Limerence Doesn't Feel Like Being in Love
It's more like a Low-Grade Emergency.
After seeing my LO, I would drive home feeling like a completely different person.
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.
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.