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I am a journaler. I have been for most of my life, starting when I was about 10. During my last limerent episode, when my limerence was at its worst, I could not (or would not) talk to anyone about what was actually happening. First of all, I did not have the words for my experience, and second, I wasn’t really sure anyone would understand. So I wrote, I wrote pages and pages and pages. For the first two years, my writing was in a spiral bound notebook. When that one filled, I started another, then another. The journaling did not fix anything right away but it gave me a place to start each day. I allowed myself two or three pages each morning to just write about my LO. Writing gave my thoughts and obsessions somewhere to go besides back into my own head. It slowed everything down enough that I could sometimes see it for what it was.

By the time I found the word limerence, my journaling changed. It started having a direction. Knowing about limerence gave my writing a frame, and the frame gave my words somewhere to land.

What I did not have, and what I needed, was an understanding specifically what limerence does. The intrusive thoughts, the contact obsession, the grief of letting go, seemed like problems with me personally, not what it actually was, which is a pattern that is triggered by a specific set of circumstances. I remember trying to find out how to stop obsessive thinking, when my obsessive thinking wasn’t the issue, it was the limerent thinking which, in itself, is obsessive.

That is the journal I wish someone had handed me when I was in the thick of my limerent episode. Since I didn’t have it, I wrote it myself.

The 30 Day Limerence Transformation Journal is built specifically for this experience. It is not generic self-help or prompts that could apply to anything. It is thirty days of targeted questions across four phases of recovery: Awareness, Detachment, Identity, and Rebuilding. Each day includes a short quote and three specific limerence prompts. I included an opening assessment to identify where you are right now, and a closing assessment thirty days later so you can see exactly how far you have come.

I felt good writing it because I know what it is going to do for the women who use it. I have been that woman. I know what it costs to be stuck in this pattern without the right tools. And I know that journaling, when it is pointed in the right direction, is one of the most powerful tools there is.

There is no mention of limerence on the outside, the cover only has the initials LTJ. I also have decided to post each day of the journal here for those who do not wish to buy a physical copy. Going forward, each weekly post will be one day of the 30 days of the journal. Please subscribe so that you don’t miss any of the prompts.

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Why We Start With Where We Are

Before any transformation can begin, you have to be honest about where you are standing.

Not where you want to be or where you think you should be by now, and not the version of the story that makes you sound more together than you feel. Where you actually are, right now, today.

This is harder than it sounds. Limerence is a pattern that runs on avoidance as much as obsession. We avoid looking directly at how much of our mental life has been taken over. We avoid looking at the LO’s faults and shortcomings. We avoid calculating what limerence has cost. We avoid asking questions that would require us to admit how far things have gone, because admitting it feels like defeat instead of what it actually is, which is the beginning of clarity.

The journal opens with an assessment to give you a clear baseline. A true picture of where you are before the work begins, so that thirty days from now you can look back and see the distance you have traveled.

This week in the newsletter we are doing that prework together.

You do not need the journal to do this. These prompts are yours right now, here, today.

Every Friday from here, I will be sharing a week’s worth of prompts from the journal. If you want to do the full thirty days alongside this newsletter, you can. If you want to purchase the journal through Amazon, you can do that too.

Both options get you to the same place. Forward.

The Limerence Feelings Inventory: Where Are You Right Now?

This is the opening assessment from the 30 Day Limerence Transformation Journal. It is the first thing you do before anything else. Read and rate each question and give yourself an honest number from 1 to 10, where 1 is barely present and 10 is all-consuming.

Obsession How often do thoughts of your LO intrude on your daily life?

Hope for the relationship How much do you still believe in a future together?

Pain How much are you hurting right now?

Anger How much frustration or rage is present?

Longing How much do you miss your LO?

Clarity How clearly can you see this situation?

Self-worth How good do you feel about yourself right now?

Hope for yourself How much do you believe in your own future, beyond limerence?

Now, without stopping to edit yourself, complete these sentences in relation to your LO:

I think about my LO _______ times a day.

When I imagine the future, I see

The last thing my LO said to me was

What I am most afraid of right now is

What I most want right now is

What I believe about myself is

One word for how I feel today:

Write your answers somewhere you can find them after you complete the final assessment. That look back is going to tell you something important. Next Friday we begin Day One.

The 30 Day Limerence Transformation Journal will be available or purchase on Amazon on June 15, 2026.

Nothing in this newsletter constitutes mental health treatment. Please work with a qualified professional for clinical support. Trust yourself first.

The first time I met my LO, I was not interested in him romantically.

I could tell there was something going on with him, like he had problems, or was a little outside the box, but nothing I could put my finger on. He was nice and very polite. There was no pull of attraction at all, and nothing that would have predicted what came next.

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Then a friend said to me that we would be cute together. What she saw was that he was a gentleman and that he seemed genuinely interested in me. A gentleman was exactly what I needed at the time. Someone to treat me right.

That was really all it took, and I was hooked. Something shifted in the way I saw him. This time I saw him through someone else’s eyes. Bad choices had trained me over and over in men to believe that maybe someone else could see something I could not. So I looked again.

He did not ask for my number when we said goodbye. I should have taken that as a sign. He had the opportunity and did not take it. Most people would register that as mild disappointment and move on, yet I registered it as a problem to solve.

I started thinking about him that night. Not because anything had happened between us. Because something hadn’t. The not-asking me for my number became something I turned over and over. Maybe he thought he was being polite by not asking, and maybe I should have asked him for his number. Maybe he felt embarrassed and didn’t want to be rejected. The questions started and did not stop.

About three weeks later, I ran into him again. It was a completely random meeting. Though I will admit that if I could have controlled it and made it happen, I would have. I took it as a sign from the universe and made sure we exchanged numbers.

He did not contact me right away the way I imagined he would, and the anxiety came on fast. I did not want to appear as desperate as I was feeling, but I also wanted to signal the right amount of interest. So I reached out once, a few days later, to say I was happy to see him again and hoped we would meet soon. He replied with something polite and generic, and a smiling emoji. I responded to that text and then stopped. Somewhere in the part of my brain still functioning clearly, I understood that this was the limit because reaching out again would cross a line I did not want to cross.

So I waited.

