10 Shocking Signs That’s NOT LOVE, It’s Limerence

This is not love — and I’ll state that up front without beating around the bush. The intense magnetic pull, the fixation on someone who barely notices you (or who notices you but refuses a relationship), is not love. It feels like love, yes — irresistible, vivid, convincing — but it isn’t. It’s limerence. And if you’ve ever been caught in it, you know it isn’t lovely or romantic: it’s painful, all-consuming, and worst of all, it keeps you from experiencing genuine love. People rarely name limerence, yet it’s everywhere: in friendships you secretly wish would shift into romance, in crushes that another person sinks into when you aren’t available, in those long obsessions that are too intense to ignore and too embarrassing to admit. The terrifying thing is that most people who are living inside limerence honestly believe they’re in love.
When limerence takes hold, your mind deceives you. It convinces you that this person is the single most important human in your life, that only they can make you whole, and that the intensity of your longing is proof of the depth of the love. None of that is true. What’s really going on is your nervous system trying to repair some wound. Limerence is a projection: a stranger, a casual acquaintance, an ex, or someone you barely date becomes imagined as the source of your completion. Your brain whispers, “If only this specific person — someone you can’t control and who is not you — loved me, then I would finally be okay.”
Where does this pattern come from? Often the roots lie in childhood. If you grew up with emotional neglect or abandonment, your mind invents ways to hold onto hope. As a child, mistaking yearning for evidence of love may have been a survival strategy. When a parent’s indifference threatened a child’s sense of self, the child might invent a story that keeps belief alive: the absent caregiver must secretly love me; they just can’t show it yet. Those early strategies can become the template for romantic life later on.
Contrast that with healthy love. Real love is mutual: both people are aware of what’s happening and participating. Sure, relationships have problems, but both partners engage in working through them. There are exceptions — you can love someone who is temporarily incapable of reciprocating, such as a spouse in a coma, or love someone after an unwanted breakup — and that is legitimate because it’s rooted in a real relationship. Limerence, by contrast, is mostly an inner one-person drama. You replay conversations, puzzle over ambiguous remarks, invent hidden meanings, and spend hours crafting the perfectly ambiguous confession—something that might hint at your feelings without making you vulnerable to outright rejection. In other words, you try to have it both ways: to reach without fully reaching. That kind of double-play drives you crazy, and it can go on for years.
In ordinary social terms this behavior might begin as flirtation, but in limerence flirting morphs into mental gymnastics and torture: you attempt to elicit reciprocated love while avoiding the risk of real rejection. If you were genuinely confident that your feelings were shared, you would probably say so plainly and move on; instead, limerence creates an addiction to hope and a terror of the truth. The fear that rejection will annihilate you is a sign that what’s being triggered is a childhood wound — the “life or death” feeling of a neglected child who believed their survival depended on another’s love. Many of us conjured imaginary scenes in which a parent loved us from afar because the reality was unbearably hollow. Those early imaginings can turn into romantic projections later on.
A personal memory often helps to illustrate this: when parents split up and drifted in and out of a child’s life, a kid may spend hours at a window wishing the absent parent would return. That longing, repeated enough times, forms a template for later romantic desperation: the sense that unless the lost person comes back or a new beloved appears, everything is over. That template is a maladaptive strategy. If someone doesn’t want to be with you, they are a poor match — a fundamentally unsuitable partner. One of the simplest criteria for a good partner is that they want to be with you as much as you want to be with them. When both people desire each other, you can confront the next challenges: compatibility, values, stamina. But with limerence you’re not even in a real relationship.
Sometimes the object of limerence will give you enough small signals to keep you hooked — a bit of flirtation, occasional attention — and you will cling to those crumbs. You continue to hope and to imagine future confessions, replaying scenes in your head where they finally declare their love. Pop culture often glamorizes this narrative: the persistent suitor who eventually wins the unobtainable person. Real life is messier and far less likely to offer that tidy payoff. Literature, pop songs, and films keep promoting this script, and if you’re trying to recover from limerence, it helps to stop consuming that theme. Treat it like an addiction: avoid the stories and songs that glorify unrequited yearning so you don’t keep reactivating the craving.
