u/shiverypeaks

I'm posting an update or general introduction to this situation, just for people who are unaware, and because I haven't posted here about it for awhile.

I just started thinking about this again, because of a recent NYT article in which the usual suspects are being interviewed.

I have a Medium article talking about the background of this, which I recommend reading, but I will reiterate some of it here.

• Why there is research on limerence
• The subreddit Wiki also has a bunch of resources I've written
• And an article which Tom Bellamy allowed me to write for his website

I write Wikipedia articles, and I've been studying romantic love for a couple of years now.

A lot of what I do is actually checking credentials, and trying to understand the veracity of different sources. I'm not a researcher; essentially what I have been doing is digging for information, and verifying it for people. I've been studying psychology off and on as a hobby for about 10 years.

So, there's this idea floating around that nothing is known about limerence. Example:

>While we may think we know a lot about love, we know little or nothing of limerence. While love is considered the most profound of human shared emotions, limerence, in a nutshell, is an individual state of involuntary obsession with another person. (Monica Vermani)

This kind of claim is nonsense, and a myth started around the 2010s, although I will get into a discussion here of whether there is "research" on limerence (technically a different claim, which could mean several things).

Actual state of the scientific literature

As I reviewed in the Medium article, there's a very large amount which is known about romantic obsession. The actual contention over limerence is/was largely an issue of taxonomy.

Tennov is basically an early author who discovered the distinction between obsessive and harmonious romantic passion, but she wanted "limerence" to refer to being in love the obsessive way. This is because she wanted to study the aspects of love which produced distress, and she found people who had never experienced it, despite reporting to her that they had been "in love".

Another early author who actually discovered this distinction is John Alan Lee, with his distinction between the love styles "eros" and "mania". Some authors have noted the similarity between limerence and mania, and there is actually a study which attempted to compare them.

(Feeney & Noller found that limerence and the mania love attitude aligned in a factor analysis, along with anxious attachment, but actually their study found that eros and agape love attitudes aligned with the limerence/anxious attachment factor as well, by the way. This is not usually stated when the study is brought up.)

The issue which Tennov discovered is that it's very difficult to tell what people mean when they say they've been "in love", just by going with the words they use.

There's a litany of terms which are used by love researchers (esp. "being in love", "romantic love", "passionate love", and "infatuation"), but these terms are used in an inconsistent way. Sometimes they refer to the obsessive variety, or sometimes being in love any way, or sometimes they have completely different definitions referring to culture, relationships, and so on.

Some authors (including Tennov) have equated limerence to "love madness", but actually even this doesn't properly disambiguate it from anything. There are people who say they're "madly in love", but they aren't experiencing the obsessional features (Acevedo et al.).

It's just a confusing topic to tease apart, but particularly over the last 20 years, a distinction has emerged that there are two ways to be in love (in other words, experience a persistent state of romantic attraction): one which is obsessive, and one which isn't.

Tennov of course discovered the distinction in the 1970s, but then it was forgotten (from what I can tell) because of writings by Elaine Hatfield. She has a 1988 book chapter where she tries to merge all ways of being in love together under one label of "passionate love" (see the first page), and her work actually became the popular taxonomy in love research.

Now, there is actually a pretty decent amount of research on the obsessive state, but most actual studies use people who are in relationships.

There is no reason whatsoever to think that this research literature can't be used to understand limerence. Some academics like Helen Fisher have even commented on this publicly.

The main problem is that if you're reading something like Helen Fisher's books, she uses a taxonomy like Elaine Hatfield's, so that even though her theories (like evolutionary theories) pertain to limerence, the terminology she uses doesn't distinguish between it and other things.

The other issue is that Tennov basically defines limerence as starting before a relationship. It's different from unrequited love, because it might turn into a relationship, or it might not, and in some cases, limerence can actually be reciprocated (as in Romeo and Juliet).

Then of course the possibility that reciprocation actually changes over time is central to her theory of how it works (uncertainty theory). This is getting interpreted as intermittent reinforcement (since the 1980s, or even earlier), which we don't have a study properly testing on love feelings, but there is a lot of research pointing that way. This is reviewed more in the Medium article, and other things I've written.

