There are many difficulties in life for the Forever Alone/Adult Virgin/Involuntary Celibate community: stigma, depression etc but I think one that is overlooked is limerence, which is a tendency to romantic obsession, specifically, falling intensely in love for an unobtainable person who doesn’t love one back. That’s a cold, slightly clinical description that doesn’t fully describe the actual experience. I know because my life was ruled by limerence for around thirty years.
I think that, often (not always) the issues that cause a deep seated Forever Alone situation are the same that give a tendency to limerence, i.e. childhood trauma/neglect. Even for people whose childhood was not abusive, I think also have a tendency to fall in love too quickly, and to imagine it where it doesn’t exist. There is a famous case in the literature of a woman in Victorian England who convinced herself that the reigning monarch at the time (a king she didn’t know) was in love with her. She spent all her time outside Buckingham Palace staring at the windows, convinced that the king was sending her secret messages by twitching the curtains (when they were almost certainly just blowing in the breeze).
This case is fully delusive, but many cases, such as my own experience, are based on fact and not wholly irrational – although they are unbalanced and cause pain. It’s important to talk about this phenomena when talking about being Involuntary Celibate, because even people who do not have limerence, there is a risk of developing it. I look through the forums of Reddit and I see a whole group of people who are like I used to be, touch starved, companionship starved, love starved – for long periods, and there is a tendency to emotionally ‘pounce’ on any interest, which is obviously counterproductive. Also, hope that feelings exist in someone, held desperately over a long time, can become self-convincing that they do actually exist.
Another thing to consider is how vulnerable this makes one, to manipulation and scams. Most people Forever Alone for extended periods will have tried online dating, where scammers are waiting to pounce on lonely people that will fall far too quickly and lose all critical faculty. See youtube channels such social catfish which showcases romance scam victims recalling how they were duped, often in financially (as well as emotionally) devastating tales.
My personal story of limerance
I want to write about my own experience with this issue, and then go over some research on the subject to find the commonality or shared experience with other people in the FA community, and then look at some solutions, either to solve an already existing issue, or at least be aware of the dangers and vulnerability for people considering entering the world of online dating, sex surrogacy or sex workers.
I don’t want to make a big deal out of my difficult childhood, play myself up as a victim or whatever. I need to state that my early years were abusive and by the time I was a teenager, I was living alone in a house as, what the Japanese call, a hikikomori (aka a shut-in). I think it was also a form of agoraphobia as I couldn’t open the curtains and needed to be always in the twilight. Very complex time and I might write the whole story up elsewhere if I think it will help people in some way. Anyway, with the abuse and neglect, the stage for limerence was set. I’ll mention that, at the time, I got obsessed with more than one thing. But one of them was a type of limerence. Obviously, I didn’t know it at the time.
Back then, at the height of my agoraphobia, there was some anniversary or something, about The Beatles (the music group) and they reissued Imagine, the film about John Lennon’s life, and also there were a couple of films about him on TV. In case you’re not into music, after leaving the band, John Lennon had an obsessive relationship with Japanese artist Yoko Ono, and there was something about the intense love between these two that hooked me in some way, or seemed to perhaps snag a deep down neurosis (as a psychologist might put it).
It wasn’t about this particular person, but I think unconsciously I got it into my mind that having a Japanese partner would solve all my problems. It manifested as maladaptive daydreaming, that is daydreaming almost all the time, of having a partner who loved me intensely, and also an interest in things Japanese, like art, film, media and culture in general.
The birth of a romantic obsession
At this point it cannot be called limerence. I’m going to coin a new term and call it pre-limerence! I’m not sure if there has ever been a qualitative study of people who have recovered from limerence, but an interesting research question would be: ‘Was there a history of maladaptive daydreaming around having a partner before the obsession?’ It’s almost as if this energy rises and is in a kind of loose form in the mind, swirling around in daydreams, and when it finds a suitable target in the world, it attaches in the form of limerence.
So this pre-limerent mental state lasted for five years in me, until it found the target. I was a virgin when it started (obviously, trapped in a house alone with the curtains closed!), but over those five years, in terms of confidence, I recovered somewhat. This was without professional help or assistance at all, just my own study and practice of cures and healing.