He ghosted me for months, but the anxiety got worse before it got better. Around month three, just as I was finally starting to let him go, he texted, and I jumped at it. The irony was that I was interested in him because my friend stated he acted like a gentleman, which was exactly what I wanted. In reality, he was no gentleman, or at least, he was not at all what I had made out in my mind.

I knew in that moment that I should have deleted the number. But the text arrived, and something shifted. All the pain and anxiety vanished. I felt light again, like everything was right in the world, so I texted back. And it started again; I was obsessing over a man who had ignored me for months.

The cycle of contact and silence lasted for over two years. When I found the word limerence, I could see what had been happening the whole time. It did not end right away. But it faded. And once it did, I could look back and see how I had moved through each of these stages without ever knowing they had a name.

THE INSIGHT

The 5 Stages of Limerence

Dorothy Tennov, the psychologist who coined the word limerence in 1979, identified something most people miss about obsessive romantic attachment. It does not arrive all at once. It moves through stages. The same stages, in roughly the same order, regardless of who the person is or what the circumstances are.

Knowing the stages does not stop the cycle. But it gives you something the cycle does not want you to have: a map. A map tells you where you are. And knowing where you are is the first step toward deciding whether you want to stay there.

Stage One: The Glimmer

Tennov used this term for the moment of activation. It is almost always small.

A suggestion from a friend. A look that lasted a second too long. One thing you have in common. Something he said landed differently than expected. Sometimes, as in my case, it is something he did not do. While my friends comment that we would be cute together piqued my interest, him not asking me for my number was the glimmer.

The glimmer does not always feel like attraction. Sometimes it is curiosity. Sometimes it is a vague sense that this person matters in some way but without knowing why.

What the glimmer always has underneath it is uncertainty and questions. I registered that the outcome is unknown, and as a person wired for limerence, uncertainty reads as importance. Something worth tracking.

The glimmer feels like possibility and hope.

Stage Two: Crystallization

Tennov also coined this term. Crystallization is when the LO stops being a person and becomes a symbol.

Every little thing about them becomes significant. Every message gets filtered through the question: does this mean what I hope it means? Their positive qualities get amplified. The concerning qualities get explained away or set aside. The gaps of information with the things you do not know about them get filled in with whatever the longing or obsession needs them to be.

You are not seeing the person, you are seeing a construction. And the construction is more compelling than any real person could be, because you built it to fit the shape of what you need. For me, I needed a gentleman; I needed someone who would treat me right, but I could not see the reality that he was not that at all.

The fantasy architecture goes up fast. Usually without your awareness.

Stage Three: The Obsession

The thoughts are no longer occasional. They are constant.

You wake up and the LO is already there. You try to work and find twenty minutes have passed inside a conversation that never happened. You analyze the last message for subtext it probably does not contain. The thoughts arrive without invitation and do not leave when asked. This was me when I was second-guessing myself, feeling I had to do something, but I was out of options. I was forced to simply wait, or get over him, and getting over him at this stage seemed impossible.

This is the stage most people recognize as the problem. But by the time Stage Three arrives, the glimmer and crystallization have already done their work. The construction is in place. The nervous system is committed. The obsession is not the beginning. It is the third chapter.

The physical symptoms are loudest here. The lurch when the phone lights up. The tightness in the chest when it does not. The sleeplessness. The inability to concentrate on anything that matters.

Stage Four: The Anxiety and Hope Cycle

This is where most people live the longest.

Hope arrives when there is contact. A text, a moment of warmth, any signal that something is there. The nervous system floods with relief. Everything settles.

Then the contact stops or produces nothing definitive, and anxiety moves back in. The checking starts. The analysis starts. The cycle runs until the next small sign arrives and temporarily resets it.

The inconsistency is not a flaw in the dynamic. It is the fuel. Unpredictable contact keeps the dopamine system on permanent alert, which keeps the hope alive, which keeps the cycle running.

Most women are in Stage Four when they finally go looking for answers. The obsession has been running long enough that they know something is wrong. They do not yet have a name for it. While stage 3 and 4 are different, I also believe they ran concurrently with one another in my case.

Stage Five: Dissolution or Reality

This stage arrives in one of two ways.

The first is reciprocation. The LO becomes fully available, and the limerence often fades. The uncertainty that powered the cycle is gone. The dopamine has nothing to chase. What remains is a real person with real flaws, and whether there is anything genuine underneath the projection.

The second is reality. Not a dramatic confrontation. Just the slow accumulation of evidence that the construction does not match the person. That the door will not open. That the almost has been an almost for too long to remain reasonable.

Reality does not arrive loudly, and recovery does not mean the feeling disappears. It means there is enough of a gap between the limerent feeling and the decision to choose what to do next. That gap starts small. It gets larger with time and with understanding. It begins with being able to name the stage you are in, while you are still inside it.

Which Stage Are You In? A Self-Diagnostic

Read each description and its questions. The stage where you answer yes most often is where you are right now.

STAGE ONE: THE GLIMMER The interest has just arrived. You are not sure it is anything yet.

Does thinking about this person feel more like curiosity than certainty? Did something small start it, a suggestion, a look, something he did not do? Can you still go a full day without thinking about him?

STAGE TWO: CRYSTALLIZATION The LO is becoming more than a person. He is becoming a story.

Have you started noticing everything, his word choices, his response times, what he does and does not say? Have you explained away something that concerned you rather than looked directly at it? Do you feel like you know who he really is, even though the actual information is limited?

STAGE THREE: THE OBSESSION The thoughts are no longer occasional. They are constant.

Do the thoughts arrive before you have chosen to have them? Have you tried to stop thinking about him and found it does not work? Has your sleep, concentration, or ability to do ordinary work been affected?

STAGE FOUR: THE ANXIETY AND HOPE CYCLE You know the pattern. You are still inside it.

Does your mood feel extreme and also follow his contact? You feel elated and on top of the world when he reaches out, but depressed and low when he goes quiet? Have you told yourself you were done and then gone back the moment he reconnects? Does any contact from him, however small and insignificant, feel like more relief than it should?

STAGE FIVE: DISSOLUTION OR REALITY Something has shifted and you can feel it.

Do you think about him less than you used to, without having tried to make that happen? Has something occurred that made the construction harder to maintain? Are you asking questions about yourself rather than about him?

