This Is Not A Love Object

A Philosopher Looks at the Phenomenon of Limerence

I’ve been writing about love addiction for, oh, 12 or 13 years now. Most of the time, people just thought I was crazy. When I interviewed psychiatrist Dr. Reef Karim for the 2011 book Love Addict: Sex, Romance and Other Dangerous Drug, he told me: "If I went to an American Psychiatric Association conference and said, ‘Doctors, today we're going to talk about love addiction,’ a third of the room would start laughing.”

Well, he and I had the last laugh in 2014 when psychiatrist Dr. Vineeth John stood up at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association and said, "What might be the criteria for love addiction and its destructive and dysfunctional behaviors?”

Okay, we didn’t actually laugh. Being right about a debilitating and potentially fatal behavioral addiction isn’t that all damn funny… although sometimes it helps to look at it that way.

So now there have been more than 700 peer-reviewed scientific studies about the neurological, behavioral and emotional aspects of love addiction. As of today, we can add “philosophical” to the list, as University of Tennessee Professor of Philosophy Dr. Georgi Gardiner has written "We Forge the Conditions of Love" in  Linguistic Luck: Essays in Anti-Luck Semantics (eds. Carlos Montemayor & Abrol Fairweather.)

Guess what? I’m footnoted!

“As you know,” Dr. Gardiner told me, “there aren't many scholarly articles about limerence, and this is the first philosophy essay about limerence.” “Limerence” being what researchers call that butterfly feeling, that “new relationship energy,” that delightful buzz of infatuation that is for sure my favorite drug in the world. Gardiner does write about other aspects of love than limerence, but I’m all about what she has to say about this one. And she says it using very big words.

One of her main points is that how we verbalize or frame our ideas of romantic love can change how we experience it. “Self-ascribing love can change emotions, attitudes, and values,” is now she puts it. “Self-ascriptions of love are affected by the person’s conception of love.

“A person’s whose conception of limerence is shaped by discourse that emphasises addiction science, neurochemical pathways, or behavioural conditioning might accordingly conceive of limerence as primarily an addiction.” That would be me. My discourse about limerence is that is can be addictive, particularly to people who are genetically and environmentally predisposed to addiction.

“The addiction is to thought patterns, rather than external drugs or behaviours like cocaine or gambling,” she writes. “They might thus understand limerence as contiguous with non-romantic cognitive or attentional addictions, such as maladaptive daydreaming, compulsive rumination, cognitive stimming, mental perseveration, and compulsive suicidal, violent, argumentative, or sexual ideation.”

“The addiction,” she continues, “is not to interacting with the person. It is to thinking about them.”

I agree. We are rarely in love with a person so much as we are to the feeling of being in love with that person. And thinking about them re-stimulates that feeling. It’s as if just thinking about taking a drink got you drunk.… and no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t stop thinking about it, even if you wanted to.

“Two features of this mental activity are emphasised: Incessance—the thoughts are constant — and lack of cognitive control. Therapeutic manuals bluntly deny limerents can intentionally stop thinking about the limerent object. [Author/researcher Dorothy] Tennov writes, ‘In summary, limerent fantasy is, most of all, intrusive and inescapable. It seems not to be something you do, but something that happens.’ Forum posts continually cast suicide as the only escape.”

The thing is, “limerence — not love — is a monomaniacal attentional phenomenon.” In other words, that thing that feels like this-is-my-soulmate-I-must-be-with-them-or-I-will-surely-die-are-they-thinking-about-me-I-have-to-check-their-Instagram… that ain’t love. That is a “monomaniacal attentional phenomenon.”

“Limerence—like many addictions—ultimately arises from unmet needs: The need for romantic companionship or to feel desirable, which corresponds to romantic limerence. The need for approval, especially from authority figures, which commonly underwrites limerence for teachers and bosses. And the need for emotional processing, leading to limerence for therapists and alterous limerence.

“In the resulting conceptual nexus, perhaps love is—at least in its most ideal instantiations—a way to bond, connect, and structure a life. The addiction described by the discourse is not to interacting with the person. It is to thinking about them. Limerence is a way to think.”

So if I have this right — and my degree is in World Literature, not Philosophy, so bear with me — Dr. Gardiner is in our corner. Addictive love isn’t a way of loving; it is a way of thinking. And we do it because we are trying to fill that existential hole every addict and alcoholic talks about. So maybe if we talk about it differently, we will start to experience it differently. I assume this is what she means by “linguistic luck.” The reality we inhabit depends on the way we frame our reality. Changing the way we talk about our thinking… can change the way we think. Which, for some of us, is a worthwhile goal.

So thanks for the reframing, Dr, Gardiner. Plus, I like being a scholarly footnote. A scholarly footnote who cusses.