Diary of a Chronically Single Girl

limerence (noun) – a state of mind resulting from romantic attraction, characterized by feelings of euphoria, the desire to have one’s feelings reciprocated, etc.

Dear Diary,

Until very recently, I had never even heard of limerence. I came across a New York Times article on my feed titled, “Is It a Crush or Have You Fallen Into Limerence?” and I was intrigued. Reading it, I had an epiphany. The intense feelings of emotional and psychological conflict that I experience from liking someone don’t make me crazy but are rather indicative of a psychological pattern that’s been around for ages.

It begins with a crush. I might see him regularly or he might be a fleeting figure in my path, but there’s a spark of something there. Suddenly, he starts to fill my thoughts. I wake up and wonder what he’s doing, if he ever thinks of me. I eat breakfast and think about what it would be like to eat breakfast with him. I stare at my phone, imagining a text from him miraculously appearing. I start to have anxiety about how much I’m thinking about him. I feel like a crazy, obsessive person, which only feeds the anxiety and makes his prominence in my thoughts more pronounced.

Now, I am hyperaware of his presence. Every interaction we have, everything he might say to me is subject to my repeated analysis. The emotional energy this takes up is exhausting, and I feel crazy for having so much pent-up emotion about someone who might not even care that I exist. It’s right at these moments of despair that a beacon of hope will usually appear: he’ll text me back or ask to hang out or tell me he likes my dress. It’s a dopamine hit like no other, and I’ll be right where I started again.

The primary issue with limerence (and why I think it’s become more exaggerated the older I get), is that I’ve never gotten through to the other side of that phase. Here I am, a 25-year-old woman who has never been in a relationship, and so my brain seems determined to cling for life to any scrap of romantic potential because that’s all I’ve ever had. There are other factors in these patterns, including a history of anxiety and an intense emotional life, but the more I experience them, the more they remind me that having romantic feelings is most of all a thing of torture. But I willingly fall back into the cycle time and time again. Does that make me a masochist?

Instead, I choose to believe that I’m fundamentally a hopeful person. My romantic history certainly looks nothing like I would have imagined for myself. But with each trip down the limerence path, I learn something new about myself. I’ve come out the other side in one piece. And one of these days, I know that I’ll be able to experience acceptance, breaking the pattern of limerence in its steps. At least that’s what I tell myself.

xo,

Chronically Single