limerence rarely sticks to securely attached people.

Why? Because they don’t confuse anxiety with connection. They don’t need to chase someone who isn’t giving back. They don’t see inconsistency as romantic; they see it as a red flag.

2. Anxious Attachment: Limerence’s Favorite Playground

If you grew up with love that was inconsistent, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, you may have developed an anxious attachment style.

• You learned to stay hypervigilant.
• To read between the lines.
• To earn love by being good enough, useful enough, lovable enough.

As an adult, this shows up as:

• Overanalyzing messages and silences
• Constant need for reassurance
• Intense fear of rejection or abandonment
• Obsessing over unavailable or hot-and-cold partners

Limerence thrives here. It feeds on your longing to finally be chosen, fully, freely, without conditions. It feels like love, but it’s really a trauma echo.

You’re not broken. You’re just trying to rewrite a story that never ended the way it should’ve.

3. Avoidant Attachment: Yearning with the Door Locked

Avoidantly attached people often grew up in environments where vulnerability wasn’t safe, where emotions were minimized or punished, and independence was the only path to security.

As adults, they:

• Distance themselves emotionally
• Feel smothered by closeness
• Struggle with commitment
• Fear dependency, both theirs and others’

Avoidants can still experience limerence, but they often fantasize about the person rather than pursue them.

They may crave connection deeply but sabotage it the moment it gets real. They often attract anxiously attached people, forming toxic push pull dynamics that fuel limerence’s rollercoaster.

4. Disorganized Attachment: Love as Danger and Salvation

This attachment style, sometimes called fearful-avoidant, often comes from childhoods that were both neglectful and chaotic.

The person they loved was also the person who hurt them.

As adults, they live in a loop of “Come close,no, go away.”

They:

• Long for intimacy but don’t feel safe in it
• Alternate between clinging and pushing away
• Feel like love is both everything and a threat
• Often feel emotionally overwhelmed in relationships

Limerence feels like rescue. But also like drowning.

It mirrors the confusion of early trauma, where love and pain were wrapped up in the same person.

This attachment style often leads to the most intense, destructive limerent episodes. But once understood, it can also lead to the most profound of healings.

Overlapping Attachment Styles: When You Don’t Fit Just One Box

Humans aren’t simple. We’re not checkboxes.

Your attachment style is not a fixed label. It’s a pattern, shaped by experience, wired by survival, and constantly in motion.

You might find yourself saying:

“I’m anxious with them, but avoidant with someone else.”

“Sometimes I push people away, but other times I cling desperately.”

“I used to be anxious, but after my last relationship, I shut down completely.”

That’s not a contradiction, it’s nuance

Why Attachment Styles Overlap

Attachment styles often blend or shift for a few reasons:

1. Different Relationships, Different Wounds

You might have had a parent who was neglectful and another who was unpredictable.

One taught you to suppress your needs; the other taught you to panic when love was inconsistent.

That can create a hybrid style, part avoidant, part anxious.

2. Situational Triggers

Certain people or situations can activate different patterns.

You might be securely attached in friendships but anxious in romance.

You might feel fine until you start to really care about someone, then the fear kicks in.

3. Trauma and Trust Erosion

Past relationships, especially abusive or emotionally inconsistent ones, can change how safe you feel in future ones.

Someone who once felt secure can become anxious after repeated betrayals.

Someone who was anxiously attached may develop avoidant tendencies as a defense mechanism.

4. Healing and Growth

The beautiful part? Attachment styles can evolve.

Therapy, self reflection, and healthy relationships can help you move toward security. You may notice yourself becoming more open, more trusting, more stable. That’s not regression or confusion, it’s healing.

How to Tell What Style You Are

You might already know. Or maybe you’re a mix. That’s okay. Attachment styles aren’t life sentences, they’re starting points. The moment you become aware of your patterns, you begin to shift them.

Ask yourself:

• How do I react when someone pulls away?
• Do I feel safe when someone is close to me?
• Do I chase people who aren’t emotionally available?
• Do I sabotage when love gets real?

Your answers may reveal more than your past,they’ll show you where to go from here.

Healing the Pattern

Healing your attachment style is the exit ramp from limerence. It’s how you move from obsession to connection.

From fantasy to reality. From survival to love.

And it starts with this:

You are allowed to want safe, steady, mutual love.

You are worthy of being chosen, without confusion, without chaos, without condition.

Limerence is loud. Love is calm.

Calm doesn’t mean boring, it means safe enough to grow.

