Limerence Is Toxic Fix for Lonely, Joyless Life (4-Video Compilation)

If a child grows up without enough emotional care, they can be especially likely to channel their romantic energy toward people who aren’t actually available. That phenomenon is called limerence — an obsessive, infatuated fixation on someone unattainable — and it stems from a developmental quirk in how our brains adapt. Limerence can cause serious harm both to the person experiencing it and to those who genuinely care for them. Yet culture often dresses this escape into fairy-tale romance with flattering language and excuses, making an addiction to fantasy feel acceptable or even noble. Today’s first letter comes from a man who uses the name Carter. He writes: “Hi Anna — I’m 35 and I’ve been married for about 15 years…” Before diving in, a note: there are a few details worth circling on a second read, but here’s what Carter shares and what’s happening for him. He says that when his son was born — his son is now six — he discovered male postpartum depression the hard way. He hadn’t realized men could go through this and felt utterly unready for the emotional onslaught and responsibilities of fatherhood. Old material surfaced from his past, especially issues connected to his alcoholic father. Today his relationship with his father is fine, but their connection was very rocky in adolescence and early adulthood, and he doubts his father will ever grasp how much damage the alcoholism caused. Not long after his son was born, Carter had an emotional affair with a coworker. In his words: he was depressed, craving closeness, and she told him what he wanted to hear. He hated becoming a father; in a moment of weakness she suggested he was “more than that.” Looking back, Carter feels she abused their friendship and crossed boundaries. Through couples therapy and individual therapy he’s learned a lot about himself and continues to work on these issues. That episode left him ashamed and mistrustful; he hasn’t had many friends — especially female friends — since then, and for years avoided socializing. Lately things have improved: his marriage is good, he’s adopting healthier habits and staying in therapy, and he’s been making friends of both genders. He challenged himself by learning to swim as an adult, overcoming a fear of water, which felt symbolic and life-changing. During swim lessons he became close to the female instructor, and now he recognizes that he’s developed limerence for her. He thinks about her constantly and experiences intrusive thoughts. He wants to remain friends, but sometimes his mind overwhelms him and he becomes frustrated at the unwanted thoughts. When they’re together their conversations are warm and intimate, and the friendship seems to be growing in what he believes is a normal way. Through therapy he’s learned that friendships and connections outside his marriage are important to his mental health, and his wife supports that. Still, he distrusts himself and others as new close bonds form, especially with women. His questions: How can he set aside limerent thoughts and build a healthy friendship with another woman after everything he’s been through? He sometimes sees it as impossible. He considers himself sensitive, and once he lets someone in he holds them close and can set boundaries and communicate, yet the intrusive thoughts breed self-doubt. He isn’t sure whether to trust himself or other people more. He fears losing friendships; finding someone new to love platonically is painful because the idea of losing them feels devastating. He worries the instructor might one day find a romantic partner and drop the friendship. He knows he cannot forecast the future and that being present should help, but living in the constant fear of what might happen is very hard. He signs off asking for thoughts. Now, some blunt feedback for Carter. There’s a real concern that you’re dissociated — your words and your actions don’t line up. You present a polished narrative but your behavior suggests something different. You and your wife have been together since you were 20, you had a child at 29, and you were overwhelmed by what becoming a father brought up. Labeling the experience “male postpartum depression” might help you make sense of it, but sometimes simpler language — saying you were really scared about becoming a dad — would be clearer. You also tend to shift blame outward when your actions hurt others. The history with an alcoholic parent is meaningful and can explain patterns, but recovery requires turning attention inward to your own behavior and choices. Shortly after your son was born you carried on an emotional affair with a coworker. You say you needed intimacy and she said things you wanted to hear. When people use “intimacy,” that can mean emotional closeness or sexual contact; context matters. A new parent at home may be less available emotionally or physically, and that can leave the other partner vulnerable. You admitted you “hated becoming a father” — that’s startling and heavy. That sentiment deserves serious reflection and careful handling; do not let your child ever hear that. In the moment you wanted validation — to feel seen as an attractive, valued man rather than reduced to a negative idea of what being a parent meant to you. Looking back you say she abused the friendship and crossed boundaries. Emotional affairs are almost always mutual; it takes two to create and sustain them. There’s a pattern here of deflecting responsibility onto others rather than acknowledging the choices you made. Given your commitment to raising a child with your wife, engaging in