Photo: Ben Koorengevel / Unsplash
When I read advice on getting over limerence, I think of a woman stepping out of a rental car in Paris. She had driven from Amsterdam to meet me, though she found driving into Paris stressful. On a quiet side street off Rue du Cherche-Midi, in the sixth arrondissement, where Paris feels like a village, I held an umbrella over her as she stepped out into the rain. We embraced, then kissed for the first time. I was stirred, heart and soul. Could she be the woman I would share my life with?
We were falling hard for each other. John Gottman calls this first phase of love limerence: the exhilaration of discovering someone you cannot stop thinking about and wanting more time together. For us, it was mutual.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term in 1979. You replay a conversation, anticipate the next meeting and attach unusual significance to a few words. When the other person wants you, too, even an ordinary afternoon together can feel extraordinary.
Dopamine, oxytocin and norepinephrine are among the chemical messengers involved in falling in love. We feel exhilarated, long to be close and think about the other person even when we need to concentrate on something else. In a brain-imaging study, people intensely in love showed greater activity in dopamine-rich areas when looking at photographs of their beloved.
When falling hard becomes something to recover from
The Washington Post reported a 500 percent increase in searches for “limerence” over five years, citing Google Trends.
Search YouTube for “limerence” or “romantic obsession,” and you will find plenty of advice on how to get over it. Heidi Priebe’s “Limerence: What Is It And How Do We Let It Go?” is one example. I understand why someone in pain would seek that help. What gives me pause is encountering so much caution and negativity around an experience that many of us grew up hoping to have: falling so deeply for someone that we could imagine a life together.
In Curry Barker’s horror film Obsession, a young man named Bear wants Nikki to love him but cannot bring himself to tell her how he feels. Instead, he makes a supernatural wish that she will love him more than anything. A wish that goes very wrong.
Watching the film, I thought of Stephen King’s analysis of horror in his landmark book Danse Macabre. King describes how filmmakers and writers draw on the fears and psychological pressure points of their era.
Earlier generations feared giant sharks, alien invasions or cancer. Through King’s lens, I recognized in Obsession the fears of the younger generation in this era: concepts of rejection, father wounds, anxious attachment, commitment—and limerence. Young people encounter these terms as they try to understand love, often amid negativity and warnings in YouTube videos and lifestyle blogs about whom to avoid and how they might get hurt. To my eyes, Barker had found the psychological pressure points of his time in the way we now talk about relationships.
My generation called that falling in love. We hoped it would happen to us.
What we wanted to build together
From Paris, we traveled through the Swiss Alps, west toward the Atlantic and on to Amsterdam. I still remember those days with the wonder of falling in love. I wanted a life with her. But we lived on different continents, each with children and work to consider.
During the pandemic, we spent long periods unable to travel to see each other. Because of the time difference, we could talk for only a short time each day. By then, we wanted so much to be together that we kept looking for ways through the difficulties. I doubt we would have attempted to bring our lives together without having fallen so deeply for each other.
Gottman cautions that, during limerence, we can overlook red flags. We can feel certain we have found the right person before we have had time to know them well.
Across those months apart, we were also building trust—the next phase in Gottman’s account of how love develops. In thousands of small moments, we showed each other that being on different continents did not mean we stopped thinking about what was best for the other.
I drew on the concepts and tools from John Gottman’s research as we worked through the difficulties of building trust and deepening our commitment. It helped. I learned to recognize ways partners can undermine trust without having an affair. In “3 Betrayals That Ruin Relationships (That Aren’t Infidelity),” Kyle Benson describes emotional withdrawal and conditional commitment, among other examples.
In Gottman’s third phase, building commitment and loyalty, we choose to invest in a future with the person we have come to know.
On a warm, sunny afternoon, I got down on one knee and asked the woman I had first kissed under an umbrella in Paris to marry me. She said yes. We are happily married—and hope to live happily ever after.
For research-based guidance on building trust and growing closer, join Love Notes, The Gottman Institute’s relationship newsletter.
