Limerence vs. Love: How to Tell the Difference

Limerence is often mistaken for that early, infatuation phase of love: when your mind keeps drifting back to the person you’re falling for. You might find yourself daydreaming, imagining a fairytale romance, not being able to sleep from excitement, or replaying interactions to remember the leap in your heart when they looked at you a certain way. But limerence goes further than infatuation, to the point where your expectations can lose touch with reality. Like the main character in the movie 500 Days of Summer whose life transforms into a musical with birds soaring overhead, limerence almost always leads to disappointment.

Limerence is defined as a state of intense romantic obsession involving mental preoccupation and emotional volatility. It can lead to problems if we want to build a healthy, interdependent relationship. However, it’s not a formal diagnosis. Like other emotions, it’s a felt sense that lives on a spectrum, ranging from mild infatuation to more extreme behaviors.

If you feel like you can’t stop thinking about someone and it’s starting to disrupt your life, remember that limerence has something to tell us, often about what the deeper, more vulnerable parts inside of us are needing.

What limerence is and how it feels

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term limerence in the 1980s while researching the early stages of romantic love. She noticed that infatuation could be damaging when it reached levels of involuntary, intense obsession that disrupted healthy relationship-building. Oftentimes, limerence involves idealization and emotional dependency, which makes it easy to swing between feeling joy or despair depending on how you’re treated (Willmot & Bentley (2015).

Common signs of limerence include:

• Obsessive preoccupation where your thoughts return to them constantly, even when you're trying to focus on something else
• Emotional dependency and feeling that you’re incomplete without them
• Anxiety and self-consciousness about how they see you or whether they like you
• Idealization of the person as perfect and completely able to meet your needs
• Fear of rejection and sensitivity to signs of possible rejection
• Sudden emotional changes depending on how they treat you
• Neglecting yourself for their sake, including losing sleep or normal activities

These features of limerence have a neurological basis. Love itself is an intense experience that causes neurobiological and chemical changes in the brain. Levels of the reward neurotransmitter dopamine surge and cause a sense of euphoria, and serotonin spikes make it hard to stay regulated. The bonding hormone oxytocin is released, making it hard to be apart from the person for very long, even in our thoughts.

But with limerence, these natural brain changes start to take on qualities similar to addiction, including intrusive thoughts or withdrawal symptoms (Wyant, 2021). You might find yourself constantly checking your texts to see if they’ve responded, and feeling anguish if they haven’t. Or, you might monitor their social media pages and dissect their posts for clues about how they feel about you, vacillating between exhilaration and feeling crushed.

In rare cases, extreme levels of limerence have been tied to stalking and violence, as in the case of individuals who stalk or threaten celebrities. But for most, limerence looks much less dramatic. You might have well-meaning friends start telling you, “You haven’t been acting yourself lately,” or “You seem obsessed with this person.” Their feedback can feel critical, pessimistic, or unsupportive. But it can also be a cue to go inwards to understand your inner world more deeply.

Limerence and attachment wounds

Research has found that the strongest emotional drivers of limerence tend to be feelings of sadness and loneliness. At intense levels, it can cause painful amounts of anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt. It’s commonly believed that these reactions originate from an anxious attachment style (Evens et al, 2026).

Attachment styles can differ across our relationships. You might feel secure and accepted by your friends, and hold a nuanced view of your parents’ strengths and weaknesses. But romantic intimacy often comes with higher stakes. Oftentimes, it triggers attachment wounds we’ve experienced in relationships of all kinds that were hurtful, neglectful, or damaged our self-worth. These relational traumas often come with a strong fear of abandonment or intrusive anxiety (Zagaria et al, 2024).

Relationship trauma can lead you to believe that “I am incomplete on my own,” “Something’s wrong with me,” or “True love will make me whole”. The need for the other person makes it easy to feel deeply hurt by any perceived rejections. You might be reminded of past abandonment, such as by caregivers in childhood who didn’t meet your essential needs.