The stages do not announce themselves while they are running. That is the whole problem. You are inside the glimmer before you know it is a glimmer, inside the obsession before you understand what obsession actually means in this context. The map does not stop the cycle. But it gives you the one thing the cycle is designed to take from you, which is the ability to see where you are. And seeing where you are is always, always the beginning of choosing something different.

Take good care,

Love, Leslie

I did the same thing with limerence and my LOs.

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I would have one coworker who knew one thing about him and another friend who knew something different. There was also a random friend I might call to catch up with and after a bit of pleasantries, I may say, “yeah, I’m kind of seeing this guy but then this happened…” then I would try to squeeze out an objective opinion from this poor person I hadn’t spoken to in ages. My closest friends knew little more. I led them to believe he was someone I, perhaps but not so sure, might be interested in. I never told a single person about the obsession and rumination. I parceled it out. I bought my booze (opinions, comments, suggestions) from my friends, a little here, a little there.

Even more depressing is that what little I shared with them was not even true.

When people asked about him, I would say, yeah, I’m sort of seeing someone. “I’m not sure I’m really into it.” “He drinks a lot.” “I just don’t have time for anyone right now.” “I’m still on the fence.”

That the words, “Still on the fence,” came out of my mouth is a joke. As if I were the undecided one. As if the situation were mine to resolve whenever I got around to it.

The truth was the complete opposite. He would not take me anywhere. He kept me in one part of his life and closed all the other doors away from any other part of his life. A friend once asked me to bring him to a party. She said she would love to meet him. I said, “Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t want to go there with him yet, maybe next time, I’ll see how things with us go.”

I acted as though it were my decision, my timeline, as if I were the one calling all the shots.

What I could not say to her was that he would not have come. He had no interest in meeting my friends. He never introduced me to his family or friends, despite my requests to do so. I had been quietly and carefully constructing a cover story that protected me from having to say the authentic version of the story out loud. This cover story hid my obsession over a man who was not taking me anywhere, not introducing me to anyone, and not losing a single night of sleep over any of it.

The story was a protection for my deep shame. Telling others I was on the fence, or putting him down because of his drinking, gave me the power. If I admitted what was happening, friends could call me out for what I was doing. I was giving months of my life to someone who treated me as if I wasn’t worthy. I was not ready to be that woman. I wanted to be in control of the narrative, no matter what that cost me.

So I kept “buying from different stores.” A little to this friend. A little to that one. I gave no one enough to see the full picture. Never gave enough for anyone to look at it and call me out on it. I felt the full weight of the shame alone so that people I considered my closest friends would not see me at my weakest.

What the Hiding Is Doing

Shame is a core feature of limerence, not a side effect. It’s not shame about the LO or what the situation looks like from the outside; it is shame about your response. The fact that as capable woman, one who has navigated hard things, you cannot seem to navigate this one. It is the difference of who you are in every other part of your life, and who you become around him.

That is where the shame lives and hides. The shame keeps the whole thing invisible. Hiding the shame keeps the cycle running longer than it otherwise would. One very effective interruption to a limerent episode is an outside perspective, someone who can see the situation clearly. When you parcel out the truth, when you manage what each person knows, you eliminate the possibility of that perspective. One person never has enough information or the full picture to provide a needed perspective, you have made sure of that.

This hiding and lying compounds the shame rather than reducing it, because secrets get heavier as time passes. The longer you carry limerence alone, the more evidence it becomes that it must be shameful. If it didn’t have the emotional charge, you could talk about it. The fact you cannot, or do not want to, becomes proof in your mind that it is worse than you thought.

Hiding distorts your own understanding of what is happening. When you tell people you are on the fence, or not sure you are into him, or position yourself as the one with the power, you are not just managing their perception. You are managing your own. The cover story is for you too. Every time you tell it, the authentic version becomes a little harder to access, a little more buried under the version you have been rehearsing.

Shame doesn’t mean your experience is shameful. It means you lack the right perspective. Shame fills the void where understanding is missing. I felt shame before I knew the word “limerence.” Once I had the word, I had something to work with.

I understand why I hid. I didn’t want to be with someone who didn’t care about me. I didn’t want to be judged so I protected myself. It was the only way I knew how. I bought my alcohol, so to speak, from different stores.

But the hiding has a cost which is that I ended up alone inside something that is already isolating enough on its own. No one is allowed to see enough to help. No one is allowed to get close enough to say, “I see what is happening here, and I am here for you.”

I don’t feel I would have needed to share my truth with everyone, or even with those I haven’t fully trusted. I believe finding just one person who could truly understand my perspective, hold it without judgment, and offer a thoughtful reflection would have been incredibly beneficial.

The Shame Spiral — How It Shows Up and What It Is Telling You

Shame related to limerence often manifests in specific ways. Recognizing these signs can be helpful, as they often serve as protective strategies that made sense at one point, but now cause more harm than good.

1. You tell different people different pieces, never the whole thing to anyone. . You’re curating the narrative, keeping the full picture contained so no single person can grasp enough of it to reflect it back to you. This feels like privacy, but it operates as isolation.

2. You position yourself as the one who is undecided. “I’m on the fence. I’m not sure I’m into it. I don’t know if I want to go there with him.” This cover story shifts the power dynamic in the retelling because the truth, that he’s the unavailable one, the one not taking you anywhere,

is too shameful and revealing to admit.

3. You make excuses for why he is not more present in your visible life. “I don’t want to move too fast.” “Things are tricky at the moment.” “I’m keeping it casual.” These phrases shield you from admitting the reality: you lack the access to his world that would allow him to be more present in yours.

4. You minimize what you are feeling to the people you tell. You say you are fine when you are not fine. You change the subject when it gets close to the real version. You laugh it off. You say it is nothing. You have become very good at performing “fine.”

5. You feel more ashamed of your response than of anything he has done. He’s unavailable and not showing up. He’s made it clear, through his words or deeds, where you stand. Yet, the shame you feel stems from your inability to let him go. Consider this: if it were a man you weren’t fixated on, and he told you he was unavailable, you wouldn’t dwell on it. This isn’t about him; it’s about how you’re responding.

6. You have never said the full accurate version out loud to a single person. Not a single person. Because saying it all out loud, to one person, would mean hearing it yourself. And you’re not sure you’re ready for that just yet.

