Introduction: When One Person Starts to Feel Like the Answer
It is 8:43 on a Tuesday night, and Riley is trying not to check the phone again.
There is nothing unusual about the room. Morgan is on the other end of the couch, half watching a show and half scrolling through something on a tablet. A laundry basket is still sitting by the stairs. Someone needs to take the dog out before bed. Work starts early tomorrow.
Nothing is happening.
That is part of what makes the feeling so difficult to explain.
Avery has not replied.
Riley sent the last message a little after five. It was not a confession. It was not an argument. It was barely even important.
A joke. A question. Something ordinary.
Three and a half hours later, Riley has thought about it dozens of times.
Maybe the joke landed strangely.
Maybe Avery is out with someone.
Maybe the last conversation felt different to Avery than it did to Riley.
Maybe Riley has been imagining the entire closeness between them.
Maybe Avery is deliberately creating space.
Or maybe Avery is simply making dinner.
That possibility occurs to Riley, too. It just does not stay convincing for very long.
The phone remains face down.
Riley knows there is no useful reason to check it. If Avery has answered, the phone will still contain the answer in ten minutes. If Avery has not answered, checking will not make a message appear.
Still, the urge grows.
There is a strange physical quality to it. Restlessness. Pressure. A sense that there is something unfinished nearby.
Morgan laughs at something on the television.
Riley laughs a second too late.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Just tired.”
That is not exactly a lie.
But it is nowhere close to the truth.
The truth is that another person has begun to affect the weather inside Riley’s mind.
A warm interaction with Avery can make the entire day feel bright. A short reply can flatten it. Silence can fill hours. One compliment can be carried around for a week. An ambiguous moment can be replayed until it begins to feel less like a memory and more like evidence in a case no one else knows is being tried.
Riley does not want to be dramatic about this.
That is another part of the problem.
From the outside, very little has happened.
From the inside, almost everything has.
When a feeling starts organizing your life
People think intensely about other people all the time.
We fall in love. We get crushes. We miss people who have left us. We wonder whether a first date went well. We imagine futures with people we barely know. We grieve relationships that never became what we hoped they would become.
None of this is automatically a psychological problem.
Human beings are built for attachment. We are affected by being wanted, ignored, loved, rejected, chosen, touched, remembered, and understood. Romantic attraction can be distracting. Early love can be consuming. Rejection can make otherwise sensible people reread texts at midnight.
The question is not whether you have ever behaved irrationally while wanting someone.
Most of us have.
The more useful question is what begins to happen when one particular person takes on so much emotional importance that your attention, mood, hope, self-worth, or ability to feel settled starts depending on what happens next with them.
That is the territory of this book.
The word we will use for much of it is limerence.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov introduced the term in the 1970s to describe an intense state of romantic preoccupation centered on a powerful desire for reciprocation. Since then, the word has traveled much farther in popular culture than the research field studying it. Only recently have researchers begun developing stronger tools for measuring the experience itself. A 2025 study creating the Limerence Questionnaire found two broad dimensions in participants’ experiences: an intense need for attachment and a pattern of neglecting oneself or other responsibilities as attention became concentrated on the person of interest. 1
A larger 2026 study of people reporting impairing limerence described the experience as chronic, intrusive, and involuntary for many participants. In a smaller real-time portion of that research, limerent thoughts appeared in roughly half of sampled waking moments and shifted along with emotional states, especially sadness and loneliness. 2
Those findings matter.
They tell us this can be more than a poetic name for having a terrible crush.
They do not tell us that limerence is a settled diagnosis, a single disorder, or a problem with one known cause.
It is not.
The science is still developing.
That distinction will matter throughout this book because limerence attracts explanations almost as easily as the limerent mind attracts interpretations.
You may have heard that it is anxious attachment.
Or childhood trauma.
Or dopamine addiction.
Or OCD.
Or ADHD hyperfocus.
Or a nervous system seeking safety.
Each of those ideas may contain something useful for some people. None deserves to become a universal explanation simply because it sounds convincing.
This book will not ask you to trade one fantasy for another.
If we are going to examine the stories your mind creates about another person, we should be equally careful about the stories we create about your mind.
The person and the job they have been given
One of the central ideas of this book is simple:
Sometimes the problem is not only how badly you want someone.
It is how many jobs that person has started doing inside your emotional life.
They may represent romance.
But perhaps they also represent proof that you are still desirable.
Proof that your life can change.
Proof that you are interesting.
Proof that somebody finally understands you.
A future.
An escape.
A second chance.
A reason to wake up excited.
A way to feel less lonely.
A way to stop thinking about yourself.
A way to become a version of yourself you like better.
This does not mean your feelings are fake.
It does not mean the other person is imaginary.
It certainly does not mean you would feel exactly the same about any random person who happened to show you attention.