You’re Allowed to Be Complicated

Your attachment style is allowed to be messy. It’s allowed to shift. You are not doomed to stay trapped in a single pattern forever. The goal isn’t to force yourself into one category. The goal is to recognize your patterns, learn where they came from, and gently move toward something more secure. Bit by bit. Choice by choice.

With compassion, not shame. When you understand your attachment style, you stop calling yourself “too much.”

You start realizing you’ve just been scared to lose love. Scared people deserve gentleness, not judgment.

Part Five: Fantasy vs. Reality "The Limerent Illusion"

This Part explores how the mind creates an illusion of love and connection during limerence, blurring the lines between what’s real and what’s imagined. It’ll also dive into the struggle of disentangling fantasy from reality and why that’s such a crucial part of healing.

In the quiet hours of the night, when you’re lying awake, does the world feel real? Or does it flicker an in between place, where you can almost touch the love you imagine, but it slips through your fingers the moment you reach for it?

Limerence thrives on illusion, that delicate space between what is and what could be. It twists, bends, and shapes reality into something it isn’t, creating a dreamscape where the impossible feels possible.

But, like symbols, dreams can’t love you back either.

The Fantasy of Perfect Love

Limerence begins with an idea, not a person. You might not even know them all that well, but you create a version of them that is perfect in every way. Your brain fills in the blanks, turning every glance, every word, every action into meaning.

In that space, they’re not just anyone, they are the person who will complete you. They’ll save you. They’ll finally show you what it means to be loved the right way.

But in reality? They are only human too. They have flaws. They may not feel the same way you do. They may not even exist in the way your mind imagines them.

This disconnect, this gap between the ideal and the real, is the limerent illusion. It’s the danger of chasing a dream while missing the truth right in front of you.

The Highs of Limerence: Chasing the Dream

What makes limerence so intoxicating is the high you get from the fantasy. Every interaction, no matter how small, becomes charged with potential. The briefest touch, the subtlest compliment, becomes proof that this person could be the one. They are the answer to everything you’ve longed for.

But here’s the catch: Fantasy feeds on the unknown. The more you don’t know, the bigger your imagination gets. The more they withdraw, the stronger your fantasies become. mLimerence thrives in ambiguity, in the spaces where you can project your hopes, fears, and needs onto someone else.

This is why limerence feels so real, it’s constructed from your most deeply held desires and unmet needs. You’re not just in love with the person. You’re in love with the fantasy of what they represent.

The Reality: Who They Really Are

The truth is that, like you, they are full of contradictions. They have their own past, their own baggage, their own fears. They may not even see you the way you see them. That’s the painful part of limerence: you’re chasing someone who may never fully exist in the way you imagine them.

The reality of love, true love, requires us to accept people as they are. Not as projections of our unmet needs or hopes. But as human beings, with flaws, imperfections, and limitations.

It’s not about the grand gestures. It’s about the small moments, the ones that show you who someone really is, without the layers of fantasy you’ve wrapped around them.

Breaking the Limerent Illusion

So how do you break free from the illusion?

How do you stop yourself from falling deeper into a fantasy that won’t ever materialize?

The first step is awareness. You have to see the illusion for what it is.

Here’s how:

1. Question the Idealization

Ask yourself: Are you in love with this person or the idea of who they could be? When you idealize someone, you miss the full picture. Real love involves accepting flaws, differences, and imperfections.

2. Ground Yourself in Reality

Take a step back and look at your interactions.

What are they actually saying?

What are they not saying?

What are they actually doing?

Are their actions aligning with their words?

Are you seeing them for who they really are, or just for who you want them to be?

3. Release the Fantasy

The hardest part is letting go of the dream you’ve built.

You have to ask yourself: Is this relationship healthy?

Are you getting the emotional safety and connection you deserve, or are you just getting your needs temporarily met through fantasy?

4. Grieve the Loss of the Fantasy

It’s painful to let go of a dream, especially when it feels like it could be your only shot at happiness.

But grieving this loss is an essential part of the healing process.

The truth may hurt, but it will set you free.

The Healing Journey: From Illusion to Reality

To heal from limerence, you need to rewrite your relationship with reality, starting with yourself.

Instead of searching for a dream, learn to build your own life in the here and now. Focus on the things that fill you up: your passions, your hobbies, your own growth.

When you stop chasing a person who doesn’t choose you, you can start learning how to choose yourself. That’s the only way to truly move toward love that’s real, not imaginary.

If you are interested in the healing process, be sure to check out my next Guide. " Live, Love, & Limerence" A guide to heal from Limerence.