Anyway, I was abroad, traveling in Australia, and I had a two week affair with Junko, a Japanese woman, also traveling around. This was the third woman I slept with. I’d just broken up with the second one. When I say ‘broken up’ I’ll briefly explain what happened. I was a typical doormat at the time. So, touch-starved, hug-starved, this starved, that starved (another new term: multi-starved!) that I essentially allowed some woman to pick me up when she wanted a travel partner, uproot me, and dump me in another country when she reached her destination.
Well Junko was staying in the same hostel, and had her own issues. She had been studying abroad in Canada, met some Iraqi guy, fell for him only to find he had an arranged marriage waiting for him and he was just a fling. It broke her as his family had welcomed her in and all knew she was just a pre-marriage fling, including his mother, all except Junko.
So she’d travelled to get over him, met some other guy but they were just friends. We got chatting in the hostel and were both going through relationship pain, and so we had this two week fling. We moved into the same room and lived together as a couple. Really, it was the best two weeks of my life, walks in the park, days out to the market, cooking for each other, just normal, you can imagine (you can imagine, but no maladaptive daydreaming please!).
Well I had a family member visiting Melbourne which I had arranged to go before I knew her, just for a couple of weeks (we were in Perth). Junko and I made the arrangement of meeting up again when I got back. Over the two weeks, I wrote daily, stayed in touch, as did she daily, but just before I got back she wrote to me and said that she was actually with this other guy romantically, and she’d told him about us and his heart was broken, so she was going back to him.
Now there are a lot of ways to look at it. I think she wanted to fall for him but because her heart had been previously broken, she wanted to be the cheater first to keep him at a distance. I don’t really know. But she asked me to meet her, and we would just know each other as friends while she waits for him to arrive from New Zealand (fellow Kiwi traitor!), and I was NO, I’m outta here!‘, and I booked a ticket home.
Well I hid out in a hostel on the edge of the city waiting for my flight, but ran out of supplies and needed to pop back the evening before I left, and I bumped into her. I’d stood her up previously and ghosted her and I think I was going to be OK up until that meeting, I would have got over her with a clean break as my confidence (with women) was returning. But of course, we spent that last night together and talking. We ended up going back to her room, but it was a different hostel and the owner wouldn’t let non-guests in. I’m not sure what would have happened if I had stayed another night with her and I’m not sure what would have happened if I had turned up to that meeting with her (back from Melbourne) in the first place. I know it haunted me for the next thirty years, but whatifs are pretty cheap to the lonely.
She came and woke me up the next day and we went to the airport together and she saw me off, which was the worst day of my life. I passed out from emotion on the plane and she later wrote to me that she’d watched me taking off crying, and that was that…
… kind of. We stayed in touch. We wrote all the time. About a year later I had an out of body experience one night where she came to me in the dark room and was crying and telling me how sorry she was and I could hear all these dogs snarling outside.
A week later I received a letter from her, that she had broken up with this other guy because he ‘did something’ but she didn’t say what. But it was too late for us. She was at home working in Japan and I had no money. But she stayed in touch, religiously, with letters and gifts, she never missed my birthday or New Year. This went on for eight years, then she suddenly stopped. I had her phone number. She’d asked me to call when I first left her, but she was with someone else then and so I didn’t want to be the ‘other guy’ like that, so I had never called. But now she had disappeared, I got a friend to phone it. Her father answered. She was out and would be back later.
So, I knew she was alive and I knew she had chosen to not stay in touch anymore, and that was enough for me. I was broken in a way, but also well aware on another level that the ‘relationship’ did not make me happy in the slightest. But I couldn’t stop writing to her, so I continued. I continued writing for around thirty years. During that time I went with two other women, just one night stands. I heard nothing from her.
The ultimate cure for my Forever Alone condition
Then something happened to me. I can’t write about it here, maybe elsewhere. (I’ll see how this site goes.) I met someone. I met a guy who not only changed the way I viewed the world, but also how the world works, how life is created. His ideas changed my mind, not my ideas, I mean the actual moment-to-moment processes of my mind and my experience of reality changed. I learned how, to a degree, to create things that I want in my life.
I don’t want to talk about that part now. I’m focusing on limerence because I want to help people who are at where I once was. I want to protect them from wandering into a thirty year dessert.
I got over myself sexually, completely healed and perhaps I was making up for lost time or perhaps it’s a mid-life crisis, but I went the other way and became promiscuous. It became completely effortless for me to obtain sexual partners. I’ll write this up elsewhere also. It isn’t important right now. What is important is that this promiscuity cured the limerence. When regular sex with varied partners became the norm, I perceived the reality of relationships, and of sex itself.
