Falling in love is dangerous. Philosopher Sam Shpall, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and author of the upcoming book Limerence and the Future of Desire, makes the radical case that the notion of "falling in love" isn't just an imprecise idea, but a hazardous one. Buried inside it is a forgotten concept called 'limerence': an involuntary, obsessive craving for reciprocation, distinct from romantic love. Conflating the two convinces us our relationships are lesser than they are. Instead, we should retire the idea of "falling in and out of love". 

In 1979, the American psychologist Dorothy Tennov published a book called Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Simone de Beauvoir called it a book that “deals with the subject in an entirely new way.” Notwithstanding this extraordinary endorsement, and a recent resurrection of Tennov’s ideas by content creators and journalists, philosophers have mostly ignored the topic of limerence. This is unfortunate, as the concept can do real philosophical work.

Tennov was interested in understanding a distinctive romantic experience. She thought it was essential to coin a term for this experience. “Limerence” is an intense, largely involuntary craving for a particular person’s romantic reciprocation. It is not mere desire, or a crush, but a more complex and existentially altering state in which your mood, attention, and sense of what matters become hostage to how that person feels about you. It involves intrusive thoughts about the person that you cannot suppress, a tendency to see them through rose-tinted glasses, and volatile swings between powerful emotions like euphoria and dread. Limerence has a natural lifespan too: on average about two years, Tennov thought, and rarely less than six months in full bloom. After this period, limerence fades—whether you want it to or not.

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Confusing limerence with love is among the most consequential (and common) mistakes that human beings make.

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 Most people would call this being in love. The title of Tennov’s book can suggest she thought this as well. But she did not. In fact, she thought that confusing limerence with love is among the most consequential (and common) mistakes that human beings make.

Love and Limerence arose from extensive qualitative psychological research, that is, from interviews Tennov conducted with hundreds of people about their romantic histories. In the early stages of this work, Tennov made a discovery about her friend Helen Payne that proved decisive. Payne was the first romantically experienced person Tennov encountered who had never undergone the limerent process I’ve just described. Tennov’s first instinct was to find this strange and puzzling. If she hadn’t lacked romantic opportunities, was her friend in some way romantically disordered? Soon Tennov discarded that hypothesis. Not having experienced limerence is, she came to think, neither more nor less pathological than having experienced it. Moreover, not having experienced limerence is compatible with having experienced romantic love. In fact, limerence is neither necessary for love nor sufficient for it.

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Doris Lessing offers a memorable expression of the instinct Tennov overcame in her novel The Summer Before the Dark. Lessing describes a woman named Mary Finchley who “had never been in love in her life” and couldn’t understand what people meant when they talked about it. Another character says that “she really believes that the way everyone goes on about love, being in love, is some sort of conspiracy, the emperor has no clothes.” The character’s verdict: Finchley is a “savage woman.” A delusional pessimist, about love no less!

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