As limerence escalates, behaviors intensify: checking someone’s social media obsessively, hunting for coded messages in ordinary posts, reading too much into casual photos. A harmless update becomes a supposed secret signal meant just for you, and for a few days you ride high on that imagined confirmation before reality returns and plunges you into despair. The emotional roller coaster — the glimmer and the crash — is a hallmark of limerence. The “glimmer” is that initial spark: you notice someone and a particular brightness appears; the world feels more alive and there’s the sense that a lost piece of yourself might have reappeared. That rush feels intoxicating and addictive. Thinking about the person becomes pleasurable, then irresistible, and before long obsession has taken root.
Often the attention initially seems mutual — perhaps they are congenial or flirty — but then a comment or a casual aside reveals they are emotionally elsewhere, and that discovery dislodges you from reality. If they have feelings for someone else or explicitly express another hope, you retreat into your fantasy world because it’s safer than facing the truth. From there it becomes easier to remain stuck in imagination than to accept the evidence. You grieve, you swear you’ll move on, you meet someone new — but if limerence is active, falling genuinely for another person becomes nearly impossible. That’s the tragedy: limerence blocks the healthy process of forming real, reciprocal attachments.
If the underlying hurt that causes limerence isn’t addressed, the pattern repeats. The glimmer will return with another person, and the loop begins again. During the quiet periods when no one is the object of obsession, life can be productive and rewarding. But the addictive pull of that particular emotional rush — often strongest when someone seems unreachable — keeps luring you back to fantasies instead of living in reality. It’s not weakness or stupidity if this keeps occurring; it’s that your brain has learned to equate intensity with love. Intensity can contain grief and longing as well as affection, and if you were traumatized as a child, the neural circuitry that governs attachment can become distorted. The result is a misfiring fall-in-love mechanism that directs you toward people who are unlikely or unable to reciprocate.
If you’re prone to limerence, it’s painful to let go of the fantasy. You may feel desperate, immobilized, or even physically ill — these are withdrawal symptoms. But withdrawal passes. Denying the problem by labeling it “just a crush” or accepting romanticized advice that the fantasy spices life up will only feed the trap. If well-meaning therapists or books reassure you that this kind of obsession is harmless, they may be missing what limerence actually is. Validation of the fantasy can reinforce denial, which prolongs the cycle. The fantasy always promises a day when the other person will suddenly recognize your perfection and reciprocate. The longer you wait for that mirage, the more life you lose.
The cost of limerence is enormous: time, energy, clarity, even money spent on psychics or coaches who only fuel the conversation about one person. Limerence can erode marriages, ruin relationships, and keep single people emotionally unavailable. A perceptive, emotionally available person will sense there’s nothing real to connect with if you’re fixated on someone else. Sometimes you may settle for second best because your limerence blinds you to what’s genuinely present, and that outcome is unfair to everyone. Investing deeply in a fantasy of reciprocity that will never materialize leads to shame and hopelessness. People caught in this pattern often feel like they’re losing their mind — but they are not insane. A natural, healthy drive to find love has misdirected itself because of past wounds.
Recovery begins when you stop insisting this is love. Name it: “I am obsessed with someone who doesn’t want me.” Admit how much it’s costing you — your joy, your peace, your self-respect — and recognize you’re using this fantasy to avoid something painful inside. That acknowledgement opens the door to change. Ask, What am I avoiding? Without shame, shift attention to what you truly need. In most cases I’ve seen, people who struggle with limerence are missing meaningful connection in their lives: friends, activities, companionship. Limerence thrives in loneliness. Connection is the antidote. When real people enter your life, fantasy fades.
Making new connections is hard, especially for people scarred by trauma, but it’s essential. You may need tools and supportive people who understand that limerence is a problem. Therapy, 12-step groups, membership programs, or communities where people commit to growth and support each other can help. The dignity of craving love is real — wanting to be loved is human — but true romantic love grows slowly and requires mutuality. Start with friendship; those bonds are love, too, and they build resilience from multiple directions so one person’s absence won’t send you spiraling. That’s how you prepare to meet real love when it arrives.
Real love differs from limerence in tone: it’s calmer, mutual, grounded in honesty, and it allows you to be fully yourself rather than being longed for only from a distance. To make room for genuine love you must release the ghost of the imagined perfect partner. Letting go is safe. Once the fantasy loosens its grip, you’ll step out of a miserable cocoon and into a life that’s messy at times but ultimately richer. Grieve the dream, stay with the discomfort, and give yourself time. What follows will be real, surprising, and life-changing in ways the fantasy never could be. Real love includes you wholly. It requires courage to break the cycle, but healing is possible. When you do this work, you’ll find something better than the illusion: a grounded life full of authentic connection and love that is mutual and sustaining, because you deserve that.