When you’re ready, it won’t sound as bad as you fear. I promise. Many other women are going through this same experience alone. Reaching out to someone you trust is the first step.

Take good care,

Love, Leslie

Nothing in this newsletter constitutes mental health treatment. Please work with a qualified professional for clinical support. Trust yourself first.

In reality, the money went mostly to food. My mom was not home much since she worked at night but when she was home, the question of dinner was not really on her radar. She would sometimes leave me a dollar to walk to the convenience store to get something to eat there. They had pierogis in a little heated case by the register, or I could get a frozen burrito. I usually had to use at least some of my own money to buy something to eat.

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Many years later as a young adult when I studying at the local community college, I rented a room from a friend’s mom, Mary. Mary was incredibly kind to me and treated me like a second daughter. She shopped at Costco and one night she brought home a case of mangoes and placed them on the counter. A whole entire case of mangos! I stood there and looked at it and thought, wow, there was so much food. It seemed so exotic and so extravagant and so completely outside my frame of reference that I still remember exactly where I was standing when I saw it.

But this story isn’t really about the mangoes. I understood that later, it was really about a mother who planned ahead. Mary thought about what her family might want to eat next week. She bought things in abundance because abundance was something she believed her children deserved.

I did not grow up with that belief in the air. What I grew up with was the opposite, the constant low level experience of not quite enough. Not enough food. Not enough planning. Not enough of someone thinking about what I might need before I had to figure it out myself.

I did not connect any of this to the men I chose for a very long time, actually, until very recently. I knew my childhood had been lean in ways that went beyond the pantry. But lots of people have difficult childhoods and most of them seem to navigate relationships without the specific pattern I kept running. So I could not quite close the gap between what happened then and what kept happening now.

A few months ago I read a book about emotionally immature parents. What I found in that book was a description of something I had been living inside my entire life, and it had finally been given a name. Things finally started to make so much more sense.

The child who learned that her basic needs were not the priority becomes the woman who does not expect her needs to be the priority. The child who got up at five in the morning to solve her own hunger problem becomes the woman who works very hard to solve problems that are not hers to solve. The child who stood in her friend’s kitchen looking at a case of mangoes like it was a miracle becomes the woman who does not know, not really, what it feels like to be provided for.

The Template You Didn’t Know You Were Given

Before we talk about emotionally immature parents, I want to say something about the “it could have been worse” thought, because if you are anything like me, it is already running in the background.

It is true. It could have been worse. There are childhoods that involve violence, serious neglect, documented trauma. If yours did not look like that, it is reasonable to wonder whether you are overstating it. Whether you are using your history as an excuse. Whether other people had it harder and turned out fine.

Here is what I want to say to that. Your body and subconscious does not compare your experience to someone else’s before deciding how to respond to it. It just responds. And a child who grows up without consistent emotional attunement, without a parent who reliably sees her and asks how she is and means it, develops adaptations. Those adaptations are intelligent. They are the right response to the environment. And they do not stop running just because the environment eventually changes.

You do not need to have had a terrible childhood for your nervous system to have learned the wrong things about love. You just need to have had a parent who was not quite there in the ways that counted.

Emotionally immature parents, a term developed by psychologist Lindsay Gibson, are not necessarily cruel or abusive in the ways we typically recognize. They may love their children. They may be doing the best they know how. But they are limited in specific ways that have real consequences for the children in their care.

They are self-focused. Not always dramatically, not always obviously, but the attention flows in one direction. Their needs, their feelings, their stories. The child learns early that there is not much room for her own inner life in this relationship. So she stops bringing it.

Sometimes these EIP’s are physically present, but they are emotionally unavailable. The lights are on but the connection is not there. The child knocks and the door does not open. After enough times, she stops knocking.

They are inconsistent. Warm sometimes, distant others, with no reliable pattern the child can learn to predict. So the child stays alert. She learns to read the room before she learns to read anything else. She becomes very good at anticipating other people’s moods and adjusting herself accordingly.

And here is where it connects to limerence.

The child who grew up waiting for inconsistent warmth becomes the woman whose nervous system lights up around inconsistent warmth because that is what her nervous system learned to recognize as love. The familiar feeling of hoping someone will show up, of waiting for the moment when they finally see her, of working hard to be the version of herself that gets through, that is not a new experience for her. She has been here before. It feels, in the specific way that familiar things feel, like home.

The man who is sometimes warm and sometimes distant, who suggests something real between you and then goes quiet, who makes you feel seen in moments and invisible in others — he is not introducing her to a new experience. He is rhyming with the oldest one she has.

That is not a coincidence. That is a pattern.

The work of understanding this is not about blame. Parents who are emotionally immature are usually that way because of their own histories, their own wounds, their own parents who were not there in the ways that counted. The chain goes back further than any of us can fully see. Understanding it is not about assigning fault. It is about being able to look clearly at what got wired in, so that you can finally understand why the pattern keeps running, and what it is actually going to take to change it.

The pattern shows up in who you choose and what you accept and what feels like love and what feels like nothing. Understanding where it came from is the beginning of being able to choose differently.

Signs Your Limerence Was Shaped By an Emotionally Immature Parent

These are not meant to diagnose anyone. They are meant to help you see the connection between what you learned early and what your nervous system keeps reaching for now.

1. Your parent’s emotional needs consistently came before yours, and you learned to make yourself smaller to manage that. In limerence this shows up as organizing yourself entirely around your LO’s emotional state. His mood becomes your weather. His needs become the priority. Your own feelings go somewhere else, the way they always did.

2. Warmth was inconsistent and unpredictable. Good moments existed but could not be counted on. In limerence this is exactly the dynamic that activates the cycle. Inconsistent warmth is not a red flag your nervous system recognizes as dangerous. It is a pattern it recognizes as familiar. The uncertainty does not repel you. It pulls you in.

3. You became very good at reading the room, at sensing moods and adjusting yourself before anything was said. In limerence this becomes hypervigilance. Analyzing his response times, his word choices, the energy of a text. You developed this skill young because you needed it. You are still using it in situations where it is costing you more than it is giving you.

4. Love was demonstrated through presence and logistics, not through emotional attunement. Someone was there, but not really there. In limerence this means that when someone is consistently emotionally present and available, something feels off. The nervous system does not recognize it as the real thing because the real thing never looked like that.

