Love and Limerence Quotes

“Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in. —Robert Seidenberg”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“the amorous relation is “a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror game which carries within itself its own frustration,”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“The eyes, as we shall see again and again, are so important in limerence that they, not the genitals or even the heart, may be called the organs of love.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“Despite ideals and philosophy, you find yourself a player in a process that bears unquestionable similarity to a game. The prize is not trifling; reciprocation produces ecstasy. Whether it will be won, whether it will be shared, and what the final outcome may be, depend on the effectiveness of your moves and those of your LO; indeed on skill.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“Limerence can live a long life sustained by crumbs. Indeed, overfeeding is perhaps the best way to end it. It bears a definite resemblance to the condition of the laboratory rats and pigeons who continue to press the bar or peck at the disk even when the probability of food reward is gradually diminished, so that on the average only one in hundreds or even thousands (for pigeons who were very persistent and rapid peckers) of “responses” actually pays off. When the animal is presented with an uncertain relationship between its actions and the behavior of the food-delivery mechanism, quite remarkable results are obtained. Even for laboratory animals, the key elements seem to be doubt and hope. Ordinary gambling resembles this laboratory behavior in its persistence even when chances of winning are slight. Perhaps for both limerent persons and habitual gamblers, the size of the possible prize is also important. Both gamblers and limerents find reason to hope in wild dreams.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“While limerence has been called love, it is not love. Although the limerent feels a kind of love for LO at the time, from LO’s point of view limerence and love are quite different from each other.
It is limerence, not love, that increases when lovers are able to meet only infrequently or when there is anger between them. No wonder those who view limerence from an external vantage are baffled by what seems more a form of insanity than a form of love. Jean-Paul Sartre calls it a project with a “contradictory ideal.” He notes that each of the lovers seek the love of the other without realizing that what they want is to be loved. His conclusion is that the amorous relation is “a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror game which carries within itself its own frustration,” a kind of “dupery.”
It should also be clear now that limerent uncertainly as well as projection can be viewed as the consequence of your limerent inclination to hide your own feelings: If you hide your true reactions, then LO, if indeed limerent, can be expected to do the same. When LO appears not to be eager, or even interested, it is not unreasonable to interpret that behavior as evidence itself of limerence; and a kind of “paranoia” becomes an entirely logical consequence of a situation that may indeed be what Simone de Beauvoir has called it: “impossible.”
Because one of the invariant characteristics of limerence is extreme emotional dependency on LO’s behavior, the actual course of the limerence must depend on the actions and reactions of both lovers. Uncertainty increases limerence; increased limerence dictates altered action which serves to increase or decrease limerence in the other according to the interpretation given. The interplay is delicate if the relationship hovers near mutuality; a subtle imbalance, constantly shifting, appears to maintain it. Each knows who “loves more.”
If limerence were measurable by an instrument that enabled its intensity to be read by the points on a dial, one could imagine that, if lovers sat together reading each other’s degree of reciprocation, the dials would rarely if ever set themselves at the same point on the scales. For instance, if you found yourself more limerent than your partner, then your limerence might decline through reduced hope, or if your partner’s were higher, it might decline through reduced uncertainty. Perhaps such true awareness would provide a means of controlling the reaction.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“But I don’t direct this thing, this attraction, to Emily. It directs me. I try desperately to argue with it, to limit its influence, to channel it (into sex, for example), to deny it, to enjoy it and, yes, dammit, to make her respond! Even though I know that Emily and I have absolutely no chance of making a life together, the thought of her is an obsession. I am in the position of passionately wanting someone I don’t want at all and could find no use for if I had her.