With many men (?most) from developed countries, sex is so unobtainable or exalted that it takes on gigantic proportions of significance in the mind. But for me, then, going through partners well into triple digits, I broke through and saw this limerence for what it was. I talk now about the origin being this film that I saw as a teenager, but I only made that link in retrospect. At the time I thought I was normal. We’re all brainwashed by media that we all want to fall in love and find a partner, what I thought was normal was actually abnormal.
I stopped writing, finally. Memories that were like sacred, divine encounters, so painful and yearning that I had to avoid anything Japanese lest their agony was unleashed, become … ‘meh’. I looked back and all these forgotten memories resurfaced, not of a perfect soul-mate who was destined to be with me and loved me, but of a kind, loving woman who would keep pushing me away and breaking my heart by bringing up this other guy, who would also complain about me, snap at me when she thought I was acting too much like a Japanese man (whom she hated). It’s like half of reality had been missing … from my reality (once I learned to actuallycreate reality). She was finally off the pedestal. I had literally thought about her every day, sometimes for much of the day, for thirty years, and then I was free.
What is the scientific research on limerence?
So this is my own personal story of limerence. Like most things in my life, I have a more extreme version of everything, but this is a studied, recognized phenomena. What can the science tell us? Firstly, how does the science actually define limerence. The term was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov and the essential definition is a tragic feeling for the unobtainable (love). It is a complex issue, which is hard to comprehend and because of this it is often dismissed as a pathology, meaning doctors/professionals won’t diagnose it as a specific problem, but dismiss it as a ridiculous fantasy (Tennov, 1999 P110-118). I think this is one of the reasons that, once it takes hold, that it is so tenacious. This is something that ruled my life and consciousness for three decades, but I couldn’t really relate it to people and be understood or helped. The couple of times I mentioned it to people or tried to describe it, the reaction was, ‘Wow, go and find her!’ or, ‘Just snap out of it’.
The early stages of limerence are possibly a normal part of a relationship that people move on from as the relationship either becomes real or is the unobtainability becomes accepted, but lonely people are at risk of limerence becoming a permanent state (Tennov 1999, pp. 89–106). The main symptom is intensive preoccupation (P22) and these thoughts are involuntary, and there is usually a strong desire that the feelings are reciprocated. (Fisher, 2016). The flaws of the love object (the focus of ones attentions) are overlooked, which Rennov referred to as a process of crystalization, basically one loses objectivity about the person.
Looking back, this definitely happened to me. I’ve mentioned Junko’s flaws, but that is very much in retrospect after my period of promiscuity allowed memories of her which were not perfect, to surface. But that is only recently. Before then, if asked, I would have said she was a perfect person (truely). But also society has this idea of perfect love or soul-mates and limerence is romanticized or seen as part of the human condition rather than a solvable problem.
Tennov (1999, P24-25) noted that the preoccupation is partly sexual, but that the emotional aspect is predominant. In a way, I’d agree, although I think the two are intertwined. Limerence might be a courting behaviour that gets out of hand or goes off course for some reason, and my personal experience of the (usually maladaptive daydreaming) was romantic and emotional, pretty much never sexual, I think underlying it is a desire for emotional and sexual union. I think that, because sex, for so many in Western societies, is out of reach, it causes that specific ‘love sick’ type loneliness (pre-limerence) that (unconsciously) searches for a target.
Promiscuity cures limerence
I also think that promiscuity cures limerence, and I think it does this by changing the mental pictures from an idealised dream of the unobtainable to actually lived memories of imperfect unions, and the latter is a healthy and realistic way to think that actually mirrors reality and does not so easily lend itself to obsession (which relies on ‘overlooking’ the imperfect nature of reality).
There is also a neurological factor at play. Intense romantic feelings are associated with dopamine fixation and may lower serotonin levels over time, which is associated with intrusive thoughts (Marazziti et al, 1999) and so the mental process becomes a cycle that feeds itself, this constant swinging between: ‘is it real, do they want me, yes and no‘ , is spurting out dopamine on imagined evidence to the positive and flatlining serotonin all the other flat and grey days inbetween when imaginied evidence dries up. The intrusive thoughts are comparable to obsessive compulsive disorder and need a balance of hope and uncertainty to keep themselves alive and constantly firing (Aron et al, 2004).
