From a young age, we are taught a lot of misconceptions about love. We learn that love changes the way we act, that it drives us to acts of desperation and leaves us dazed and consumed by thoughts of our beloved. To be shot by Cupid’s arrow is something we all long for.
Romeo and Juliet were so in love they couldn’t live without one another. Carrie loved Big so much she was willing to accept the bare minimum affection in return and revolve her entire life around him. Don’t get me wrong — I adore Sex and the City, and Carrie Bradshaw is one of the reasons I became a writer. But I never understood why she chose Big. To me, it didn’t look like love. It looked like Carrie had fallen in love with the idea of Big, put him on a pedestal, and was blind to the reality that Big only gave her crumbs, never the whole cake. I’ve since come to the conclusion that it wasn’t love, but limerence.
Coined by Dr Dorothy Tennov in her 1979 book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, limerence is the “interpretation of events, rather than the events themselves. You admire, you are physically attracted, you see, or think you see… the hint of the possibility of possible reciprocity, and the process is set in motion.”
Throughout her research, Dr Tennov interviewed 500 people who were experiencing love obsession and came to the conclusion that limerence is the very first stage