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“Limerence is, above all else, mental activity. It is an interpretation of events, rather than the events themselves. You admire, you are physically attracted, you see, or think you see (or deem it possible to see under "suitable" conditions), the hint of possible reciprocity, and the process is set in motion”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“I have just read back over this diary. In March I would never have believed that so much time could go by totally without progress. I have become desperate. My passion has taken over my consciousness. Hours of every day are devoted to Laura, to what has become fastidious concern over every detail of my dress and appearance, to the endless daydreaming, and to the search for ways to interest her in things that we might do together. Her image is everywhere I look. Everything I think of, no matter how remote, leads me back to thinking of her. The first thing I see when I wake up in the morning is her face, and she is in my thoughts whether or not she is in my presence. I have become determined to do something about this, but I do not know what to do. Other things scarcely exist for me anymore. I forgot to pick up the photographs I had ordered, and they were almost sent back to Paris. I am incapacitated. I like Laura, she is nice, but this extraordinary reaction of mine is entirely inappropriate. I have a kind of sinking feeling almost all the time and I welcome problems serious enough to distract me from this idiocy. My major feeling is not wanting to work on my dissertation, despite the approaching deadline. My stomach aches, and I feel sunk, depressed. If I could only be absolutely sure that she is not interested in me, I would have nothing to build hopes on, but when she is at all nice to me, I suffer.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“Whether or not sex destroys romantic love or limerence, as moralists have proclaimed vehemently, seems rather to depend on the meaning attached to sex by the two people involved, the limerent meaning. In former times, sexual surrender of a woman to a man also communicated complete social and emotional surrender. If this occurred prematurely so far as the development of the man’s limerence was concerned, the effect was quite different from what it might be among people today for whom sex carries no such connotation of commitment. In other words, sexual surrender once indicated the end of uncertainty in LO’s response, uncertainty that was as necessary then as now for limerence to reach its peak.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“It is useful to distinguish sexual fantasies from limerent ones. Limerent fantasy is rooted in reality—that is, in what the limerent person interprets as reality. Your limerent daydreams may be unlikely, even highly unlikely, but they retain fidelity to the possible. The image of the moment of consummation, in which your LO indicates to you by word or gesture that the feelings are returned, is the more blissful—even when only in fantasy—if the events imagined to lead up to it could actually occur. As beautiful as a scene on a Caribbean island may be with you and LO dancing together in the moonlight, the scene brings the glow of bliss only when you are able to fill in the gaps, as it were, between present circumstances and the desired event. In acute phases, limerent fantasies are intrusive rather than voluntary, and they often reach a peak of satisfaction in a situation that may or may not lead to a sexual embrace.
In contrast, sexual fantasies are for most persons under more or less voluntary control. Here, it is necessary to distinguish between fantasy and arousal—the latter being a physiological as well as psychological state accompanied by definite sensations in the genital region. Fantasy is mental activity which creates and or augments those sensations. Sexual fantasies may involve intrusive and involuntary desire, but they differ from limerent imaginings (at least for those whom I interviewed) in that sexual fantasizing may also involve strangers, imaginary individuals, and situations that could not take place—even ones that you would not wish to have take place. Group sex, rape, seduction by a mysterious stranger, intercourse with animals: Such fantasies can be arousing for people who would not actually wish to engage in them in real live.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“When you are limerent, no matter how intensely you desire reciprocation you cannot simply ask for it. You cannot simply inquire as to whether or not it exists. To ask is to risk premature self-disclosure. The interplay is delicate, with the reactions of each person inextricably bound to the behavior of the other. Like a hunter for whom the crackle of a twig in the bush measures the presence of the hunted, you subject LO’s seemingly ordinary postures, movements, words, and glances to incessant analysis in quest of “true” meanings obscured beneath an ambiguous surface. Here, where the path is treacherous and possible consequence profound, face values cannot be trusted. Things may be what they seem or, again, they may in fact be just the opposite of what they seem. Despite ideals and philosophy, you find yourself a player in a process that bears unquestionable similarity to a game. The prize is not trifling; reciprocation produces ecstasy. Whether it will be won, whether it will be shared, and what the final outcome may be, depend on the effectiveness of your moves and those of your LO; indeed on skill.
