We’ve all been there. We have a meet cute and the object of our affection quickly begins to fill up every part of our thoughts at all time of the day. You long for them, to want to live inside their skin, you want to just sit there and adore them. You love them!
But wait – do you actually?
You see, when you meet someone and become obsessively infatuated by them, then that could be limerence. Limerence is described as a strong state of infatuation or obsession with someone else, often at the detriment of all other things in your life. Below then, is how to tell that what you feel for someone is limerence and not love.
You don’t care for who they are
When you experience limerence with someone, what happens is you will handpick certain positive traits that they possess and make them the whole of whom they are. Thus, you tend to view the object of your affection as a perfect being, meaning you never fully appreciate their humanity.
Love often involves loving the other person wholly, loving the good while also acknowledging the bad. Limerence eliminates the bad completely.
Obsessive and intrusive thoughts
When experiencing limerence, you often get all-consuming intrusive thoughts about the object of your affection through your day. You create fantasies about them and even make a huge deal out of fleeting and inconsequential interactions with them.
This obsession means that your life comes to a halt as you put a lot more effort into thoughts of the object of your affection.
Love often adds to your life and brings more than it takes. So, if you find that your life stops because of someone, that is more likely limerence than genuine love.
You don’t want a real connection
Believe it or not, when experiencing limerence, while you will long for someone, you will not want a deep genuine connection with them. This could be down to several psychological reasons, but one is that you might be afraid that they may not be who you’ve made them to be.
Limerence makes you put someone on a pedestal. Therefore, when there is a chance of genuine connection, you might turn them away because you are afraid they might not be whom you have made them out to be in your mind. Instead, you’d rather maintain the fantasies about who they are in your head.
Now, limerence can lead to actual genuine love, but it needs you to be honest with yourself first. Then, after that, begin to make efforts to know the other person to see if you and them are a good match.