Limerence

Why do we obsess over people who don’t want us back?

At some point, everyone has liked someone who didn’t return their feelings. When this turns into an obsessive romantic longing for the other person, it’s a state of mind known as limerence.

Limerence can feel just as intense as love; a former situationship can hold the same emotional significance as an ex-partner. However, often, you don’t know enough about your ‘limerent object’ to be in love with them. Because you don’t have enough data on the object of your desire, you project everything you want in a partner onto them; you hone in on the things you value and magnify them, blurring out any bits you might not like, making it easy to paint them as an idealised version of your dream person.

Obsessing over someone who doesn’t return our feelings can feel like an inescapable trap because, often, that person does like us back, but not quite enough to commit. A completely one-sided connection is very hard to create, there’s usually some level of reciprocated feelings. But when there’s an imbalance of the scales, the person experiencing limerence then feels as though they must do everything in their power to make the limerent object feel the same way they do.

This creates a never-ending rollercoaster of highs and lows – a slight rejection feels devastating and even a hint of approval from the object of your desire feels euphoric. And these actions can be so small that the person in question may not even give them a second thought. The age of social media makes limerence so much more intense because there’s now a nearly infinite number of avenues that a person can use to, consciously or not, throw a baited hook into the waters once more, knowing you’re still waiting for another chance to be reeled back in.

I’ve experienced limerence twice in my life and in each instance the person I had feelings for became the only thing I thought about when I was on autopilot, slipping into a fantasy about them or ruminating on a past encounter became muscle memory. Every song I listened to, film I watched, or conversation I had somehow became a path that led right back to them.

For me, and friends who have experienced the same thing, limerence became an exercise of data gathering: carefully curating a selection of screenshots that seemingly prove their interest, memorising exact turns of phrase that are whispered as you look up at the ceiling together in the dark, compiling a mental directory of presumed competitors from their loyal Instagram-likers. Old messages are poured over with such regularity that they could be recited word for word and hold the same pointless spot in your long-term memory as a sonnet you had to memorise for Burns Night or a description of your hometown for a Standard Grade French exam. And their Instagram page acts as an oracle of all knowledge that you repeatedly tap on like a lab rat slamming the food button in its cage. 

The issue with pouring over all this evidence and analysing every minor interaction is that the conclusions you come to will never be concrete, trying to understand their intentions and how they felt about you will always feel like wading through murky grey water with no shoreline in sight. There is never any real lightbulb moment or day where you wake up and it all makes sense.

In Stephanie Danler’s Paris Review essay The Unravelers, she argues that all women are either knitters or unravellers. She describes herself as “a great unraveler” […] “I can undo years of careful stitching in fifteen gluttonous minutes. It isn’t even a decision, really. Once I see the loose thread, I am undone”. I too, I think, am an unraveler. Once I get something in my head I will pull, unravel, and untangle every inch of thread until I get to the bottom of it. My mind will work overtime clawing at a great ball of yarn until an answer to my questions is revealed. In the case of limerence, we are often left after long periods of agony and rumination to take a step back and look at the insurmountable pile of mess we’ve left in our wake, how we’ve completely undone ourselves in the process, and still are left with no real answers.

It’s very difficult to overcome limerence and you often have to be dragged out of it kicking and screaming. A friend of mine once had a brief but intense situationship and obsessed over the man in question for a year after it ended until one day, as she sipped her coffee and enjoyed her daily routine of checking his new girlfriend’s Instagram like it was the morning paper, she saw something that made her crash back down to reality: a pregnancy announcement. In the case of my situationships, it took seeing both of them happy in new relationships to finally be able to move on and realise I had superimposed some vague fear of commitment onto the real reason it ended: they just didn’t want to be with me.

The key struggle with trying to stamp out an obsession with someone is that, often, expressed fondness on their behalf, even if ever so slight, is enough to keep the flames burning. Cryptic clues, unexpected messages and chance encounters are wood to the fire, which in turn warms the ego of the desired and encourages them to occasionally fling kindling into the flames, whether they do it consciously or not. 

In my experience, there is no magic fix, often a quick crash landing comes in the form of seeing a hard launch on Instagram, or in the unfortunate case of my friend, an ultrasound scan proudly displayed on their fridge. When unpacking all of the shame and loneliness felt when you hit the ground, it helps to treat yourself with kindness and work through it with a trusted confidant. I find the “that man hates your guts and doesn’t care whether you live or die” sentiment that most TikTok creators adopt to be unhelpful and cause more pain than it alleviates. 

All of the time I spent moulding myself into the best possible version, twisting and obscuring parts they might not like and holding a light up to the ones they might, trying to win them over with demonstrations of worthiness, were all futile. In reality, when someone wants to be with you, it takes a lot to put them off, and when someone doesn’t, it’s a near-impossible feat to win them over.

It is so difficult to finally walk away, but one day you take a step back from the wreckage and realise that continually sifting through all of the parts that have washed up on the shore will never provide you with any real answers and that it’s time to make your way out.

I’m a firm believer that it should feel right from day one, and if you’re still obsessing over a long-lost connection, it was never built to last.