an emotional affair was a major breach. Even if she flirted with you, your vows carry weight and you must own that. You can’t just put all responsibility on her. Through therapy you learned a great deal about yourself and continue to work on it, but you describe becoming mistrustful and avoiding friendships — that was part of your coping. Now you say life is great and your marriage is great, but consider this: “great” may be what you tell yourself while keeping secrets. If your heart is occupied by someone else, the marriage is at risk. You say you’ve taken healthy steps — exercise, therapy, new friendships, learning to swim — which are positive. Yet the new friendship with your female instructor has become more than friendship for you. You label it “limerence”: obsessive longing for someone you can’t have. Limerence is dangerous and addictive; it can destroy real relationships. When you say you only wish to be friends yet you constantly have intrusive, romantic thoughts, that’s a contradiction. Those thoughts are part of you; they aren’t a foreign force invading you. You need to acknowledge that these intrusive desires reflect a part of yourself that is tempted to break your commitments. Calling your connection “normal” and “growing” doesn’t match the signs of limerence. Therapy has helped you see your need for connection outside the marriage — which is legitimate — but being “supportive” isn’t the same as being oblivious to risk. Realistically, few people recover from deep limerence and retain a stable, purely platonic friendship with the object of their obsession. One practical test: could you be fully candid with this woman about your intrusive feelings? If the answer is no, that’s a red flag. Any relationship that requires you to lie to the person who depends on you most — your spouse — is corrosive. Limerence is an escape from responsibility. If what you want are greater freedoms to flirt or pursue other relationships, that’s a different arrangement than the marriage you described. Perhaps you seek permission to live differently, but that is a major life change that must be negotiated honestly. Given your upbringing around alcoholism, intimate commitments may feel confining or terrifying. Still, if your decision is to stay married, you must cut off contact with the person you’re limerent on. Limerence behaves like an addictive drug: exposure tends to feed it. If you truly want to get past it, you must do everything possible to remove the triggers — end contact, stop ruminating, avoid letters or posts about them. A useful daily practice is to write down the anxious, fearful, resentful thoughts that arise (the “daily practice”). Pouring those thoughts out on the page helps you process and reduce their power. If your aim is to remain a committed partner and parent, you must step away from the relationship that’s threatening that commitment. It’s possible to gently end such relationships in real life; you don’t have to dramatize the severing — you can simply say, “I value our time, but this isn’t compatible with my life,” and leave it at that. You say you feel empowered to set boundaries, but your current situation suggests you aren’t actually setting the boundary that matters: cutting off contact and protecting your marriage. Your confusion about losing friendships is part of romanticizing the attachment. A friend who truly cares for you rejoices when you find love; jealousy and fear that someone will leave their friendship for romance reveals romantic attachment, not platonic friendship. Being present and enjoying what you have sounds like a nice motto, but when the fear of future loss is driven by romantic obsession, those words ring hollow. If you want the candid opinion: your marriage is in serious danger. If you intend to save it, stop all contact with the person who triggers your limerence. Your therapist could be helping you, but they should also be calling out when an emotional pattern is putting your life at risk. Limerence feels intoxicating at first — like a cure for pain — but it fades and often leaves destruction behind. Sometimes people meet again with an ex and imagine that recapturing the past will fix everything, but more often the fantasy collapses under the weight of daily life. Now to a different letter. This one comes from a man called Ed. He asks whether he’s trapped in a mix of CPTSD trauma bond and limerence. He grew up as an only child with an alcoholic mother, was emotionally neglected, spent a lot of time alone, and found it hard to make and keep friends. His parents divorced when he was seven, remarried, and divorced again when he was 18. He dropped out of high school during his sophomore year because of the home situation, later got a GED, and says he’s never used drugs or alcohol. At 16–17 he met his first love and lost his virginity to her. She was a “good guy” choice for her at that time; she’d had an abusive mother and a chaotic history. He treated her devotedly, became anxious about losing her, and essentially became a doormat. She broke up with him within a year to pursue partying, drugs, and other people. That breakup devastated him; he felt suicidal, immobilized, enraged, desperate, and worthless. He continues to struggle with the aftermath, including what he calls sexual trauma. Later he married his now-wife (25 years together). He married young and emotionally unhealed, and admits he sold himself to the marriage in order to avoid losing her — marrying for survival and stability. He says he loves his wife as a friend and the mother of his children, but the chemistry and attraction he felt with his first