Reflection

Limerence: Handing Someone the Remote Control of Your Inner World

A person sits down in my consulting room and describes a silence.

Not a fight, not a betrayal. A silence. A message that took four hours to come rather than one. A pause before an answer. A look, or the absence of one. A head turning away at the wrong moment.

And they have replayed it. Not once, but continuously, for days, running the conversation again and again, examining the pause from every angle, testing what it might have meant. By the time they describe it to me, that small ambiguous moment has been given more attention than anything else in their week.

What has happened is that they have given their emotional life away. Not by choice — nobody decides this — but it has been handed over, and everything now runs through one other person: how the day goes, whether the work gets done, whether the evening is bearable.

It is a bit like giving someone else the remote control of your inner world. They press something without knowing they have pressed it, and the whole channel changes. And they are very often unaware that they are holding the remote at all.

There is a word for this state. It is limerence.

What the word means

The psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined it in her 1979 book Love and Limerence, after a decade of research — thousands of questionnaires, several hundred interviews, and a long reading of autobiographies and private journals. She needed a new word because the existing ones would not do. “Infatuation” sounded trivial. “Love” meant something else. What her respondents kept describing was neither.

She identified the same features I hear in the room: intrusive, involuntary thoughts about one person; an aching need for the feeling to be returned; mood governed almost entirely by that person’s behaviour; and an idealised picture of them that survives contact with evidence.

The term has found a large audience recently, mostly online. That is not surprising. People recognise the state at once, and many have carried it for years without a name for it, unable to explain to anyone why an attachment that went nowhere took up so much of their life.

It is often not romantic at all

A caution first, because this is the point at which I depart from the original description.

Tennov’s limerence is romantic by definition. She was studying being in love, and the longing she described is longing for romantic feeling returned. Someone who knows that literature could reasonably say that what follows is not limerence at all.

My impression — from the consulting room rather than from research — is that the romance is not the load-bearing part. The same structure seems to appear without it, and to behave in much the same way: the same scanning, the same swing, the same inability to be settled by reassurance. I may well be stretching her term further than she would have allowed. I use it because it is the word people arrive with, and because the structure seems to me the more useful unit than the category of the relationship.

With that said: most of the writing on this treats limerence as a love phenomenon, and that is not what I see.

A great many of the people who come to me in this state are not describing a lover. They are describing a colleague. A manager. A supervisor, a teacher, a mentor, a friend, someone in a group they belong to. The structure looks the same to me — the replayed silence, the scanned message, the day rebuilt around whether they were acknowledged — and there is no romantic content in it at all.

What defines limerence is not the category of the relationship. It is that someone has given their whole emotional life over to one other human being, who did not ask for it and usually does not know they have it.

And when you follow it down, what you usually find underneath is not desire. It is the need to be accepted. The need to be loved, or at least approved of, at almost any cost. The other person has become the one who can grant that, and so their smallest gestures acquire enormous weight, because they are being read as verdicts.

That is why a turned head can ruin a week. It is not being read as a turned head. It is being read as a judgement on whether the person is acceptable.

An illustration

What follows is not a patient and not a case. It is a composite, invented to show a shape that turns up often enough to be worth describing.

Someone comes away from a brief encounter convinced they were rude. Nothing much happened — a remark that landed oddly, a conversation that ended at the wrong angle. But the conviction settles and will not lift. So they find a reason to see the person again, and they apologise. The apology is received warmly and waved away.

It does not help. Within a few days the doubt returns, and so does the need to check. Each time they are reassured; each time the reassurance dissolves before the week is out. Months pass this way.

There is no romance anywhere in this. The other person is barely known and has no particular importance in this life. What they have become is the holder of a verdict — acceptable, or not — and no verdict is ever delivered clearly enough to be believed. Meanwhile a great deal of a life is being organised around obtaining it.

Tennov called the person at the centre of this the limerent object, which is accurate and cold. I have come to think of them as the qualifier: the one who decides whether you qualify. Not whether you are loved, necessarily. Whether you pass.