5. You learned that if you were useful enough, easy enough, good enough, you could earn more warmth than you would otherwise receive. In limerence this is the engine of the whole pattern. The belief that if you explain it right, behave right, need less, give more, something will finally open up. The trying is the template running exactly as it was installed.

6. Emotional conversations went nowhere. Bringing your real feelings to the relationship did not result in being heard. In limerence you already know, on some level, that bringing your real feelings to your LO will not result in being heard. You do it anyway, or you don’t do it at all, or you draft the email for three hours and delete it. Either way the outcome is the same one you learned to expect a long time ago.

7. You spent more energy trying to understand your parent than they ever spent trying to understand you. In limerence the investigation is entirely outward. What is he thinking. What does he need. What did that mean. The same asymmetry you grew up inside. All the effort flowing in one direction, toward someone who is not tracking any of it.

8. The relationship felt like almost. Almost close, almost enough, almost what you needed. Almost is the word limerence runs on. And if you grew up in an almost relationship with a parent, your nervous system does not experience almost as a warning. It experiences it as the texture of love. The gap feels familiar. The gap feels like where you live.

If you recognized yourself in most of these, then it is a map. And maps are only useful if they help you understand where you are so you can figure out where you want to go.

The template was built a long time ago by a child who was doing the best she could with what she had. It made sense then. It does not have to keep running now.

Take good care,

Love, Leslie

Nothing in this newsletter constitutes mental health treatment. Please work with a qualified professional for clinical support. Trust yourself first.

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Not just happy, but I would finally feel settled and certain. All the noise and rumination that had been churning for days would settle and I would think at how simple it was, why was I even worried. Everything was fine. We were fine. I was fine, more like elated.

I would be present with my daughter that night when I picked her up from her dad’s. I could work. I could sleep. I was a functional person and everything made sense, I felt whole.

Then he wouldn’t text.

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Not the next day, which was okay. Not the day after, which was still okay but I noticed. By day three something had shifted. I couldn't point to the moment it happened. The good feeling was just gone and the questions were back. Had he thought about me. Would he reach out. Did it mean something that he hadn't yet.

By day five I was not okay and the panic came rolling back full speed.

I want to be specific about what not okay looked like, because from the outside I was still functioning. I went to work. I showed up to places I needed to be at. I did what was required to seem like I was a regular grown up. But my tolerance for everything else had dropped to almost nothing. I was short-tempered in ways I couldn’t fully explain. I was constantly distracted and unable to care about anything that wasn’t him, not because I didn’t want to care about other things, but because I genuinely couldn’t focus on them. My brain had one job and it wasn’t mine anymore to control, the limerence was controlling me from the inside.

The thoughts were specific and relentless. What could I do to make him want to contact me more. What could I say, how could I position it, what version of myself would make him think about calling me on a weekday instead of just on the weekends when he knew I didn’t have my daughter.

That last part I knew but had not said out loud. His schedule was loose, full of leisure time. Mine was structured around a child, a career, a life with actual obligations. And I had the slow, quiet sense that I existed in his mind on a specific schedule, that I surfaced when he knew I was free, and the rest of the time I simply wasn’t there.

I had made myself a rule that there would be no texting him first more than twice a month. I had learned the hard way, not so much from him, but my long history of limerent relationships, that the contact right after seeing someone, the natural human impulse to reach out, would either land in silence, or seem needy and desperate. So I made the rule.

I did not see this as a pattern. Not once, in all those weeks, did I step back and look at the cycle clearly. The high, the wait, the slow deterioration, the volatile distracted version of myself that showed up around day five, the reset when contact finally came. I lived inside it completely for two years. I had no idea.

The Baseline Nobody Talks About

Limerence gets mistaken for love because the culture only ever shows us one small part of it.

The hit. The flood of warmth when your LO texts, when something real passes between you, when contact is restored after silence. That part is real and it is powerful, but it doesn’t last like love would, it is over in just a few minutes.

What I want to talk about is everything after the minutes.

The majority of a limerent episode is not spent in that flood. It is spent in the space between contacts, and that space does not feel like beautiful longing or electric anticipation. It feels like a low-grade emergency with no clear source. A sick feeling in the stomach, not the chest. A constant background noise and anxiety that doesn’t stop even when you’re doing other things, even when you look completely fine, even when you are performing so well that no one around you can see any of it.

Dorothy Tennov, the psychologist who named limerence in 1979, documented this across hundreds of interviews. The people she spoke with described the same pattern over and over: not joy but urgency, not passion but a nervous system that had handed over its regulation to another person’s behavior. It rose when there was contact. It dropped when there wasn’t. It could be reorganized entirely by a single text, or by the absence of one.

This is the part that makes “just move on” such a useless response. The people saying it assume you are choosing to stay in something that feels good. They don’t understand that what you are experiencing in the intervals, which is where most of your time actually lives, feels closer to withdrawal than to love. The hit is brief and real and what keeps the cycle running. The withdrawal is where you actually live.

It is also why so many accomplished, high-functioning women carry this in total silence. You look fine. You’re showing up and managing everything that is expected of you, but nobody can see what’s running underneath. Without a word for it, you reach the only conclusion available: something is specifically wrong with you, a defect with no category, a weakness that other people don’t seem to have.

It is not a defect. It is a pattern. Dorothy Tennov named it in 1979 and estimated that somewhere between twenty and fifty percent of people experience it. That is not just a few people, but basically almost half the room.

Knowing the word limerence doesn’t fix it, but it changes what you’re looking at. Instead of looking at yourself as broken and flawed you can see it as a learned patter. A flaw feels permanent because it is what you are. A pattern can be understood and interrupted because it is what the nervous system learned to do, not what it was born to do.

That distinction is where it is understood and can be healed.

10 Things Nobody Told You Limerence Would Feel Like

1. Not butterflies. Nausea. The feeling lives in your gut as actual physical unease that doesn’t lift when you try to reason with it. The body registers what the brain is still explaining away.

2. Present in body, gone everywhere else. You are technically in the room. You’re at the dinner, in the meeting, next to your kids. Your brain is running a completely different show, and it is not the one anyone around you can see.

3. Hijacked by a single notification. One text from your LO can reorganize your entire emotional state in under thirty seconds. So can the absence of one. Your nervous system has handed over the controls to someone who doesn’t know they’re holding them.