This issue of before vs. after (or inside vs. outside) a relationship does distinguish limerence from being in love other ways, in some respects, and I don't think there is any study looking at why some people fall in love outside of a relationship versus inside. There are many theories about this, however, kind of summarized in the unrequited love article on Wikipedia, because it's generally the same issue.

There's also an evolutionary theory about this in the limerence article. Limerence basically evolved before language, so the obsession is supposed to signal commitment. (It's supposed to be attractive to a potential partner.) People don't in general seem to like it nowadays, for cultural reasons. They want the early period of a relationship to be non-committal, and they often want (or think they want) a long-term (or even life-long) relationship, not a kind of wild 2- or 3-year fling while they take care of a small child, which is kind of what a limerent relationship gets you. Only sometimes limerence does turn into a healthy long-term relationship, but it's unclear how often this happens.

There also aren't any studies which explicitly looked at the trajectory of long-term limerence outside of a relationship, but there are some published theories about it. (See the Medium article and Wikipedia.)

To make a long story short, there is quite a lot which is known about it, and there are actually quite a lot of academics who have talked about limerence. The limerence article on Wikipedia is largely written with sources which actually use the term.

Articles

I'm recommending these articles that I wrote:

• Limerence - broad overview of relevant research and theories.
• Romance - broad overview of related concepts, terminology, and history.
• Romantic love (mental state) - psychology article about being in love.
• Biology of romantic love - scientific information and evolutionary theory. Some of the evolutionary theory more pertains to pair bonding in general; The limerence article has a cherry-picked evolutionary account which is more relevant, using sources which are more connected to the concept.
• Reward theory of attraction - theories on how attraction and falling in love works. Highly recommend reading.
• Unrequited love - reasons for unrequited love and so on.
• Colour wheel theory of love - one of the better taxonomies which has been developed, still relevant today, and some research in there is relevant to this. (I think that several of Lee's love styles actually correspond to being limerence, when taken together: mania, manic eros, and manic ludus.)
• Love addiction - a proposed diagnosis which is supposed to encompass limerence. It's just like everything love, the terminology has been somewhat fuzzy. Only recently has a concept been developed that "love addiction" refers to the obsessive state when it becomes clinically important. A proposed diagnostic criteria is listed in the subreddit wiki. The diagnostic criteria can't (or shouldn't) be included on Wikipedia due to their guidelines. Some authors include limerence as a type of love addiction.
• Obsessive love - a related term which is kind of like limerence, but it has other connotations ("obsessive love disorder").

Most articles about love on Wikipedia have tended to be poorly written. I'm the person who has been updating them, so they are written correctly, with up-to-date info. Those articles I listed are good; most others are not. I am still working on this as a long-term project. Sometimes people have asked me if my articles are original research, and they aren't. I have sources saying all of the things my articles say, and relating the terms together. The limerence article is written, for example, almost entirely with sources which actually mention the term.

"Limerence", "Love addiction", and "Obsessive love" have resources for understanding it from a clinical perspective. A therapist would read the kinds of things I'm citing there, and I'm sure there are others, if you start reading books about love addiction. I did a Google Scholar search when I was writing the "Love addiction" article, but there is a lot of stuff which doesn't appear there.

There are also people like Frank Tallis who had already argued that more attention should be given to limerence by clinicians. (Tallis is a clinical psychologist who specializes in OCD and obsessions.)

That said, the unfortunate truth is that there aren't easy answers for healing from this. There is research on a CBT-like technique, using EEG (which shows that it really does something), and it's been tested in a pilot study with limerent individuals, but we expect that it takes some work. It's not going to work immediately, and maybe not even quickly. (Also see the subreddit wiki for other resources.)

I've encountered academics talking about drugs for love addictions, but I don't have much to report about this other than what's summarized on the subreddit wiki. Some academics have also talked about oxytocin drugs, but nobody has a good idea if they would actually do anything.

For people who want to learn more about limerence, I also strongly recommend Tom Bellamy's content.

• Living with Limerence
• YouTube

People who don't study this won't understand just how good his content is. Again, I've been studying this for a couple years, read hundreds of academic papers, and I can vouch that his content is just...absurdly good. His book (Smitten) is the best (most useful) book anyone has written about this, that I have come across. There are other books that I recommend (e.g. Love Sick, by Frank Tallis), but Tom's book is the best book if you are going to read just one. Tom's writings on limerence recovery are the best I have ever encountered.