And the other person does not even have to still be there. It is not unusual to hear someone describe still turning over, regularly, what a manager thought of them ten years ago. The job ended long ago. The manager has almost certainly forgotten the whole thing. But the question was never answered, and so the file has stayed open, and it is consulted still.

Which points at what this is actually about. What is intolerable is not the boss, or the colleague, or the person who was barely known. It is not knowing. Underneath all of it is a difficulty in living without knowing — or without controlling — what other people think and feel about you.

Heaven and hell, on someone else’s timetable

Most people have had a glimpse of this.

Being love-struck, early on, before anything has settled. They look at you and you feel alive. They turn their eyes away and you are shattered. A message answered quickly is interest; a second one that goes unanswered is abandonment. An invitation accepted is the beginning of something; an invitation declined is a betrayal.

Anyone who has been through that knows how disproportionate it looks from outside, and how entirely proportionate it feels from within. It usually passes within a few weeks, once enough is known for the other person to become real.

Now keep that state and take away the ending. Stretch it over years. Attach it to someone who may not be a lover at all — a manager, a colleague, someone barely known. That is close to what is being described here.

What makes it so punishing is the swing.

The same person can lift you into something close to elation with one warm sentence, and drop you an hour later with a flat one. Nothing in your circumstances has changed in that hour. Nothing has actually happened. Only what you believe you have been told about where you stand.

They hold both, and they can move you between them very quickly — usually without knowing they are doing it, because from where they stand they simply replied to a message in a slightly different tone.

Where the ordinary ends

A line is worth drawing here, because wanting to be thought well of is not what this essay is about.

Wanting to impress someone you respect, hoping they have a good opinion of you, being pleased when they do and disappointed when they do not — that is ordinary. It is most of working life and a good deal of friendship, and there is nothing to be treated in it.

What is being described here is a different order of thing. It is not that their opinion matters. It is that their opinion has become what you are made of. Your sense of who you are is no longer held inside you at all. It is held by them, issued back to you in instalments, and revised without notice.

That is the difference between caring what someone thinks and having handed them your sense of self.

The part nobody else sees

There is a layer of pain in this that rarely gets described, because it is the layer people stop talking about.

Most will mention it once, perhaps twice. To a friend, carefully. And the friend says: don’t be stupid. Forget about them. Move on. It is meant kindly, and it is usually good advice. It also lands as a verdict of its own — that this thing occupying most of their inner life is, to everyone else, a small matter. Slightly embarrassing. Not important.

So they stop mentioning it. And from that point they carry it alone.

What gets carried can be substantial. People do things in this state that they would not otherwise do and find very hard to explain afterwards. Money is lent, or given, in amounts that make no sense, in the hope that it will create something more meaningful between them. Practical help is offered far beyond anything the relationship warrants — taking on the other person’s problems, looking after their children, becoming indispensable. Arrangements are made that leave someone financially or practically exposed in ways they would be ashamed to describe to their family, let alone their accountant.

The asymmetry is brutal. On the other side, none of it is received as what it was. They experience a generous person. A kind colleague. Someone helpful. They do not see meaning in it, because from where they stand there is no meaning in it to see.

Then comes the guilt at what was given away, and after the guilt, the shame — which is worse, because guilt is about what you did and shame is about what you are.

And there is a loop in this worth naming. Because it cannot be spoken about, the person is alone with it. And a figure you are alone with grows. It becomes luminous: very bright, very large, the only thing in the room. Standing by yourself in front of something that bright is not a stable position. The isolation magnifies the figure, the magnified figure produces more instability, and the instability is one more thing that cannot be mentioned to anybody.

Which is part of why saying it out loud, once, to someone who does not tell you to stop being stupid, tends to do more than people expect.

A line worth keeping sight of

Nearly everything described here is suffered privately, and the other person is usually unaffected by it. Not always, though.

Repeated approaches. Messages that go unanswered and are sent anyway. Arranging to be where someone will be. These stop being private at the point where the other person has to start managing them — and that point arrives earlier than it feels from the inside, because from the inside it does not feel like pressure. It feels like trying to resolve something unbearable.