4. A low hum of dread with no source. Like you forgot something important. Like bad news is quietly on its way. This sourceless anxiety is the actual baseline of limerence, not the romantic longing the movies promised you.

5. Addicted to the hit, trapped by the withdrawal. The euphoria of contact is real, brief, and what keeps you coming back to something that mostly feels terrible. You know this. The knowing doesn’t help.

6. Performing okay while the real version runs underneath. You show up. You function. You are, by every external measure, completely fine. The performance is so practiced that even people who love you can’t see the gap.

7. Ashamed of your own intelligence. You are smart enough to see exactly what is happening, and you still cannot stop. That specific shame, belonging to the capable woman who cannot think her way out of something, is its own quiet kind of suffering.

8. Starving for certainty more than for love. What you need most is not reciprocation. It is a clear answer, any clear answer. The ambiguity is the actual mechanism. Part of you already knows that a definitive no would hurt less than this.

9. Convinced that resolution is just ahead. Limerence creates a persistent sense that one more conversation, one more piece of information, will finally make everything clear. The almost is structural. It is what keeps the cycle running.

10. Deeply relieved when you finally find the word limerence. Because it means this is a known thing. It has been studied and named and documented across hundreds of people who felt exactly what you are feeling. It is not just you. It is a pattern. And patterns can be moved through.

See you next week,

Love, Leslie

Nothing in this newsletter constitutes mental health treatment. Please work with a qualified professional for clinical support. Trust yourself first.

He had told me that he did not want a relationship. I heard it, but I didn’t really hear it.

I just started working on ways I could show him he was wrong. Not directly tell him he was wrong, but subconsciously figure out a way to prove to him that he needed me. What could I say to show him how much I cared? What did I need to do to get him to change his mind?

It wasn’t the rejection but my response to it. Because my response was not to be sad about it, or accept it, or walk away. My response was to start drafting the email of all emails that would finally explain things correctly. To have the conversation that would make him understand. To find the exact right sequence of words that would shift something in him so that he would finally get it.

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I spent hours on drafts of this email he never saw. I would get close to something and then delete and start over because it wasn’t quite right yet. Too much. Not enough. Wrong tone. I would think about what he might say back and prepare for that too, and then prepare for the response after that. I ran the whole thing out in my head over and over, like a madwoman, every version ending the same way, with him finally understanding the real me, with things finally making sense to him.

The email I eventually sent landed nowhere near where I had aimed.

The problem was never the wording. I was trying to explain my way into something that explanation could not reach. He had already told me where he stood. My brain, which is very good at finding solutions to problems, had decided this was a problem it could solve if I just worked on it a little longer, tried a little harder, found the right angle. It could not. There was no angle. There was no solution. I just didn’t know that yet.

The Problem-Solving Brain

Limerence takes everything you are good at and points it in the wrong direction. Understanding how the trap works is the only way to stop it, because you cannot interrupt something you cannot see. When you are in the middle of a limerent episode, the drafting and redrafting feels productive. The rehearsed conversations feel necessary to get things just right. It takes a long time to realize that all of that effort was not moving you forward. It was just keeping the cycle running, and keeping you from healing.

High-achieving women are not more susceptible to limerence because we are weak. We are susceptible because we are strong in exactly the wrong ways for this particular situation.

We are trained to close the gap between where something is and where it could be. We see an unsolved problem and we work on it, because working on things until they are solved has always been the answer. It has built our careers. It has gotten us through hard things. It works.

Limerence looks, to an achieving brain, like a problem that hasn’t been solved yet.

Uncertainty is at the core of limerence. It is the essential feature that triggers and sustains the whole thing. So we investigate and gather more data. We analyze patterns in his behavior, in his response times, in his word choices. We try a different approach. And when that doesn’t work, we try a smarter one.

We cannot solve our way out of limerence. But we will exhaust ourselves trying.

There is a second part worth mentioning. High achievers are rarely in situations where effort makes things worse. When working harder has reliably produced results, the idea that it is actively keeping you stuck is hard to accept. That your best qualities are the exact thing making it worse is not a conclusion anyone arrives at easily or quickly.

So the analysis continues. The drafting continues. The imaginary conversations continue. The very qualities that make you a badass at everything else become the engine that keeps the cycle running.

Here is what makes this particularly hard to see when you are inside it. In every other area of your life, persistence is the right answer. You did not get where you are by walking away from hard things. You got there by staying, by working, by finding the approach that finally worked when the others didn’t. That history is exactly what limerence exploits. It presents itself as one more hard thing that just needs the right approach. One more problem that hasn’t been solved because you haven’t found the solution yet.

But there is no solution. Not because you aren’t smart enough to find it, but because it doesn’t exist. The situation is not a problem with an answer waiting at the end of enough effort. It is a pattern running in your nervous system that feeds on exactly the kind of engaged, persistent attention you are very good at giving it. Every hour you spend analyzing is another hour the pattern gets to keep running. The analysis is not progress. It is fuel.

There is also something worth saying about what it costs to finally see this clearly. Because the moment you understand that your best qualities have been sustaining the thing that is costing you so much, there is a grief in that. About the time. About how capable you are and how little that protected you. That grief is real.

But understanding how the trap worked is not a reason to feel foolish. It is the first requirement for getting out. You are starting that process now. And that matters more than it might feel like it does right now.

Are You Using Your Intelligence Against Yourself? A Simple Checklist

— I spend significant time rehearsing conversations with him in my head: what I’ll say, what he’ll say, how I’ll respond.

— I analyze his behavior, his word choices, or how long he takes to respond — looking for what it actually means.

— I believe that if I explain myself more clearly, or frame things differently, he will finally understand and something will change.

— I have drafted and re-drafted messages, sometimes for an hour or more, before sending, deleting, or saving them.

— I have built a case, using real evidence, for why the situation makes sense, or why he actually does care, despite what the surface suggests.

— I feel that this situation is unresolved because I haven’t found the right strategy yet. Not because the situation itself is the answer.

— I know, intellectually, exactly what is happening. And I am doing it anyway. The knowing does not stop the doing.

If you checked most of these: you are not failing. You are applying a very well-developed set of skills to a situation that does not respond to skill. That distinction matters more than it might seem right now.

