Is Your Heart Okay?
I'm not talking about the organ beating in your chest but the love pulsing in your soul and where limerence fits in
This morning, I considered my heart a prism suspended in the centre of my chest. I visualised the many facets reflecting and deflecting all the wavelengths of light: the colours we can see and those we can’t. There was only pure light in the centre of the prism, and it occurred to me that I only wanted to allow that which amplified it to enter. I finally had an image of what all my seeming mistakes have been trying to teach me. My heart is whole and precious.
Like an infant, I have busied myself with one distraction or another and beamed toward wavelengths that seemed vivid and promising. I have been seeking learning and love. I want to make sense of things and feel fulfilled, but it is hard for a babe with a perpetually open but broken heart. Life is a tough-love parent, and a toddler must fall and scrape their knees and bruise their butt many times before they learn to walk. Some humans defy developmental milestones and are born running, while others totter precariously forever. Like those sweet darlings who keep pulling themselves back up time after time, responding to an invisible urge to grow, some hearts take a long time to master the art of love.
I have not mastered it. I think it might be my life’s work.
Ironically, my daughter has always told me she loves how I love. She teases me and is most amused by my devotion to loving movies that the rest of the world and Rotten Tomatoes think are shite. She sees a heart still full of childlike wonder and is encouraged by it. A friend attempted to summarise my answers to his questions about life, “Oh…you’re just happy to be here,” he said, and he was right, but sometimes I think I will bleed to death if I graze my knees just one more time.
Last night, I texted a friend,
Brother…I fear I have a faulty heart…Sometimes, I can’t even breathe with my manufactured suffering…
I am talking about limerence.
I was gifted a moment to ponder this concept recently but was mortified at the definition;
limerence
or li·mer·ance
[ li-mer-uhns ]
Phonetic (Standard)IPA
noun
the state of being obsessively infatuated with someone, usually accompanied by delusions of or a desire for an intense romantic relationship with that person:
Her limerence lasted for around three months before she actually met him.
Limerence is an acute onset, unexpected, obsessive attachment to one person, the Limerent Object (LO) (Willmott et al.)
I considered the taste for a certain sweetness I was developing, and as the gauze fell from my eyes, I saw something I couldn’t unsee. But also, somewhere in the distance, I heard the answer to a prayer. If I could understand why a fulfilling love has eluded me…maybe I could finally learn to walk…to love meaningfully. You see, there is another part, many parts, to this limerence gig, so it all starts to make sense.
Although limerence is usually unrequited or unspoken, if feelings are reciprocated or explained, limerent behaviour stops, and either loving or distancing behaviour begins.
The resonating continues; perhaps the last part is more commonly described as an avoidant attachment style. There seems to be a malfunctioning gain perpetuating the uncertainty of the LO’s reciprocity. In other words, happier obsessing over a fantasy than to be trapped in an unsatisfying relationship.
Dear God, finally, the intergenerational and childhood trauma cry is loud enough to be questioned. Why does everything seem to hark back to parental love? Did I not have enough? More importantly, was I witness to my parent’s loveless relationship? And was my mother trapped?
Then, limerence must be a coping mechanism. It could be a clever short circuit to faulty wiring. A way to experience love without committing to it? I haven’t read any of these theories because, from my reading, there seems to be very little research on the topic. The term was first coined by Dorothy Tennov, a U.S. psychologist (1928-2007), in her book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. She chose the term limerence because “it was pronounceable and seemed to me and two students to have a ‘fitting’ sound.” (I love the human randomness of etymology)
According to Tennov, limerence is a third kind of desire, separate from romantic love and erotic desire. Tennov says that limerence is not better or more important than other types of desires or attractions, but it is more powerful than others in almost all cases.
Boom! Justification! For a person happy to be here but also broken, limerence appears to be a way to maximise the experience with all the tricky psychology of a genius…or magic of a faerie. Ha!