It seems worth saying plainly, then: they are entitled not to be pursued, whatever is happening for you, and however little they know about it. If you are not certain whether you have crossed that line, the uncertainty is itself worth taking to someone.

Why uncertainty is the engine

The counter-intuitive thing about limerence is that it does not thrive on encouragement, and it does not thrive on outright refusal. It thrives on the space between.

Hope with no resolution is what keeps it running. This is why a clear and final answer sometimes breaks the spell within weeks, while a warm but ambiguous friendship can sustain it for years. It is why the manager who is pleasant but unreadable can occupy someone far more completely than one who is openly hostile.

It is also why limerence so often cannot survive being fully returned. When the other person becomes available, knowable and ordinary, the state frequently collapses. What is left may be love, or affection, or may be nothing at all.

That collapse tells you something worth knowing. If a feeling cannot survive the other person becoming real, the feeling was not really about them.

Limerence and love are not the same thing

It is worth being precise here, because a great deal of unnecessary suffering comes from confusing the two.

Limerence is organised around the self. Its central question is what does this person think of me, and will they give me what I need? Love is organised around the other. Its central question is who are you, and what do you need?

Limerence needs uncertainty. Love needs security, and can bear it.

Limerence struggles to survive full knowledge of the other person. Love is what remains when full knowledge arrives and the attachment holds anyway.

None of this makes limerence shameful. Many long marriages began in it. But it is a distinct state, and mistaking its intensity for proof of destiny is how people end up giving years to situations that cost them a great deal.

What the psyche is doing

In Jungian analysis, a state like this is read as a projection of unusual power.

The other person is carrying something, and it is rarely arbitrary what they carry. Very often it is a quality the person cannot experience as their own: a freedom they have never permitted themselves, an ease, an authority, an aliveness, a sense of being worth attention. In Jung’s language, a large part of the inner world — the anima or animus, and with it much of someone’s own unlived life — has found a hook and attached itself to a human being who is, in reality, just going about their week.

This is why the experience so often carries a fated, almost numinous quality. Something genuinely large is involved. It simply is not located where it appears to be.

It also explains the exhaustion. An enormous amount of psychic energy is bound up out there, in someone else. Withdrawing a projection of that size is not a matter of deciding to stop, any more than one can decide to stop dreaming. It has to be understood before it can be released — and what it releases is the person’s own vitality, returned to them.

It happens in the consulting room too

Sooner or later, the same thing turns towards me.

That is not a failure of the therapy. It is often the most useful event in it. Someone who routes their emotional life through one other person will, in time, route it through their therapist — and then the pattern is in the room, where it can be looked at directly rather than reported second hand.

What it looks like is small and relentless. I turn my head, and it means something. My face does something I was not aware of, and it is read. I glance at the clock. I am tired, or — not ideal, but it happens — I yawn. None of these register as neutral events. Each is taken as evidence about how I regard them, and each can produce real emotional havoc for the rest of the week.

And it runs the other way too, which is subtler and easier to miss. What the person says begins to be shaped by what they believe I want to hear. They are not reporting what they think; they are offering what they have calculated to be the right answer, adjusted in advance to the reading they have taken of my face. Sometimes this goes on for months before either of us names it — a therapy in which the person is working very hard to be a good patient, and is therefore not quite present in it.

That is not deception. It is the same survival apparatus, running in the one room where it was supposed to be able to switch off.

In psychoanalytic language this is transference: a pattern that belongs elsewhere, arriving in the present relationship. The advantage is that here, for once, it can be spoken about while it is still happening. The person can say what they saw. I can say what was actually going on. And the distance between the two becomes the work — because it is exactly the distance between the colleague’s turned head and what it was taken to mean.

Underneath it is an attempt at control

There is a paradox at the centre of this state, and it is worth naming carefully, because it is where the whole thing turns.

The other person controls your inner world. That is the lived experience of it: their message, their silence, their expression decides how you feel, and you appear to have no say in the matter.

So you try to control them. Not by force, usually — by anticipation. By watching them constantly, managing how you come across, rehearsing conversations in advance, adjusting yourself to produce the response that will settle you. The effort involved is enormous, and it is aimed almost entirely outward.