In the evidence-based therapy Internal Family Systems (IFS), parts of ourselves that are desperate for love are often seen as holding trauma burdens. They’re often protected by more defensive parts of us that are working hard to make sure we aren’t hurt again – whether through keeping us isolated, or looking to others for rescue.

Limerence could be coming from a wounded part that’s longing for love and emotional safety. Or limerence could come from a protective part that’s determined to ignore the aspects of someone that aren’t ideal, to protect you from the painful truth that they won’t always be able to meet your needs.

How to stop limerence

According to relationship researchers John and Julie Gottman, limerence can sometimes transform into healthy love. This is because love exists on a spectrum, with obsession on one end, and indifference on the other. Healthy love lies somewhere in the middle, and naturally fluctuates depending on the relationship season and context. A realistic goal is to move toward that middle space by patiently building trust and vulnerability with each other.

Here are four strategies to consider:

1. Build internal boundaries

If you sense that limerence is one-sided, an important step is to build internal boundaries. You might ask a friend to hold you accountable to not obsessively check your texts, or choose to do a useful, hands-on activity when the urge to daydream comes on. These behavior changes can be easier to do than trying to force your feelings to change.

2. Build boundaries within the relationship

When limerence happens in a dating relationship, the goal is to build interdependence and emotional boundaries with each other. This often looks like practicing mindfulness of where they end and you begin to avoid enmeshment. So, if your partner isn’t feeling well or is in a low mood, emotional boundaries look like soothing fears of having done something wrong yourself, and focusing on how you can support them.

3. See the good and the bad

Interdependence also looks like staying realistic about their strengths and growth areas. It’s natural during a honeymoon phase to focus on your loved one’s attractive qualities, and tune out concerns. Transforming limerence into love requires acknowledging their flaws while soothing potential disappointment, remembering that these feelings are likely a reflection of your deeper attachment needs, and not a mark on the relationship.

4. Don’t settle for less than mutual love

Being seen, accepted, and pursued by your partner can help you build more secure attachment with yourself and others. This organic process reflects how inner healing often happens through relationships, not because we’re idealizing someone, but because we’re building trust and safety together in real time. It’s possible that you will still feel more whole and complete, but this will be a byproduct of an authentic connection that comes with moments of healthy conflict and repair.

How therapy can help address limerence

A few types of therapy can be particularly helpful for working through limerence that’s disrupting your life.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a top one to consider. An IFS-trained therapist will guide you in getting to know and befriend inner parts, including ones that have been working tirelessly to keep you safe, and wounded ones carrying trauma. You learn to access the “8 C’s” of your authentic self: calm, confidence, creativity, connectedness, curiosity, clarity, courage, and compassion.

Questions that an IFS therapist might ask about limerence:

• When you notice the limerence come up, where do you feel it in your body? How does your curious, compassionate self feel toward this part?
• What is the limerence protecting you from? What is it afraid will happen if it stops doing what it’s doing?
• What does the limerent part of you have to say about what it truly needs?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can also be helpful for changing obsessive thoughts and behaviors. You learn to redirect preoccupied thoughts, replace idealization with realistic perspectives, and create routines that build your sense of self-worth.

Attachment-Based Therapy is a general therapeutic approach that can help you understand the origins of your attachment style and wounds, soothe triggers and regulate strong emotions, and practice building interdependence in your relationships.

Limerence can be a disorienting and painful experience, but it also carries a quiet invitation: to turn inward and tend to what your inner world is asking for, and begin building a relationship with yourself that makes healthy love possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marian Ting, LMFT, is a licensed therapist and writer specializing in trauma, mood disorders, and depth-oriented approaches to mental health. Drawing from her practice across community mental health, university counseling, and group practice settings, she translates clinical insights into content that is accessible, compassionate, and grounded in the realities of years in the therapy room.

Marian writes from both professional expertise and lived experience navigating her own mental health journey, which informs the honesty and warmth of her work. She is passionate about making mental health knowledge empowering for clients and clinicians alike. Marian is also an advocate for the healing potential of psychedelic-assisted therapies and increasing access for underserved communities to this transformative medicine.