The work ahead is not about getting smarter about the situation. It is about recognizing that the situation is not the problem to solve.

Until next week, take good care,

Love, Leslie

Nothing in this newsletter constitutes mental health treatment. Please work with a qualified professional for clinical support. Trust yourself first.

Subscribe to Beyond Limerence and be the first to know when the book, Maybe He’s Dead, is available.

You didn’t stumble onto this newsletter by accident.

You’re here because you are the woman who has it together. The career, the credentials, the competence. The one people call when things fall apart.

And yet there is this one person. This one loop in your brain that you cannot, no matter how smart or disciplined or self-aware you are, seem to turn off.

I know because I was you.

I’m an attorney. Professionally trained to be logical, analytical, evidence-based. And I completely fell apart over a man who was an alcoholic, a drug addict, and who told me directly he did not want a relationship.

I don’t even drink.

One night, exhausted and ashamed, I went looking for an explanation. And I found a word. One word. Thirty years of confusion was finally answered.

That word is limerence. And it’s why you’re here.

Let’s get into it.

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The Name That Changes Everything

In 1979, psychologist Dorothy Tennov interviewed over 500 people about romantic love. What she found didn’t fit any existing category. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t infatuation. It wasn’t obsession in the clinical sense.

It was something specific. Consuming. Involuntary. Experienced almost universally in silence because nobody had a word for it.

She called it limerence.

Here’s what it is in plain language: an involuntary state of intense romantic obsession, triggered by uncertainty, characterized by intrusive thoughts about one specific person and an overwhelming need for their reciprocation. It produces euphoria when they’re warm. Crushing despair when they’re not. And a mental preoccupation so total it can hijack an otherwise perfectly functioning life.

It is not a crush. It is not love, though it impersonates love convincingly. And it is not a personal failing. There are also some terms that are helpful to know. The person one is limerent about is called a limerent object (LO) and when one is limerent about a person, it is called a limerent episode (LE) Limerence is a recognized psychological phenomenon.

Knowing the word doesn’t fix everything. But it moves you out of shame and into understanding. And understanding is where recovery begins.

The Night I Found The Word

One night, like many other nights before, I was sitting at my desk late on night with a full day of work behind me, a daughter to get ready for school in the morning, and a million other things I should have been doing.

Instead I was on my phone again checking to see if he had texted. He hadn’t. I started constructing reasons why. Maybe something happened. Maybe he was in the hospital. Maybe he was dead. He wasn’t dead. He was an alcoholic who didn’t want a relationship and had told me so. I just couldn’t accept it.

Of course, like every other night, I started googling relationship advice, avoiding the painfully useless Matthew Hussy and Bustle articles, I typed some search term into Google and ended up in a rabbit hole. There it was.

Limerence.

I read the definition once. Then again. Then I sat back in what I call both relief and disbelief. It had a name, and for thirty years nobody had ever told me. No therapist or friend, no one. Why had I never heard this term?

I kept reading. I read about Dorothy Tennov and her research. I read about the intrusive thoughts, the crushing despair when contact dropped off, the euphoria when contact returned, the way limerence attaches specifically to uncertainty, why the unavailable ones trigger it and the available ones somehow don’t. I read about women who had spent decades wondering what was wrong with them.

I wasn’t “fixed” and I wasn’t over him. Nothing about my situation had changed but something had shifted in me because for the first time in thirty years I wasn’t a failure. I was limerent.

That night was the beginning of everything that eventually became my this newsletter. I write it for the woman sitting where I was sitting, ashamed, and anxious, certain she was the only one. The woman sitting where I was doesn’t have to spend another thirty years without the word.

“Why Can’t You Just Move On?”

You’ve heard it. Maybe from a friend. Maybe from yourself.

Here’s what to say to them, or to the voice in your head:

“This isn’t about willpower. Limerence activates the same neurological pathways as addiction. You wouldn’t tell someone in withdrawal to just decide to feel better. I’m not stuck because I’m weak. I’m stuck because I’m dealing with something that has a name, a mechanism, and a recovery process. And I’m in it.”

You don’t owe anyone that explanation. But you deserve to have it.

If you are interested in my upcoming book, Maybe He’s Dead, please subscribe for updates on the publication.

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See you next Friday. — Leslie

Nothing in this newsletter constitutes mental health treatment. Please work with a qualified professional for clinical support. And always — trust yourself first.

Hey, you! I know you!

You have built a life most people would envy.

You have an impressive career. You’re raising great kids. You’re smart and fully capable. Your ability to show up, perform, and hold it all together is unmatched.

And yet.

There is this one person, or maybe a pattern of people, who have taken up permanent residence in your mind. You replay conversations. You analyze texts. You construct entire futures with someone who may not even know you’re doing it.

You are not weak. You are not crazy. You are not “just obsessed.”

The name for what you’re experiencing is limerence.

This newsletter exists because I’ve lived it for over 30 years and because the women who find their way here are some of the most capable, self-aware, high-functioning humans on the planet. They deserve answers that match their intelligence.

So if you’ve been wondering, “Why do I keep doing this? Why can’t I just move on? Why does this feel like an addiction I can’t quit?”

You are exactly where you need to be.

Who Is Beyond Limerence For?

Beyond Limerence is written specifically for:

• 🏆 High-achieving women who are successful everywhere except love: You’ve climbed the ladder, built the business, raised the kids, earned the degrees and none of that has protected you from falling into a pattern of obsessive, all-consuming attachment to someone emotionally unavailable. You don’t need to be told to “just move on.” You need to understand why your brain works this way and how to rewire it.

• 🔍 Women in the research phase: You might have just discovered the word “limerence”in a YouTube rabbit hole at 2am and suddenly your entire romantic history snapped into focus. You are hungry for real information, real frameworks, and real talk from someone who has been where you are and found a way through.

• 🌀 Recovering limerents who keep relapsing: You thought you were over it. Then a text came in, or you ran into them, or someone who looked just like them walked past you at the grocery store and you were right back at square one. You need tools, not just inspiration not just sympathy.

Who This Is NOT a Good Fit For?