But what is being defended is not really the relationship. It is your own internal state. You are attempting to control another person in order to control what happens inside yourself, because controlling what happens inside yourself directly feels impossible.

That is the trap. It is also where the way out lies. The work is not to manage the other person more skilfully. It is to take the remote control back — to build some capacity to hold your own inner weather, so that a pause before an answer can be a pause before an answer, rather than a verdict.

Attunement running in the wrong direction

Winnicott described the good-enough mother: not a perfect one, but one attuned enough to the infant that the infant does not have to attend to her. The baby can simply be, and go on being, because somebody else is holding the environment steady.

He also wrote about what a baby sees when it looks at its mother’s face. Ideally it sees itself — its own state, reflected back — and in that way slowly learns what it is feeling. But when the mother’s own state is what fills her face, the baby sees her instead. And then something reverses.

That move is worth pausing on, because it is the decisive one. For Klein the infant’s world turns on the breast: feeding, what is given and what is withheld, what is taken in. Winnicott shifted the centre of the story from the breast to the face. What an infant needs is not only to be fed, but to be reflected — to look up and find its own state handed back to it, and so to learn both what it is feeling and that it exists at all.

Which tells you what the adult is really doing when they scan a face.

They are not only checking for a verdict. They are looking for a mirror.

They are searching the qualifier’s face for their own feeling given back to them — hoping to see there, or failing that to imagine there, that they exist. Not that they are liked. That they exist. And it is done with the urgency it is done with because, at the level where this operates, it is how a person feels alive. In the original arrangement it was how they survived.

The reason the search never ends is that a colleague’s face is not a mirror. Nor is a lover’s, most of the time. It is a face, occupied with its own day.

If the caregiver is not reliably attuned, the child has to attune to the caregiver. This is not a preference. It is survival. A small child cannot leave, cannot provide for itself, cannot go elsewhere. Its care depends on the adult’s state, so it learns to read that state with great skill: the sound of the key in the door, the set of a mouth, the length of a silence. It learns to adjust itself in advance, to keep the relationship safe.

What grows out of that adjusting, Winnicott called the false self — a self organised around what the other person seems to need, rather than around what is actually felt.

Now take that child into adult life and give them a manager whose approval matters, or someone they love who is hard to read. The same apparatus switches on. The scanning, the anticipating, the constant small adjusting. And the reason it feels so much larger than the situation warrants is that it is not being handled as a social difficulty. It is being handled as survival.

That is also why reassurance from outside so rarely settles it. Nobody has ever been reassured out of a survival response by being told it was disproportionate.

And that, in the end, is what the state looks like once you know what you are looking at.

An adult with an adult life and adult competence — and inside, a small child standing in front of an omnipotent parent, breath held, watching a face to see what is about to happen. Everything waits on that face. Nothing can proceed until it has been read.

The manager is not omnipotent. The person who has not replied is not omnipotent. But something very old is running, and in the arrangement it comes from, the figure in front of you held everything, and you could not survive their displeasure.

What attachment research adds

A word first, because two different traditions are being put side by side here and it would be sloppy to blend them quietly.

Winnicott belongs to object relations: the face, the mirror, the false self, the interior. Bowlby and Ainsworth belong to attachment research, which grew out of ethology and observation, and which the analytic establishment of the day — Winnicott included — regarded with some suspicion. They were not saying the same thing, and they did not much want to be.

But they account for different halves of this, and neither does the whole job alone. Winnicott explains what is being sought: recognition, reflection, the sense of existing in another person’s face. Attachment research explains the behaviour: the proximity-seeking that does not settle, the comfort that arrives and does not comfort.

The child who cannot be settled

Ainsworth’s Strange Situation put this on film, more or less. An infant and a caregiver in an unfamiliar room; the caregiver leaves for a few minutes; the caregiver comes back. What matters is not the leaving. It is the reunion.

A securely attached infant protests the separation, seeks contact when the caregiver returns, is comforted by it, and then goes back to playing. The distress resolves, and the world becomes interesting again.

