Disentangling limerence from love

A work in progress

This post forms part of the additional content for the Intimate Relationships course now that all course material has been posted.

The piece below was presented at three professional conferences in 2024: the American Philosophical Association (APA) Pacific Division, EPSSE (European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions), and the conference “Problems of Love,” organized by Justin Clardy at Santa Clara University.

This piece pairs well with the video lectures on Dorothy Tennov and Plato. I’m currently working on developing it into an academic article, so any feedback is welcome!

Also, a reminder that I’m doing an Intimate Relationships Live Q&A next Monday 3/23 from 12:00-1:30 PT! Link here.

At Lisbon’s NOVA campus during the 2024 EPSSE conference

Disentangling Limerence from Love

In Plato’s Symposium, diners at a feast discuss the nature of love. Numerous attendees had partied a bit too hard the night before, so one of them, Pausanius, suggests that they ride out their hangovers by conversing on the topic of love instead of binge-drinking for a second night in a row. The other diners happily comply, and their conversation gets underway as they take turns offering speeches on the nature of love. In the midst of these speeches, a drunken party of men and flute-girls rudely interrupt the dinner party led by Alcibiades. This beautiful and clever youth is feeling dejected because Socrates has recently turned him down. Alcibiades was crushing hard when he invited Socrates to spend the night with him. He told Socrates, “you can have me, my belongings, anything my friends might have. Nothing is more important to me than becoming the best man I can be, and no one can help me more than you to reach that aim” (Plato 1991, 30). Alcibiades slipped his arms under Socrates’ cloak suggestively. But Socrates promptly friend-zoned Alcibiades. As Alcibiades recounts this story to the fellow diners at the Symposium’s dinner party, he gestures to Socrates and exclaims, “He turned me down!”

In addition to sharing this story, Alcibiades also describes in his speech the effect that Socrates’ presence has on him. The moment Socrates starts to speak, Alcibiades says, “I am beside myself” (29). He describes himself as a slave to Socrates (32). He compares Socrates to the statue of a god who has innumerable little gods inside him. It’s clear that Alcibiades has got it bad.

Alcibiades’ drunken speech about his unrequited passion for Socrates in an otherwise sober dinner party seems to stage precisely the heady disequilibrium of falling in love. Alcibiades has fallen, and he can’t get up. Yet is his passion for Socrates, properly speaking, love? Or should we rather call it a crush, or an infatuation?

In 1979, the psychologist Dorothy Tennov suggested a new name for this kind of experience: limerence (Tennov 1979). Limerence refers to the experience of passionate obsession with someone, especially when either that person does not reciprocate our feelings, or we are not sure whether they reciprocate them. Tennov noticed that few psychologists had attended to this experience, which has much more to do with the “individual” than with a romantic relationship as such. Many of Tennov’s patients were describing themselves as hopelessly in love, in ways that deeply affected their concentration, life plans, sense of meaning, and ability to sustain relationships with others. Sensing that what they were describing wasn’t quite the same thing as “love,” Tennov came up with the term “limerence” to describe this state, noting that it is usually what we call falling in love or being in love.