Dr David Pearl is a relationship therapist and a leading specialist in limerence, a state of intense infatuation or ‘love sickness’ with another person, often unrequited. Pearl explains why some of us can become transfixed with someone we barely know, and how it nearly ruined his own 16-year marriage
Throughout my life, I have had mild crushes. When I was about eight or nine, I became completely obsessed and infatuated by a girl in my class. I still remember her name. I was like a rabbit in the headlights. When I was around her, I couldn’t function. But I hadn’t experienced anything like that as an adult.
And then, 15 years ago, when I was 50, I started training to be a therapist. There was a woman in my class, around the same age. I had only spoken to her a couple of times, possibly for around 20 minutes, but I became completely obsessed with her. It seemed to rekindle all these old feelings from when I was a child. It got to the point where I was looking her up on the internet, just to find out more about her. I was thinking about her 90 per cent of the time: replaying every interaction, every word she said, trying to find some meaning in it. I was rehearsing what I was going to say to her, to make a good impression. I didn’t know her and yet I was besotted. I liked her perfume. It reminded me of the first woman that I felt was kind and attentive to me: my babysitter. I also loved her caring qualities. I was like an addict.
My wife and I have been together for 36 years, and I’ve never been unfaithful to her before. I’ve never strayed. I might have pointed out an attractive woman to her in the street, but she has always been fine with that. She has never felt insecure or shamed me. But this was something different. My behaviour was so out of the ordinary and so off-kilter. After a couple of weeks, my obsession became so intense that I couldn’t keep it a secret anymore. I was really struggling and so I told my wife the truth: I’d met a woman, and I was completely obsessed with her and I didn’t know what was going on.
For the first couple of months, she was really angry with me. I had convinced myself my marriage was broken beyond any chance of repair and I had to leave my family. My therapist constantly and gently reminded me I knew nothing of this person. There was no evidence of any reciprocated feelings apart from someone being friendly. And yet this very ambiguity fuelled my addiction. To my wife’s credit and courage, not once did she demand I break off contact with this woman.
For a while, we were just muddling on. We were both in therapy, as we were both doing our therapy training, so I think that certainly helped. It helped recentre me for a while. And then one evening, I came across an internet forum for people with a condition called limerence.
Neither my wife nor I had come across the term before but it described everything I was feeling. Limerence feels like an addiction. I spoke with my wife. If I was addicted to alcohol, cocaine or gambling, what would she do? And she said: ‘Well, I would support you.’ Well, maybe this is no different? This is an addiction just the same. The challenging thing is it’s an addiction to another human being, which is never easy. But, I explained, maybe that’s the way that we needed to look at this. I’m an addict, and I need to go and get help from people who understand addiction. That is when I joined Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous.
I know now, from my meetings there, that I was experiencing classic symptoms of limerance. There’s a lot of confusion around the condition because some people just assume that obsession is normal when you start a relationship. But the main difference is that limerence is a fantasy, fuelled by an obstruction to consummation. When one or both parties with limerence are already in a long-term, committed relationship, it’s a major barrier to consummation. That keeps the fantasy going. Limerence only happens because you don’t know the other person or because you know you can’t have them. We choose to build them into this idolised god or goddess, and we put them on a pedestal. They are the answer to our dreams, and we think we’ve met our soulmate. It’s a great biological trick to get us to procreate and make more of the species.
Crushes are completely different. They are just a bit of harmless fun and you eventually stop thinking about them when they are away from your eyeline. But with limerence, it’s on a different scale. If we’ve got limerence for someone that’s not our long-term partner, you become less invested, or not as committed, and it will impact your real relationship.
It was really hard overcoming my limerence because the person I felt it for was on my course and so I saw her every week for a year. I didn’t want to let the feeling of shame stop me from trying to work out what was going on, so I was very open with her and also my tutors. Everybody knew about it in my class. It made it very uncomfortable for the woman that I had it for. In hindsight, I would have handled it very differently.
Limerence has nothing to do with the other person. They’re just a catalyst and mirror for ourselves. They don’t need to know about how we feel, and yet a big problem with limerence, and I see it in the clients that I work with, is the need to disclose. We’re looking for validation, and reciprocation because deep down, we do not feel good about ourselves. So many people that develop limerence were raised in a family that didn’t seem to care. Growing up, they may not have had enough love.
I believe my own limerence was a reflection of my father. Perhaps an early-life wound. I was often trying to get his approval. There were certain religious characteristics about the woman that I had limerence for that my dad might have approved of more than my wife. These were all deeply unconscious things at the time.
There is a way out of limerence: abstinence. It is the hardest thing for any addict to do. Whenever I’m working with somebody who’s knee-deep in limerence, they’ll try and argue why they’re right, and I’m wrong. Why they can remain friends with the other person; or carry on working with them. I have a client at the moment who’s struggling with limerence, and the other person is a neighbour. I have advised that he move home. I have even worked with a woman who had limerence for her mother-in-law. She had been straight all her life and never had any feelings towards other women. Then suddenly, she gets limerence.
It’s a very hard thing to combat. Eventually, I left the therapy course and no longer saw this woman every week. It still took me a year to stop thinking about her. The average time to move on from limerence is six months to three years. Even now, 15 years on, she’ll come into one of my dreams, although very rarely. It’s still incredible to me how powerful addiction is.
As told to Eleanor Peake