Avery may truly be funny.
Avery may truly understand Riley in ways Morgan does not.
There may be real attraction. Real affection. Real compatibility. Real chemistry.
Reality matters.
But reality is not always the only thing carrying the feeling.
A person can be real and still become symbolic.
They can be themselves and also become the doorway through which you imagine another life.
When that happens, losing the person may begin to feel like losing far more than a person.
You are not only afraid of losing Avery.
You may be afraid of losing the future Avery represents.
The version of yourself you become around Avery.
The feeling of possibility.
The answer to a question you had not realized you were asking.
That is why simply saying, “They’re not that special,” usually does not help.
Maybe they are special.
But the intensity often cannot be understood by studying them alone.
We also have to understand what has gathered around them.
Compassion is not the same thing as permission
There is another promise I want to make before we go any further.
This book will not shame you for having needs.
Wanting reassurance does not make you weak.
Wanting to be chosen does not make you pathetic.
Wanting touch, attention, recognition, excitement, closeness, or emotional safety does not make you too much.
These are deeply human needs.
Many people who become trapped in limerence have already spent enough time telling themselves they are ridiculous, obsessive, embarrassing, selfish, disloyal, broken, or impossible to love.
Shame rarely produces the kind of change people hope it will.
More often, it makes the pattern harder to look at.
But compassion has an important limit.
Understanding why you did something does not erase what the behavior did to somebody else.
You can have an attachment wound and still cross a boundary.
You can be terrified of abandonment and still frighten someone with repeated contact.
You can be lonely and still neglect your partner.
You can feel a desperate need for reassurance and still place an unfair emotional burden on another person.
You can have no intention of hurting anyone and still create hurt.
A mature understanding of limerence has to hold both truths.
Your experience deserves compassion. Other people’s experience of your behavior deserves reality.
We are not going to choose one at the expense of the other.
Later in the book, we will spend considerable time with the people who absorb the weight of limerence: partners who feel another relationship quietly entering their home, and people who become idealized so intensely that they no longer feel free to be ordinary.
That may be uncomfortable.
It is supposed to be useful, not punishing.
There is a difference.
Accountability asks, What happened, and what can I do differently?
Shame says, What happened proves what kind of person I am.
Only one of those gives you somewhere to go.
This is not a diagnosis
You will notice that I often use phrases such as may, can, for some people, and one possible explanation.
That is intentional.
Limerence is still an emerging research area. The available literature is growing, but it is small compared with the evidence base for topics such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attachment, or anxiety. A recent scoping review described the direct research literature as extraordinarily limited. 3
That means we need two kinds of honesty.
First, we should take the experience seriously.
Second, we should not pretend that psychologists have already solved it.
Some parts of this book will come directly from limerence research.
Other parts will draw from better-developed fields such as attachment science, rumination, obsessive-compulsive behavior, emotion regulation, romantic attraction, learning, relationship psychology, and behavioral change.
And some of the tools in this book are frameworks created to help you organize those ideas.
I will not present those frameworks as medical discoveries.
They are maps.
A map can be useful without being the territory.
You are also not expected to diagnose yourself while reading.
There is no quiz at the end of this introduction that will tell you whether you are officially limerent.
For some readers, that word will fit perfectly.
For others, it will fit partly.
You may recognize a painful mix of attraction, anxious attachment, obsessive thinking, loneliness, fantasy, grief, or dissatisfaction with your current life.
That is enough to keep reading.
The goal is not to earn a label.
The goal is to understand what your mind has been doing and recover more choice about what happens next.
Recovery does not mean becoming cold
People sometimes approach this work with a private fear.
If I get better, will I stop caring?
Will I have to admit the connection meant nothing?
Will I become emotionally flat?
Will I lose the part of myself that is capable of loving this deeply?
No.
That is not the goal.
Intensity is not the enemy.
Love is not the enemy.
Fantasy is not the enemy.
Attachment is not the enemy.
The problem is rigidity—when your emotional world becomes so tightly organized around one person that there is no room left for uncertainty, ordinary life, other relationships, or your own values.
Recovery is not learning how to stop wanting.
It is learning how to want without disappearing.
It is learning how to feel an urge without automatically obeying it.
How to tolerate an unanswered question.
How to recognize the difference between what happened and what you fear it means.
How to let another person be important without making them responsible for your entire emotional stability.
How to grieve what cannot be yours without making grief evidence that you cannot survive.
How to build a life that contains enough sources of belonging, purpose, pleasure, attachment, novelty, and self-respect that one human being no longer has to carry all of them.
That is where we are going.
But first, we need to understand the experience itself.
Because Riley’s problem is not simply that Riley thinks about Avery too much.
The deeper problem is that every thought has started asking the same question:
What does this mean about whether Avery wants me?
And every possible answer has started meaning too much.