The rocky course of progression toward ecstatic mutuality may involve not externally created difficulties, but the feinting and parrying, the minor deceptions, and the falsehoods of the lovers themselves that are so frequent as often to have been viewed as a “natural” aspect of the romantic love pattern. (They also occur in sexual seduction and in many other forms of human interaction.) The lovers’ fears lead them to proceed with a caution that they hope will protect them from disaster. Rather than commit themselves, they flirt. They send out ambiguous signals more or less as trial balloons. Reason to hope combined with reason to doubt keeps passion at fever pitch. Too-ready limerent availability cools them. Andreas Capellanus, medieval author of The Art of Courtly Love, was neither the first nor the last to advise lovers to. erect artificial barriers and if necessary conceal their true feelings. When Stendhal began to fall in love himself, he feared the failure that certainty could bring and so, for “effect,” he avoided his LO and walked about alone, brooding. You may lose your love through open declaration of your true feelings.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“I found surprisingly consistent support for the ancient wisdom that associates love with the heart. When I asked interviewees in the throes of the limerent condition to tell where they felt the sensation of limerence, they pointed unerringly to the midpoint in their chest. So consistently did this occur that it would seem to be another indication that the state described is indeed limerence, not affection (described by some as located “all over,” or even in “the arms” when held out in a gesture of embrace) or in sexual feelings (located, appropriately enough, in the genitals).”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“Scientific research has emphatically confirmed the age-old suspicions concerning the importance of gaze. When we are experiencing intensely pleasurable emotions, our pupils dilate and become larger. Unconsciously and involuntarily, this pupillary reflex can betray feelings. In addition, a small increase in the secretion of the tear ducts causes the eyes to glisten producing “shining eyes of love,” which, when combined with dilation of the pupil, emit signals of amatory interest. Not only that, the eyebrows, once thought designed by nature to keep perspiration from running into our eyes, are now believed at least by some scientists to have as a basic function the indication of mood change. When we are surprised they rise; when we are angered, they lower; and when we are anxious, they knit together. To arch them means to question, and to flick them quickly once up and down is to acknowledge another person in an attitude of friendliness.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“At first, I’d set up little tests. I’d say that if at the next meeting she elects to sit beside me or facing me, I will count it as proof that this madness is not unilateral. But when she chose a seat farthest from me, or one which made it very difficult for us to look at one another, I realized that the test was not a test at all. No matter what she did, I could interpret it in my favor. Her remote position in the room could serve the function of helping her to hide feelings as intense as my own. She was as afraid as I was of overt interaction! Of course, if I had been certain of that conclusion, I’d have found it possible to take a positive step, but my thinking on the matter oscillated like a seesaw. Up and down, back and forth, my reactions went, but always with the same final result: I dared not advance.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“Uncertainty about LO’s true reaction is an essential aspect of your own limerence. Removal of the uncertainty is the goal, and because your desire is so unrelenting, so imperative, you continually search for the meanings underlying events. This brings us to the matter of hopefulness, as essential to the development of a full limerent reaction as uncertainty. Since limerent fantasy is rooted in the limerent’s actual life situation, it would seem to follow that hopefulness must be similarly grounded. Well, yes and no. The problem is once again that it is not objective reality, but reality as it is perceived that provides the base for limerent hopefulness. Just as lack of confidence and fear of no response in LO may be based on misperceptions of reality, so hope of reciprocation of feeling turns out to require little foothold in actuality once the limerent reaction has fixed itself. It is primarily the true nature of LO’s reaction to yourself that is obscure to your limerent eye, and it is this confusion that causes so much stress and anxiety over how to behave, what to say, how much to reveal, or how fast to move.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“In summary, limerent fantasy is, most of all, intrusive and inescapable. It seems not to be something you do, but something that happens. Most involuntary are the flash visions in which LO is reciprocating. Compelling, seductive, tempting, or even, as one man described them, “tantalizing,” the longer limerent fantasy is a deliberate attempt to achieve relief of the limerent yearning through imagining consummation in a context of possible events. Limerent fantasy is unsatisfactory unless firmly rooted in reality. Sometimes it is retrospective; actual events are replayed in memory. This form predominates when what is viewed as evidence of possible reciprocation can be reexperienced. Otherwise, the long fantasy is anticipatory; it begins in your everyday world and climaxes at the attainment of the limerent goal. The intrusive “flashes” may be symbolic; you find LO’s indication of returned feelings expressed by a look, a word, a handclasp, or embrace. The long fantasies form a bridge between your ordinary life and that intensely desired ecstatic moment. The two types of fantasy are ends of a continuum, not mutually exclusive. The duration and complexity of a fantasy often seem to depend on how much time and freedom from distraction is available. The bliss of the imagined moment of consummation is greater when events imagined to precede it are believed in. In fact, of course, they often represent grave departures from the probable, as an outside observer might estimate them.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“Just as all roads once led to Rome, when your limerence for someone has crystallized, all events, associations, stimuli, experience return your thoughts to LO with unnerving consistency. At the moment of awakening after the night’s sleep, an image of LO springs into your consciousness. And you find yourself inclined to remain in bed pursuing that image and the fantasies that surround and grow out of it. Your daydreams persist throughout the day and are involuntary. Extreme effort of will to stop them produces only temporary surcease.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“Limerence has certain basic components:
• intrusive thinking about the object of your passionate desire (the limerent object or “LO”), who is a possible sexual partner
• acute longing for reciprocation
• dependency of mood on LO’s actions or, more accurately, your interpretation of LO’s actions with respect to the probability of reciprocation
• inability to react limerently to more than one person at a time (exceptions occur only when limerence is at low ebb—early on or in the last fading)
• some fleeting and transient relief from unrequited limerent passion through vivid imagination of action by LO that means reciprocation
• fear of rejection and sometimes incapacitating but always unsettling shyness in LO’s presence, especially in the beginning and whenever uncertainty strikes
• intensification through adversity (at least, up to a point)
• acute sensitivity to any act or thought or condition that can be interpreted favorably, and an extraordinary ability to devise or invent “reasonable” explanations for why the neutrality that the disinterested observer might see is in fact a sign of hidden passion in the LO
• an aching of the “heart” (a region in the center front of the chest) when uncertainty is strong
• buoyancy (a feeling of walking on air) when reciprocation seems evident
• a general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background
• a remarkable ability to emphasize what is truly admirable in LO and to avoid dwelling on the negative, even to respond with a compassion for the negative and render it, emotionally if not perceptually, into another positive attribute.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“Limerence is not mere sexual attraction. Although something you may interpret as sexual attraction may be, or seem to be, the first feeling, sometimes nothing you would label sexual interest is ever consciously felt. Sex is neither essential nor, in itself, adequate to satisfy the limerent need. But sex is never entirely excluded in the limerent passion, either. Limerence is a desire for more than sex, and a desire in which the sexual act may represent the symbol of its highest achievement: reciprocation. Reciprocation expressed through physical union creates the ecstatic and blissful condition called “the greatest happiness,” and the most profound glorification of the achievement of limerent aims.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“The illustrious and influential Sigmund Freud dismissed romantic love as merely sex urge blocked. Pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis provided his famous and entirely incorrect mathematical formula: sex plus friendship. (It seems to be neither.) Contemporary sex researchers seldom discuss love since they view sex and love as quite distinct from each other. Psychoanalytic writers have disagreed with each other as well as with the master, Freud. Theodore Reik asserted that sex and love are quite different, although the usual interpretation of Freudian concepts is that they are fused. Psychoanalyst Robert Seidenberg comments that the only similarity he could think of is that neither makes sense. In books with the word “love” in their titles, two of the most widely read writers on mental and emotional life managed to virtually avoid the subject of romantic love: Erich Fromm, in the Art of Loving, dismisses “falling in love” as a clearly unsatisfactory, as well as “explosive,” way to overcome “separateness”; and Rollo May, in his best-selling book Love and Will, forces the reader to search for romantic love in the interstices between sexual, procreational, friendly, and altruistic loves. The general view seemed to be that romantic love is mysterious, mystical, even sacred, and not capable, apparently, of being subjected to the cool gaze of scientific inquiry.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“One non-limerent, on learning of limerence theory, felt that the pain of limerence may be great but that it should not be forgotten that non-limerents hurt, too. He expressed his feelings in a poem about his sadness over having to end a relationship that was dear to him because his lover had begun to demand the impossible in her limerence. ‘We hurt too you know, its not easy to give up a good friend. To see someone change before your very eyes from someone you feel knows and loves you, to someone who is suddenly demanding the impossible. As if you were not you at all.’ This poem tells how strongly I felt the sadness of having to part. I was allowed to keep a copy of the poem to show others. I did. I explained the circumstances of its being written before reading it to a few interviewees. A limerent who was suffering from the pain of non-mutuality gave the following reaction, ‘Okay, I understand what the poem is saying, and I can see that the writer really didn’t like the relationship to break up and all. But frankly, almost from the first line my feelings were for the person addressed in the poem. The person being told to leave by a lover when the crime has only been that of loving.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love

“The relationship between limerence and sex remains extremely complicated. Despite virtually unanimous agreement among interviewees that sex with LO under the best circumstances provides the “greatest pleasure” knowable in human existence, it appears that the very nature of limerence and the very nature of sex conspire to undermine the happiness except under the luckiest and most extraordinary of circumstances.”
― Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love