Limerence, and a July 24, 1987 greeting card

I follow a community on Reddit which talks about limerence and how some people are enslaved by their feelings for someone who doesn't return them. One of the questions that often comes up is why some people are limerent. This question is proffered as a way of figuring out a "cure."

Many people think that it's a spin-off of OCD since part of experiencing it is obsession with someone who you believe you are in love with. I can certainly see this connection as I experienced it when I was infatuated with "Henry." I don't feel that the compulsive part of OCD really fits the experience though. For me, fantasizing about or being preoccupied with the object of my desire was too mindful to be a compulsion.

Based on my experience of falling out of love with Henry, I believe that limerence is a way of dealing with a sense of incompleteness in your life. This seems to be especially so when you've grown up in hard circumstances or have low self-esteem. I used fantasies of being loved by a kind person and living a normal life as a way of creating a positive narrative in my life when one was entirely absent. It was a way of surviving everything that hurt me by imagining another possibility.

If I were to get metaphysical, I would say that I was born to be limerent because the way it made me tick set the stage for having a long distance relationship with the person I was destined to be with. I was already practiced in weaving realities of a relationship in my head with someone long before Tito came into my life. I was also used to sustaining myself emotionally with hope when no tangible reality was at hand.

Many of the cards, letters, and cassettes that Tito and I exchanged were about sending the threads of those cloths into the gap between us to integrate the bond I was fabricating with him. It was easier at first because it felt more real.