I've also talked to Tom a lot in emails, and he comes across to me as very intelligent, and like he genuinely cares and wants to help.

I would consider Tom the leading expert on many of these scientific questions, like the trajectory of what happens to limerence over the long-term.

Anyway, unfortunately, moving onwards to the other point of this post...

Fake limerence experts

As it's covered in my Medium article, there are a few things somebody could mean when they say there is very little research on limerence. Although they could mean simply that there are few studies designed to distinguish it (which is accurate - although we know quite a lot, per what I reviewed earlier), they could also mean that little or nothing is known about it.

It's this latter misconception which people always take away from the claim that's the issue.

I think most people would agree that conveying this is kind of ridiculous, if in reality there is a general theory of how limerence works, what causes it, and what treatments are available (as reviewed in the above Wikipedia articles), sometimes even using the term "limerence".

If your therapist doesn't understand what limerence is, how to find information on it, or how to treat it, for example, that's because of this misconception, which was spread across the internet in the 2010s, originally by some specific people.

The Medium article covers the initial history of this, created by Albert Wakin and Lynn Marshall (then Willmott).

I came to this from the perspective of a Wikipedia editor, where the sources talking about these people are actually generally excluded as being citations there, for being unreliable. Their papers were published outside real journals, the articles about them (especially the older ones) tend to actually be blogs, and their ideas would be considered fringe theories which contradict the mainstream science.

Wakin has repeatedly claimed to be an expert, although he clearly isn't, and it's also clear that he has never been doing much if any research about this at all.

An expert in psychology would have a PhD in a narrow field of expertise. Having a psychology degree does not make somebody an expert. People with PhDs in romantic love would be considered the preeminent experts on limerence, because that is the field which studies the mental state. I've talked to a lot of romantic love researchers in emails, and they've all read Tennov. A PhD ostensibly demonstrates that the person has read the entire academic literature on a particular topic, or a large portion of it.

Even somebody with a degree in attachment theory would not be identifiable as having expertise on limerence, because attachment theorists study relationships, not the mental state.

Additionally, somebody who truly wanted to help people would be doing what I've been doing: digging for information, and there is quite a lot. Wakin has never produced any useful information, let alone studies, although it has existed, because I found it.

What little research Albert Wakin has done, he appears to have simply lied about, or grossly misrepresented, first by conducting a study where he found limerence was quite common (25-50%), then discarding the study and making up a fake prevalence estimate instead (5%). He also seems to have conveyed to people around that era that he was doing brain scans, but he was never doing this, because a later article clarifies that he was only looking to get funding. He never got funding, because he's just clearly a bozo, and people had already done brain scans at that point.

Wakin has also repeatedly stated in internet articles that he was talking about obsessed ex-partners, and there was quite literally a brain scan of this already done by Helen Fisher's team.

Sources are listed in the Medium article, in the section there about this.

Albert Wakin also spread a lot of misinformation in his material, by simply making things up, like that limerence never goes away even if you get into a relationship, or that it's related to OCD, rather than being in love.

Again, he does not have any relevant credentials to be making claims about this kind of thing, and his claims are contradicted by actual researchers in the field. Helen Fisher commented on him specifically in 2008. Fisher is one of the original authors to compare being in love to OCD, and Wakin is even citing her indirectly in his paper (by citing a paper by Dixie Meyes, which cites Fisher). Fisher was the origin of the idea that SSRIs dampen obsessive thinking and/or love feelings, although this was later debunked. People talking about limerence never know about Bode's study, because they think there isn't any research on this. I've seen the serotonin claim floating around in content about limerence now, although it was actually originally disproved in 2012 (overview).

Albert Wakin's own claims are generally nonsense. He just scammed his way into getting some minor media coverage. However, his fringe theories about this have then been picked up by other similarly dishonest and uncredentialed people.

The other major author responsible for this nonsense is Lynn Marshall, who seems to be directly responsible for conveying the original myth that little or nothing is known about limerence, because of a comment in her paper.

However, if you were to claim she lied about this (or made a mistake), it turns out that she has a self-published book where she is aware of the mainstream research and cites a bunch of it, so she will say "I cited it all in my book!" However, nobody can read her book because it's out of print. I was lucky to obtain a copy on eBay for a reasonable price.