Someone told me he thought I was like an octopus in captivity. I asked him to say more because the analogy seemed far from flattering. According to Young Einstein, an octopus in captivity will die if it does not have a puzzle to work out. He then handed me the puzzle of limerence. So, here I am, working it out publicly, shamelessly, and through writing.
Last night, a photo of me and said LO fell out of my wallet, and I felt the familiar panic rising—hallmark distress at being separated and uncertain. It was visceral and excruciating, symptoms far outweighing the stimulus.
The themes primarily regard experiences of ruminative thinking, free-floating anxiety and depression temporarily fixated and the disintegration of self.
This is the part I hate. This is the reason I am ready to “work this out”, but there is a silver lining,
These themes are further linked to an inclination to reintegrate unresolved past life(s) experiences and to progress to a state of greater authenticity (i.e. being truer to one’s inner self).
One of the only academic papers I could find on limerence suggests a proposed therapy similar to that for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (Gulp): Exposure Response Prevention (ERP).
ERP is a behavioural therapy that involves deliberately exposing an individual to a feared stimulus and preventing the individual from engaging in rituals that alleviate their anxiety. In the case of limerence, one may imagine the feared stimulus as separation from or rejection by the LO.
In short, there's no contact, and I have already initiated this. I felt like a powerful grown-up at the time, but that was probably the vibration of truth kick-starting my healing. In reality, it has taken tears, tenuous willpower and the fear that I can’t do this without some professional help. Fortunately and conveniently, I had a trip planned, so here I sit on the terrace of my villa next to the ocean in a remote part of Bali and contemplate all of this. When the photo incident happened, I was heading to a Yin Yoga class and cried indulgently during each extended pose. I wept for the brokenness that necessitated this short circuit and for fear I might not manage the journey to a mended heart. The only way I know how to face fear is to write about it, so I’m doing that.
“But you’re fearless!” friends often tell me. One explained this by suggesting I must be a young soul and don’t have the accumulated fear of previous lifetimes. I’m unsure about that, but I feel younger now than I did at thirty, if that makes any sense. I imagine myself as the character from the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where Brad Pitt’s character is born an old person who gets younger throughout their life until they become a baby who eventually disappears back to, where? I guess I'm fearless enough to be a babe who is learning to walk.
When the waves recede, part of my processing includes wondering if this thing has any superpower potential. Most things are on a spectrum, so surely limerence is as well. What if there is a way to distil this phenomenon and dispense it in nourishing drops? As a starting point, I know my limerence has good taste; it finds me magical people, but they are turned into unreachables. So, we should set the temperature of the still to extract the first part of this compound. Next are the euphoric heights followed by the crashing lows - keep the first part and bin the second…you get my drift.
How do we utilise this metaphysical contraption? My friends who are experienced gin makers would tell me to know my ingredients, commit the recipes to memory and trust my intuition. This last piece will be the trickiest. I pride myself on my intuition, but limerence is a menace and fucks with it. A line from the novel Mrs S by K. Patrick comes to mind, “My imagination is so readily confused with intuition.”
I think it starts with baby steps: understanding what it is, trusting myself to weather the storm of insecurity and doubts as I head to the safety of the shore, and believing in the magic of being here. I’m up for the whole experience of this life, and I know it takes vulnerability and courage, but ultimately, I trust myself to keep myself safe. The page is an apothecary, and soon, I will shelve a precious potion to be dispensed one drop at a time.
Thank you for the intro to Liberace ( limerance, I had to leave the hilarious auto correct). It got me thinking about it in a prism manner- the many facets. A longing, hopeful, ache of a narrative for various aspects of this waning life.
We’ll write til we/the story crosses over I’m sure. x
I love the imagery of your heart as a prism. "My heart is whole and precious." True that! Limerance is a word more people should know about. I admire the word-coining alliteration of love & limerance too! Bali sounds like a place of good medicine to keep exploring it. :)