girlfriend never existed in the marriage. He has often thought about that first love throughout his marriage and never managed to let go. He admits he’s not provided his wife with the emotional needs he once met for his ex. Before his first child was born, he questioned whether his marriage was right, but when pregnancy arrived he chose to stay to avoid his children experiencing divorce. He now has two adult children and didn’t leave the marriage, but he hasn’t been happy. His wife senses his distance and has warned that she’s waiting for the day he announces he’s leaving, though she remains by his side. A year ago he reconnected with his first love after thirty years; she’s married with adult children. They met to “get closure,” a suggestion from a past therapist. The reunion happened amid Ed’s recent nervous breakdown at work, leading to job loss and disability. He lists diagnoses: schizoaffective disorder, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and says he has no friends. The ex apologized for the past, they became Facebook friends, and she invited him into a group she began. From that point his life became an emotional roller coaster — tearful, anxious, and full of mixed signals — causing distress for him, for the ex, and for his wife. There was no physical infidelity but there was emotional infidelity: he lived waiting for texts, likes, or hearts to feel acknowledged and was heartbroken when they didn’t come. He met up with the group and helped, often feeling used but continuing to pursue the ex. She expressed mutual feelings for a time. The situation continued, then cooled; he is no longer in the group but can’t stop thinking about her. He’s tortured by not being enough for her when young and wonders whether he should go no-contact, whether ex-romantic partners can be friends when both are married, whether he should disclose his feelings to his wife, and whether his feelings are trauma-driven rather than real. He thanks for the videos and asks for help. The response: this is a heavy situation. A common thread is that people who were neglected or traumatized early can be drawn to the intensity of past relationships. Your first love provided a wild, unguarded connection that felt profound in adolescence, a time when many of us loved without the fear we develop later. It’s understandable that those memories are powerful. The key issue for you is isolation: you say you have no friends and significant mental-health diagnoses, yet you have your wife who has stood by you. When someone feels isolated and unwell, the reappearance of an old flame can be intoxicating because it offers a taste of that youthful feeling of being seen. That doesn’t mean the past partner is the one true person for you now, but the pull is understandable. From what you describe, this re-connection took on the structure of an emotional affair: secretive, highly charged, and centered on hope for reciprocation. That pattern tends to cause misery — the roller-coaster of highs and lows, the waiting for approval, the constant checking of phones. This isn’t necessarily a trauma bond in the classic sense (intermittent reinforcement), but there are overlaps: intermittent contact, highs and lows, and intense yearning. Regarding “closure” — meeting an ex to get closure rarely works that way. True closure usually comes from making a clean break and moving forward, not reactivating the dynamic. Also, if the ex’s involvement has been inconsistent — warm, then distant — that’s likely to produce intermittent reinforcement that fuels obsession. It’s possible that someone else might actually be a better match in real life, but the evidence you’ve given suggests this relationship is not creating stability or wellbeing for you. If the ex is married and not stepping out of that marriage, it’s wrong to try to tear her away. Don’t make your wife a fallback plan. If you don’t intend to leave, it’s cruel to treat your spouse as a placeholder while you chase a fantasy. You were advised by a therapist to seek “closure” by meeting your ex; that advice looks misguided here. When trying to heal from trauma, moral clarity helps — cleaning up deceptive behavior, making amends, and not living in secret. The best path is to restore integrity in how you live. If you want to save your marriage, don’t disclose every turbulent thought to your wife unless and until you’re prepared to act on them; sharing raw, unprocessed feelings can inflict needless pain. Instead, focus on cutting contact with the ex and rebuilding a life with friends, meaningful activities, and joy. You need friends and social connection; being part of groups and experiencing companionship will help reduce the magnetic pull of the past. Twelve-step programs, such as Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, or participation in a supportive community can provide structure and people who understand the recovery process. In short: create joy and connection, stop secretive contact with the ex, and repair moral integrity. Emotional affairs are relationships kept hidden by someone who’s already committed elsewhere — they are romantic but not overtly sexual, and they frequently rely on lying and omission. Those hidden dynamics produce vast unspoken truths that almost inevitably hurt people involved. The next letter is from a woman named Zara. She asks: How do I move on? Her story: she developed a relationship with a coworker named Doug, who had significant childhood trauma. She fell for him around Christmas, about four months after beginning on his team. She noticed his integrity and strong work ethic, they clicked, he was quiet and