The anxious, ambivalent pattern looks different. The infant is highly distressed — and on reunion both seeks the caregiver and resists them. Reaching and pushing away. Being held and not settling. The comfort arrives and does not take, and the child does not go back to play. Often it was already watching the caregiver before the separation, exploring less than the others, keeping an eye on the door.

Set that beside an adult in limerence and the shape looks much the same. Contact is sought and does not settle. Reassurance is given and does not take. And the play — work, friendship, the rest of a life — does not resume.

Two cautions are worth stating. These are patterns of behaviour observed in infancy, not a destiny, and plenty of people with a difficult early attachment are perfectly settled adults. And the attachment styles language now circulating online is a great deal cruder than the research it comes from. What is useful here is narrow: it explains why being comforted does not comfort, which is otherwise one of the most baffling features of the state.

Where it takes hold hardest

Limerence is common, and in most people it passes. But there are conditions under which it grips harder and lasts longer.

When acceptance has always been conditional. For the reasons above: if love or approval had to be earned, watched for and anticipated, then the intermittent signal at the heart of limerence is not strange at all. It is the emotional weather someone grew up in. See attachment styles and fear of abandonment.

When the other person is unavailable. Married, senior, distant, indifferent, departed. Unavailability guarantees the uncertainty that sustains the state, which is exactly why those are the ones that last for years.

When actual life has thinned out. Limerence expands into empty space. It is often at its worst during loneliness, stalled work, grief, or a marriage that has gone quiet. It supplies intensity where there has been none, which is a real function and not a trivial one.

When the mind already runs to rumination. Limerence overlaps with obsessive thinking. You will find a good deal written online linking it to ADHD and to autism; the honest position is that the evidence is thin — limerence itself has attracted very little peer-reviewed research — and a recognisable pattern is not the same as an established link.

Why this state attracts the wrong kind of attention

There is a hard thing to say here, and it has to be said carefully, because it must not become blame.

Someone in this state seems to make an unusually easy target for a person who exploits others.

The reason is mechanical. What sustains limerence is intermittent, unpredictable approval — and intermittent, unpredictable approval is exactly the instrument a manipulative person uses. Warmth, then withdrawal. Closeness, then coolness with no explanation given. It need not even be deliberate at first; someone who exploits relationships tends to discover that this works, and to go on doing what works.

And the person on the receiving end is already equipped to cooperate. They read faces for mood. They adjust themselves in advance. They assume a drop in the other person’s temperature is something they caused and must now repair. Ask them who was at fault and they look first at themselves — and if they are offered an account in which they were the problem, they will often take it, because at least it answers the question they cannot bear to leave open.

In French clinical language this figure is called the pervers narcissique. In English one speaks of narcissistic abuse, or of coercive control. None of these are formal diagnoses, and the label matters far less than the pattern: idealisation, then devaluation, then just enough warmth to restore hope. See also gaslighting and the toxic relationship.

Two things need saying plainly.

This is not the person’s fault. A vulnerability is not an invitation, and being easy to exploit is not the same as consenting to it. The responsibility sits entirely with the one doing it.

And not every unavailable person is exploiting anybody. Most are simply unavailable, or inconsistent, or not especially interested. The state can grip just as hard around someone entirely innocent of it, which is why the presence of limerence tells you nothing on its own about the character of the other person.

It is worth knowing all the same, because it changes what the work is for. Taking back the remote control is not only a matter of recovering your own life. It is also, in practice, what makes a person very much harder to run.

And the reverse: when an ordinary person becomes the monster

The mirror image of this is just as common, and far less often said.

Most of the time, the other person does not know. They do not know how they are felt about, they do not know what they are carrying, and they have no idea of the power they hold. They are simply getting on with their life.

And from inside the state, a person who is simply getting on with their life — who is not thinking about you at all — can be experienced as someone deliberately torturing you.

That is the mirror image of the section above: an entirely ordinary person, experienced as cold, cruel and manipulative, as a pervers narcissique, when they are nothing of the sort.