So on the one hand, she cites all the mainstream research, and considers limerence to be unrequited love, but then on the other hand she hides that from people, and avoids citing any of that in her publicly-facing works, and gives the impression to her readers (therapists) that limerence is some other thing which nothing is known about.

This is a scam to farm citations and clout or something, but if you were to call her a liar, I am sure she will say she didn't lie, because "it's in her book" (that you can't read).

What little research she has produced is also garbage, not interesting, or even not real science according to a typical definition. Her original "study" was simply a subjective textual analysis, where she counted "themes". There was no hypothesis testing or statistics, and she did not ask her participants about their personal histories.

She has a later study which I talked about in an older post here. She and her associates attempted to develop a measure of limerence, but the studies they conducted show that it's not very useful for research.

Her supposed findings are also not novel. There is already other research (real studies) which connects romantic obsession and unrequited love to anxious attachment, which seems to be a concern of hers, for example. It's an idea which has been around since the 1980s, and has been investigated by a litany of studies (e.g.: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

Some people have historically liked Lynn Marshall, because of her writings trying to connect limerence to attachment theory, but I am just here to tell you that many other people have written about this kind of thing, and Marshall's writings are very low quality by comparison.

The Wikipedia articles on limerence and biology of romantic love have a discussion of how limerence relates to the "attachment system" (from attachment theory). I would say that it's fairly well-established that limerence (and romantic obsession/unrequited love more generally) relates to an individual's personal history with attachment. However, attachment science is slowly pivoting away from the claim that this relates primarily to early childhood, based on studies which show this is only a minority contribution to attachment styles (see Dugan et al.; Barbaro et al.). The more modern idea is that attachment style also relates to things like adolescent friendships, and early-life romantic relationships, not just a relationship with a parent or infant abandonment.

Marshall and her associates are also responsible for fabricating a false claim that Tennov advocates some kind of a connection between limerence and stalking, with an erroneous citation to an eBook Tennov published in 2005.

>The condition has been implicated as a major cause of relationship and family breakdown, as well as being related to anti-social behaviours, including stalking and self-harm (Tennov, 2005). (Willmott & Bentley)

>For instance, limerence may lead to damaged relationships with significant others as well as engagement in anti-social behaviors such as stalking (Tennov, 2005; see also Bradbury et al., 2024). (Marshall et al.)

In reality, Tennov says the opposite of this in her eBook. She says that she has no data connecting limerence to violence, and that famous fictional cases like in the movie Fatal Attraction do not conform to her expected pattern.

Basically, this claim is like if a famous scientist said that "we have no evidence lizard people live inside the Earth, but technically nobody knows for sure", then a group of people went around saying "[Famous scientist] says lizard people might live inside the Earth!" This is what the eBook claim is like.

Her associates later laundered the claim into a BBC article.

Again, it's false. I filed a complaint with the BBC, and the very hilarious thing about this, is that the BBC did not even get back to me with a rejection saying they found my claim about this had no merit. Instead, first, they pretended not to get the complaint, by bouncing me back and forth between different forms (saying I used the wrong one at form A, directing me to form B, then saying form B was wrong, and to use form A), then simply never responded. They must have either not bothered to investigate, or found my claim actually had merit, but did not want to issue a correction because it would be too embarrassing.

There is also a paper by Paula Bradbury et al. which claims to be a "systematic review" with a connection between limerence and stalking, but it's a fake systematic review. They simply cherry-picked a handful of papers, and largely mispresented what is in them as well. The research I cite from comes up in Bradbury's search criteria. They simply discarded it, and don't tell people about it, so they can make stuff up instead.

An overview of the stalking connection is covered in the subreddit FAQ, drawing from some actual research on this. Tom Bellamy actually also has an article criticizing the stalking paper, and has stated that there is no research showing a connection in a different article (originally WaPo).

But again, the Bradbury paper is just a group of very incompetent, pernicious people inventing a fabrication. The paper claims that there are "strong correlations between limerence and early-onset pathways into stalking", but nobody has done a statistical analysis to find "correlations", and there are arguably only one or even zero actual limerence stalking cases discussed in their citations. It's just one of Lynn Willmott's participants who uses the phrase "stalking, for want of a better word" (probably talking about monitoring social media), and Brandy Wyant, who is a therapist that states in her paper she was actually not trying to stalk. (Also see here for an older writing of mine about this.)

