Overcoming romantic obsession

Marielle Segarra (0:00)

Hey, it's Marielle.

I saw this video the other day of a little bird that's sitting on somebody's kitchen counter. It must be a pet. And the bird, it sees a potential mate on the floor. So it jumps down and sidles up to the other bird, nuzzles it, tries to mount it.

Tom Bellamy (0:18)

Hey, how you doing?

Marielle Segarra (0:20)

Yes, that's the yin-yang twins playing in the background. The iconic seduction song, wait, the whisper song came out in 2005

Anyway, then you realize, the other bird, it's not actually a bird. It is a bird wind-up toy.

I feel like I've done this before in dating. Set my sights on somebody juicy, slid into their view, did my little mating dance, and then realized they were not a suitable companion. And yet I couldn't stop thinking about them. Even after I knew they were a wind-up toy.

Tom Bellamy (0:55)

I would say limerence is an altered mental state, fundamentally. So it's a state that many of us go into in the early stages of love.

And it's kind of a profound romantic infatuation with another person. So the kind of early experience of limerence could quite be well described as a love intoxication.

Marielle Segarra (1:17)

Tom Bellamy is a neuroscientist and author of the book Smitten, which is all about the neuroscience of this state called limerence. Limerence is a term coined by a psychologist named Dorothy Tenoff in the 1970s. And Tom says, it's essentially when you get an extraordinary natural high from being with or around another person. You feel euphoric and exhilarated, and you have this strong desire to bond with them, typically romantically or sexually.

And that's not always bad, right? You might feel limerence in the early stages of a healthy mutual relationship. I felt that myself.

But sometimes these feelings get pointed in the wrong direction. You have them for someone who you can't or shouldn't be with, and you get all twisted up.

Tom Bellamy (1:59)

Limerence, if it goes on for too long, usually either because the other person isn't available or they're incompatible in some way, and there's some uncertainty around it, so you're not actually able to form a healthy bond with them, then it can take quite a negative turn.

Marielle Segarra (2:17)

Sure, you still get that high feeling when you're with them, but when you're not, you get anxious, and instead of desiring them in a straightforward way, you crave them.

Tom Bellamy (2:27)

And it kind of develops into an obsession that's very hard to break. And so I think limerence in, certainly in those latest stages, is very well described as addiction to another person.

Marielle Segarra (2:39)

Tom started writing about and researching this topic after he experienced this kind of limerence, limerence that was a problem. He was happily married, but that didn't stop him from developing this craving for somebody else.

Tom Bellamy (2:51)

My first thought obviously was, well, what's going on in the brain? What's happening to me? How can I make sense of this experience that I'm going through? And so I then came across the book Love and Limerence by Dorothy Tennoff, and realized that this described exactly what I was going through, but that I had a perspective on it with an additional 40, 50 years of neuroscience research. I had a completely different perspective on Limerence compared to when the book was written in the 1970s.

Marielle Segarra (3:21)

So he started a blog anonymously, and it grew and grew until he had a large following, and a community of people who had been through the same thing.

Tom Bellamy (3:28)

And so that also gave me a huge kind of database of information of what Limerence is and how people experience it, and the effect that it has on our lives.

Marielle Segarra (3:37)

On this episode of Life Kit, I talked to Tom about Limerence. What does it feel like? When does it become unhealthy? And how can we snap ourselves out of an overwhelming crush or remove ourselves from a romantic relationship that's become unhealthy and addictive? That's after the break.

I'm looking at the list here from the book of symptoms that are characteristic of the condition, frequent intrusive thoughts about the other person, an acute need for reciprocation of equally strong feeling, insecurity or shyness when in the presence of the other person, often manifesting in physical discomfort like sweating, stammering, racing heart, an aching sensation in the heart when uncertainty is strong, a remarkable ability to emphasize the positive features of the other person and minimize or empathize with the negative, exaggerated dependency of mood on the other person's actions, so elation when they're reciprocating, and devastation when you sense disinterest from them.