somewhat anxious, and she felt at ease encouraging him to join her at lunchtime. They spent lunchtimes together by a nearby river watching kingfishers, which made her feel calm and joyful. Zara is 50 and Doug is 33. She is married — but the marriage had been essentially sexless for nearly twenty years by her decision, and they remained together primarily to co-parent their adult autistic son, whom they both adore. The husband used to pick her up from work, but once Zara and Doug became close and held hands, she started telling her husband she’d catch the bus instead, inventing reasons to be with Doug. She admits she’d never loved her husband; she married because she needed a friend and had an emotionally abusive, narcissistic mother. Her husband loved her and was kind, so she chose stability. She had been a virgin and deeply disliked sex with him, and ultimately stopped the sexual side of the marriage after five years, a choice he didn’t appear to notice. With Doug she felt different — for the first time she imagined happiness and a full relationship. Early on Doug confessed he’d been sexually abused as a child; she cried and had never met someone with that history. He told her he’d had sex with only a few adult partners, which made her assume the childhood abuse hadn’t damaged his capacity for intimacy. After two years of what she calls blissful friendship and romance — lunches by the river, holding hands, Saturdays together, theater trips — they finally spent a night together. In bed he masturbated and slept immediately afterward, leaving her awake and feeling rejected, stunned, and confused. That’s when her pain began. She researched sexual trauma and its effects, and wondered whether his behavior was punitive or merely indicative of his own difficulty. She avoided pushing him to talk about it, not wanting to retraumatize him, but pretended to be okay while working together each day. She later tried to discuss the night and got little meaningful response; he seemed angry when she pressed him and offered scant explanation. Six years on, they still work together and “get on,” but no longer spend time at lunch or outside work. Doug has been in therapy for four years and his social life has improved; he now owns a flat. Zara helped him view flats and drive him around. He has a 60-year-old flirty woman at work who seems jealous and gossipy, so Zara fears confiding in Doug because he might share her private details. Now, at 58, Zara feels utterly destroyed and wishes to start a new chapter, even though she still cares for Doug. The response: this is a painful situation. Having an adult autistic son is a large responsibility and understandably shaped many choices. But Zara’s involvement with Doug began while she was married and hiding the truth, so the first rupture in this story is the deception toward the husband. Living a lie erodes moral clarity and self-respect. It’s not necessary to disclose all gruesome details to the spouse, but the pattern of secrecy itself needs to be corrected. If you want to recover from trauma and become someone who experiences authentic love, honesty and responsibility are essential. Regarding the relationship with Doug: older woman–younger man pairings sometimes succeed, but in this case Doug’s inconsistent behavior and apparent inability to engage sexually in a night together suggest he’s not emotionally available in the way Zara hoped. When he immediately masturbated and fell asleep, that withdrawal is a real wound. He has had trauma and therapy, and trauma can influence adult intimacy, but that doesn’t excuse misleading behavior or leaving someone hanging. It seems you and Doug may have agreed implicitly to shelter the pleasurable, romantic parts of your connection while avoiding the hard truth that real commitment and explicit agreements were never made. That tacit pact — taking the dreamy moments without clarity or consequence — keeps both of you trapped in fantasy. You helped him in practical ways (viewings, driving) and were emotionally invested; he later gravitated toward another older colleague. That pattern indicates he seeks certain safe, artful companionships rather than full mutual closeness. You were starved for affection and companionship and found a person who offered a beautiful, dreamlike version of connection — lunches by the river, outings, cultural experiences. But he could not provide intimacy consistently. Recognize also that both of you were wrong in deceiving your spouses. Facing that reality opens the way to change: if some part of you can accept responsibility for your choices, you gain power to alter your situation. There are alternative ways to experience joy and companionship — other people to sit by rivers with, groups, friends and activities. If leaving the marriage is what would make you happier, the honorable route is to do that without lining up a new partner first. You don’t have to stay in the lie; you can choose a path that honors the people involved. In short: the man you invested in has not been emotionally available; your relationship with him is an emotional affair and a form of limerence — a fantasy-driven obsession with what could be. The wound began earlier, when the marriage was already in a shadow state and you started lying. Recovery requires honesty, responsibility, and rebuilding authentic sources of joy and connection. Now, a deeper look at limerence: a history of trauma can make one vulnerable to limerence. Limerence is an infatuation that mimics the initial rush of falling in love, but then becomes a painful addiction to an imagined perfect love. It robs real life of