So is there an official cure for limerence? Not official, because officially it isn’t recognized as an actual condition, but generally, the gold standard for all these sorts of issues is cognitive behavioural therapy (although, being promiscuous was a lot more fun for me!). Wyant (2021) wrote an extensive paper on this treatment for limerence. Firstly, the assessment is made that is it actually limerence, and not a romance, and the distinguishing characteristic is the unavailability of the object. Then in case studies, core beliefs such as: I am not as good as others. I am vulnerable if I lose control, were uncovered. These were countered with new thoughts and affirmations. Participants kept journals of their intrusive thoughts and limerent rituals, and failures and successes in replacing them with the positive. Also, a visualization included imaging the limerant object (focus on ones love) rejecting them seemed to help (as a replacement thought).
I think a modified form of this can be applied to ‘pre-limerence’, which would be of great relevance to many in the Adult Virgin community. I know from my own life story, but also being part of the relevant communities on reddit, that much of the emotional pain is due to the excessive rumination (thinking too much) and/or maladaptive daydreaming (living in a dream), of feeling tortured by being left out, of romance existing for everyone except oneself, perhaps imagining and idealizing a lover, which is what I did before this pre-limerent energy attached itself to Junko as an object, and then put me in a three decade wilderness.
Now don’t get me wrong. The affair with Junko was positive, it was never abusive and we were never nasty to each other, we left on good terms and stayed friends, but it caused me pain and stopped me from reconnecting with other women and healing because I became limerant. That I stayed in touch longer than her didn’t hurt her as it was letter based, we never used electronic communication. I never stalked her. The funny thing is that I did actually visit Japan, to her home town, about two thirds of the way through my limerence. I mentioned it in a letter to her before hand in case she wanted to meet (she had already stopped writing by this time) but she never responded and I never looked her up. So it was never stalking behaviour.
Perhaps, unconsciously, I wanted to keep her as unavailable because, deep, deep down what I really wanted was limerence and not love. This is a realization I’ve had quite recently, since I’ve been healed. Nowadays I have opportunities for being in a relationship, but decline. My single life suits me better. I let women stay over for a night sometimes but never more than that. Perhaps the idea that a woman will complete me went so deep in me and I was so damaged and so in need of being complete, but in another sense I do NOT want that, I’m a happy loner in many ways, then this conflict in my unconscious created a limerant object?
Oh, this is going far too deep now. Look at me, Signumd Frued! I’ll get to the crux of what I wanted to say in this article, and that is that many Adult Virgins, if not already limerant, are at greater risk of it and if so, then likely in a pre-limerent state, vacillating between despair and intrusive daydreams of imagined, idealized love, which I caution is an energy in the mind that will eventually look for a target.
The antidote to this, in lieu of becoming Sex Unstuck, getting over oneself and healing, is to be mindful of the state of ones mind, and use the essential tools of CBT in conjunction with journaling to uncover daydreams, thoughts, rituals and attitudes as part of a mental healing. I did do this. I got into CBT when the original book by Dr. Burns came out and I was already limerent by then and I did manage to heal my mind to some degree, but in a way I was too late. If I had have known of the danger in advance, and could have applied what I know now to my pre-limerent state, I don’t think I would have lost three decades. I think I would have been dumped by number two, as that is normal and a part of life. I would have seen Junko as a flawed human being like me, have my heart broken, drink too much for six months, and have a bout of promiscuous ‘playing the field’ and moving on a year later. That would have freed me and freed my mind to what my mind was actually always looking to unite with, not a perfect romance, but a supernatural, divine awakeneing, and the distractions of this world that ensnared me took my attention from a far greater goal that I am only now obtaining.
References
References
Fisher, H. (2016). Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, p. 22.
Marazziti, D., Akiskal, H. S., Rossi, A., & Cassano, G. B. (1999). Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love. Psychological Medicine, 29(3), 741-745.
Tennov, D. (1999). Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Scarborough House.
Wyant, B. E. (2021). Treatment of limerence using a cognitive behavioral approach: A case study. Journal of Patient Experience, 8, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/23743735211060812
#limerence #foreveralone #involuntarycelibate #FA #mentalhealth #healing #relationships #selflove #abuse #childhoodtrauma