The reason is that the relationship is not really with the person. It is with a figure that has been built. An enormous amount of fantasy, hope and meaning has been attached to someone who has, in fact, done very little. And once that much has been invested, ordinary behaviour cannot help but look like betrayal. A reply that takes a day. A holiday they did not mention. Warmth on Tuesday and preoccupation on Thursday — which is simply what people are like.

Measured against the figure that has been constructed, the real person is bound to fail, and to fail repeatedly. The failure is then felt not as a mismatch but as a wound deliberately inflicted — which is a great deal of suffering produced, in the end, by someone who was not thinking about them at all.

There is a second turn to it. The weight is usually felt by the other person, even when nothing has been said aloud. Being the object of that much attention and expectation is uncomfortable, and people commonly respond by drawing back a little. That withdrawal is then read as proof of exactly the coldness they were already suspected of — and now there appears to be evidence.

This is why the language of narcissistic abuse, genuinely useful where it applies, does harm when it is reached for too quickly. It can turn a painful but ordinary disappointment into a story of having been targeted, which is much harder to recover from, and which closes off the more useful question: what did I need this person to be, and why did I need it so badly?

Is it a disorder?

No. Limerence is not a diagnosis, it does not appear in the DSM, and nobody has it in the way one has an illness.

That is worth saying plainly, because the language of pathology has spread quickly around the word. It describes a human state that has almost certainly always existed. A great deal of the world’s poetry is about it.

What can be said clinically is narrower, and more useful. When the state persists for years; when it crowds out work, friendship and sleep; when it keeps someone tied to a situation that is harming them; or when it returns again and again with a different face each time — then something is happening that is worth understanding, whatever we choose to call it.

One distinction does seem to me to matter. Limerence involves hoping the feeling is returned, and reading the evidence either way — which is why it is so tormenting, and why it survives on ambiguity. Where the belief that it is returned becomes fixed, and holds against clear and repeated evidence to the contrary, that is a different thing and a more serious one. It warrants proper assessment rather than an essay.

What actually helps

Willpower does not work. Neither, usually, does more contact. The commonest mistake is to seek one more conversation, one more piece of evidence, in the belief that clarity will end it. More often it refreshes it.

What does help:

Reducing the uncertainty rather than the contact. Ambiguity is the fuel, so where a real answer can be had, having it — even a painful one — often does more than months of distance. That needs saying carefully, though. Sometimes asking is perfectly reasonable. Often it is not: where the person is married, or senior to you, or in your care, or simply not interested, asking puts something on them that is not theirs to carry. In those cases the uncertainty has to be reduced from your own side — by accepting that no answer is coming. Which is harder, and is a good deal of what the work turns out to be.

Refilling the life the state has emptied. Limerence occupies territory. Work, friendship, the body, anything with its own gravity takes some of that territory back.

Understanding what the person represents. This is the piece that prevents the next one. Someone who grasps what the other person was carrying for them has a very different relationship to the pattern than someone who simply waited for it to fade.

Taking the grief seriously. The end of limerence is a real loss, and it is routinely dismissed by everyone around the person on the grounds that nothing actually happened. Something did happen. It happened internally, and it mattered.

When it keeps happening

In over twenty-five years of practice, what brings people to me in this state is rarely the other person. It is the recognition that this is not the first time. That the same shape has appeared before with a different face, and that years are going somewhere they did not choose.

That pattern is workable. It is very difficult to see alone, because from the inside limerence does not feel like a pattern at all. It feels like this person, this once. Therapy offers the outside view, and a place to ask what the attachment is really carrying, and what it is asking for, without anyone treating the feeling as foolish.

Dr Philippe Jacquet has worked with this territory for over 25 years. If any of this is familiar, it can help to talk it through. Arrange a confidential consultation, at Harley Street, Central London W1, or online.

Closely related: projection in psychology, the mechanism underneath all of this; fear of abandonment; and the affair as symptom, where a similar intensity attaches itself inside an existing life.

Sources: Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love (1979); D. W. Winnicott on the good-enough mother, the mirror-role of the mother, and the false self; Melanie Klein on the part-object; Wakin and Vo, “Love-Variant: The Wakin-Vo I.D.R. Model of Limerence”.