What’s in a name
For the love of limerence
Remember that scene in Moulin Rouge when a rapturous Ewan McGregor explains what love is to his garretdwelling Bohemian comrades? ‘‘Love is a many-splendored thing,’’ he says, grinning that 10,000-watt smile of his, giddy – no – delirious with it.
‘‘Love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love!’’
Love is all you need? Is it really?
Yikes, it’s Valentines Day . . . again, and I have some bad news for you, romance fans. Turns out our songwriters, movie makers and romance novelists have been lying to us about love for centuries.
And I’m here to set the record straight.
For pretty much my entire life I’ve experienced love like an upheaval through my body, like it is in the movies – a giddy, all-encompassing, delightful, terrifying sensation that overwhelms me.
Undeniably physical, it comes with a tingly pressure that slithers down from my ‘‘heart’’ into the crawl space under my solar plexus and just hangs out there, rolling around like a sack of cats, making it hard to sleep, eat and think straight.
It’s the feeling pop songs, rom-coms and romance novels have been dining out on since Romeo first turned Juliet’s head. I always thought that was love. I couldn’t (or maybe wouldn’t) understand what people meant when they said it wasn’t.
Then, a few years ago, I stumbled across a discussion on a friend’s Facebook post about romance, where someone described that sensation, the rolling, boiling, sack of cats sensation, almost dismissively as ‘‘limerence’’.
I’d never heard the term before, but if I’d been a character in a movie in that moment, the audience would have heard that strange new word reverberating in my head like a struck gong as the camera crashed in on my shocked face.
Limerence! Limerence . . . limerence . . . limerence.
The sound of it just struck me, I don’t know why. It’s not like that feeling doesn’t already have another name, one I’d dismissed because it belittles what are, for some of us, a very strong, often debilitating emotion. Maybe I was just ready to hear this one? Maybe it was just a prettier word?
It is pretty, too. Limerence. Sound it out as you say it: Like ‘‘limerick’’ and ‘‘glimmer’’ and ‘‘rinse’’, it has a chiming, sibilant, onomatopoeic quality that I find quite charming.
Unlike the word ‘‘infatuation’’, which has the word ‘‘fat’’ in the middle of it – the verbal equivalent of a pipe stopped up with lard.
It’s fluid, like sculptor Beth Cavener’s work, Limerence, which depicts the feeling as two sleek polecats locked in a violent embrace, jaws clamped on one another’s throats. I found it when I was researching this column, and she’s spot on.
But I’ve been calling that sensation ‘‘love’’ ever since I first felt it.
Have I been wrong my whole life?
I rushed off to Professor Google to unpack everything the word contained and . . . there it was, an explanation for my terrible teenaged years, difficult 20s and disastrous 30s.
Coined in 1979, in her book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, psychologist Dorothy Tennov describes it as an involuntary and acute longing that leads to ‘‘obsessive-compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviours’’. Bingo!
‘‘The expression ‘thinking of you’ fails to convey either the quality or quantity of this unwilled mental activity.
‘‘ ‘Obsessed’ comes closer but leaves out the aching,’’ Tennov wrote in the preface and, boy, I have never felt more seen in my life.
There are positives – not everyone goes through this nonsense but, if they do, it can make ‘‘the Limerent’’ as she calls us, want to be better people.
I immediately thought of the time, in defiance of God and nature, that I took up running after developing a fiery, soul-eating crush on a runner.
But the negatives are . . . pretty bloody negative. When it goes badly, and it almost always will because it’s not real, the grieving can be intense. You can feel worthless, broken.
Then afterwards, when the dust settles and you come back to yourself, you’re left wondering what the hell you were thinking, how you could have lost yourself so completely.
Another awkward truth of limerence: it comes with an overwhelming inclination to express your feelings in writing, which explains – although not excuses – all the notebooks crammed with dreadful, angsty poetry in the back of my closet.
The jury, which includes a lot of relationship counsellors and anthropologists, is out on whether the limerent can fix the issue. But I found just giving it a name less powerful than ‘‘love’’, but more respectful than ‘‘infatuation’’, was all I needed to put it in its place.
Love is what I feel for my family, it’s there even when they drive me up the wall or hurt my feelings as only family can. It doesn’t have a sensation. It just is.
Limerence, the candy heart-coated, pop jinglesinging nonsense that’s celebrated on Valentine’s Day, which makes me write trashy romance novels, watch rom-coms and swoon over impossible, totally out-of-reach celebrity crushes, is here today, gone tomorrow.
Like heartburn or a stranger’s fleeting smile, and so unlike love, it passes.