Love, Limerence, and the Emotionally Unavailable Partnership

No one ever said that love was easy, although we may have all had the experience that it can be.  I think that everyone can agree that love can be different, and with each new person that we love, we may discover a new version of love, or we may discover that we can love and be loved in a different way.  Some people think that ‘true love’ is very obvious and maybe even immediate, and others take a while to build on and grow into love.  There is no one standard of love, which is the beauty of it, because although we often know when we love someone, different types of love force us to grow and change as humans.

What we do know about love is that our formative love and family experiences can often define what we consider to be love, and what we go into the world looking for. Our young experiences and the things that we know about love from our families can shape our concept of love as we begin to explore at an early age what it may mean to us. And as adults, we may have to stretch our imaginations and try dating people who don’t feel familiar to us or remind us of our young relationships to find different experiences and definitions of how love can be. This is especially true in situations where the love that we received from our family of origin is not the type of love that we need, or that feels healthy to us now.

In this article, I’d like to talk about a type of love that is often very intense and extremely exciting, which can also cause a great deal of pain, and it may even be a version of love that is terrifying and can cause extreme turmoil when it falls apart. I’d like to define this type of love as “limerence”. I don’t think that everyone has had the experience of limerence, though many people can definitely say that they have had this type of love multiple times, even. Limerence is a state of infatuation or obsession with another person that involves an all consuming passion and intrusion of thoughts. I believe that limerence is a type of love that can sometimes be related to childhood trauma, and those who find this experience repeating in adulthood over and over again are working through some version of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (also known as c-ptsd) from a time in their childhood when they experienced neglect, or from when they’ve felt tenuous love from an emotionally unavailable caregiver. Symptoms of c-ptsd include fantasy, obsession, and longing among many other things. These mechanisms, also present in limerence, were all coping mechanisms to having an emotionally unavailable caregiver. The use of fantasy is usually born to protect one from the feelings of disappointment and the reality of loneliness.  The obsessive thoughts are a form of feeling like one has control over a situation when they do not, and the obsession attempts to block the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness that the person felt (and maybe still feels) in relationships, specifically with someone who is unavailable. And longing is in a similar vein, the feeling of longing implies that we don’t have our needs met, and so we may get stuck in a longing infatuation with the person who is unavailable as a way to meet our own need for them.

Limerence can begin as mutual love and become limerence if one person withdrawals or abandons the other. The withdrawal itself is the trigger of the original wound of being abandoned over and over again by a caregiver, emotionally or literally or both. The love that was once mutual and shared can become unrequited and obsessive,  and the obsession can become limerence,  the addiction to the unavailable partner and trying to get their love or attention again. Here is how limerence can be explained as a symptom of one’s earlier wounds.

In adulthood, when we fall into limerence with someone, we may be repeating this wound of obsessing about the breadcrumbs of love that we may be receiving from someone who is unavailable as a way to undo what happened to us in the past and finally have the unavailable person choose us and become available to us, which is likely something that our parents or caregivers could never give us and never will.  In therapy, we call this type of repeating event a “Repetition Compulsion”, and the compulsive aspect of us attempting to undo this trauma or get our needs met is what causes limerence.

Falling in love with someone who is unavailable means that you are unavailable. This is a tricky concept to understand, so bare with me.  As long as we are attempting to love someone who cannot properly give us love,  we are keeping ourselves unavailable to someone who can, who would like to love you. As long as you are in limerence, you are the unavailable one, because you are committed to someone who is not committed to you, who will likely never be committed to you, and you are keeping yourself from loving someone who can commit to you, who you can be committed to. If you have a habit of choosing unavailable partners who don’t want commitment, it’s possible that you are actually terrified of commitment and it feels safer to you to love someone who is not actually an option to keep yourself safe.  This fear of commitment is ironically also born from being trapped in a primary relationship as a child with someone who could not meet your needs, so in a way,  you are keeping yourself trapped by your continual choice to become attached to unavailable people.

There is a fantasy that the person who abandoned you will come back, and the fantasy is the coping mechanism that you have formed to tolerate the loss.  In my next blog post,  I’ll be writing about how to grieve, work through the c-ptsd symptoms that have kept you unavailable, and how to become present and available to a partner who is also present and available.