its good things and blocks the ability to experience actual, reciprocal love. Limerence is especially common among people who were emotionally neglected or abused as children, though not everyone with a hard childhood develops it. Abandonment wounds can make us cling to fantasy as a survival strategy: the intense hope and belief that a perfect love is possible helps kids survive emotional neglect, and later that pattern can harden into compulsive attraction to people who are unavailable, troubled, inappropriate, or abusive. If limerence is new to you, the first recognition of a name can be a powerful revelation — many people feel instantly understood. The term was coined in the 1970s by Dorothy Tennov, who studied the experience of falling in love. Since then writers and clinicians have refined the concept: limerence resembles love but extends into prolonged fantasy and sometimes into addiction because it’s focused on someone who doesn’t return the feeling. The person on whom one fixates is sometimes called the “limerent object” or simply “the LO.” If the LO ever did reciprocate fully in daily life, the fantasy’s electricity usually fades because real relationships involve mundane realities — chores, bills, arguments — that ground a partner into being ordinary in ways that dissolve the magical aura. There may be a genetic tendency toward limerence, but it’s more often seen in those who were emotionally neglected. The drive to sustain intense hope becomes a coping mechanism that, in adulthood, turns into compulsive longing for someone inaccessible. How to recognize limerence? It often begins with a “glimmer”: a charge of excitement when you first encounter the LO, a rising sense that something magnificent has started. You think about them even when they’re not present, and the longer you ruminate, the stronger the attraction. Unlike a typical romance that grows through shared time, limerence can grow through absence or through sparse interactions that are endlessly replayed and analyzed. Seeing the LO feels electrifying and makes life seem more vivid. You replay past meetings obsessively, dissecting every phrase for hidden meaning, and you find subtle ways to be near them without revealing your true feelings. The next phase is obsession: you fantasize about telling them how you really feel, but you don’t, because exposing it might destroy the hopeful illusion. You may feel anxious, empty, or depressed unless you can see or think about the LO, and you often invent cover stories to explain why you bring them up with others. You search for tiny hints that they secretly reciprocate. Over time this escalates to full-blown addiction: constant analysis of any communication, stalking social media, scanning for signs they might be unhappy in their real-life relationship, and creating elaborate theories about coded messages directed at you. Magical thinking creeps in: you believe in secret destinies, past lives, twin flames, or psychic bonds that guarantee the two of you are meant to be. People may spend money on psychics or therapists who confirm their fantasies. Disclosure — telling the LO how you feel — is a critical crossroads. Some people reveal their feelings, which can break the spell one way or another. More often people avoid disclosure because they can’t bear to lose the hope the fantasy provides. In advanced limerence, the mental energy devoted to the LO consumes life: if you’re partnered, it damages that relationship; if single, it prevents you from meeting real prospects. You avoid asking because the hope is sustenance; you’d rather hold on than risk a definitive “no.” If the LO rejects you, the mind sometimes flips the narrative into conspiracy and hidden messages, doubling down on obsession. This condition isolates people, drains them of motivation, and immobilizes action. Occasionally a new person sparks another glimmer just when that old obsession becomes unbearable, but that just repeats the pattern rather than resolving it. Healing from limerence begins with honest recognition that you’re trapped in this pattern. You need tools to identify limerent thinking and to process the underlying pain and unmet needs that push you into fantasy. You’ll also need meaningful activities that produce joy and connection and a network of people who understand recovery and support healthy change. Twelve-step communities like Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous can offer meetings and literature for those who resonate with that model. Online support groups and therapeutic programs can also provide practices, daily rituals, and peer accountability. Not everyone with childhood trauma develops limerence, but it’s a common adaptation among those who were starved for emotional attunement. Once you name it, the experience stops feeling uniquely shameful and starts to look like a pattern that can be changed. If you’re trying to free yourself from a limerent fixation, practical steps include stopping contact with the LO, filling your life with honest friendships, building sources of joy that aren’t dependent on one person, and working through trauma in therapy or peer recovery groups. An emotional affair — a hidden, romantic but not necessarily sexual relationship — almost always contains lies and omissions, and the secrecy produces buried truths that inevitably cause harm. In nearly every case, an emotional affair leads to suffering unless it’s ended and addressed with integrity. The path to recovery involves acknowledging the behavior, stopping the deception, and creating healthier ways to meet the needs that drove the obsession in the first place.