There's another researcher named Giulia Poerio who appears to be associated with these people, because they're all around Sussex, UK, and make similar BS claims, all citing each other.

Poerio's paper (Evans is her PhD student, or something) repeats the stalking claim, but this time with a different BS citation:

>At its extreme, limerence can lead to problematic behaviours such as stalking and interpersonal violence (Banker, 2010). (Evans et al.)

Let me just quickly show the quote they must be referencing from Robin Banker's paper (a master's thesis):

>Another severe negative effect is an enraged sense of jealousy that can occur in some limerent individuals when the need for exclusivity, either emotionally or sexually, is unmet. Several of Tennov's (1999) interviewees reported either being the perpetrator or the victim of various forms of violence when faced with rejection. Kaighobadi, Shackelford and Goetz (2009) revealed that jealously is a common cause of both physical and sexual partner directed abuse, more frequently occurring in men than in women. In their empirical review, Kaighobadi et al. reported that men are five times as likely to commit homicide toward their female partner if sexual jealously is triggered, if the victim terminates the relationship or leaves them for another man. They also found that 30% of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate partner while this figure for male homicide victims is only 5%. Yet, Tennov suggests that homicide relating to limerence can involve spouses, lovers, potential romantic rivals, mistresses, and their related partners and lovers. In summary, extreme jealousy in limerence potentially contributes to violent behaviors toward the self, to property and to others, resulting in serious assault or murder. (Banker)

First, this actually contradicts Tennov's own account that she has no data on this. Banker just makes up a ton of stuff like this in her paper.

Second, the actual research reviewed there (Kaighobadi et al.) is about intimate partner violence. Poerio's associates citing this is an example of the logical fallacy called equivocation, where different definitions are used in different contexts, that I talked about in the Medium article. They are citing research which is about something that doesn't fall under a typical definition of limerence; otherwise, if this counts as limerence research, then there is research on limerence.

The stalking claim (as with many of their claims) is all just people making stuff up, using logical fallacies, or misrepresenting what their citations say.

Again, the subreddit FAQ (and see also my previous post) has a bit on whether there really is a connection between limerence and stalking. The real connection is between obsessed ex-partners, and people who have delusions.

I actually had a filter on this subreddit for awhile where I was reading every single post where the word ("stalk") was mentioned here, and the vast majority of people here are using the word to refer to monitoring social media pages, not to real (overt, criminal) stalking, which is a form of harassment. This is an issue of language, that people started using this term in a very vague way over the past couple decades. They would have different causal factors, and you wouldn't extrapolate from one to the other.

I've seen somebody posting on here, for example, who actually clearly had a morbid infatuation (a delusion their LO would eventually reciprocate as a result of stalking). The person with a morbid infatuation doesn't know they have a delusion, however, so they might identify as being limerent.

The fact that you may occasionally find real stalkers who are experiencing something we would properly call "limerence" does not mean there is a meaningful connection. Sometimes stalkers are gay, but this does not mean there is a connection between stalking and being gay. A proper scientific investigation on limerence and stalking would compare the association to other modes of attraction and other factors, like personality disorders, breakups, and delusions, which nobody has done. Mullen's 1999 study appears to make the connection between limerence and (criminal) stalking seem extremely small, if there is any important connection at all.

This goes back to the misconception about there being little research. There is already research on stalking, and we have a pretty good idea of how it works and why it happens. These people talking about limerence hide that from people, and just make stuff up instead.

In this case, the claim is basically defamatory and stigmatizing. I view it as harassment (and you should too).

When these articles come out, like the BBC or NYT articles, they really ought to get a barrage of emails telling them not to talk to this group of people. What little research they have produced is not useful, and they spread some very consequential misinformation to the public, and to clinicians.

Eventually you are going to have the problem that there will be people claiming to have PhDs on limerence, but they are just part of this little cult, who don't actually know anything and spread misinformation.

I don't have a lot of power, except to periodically inform people about what is going on.

If other people are interested in this situation, it's helpful to find and read the kinds of things I've been reading, to verify that my claims about what my sources say are correct.