Beyond Limerence is a specific newsletter for a specific kind of reader. It’s probably not for you if:

• You’re looking for dating tips, a dating coach or advice on how to attract a partner

• You believe things can still work out with your “crush” (Limerent Object or LO) and just needs more time

• You want validation for staying in the cycle, not tools for breaking it

• You’re not ready to look honestly at your own patterns, only at his

• You’re in an active mental health crisis that requires professional clinical support (this newsletter is educational content, not therapy, please seek professional help if you need it)

If you’re not ready yet, that’s okay. Come back when you are. The door stays open.

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The Biggest Problems That Brought You Here

If you found your way to this newsletter, chances are you’re wrestling with at least one or all of these issues:

• Problem #1: You didn’t know this had a name. You’ve spent years calling yourself “too much,” “too sensitive,” or “bad at relationships.” Discovering the word limerence is a relief and a reckoning at the same time.

• Problem #2: Logic doesn’t fix it. You know he’s not right for you. You can make the list. You’ve talked to your therapist or friend and you still can’t stop thinking about him.

• Problem #3: The withdrawal is real. When you try to detach, it feels like grief. Sometimes worse. Most advice doesn’t account for the fact that limerence activates the same brain pathways as addiction.

• Problem #4: You’re embarrassed by it. You’re competent, accomplished, and respected in every other area of your life. The last thing you want is for anyone to know how much mental real estate this person occupies. So you hide it which makes it worse.

• Problem #5: The Limerent Object is often unavailable by design. Married, emotionally closed off, inconsistent, substance abuser, lives far away, or just far enough away to stay idealized. You keep picking the same type without knowing why and that “why” is the key to breaking the cycle.

• Problem #6: You confuse limerence with love. The intensity feels like proof of depth. But limerence is a fantasy architecture built on uncertainty and learning to tell the difference will change everything about how you choose partners.

• Problem #7: You’ve tried to “logic” your way out. Spreadsheets, pros-and-cons lists, journaling, none of it touches the thing underneath.

• Problem #8: The intrusive thoughts won’t stop. You’re in a meeting, a conversation, a perfectly good moment and your brain hijacks it. Again. The mental chatter is exhausting, and nobody around you quite understands why you can’t just... stop.

• Problem #9: You don’t trust your own judgment anymore. After one (or more) limerent episodes, you start to wonder if your feelings about anyone can be trusted. That self-doubt has consequences that ripple far beyond the original relationship.

• Problem #10: You’re terrified this is just who you are. That maybe you’ll always be this way. That real, reciprocal love isn’t actually available to you. I’m here to tell you: that fear is a symptom, not a diagnosis.

Here’s what we’re going to do about all of it.

What You Get Each Week From Beyond Limerence

This is a weekly education in the lived reality of limerence, from someone who has spent decades inside it and built a framework for recognizing and getting out. Here’s what lands in your inbox:

🧠 Explanations in plain language — Finally understanding why your extraordinarily capable brain keeps doing this one maddening thing.

📝 Scripts — The exact words for the conversations you’ve been avoiding, or the ones you need to have with yourself.

🌀 Tools for the 2am spiral — Concrete, repeatable steps for the moments when your brain won’t cooperate and you need something to actually do.

📖 Stories that make you feel less alone — Real experiences with a clear lesson attached, so you can recognize your own patterns from a safe distance.

⚖️ An honest look at limerence — Not toxic positivity. Not “just move on.” The truth about what this pattern is, where it comes from, and why logic alone won’t fix it.

✨ What healing actually looks like — The mental space you get back. The relationships that become possible. The version of yourself that was always there underneath.

❓ Questions worth sitting with — The kind of reflection that actually moves the needle, delivered when you need it most.

🚩 Pattern recognition — Learning to spot the cycle before you’re already in it.

🎯 Frameworks you keep and return to — Not inspiration you forget by Tuesday.

Beyond Limerence is your weekly reminder that you are not broken. You are just running an old program that was never yours to begin with.

Who am I?

I am an attorney and by nature I am logical, analytical, and evidence-based. I am the person other people call when they need someone to think clearly under pressure. I am NOT a therapist.

I am a woman who has spent my entire life navigating limerent relationships and I carried this shame year after year with every relationship I ever had. I most recently knew I had to do something when I completely fell apart over a man who was an alcoholic, a drug addict, and who had told me, without ambiguity, that he did not want a relationship with me.

I don’t even drink (or use drugs for that matter).

The crazy part was not the situation itself, but the fact that I am someone who prides herself on reason, on seeing things clearly, on making sound judgments. In this situation I could not detach or logic my way out of caring desperately about someone who was not available to me in any real sense.

I kept waiting to hear from him. I kept checking my phone. I convinced myself that if I just said the right thing, framed it the right way, was patient enough... something would shift.

It didn’t shift until I finally found the word limerence.

Coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in 1979, limerence is the involuntary state of obsessive romantic attachment most commonly triggered by uncertainty and emotional unavailability. The moment I read that definition, thirty-plus years of my own romantic history snapped into focus.

I was not weak. I was not pathetic. I was not “bad at relationships.”

I was limerent. And I had been for a very long time.

That recognition became the foundation for my upcoming book and now this newsletter. I write here as a high-achieving woman who has been exactly where you are, and who found a way through.

I’m glad you found this place. You don’t have to keep doing this alone.

Ready to Go Deeper?

Beyond Limerence is the starting point. But if you are interested, I wrote a book, which I plan to release in May 2026 called Maybe He’s Dead.

The title comes from a real moment. After not hearing back from the alcoholic, the one who didn’t want a relationship, the one I couldn’t stop thinking about and my brain went straight to the worst-case scenario. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s in the hospital. Because that was the only explanation my limerent mind would accept for his silence. Not indifference. Not avoidance. Death.

If you’ve ever been there, you know exactly what I mean.

The best way to know when Maybe He’s Dead is available? You’re already doing it.

Subscribers to Beyond Limerence will be the first to know when the book drops including early access, behind-the-scenes updates, and anything else I share along the way.

So stay subscribed. We’re just getting started.

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Glad you’re here. Let’s get you your life back.

— Leslie

Final note:

I am not a therapist, and nothing in this newsletter constitutes mental health treatment or legal advice. The insights and tools shared here are based on my own lived experience and research. Please work with a qualified mental health professional for clinical support and as with anything you read, trust yourself. If something doesn’t resonate or feel right for you, leave it. You know yourself best.