This is a bit of an experiment. I seem to have had positive reactions from personal posts, so I thought I’d try one here. It doesn’t start off that way, but ends up intensely so.
Limerence.
A while ago, I used to run a support group for people who were romantically stuck on one individual and couldn’t do anything about it. It apparently worked quite well although with hindsight I’m not sure it actually helped. It’s a little like this blog in a way. The original purpose of this blog was for me to dump stuff which was on my mind so it didn’t distract me from doing other things, but in fact it seems to feed the urge to write. Similarly, the fact that people had a place to go where they could express their feelings about this other person, whoever it might be, I now think may have fed their craving, as it were, and I’m not now sure it was a good idea. Nonetheless, with my history I was probably a good choice for the group. The way it happened was that a young woman with the problem had a mutual acquaintance who knew about my history and decided I was a good fit because he was a first-hand witness to what had happened.
To be honest, I’m not sure what would actually have helped. The alternatives seem to be either to express yourself, though probably not to the object of your affections, or to try to ignore it and hope it goes away, but either of these isn’t ideal because in the former case it seems to stoke it and in the latter it pushes harder until you have to acknowledge it for the sheer sake of honesty to yourself. It just will become the element in the room. Another option might be to keep yourself busy.
Dorothy Tennov is a psychologist specialising in unrequited love, and it was her who invented the word “limerence”. It’s a useful word meaning, to quote Wikipedia:
A state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and have one’s feelings reciprocated.
One of the purposes of using the word limerence is that if you don’t, you can easily get bogged down in a circular conversation or intenal rumination about whether it’s love or infatuation rather than getting past that question and addressing the actual problem. Some of the time, of course, it isn’t a problem at all because it’s simply the mechanism which gets two people together into a relationship which is real, although there may be other issues there such as what they call “falling in love too easily”. Tennov’s word enables one to name something which is a real psychological phenomenon. The problem is that we have a biological drive to do this which will continue to push at us until it gets resolved. Although it has obsessive-compulsive elements to it, anyone, apart presumably from aromantic people, can fall victim to this phenomenon and in fact having obsessive-compulsive personality traits is not a good predictor of whether this will happen. It can also, very unfortunately, edge into erotomania and stalking, although not for most people who become limerent.
It’s easily possible that the problem won’t resolve at all. Tennov quotes a case where someone became fixated on someone in her adolescence and her diaries showed that this continued for the next seventy-six years, after which she died. No use to anyone else and completely tied up in someone, regardless of what her prospects would have been for another situation, the poor woman died sad and alone, never having had a relationship, because of this fixation. And the thing to bear in mind is, this is a vulnerability which most people have.
A certain set of circumstances usually leads to persistent and unsatisfied limerence, and I can confirm that this pattern was common in the group. An initial event draws a person to someone’s attention and they develop the usual “falling in love”-type emotional and thought pattern which is presumably supposed to satisfy the function of biological reproduction, although there is a major caveat here: it obviously isn’t confined to heterosexual couples. Then something happens which frustrates the limerent individual’s ability to achieve closure. For instance, the person concerned may move to a distant part of the country or turn out to be in a stable relationship. Since it’s happened to me twice, I’ve unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for the support group, been forced to become an expert in this, although the first case is less typical than the second, which is more text book. The way it happened can be easily traced with hindsight, and in fact I was more or less aware of it at the time. Vicky happened to choose to go on a tour of Europe with her partner at the point when I would’ve wanted to resolve it. Note that resolution absolutely did not mean going out with her. Rather, I wanted a short, sharp rejection which would make it clear that nothing could happen. It has also been mentioned that it was odd that she didn’t “do the boyfriend mention”. I think this is because she was oblivious of what was happening, or aware of it but didn’t consider it her problem, which is true. She didn’t owe me anything. It just happened. I got unlucky.
Incidentally, you might think it’s a bit careless of me to use her real name, although obviously I’m not going to mention her surname. In my defence, it’s widely known what happened, it’s quite a common name and she’s never going to read this.
Although there is a pattern to the circumstances in which this kind of thing happens, certain people are more susceptible than others. For instance, there is a tendency for them to test with a significantly higher IQ than average, and they tend to be underoccupied in some way. These things are known from the literature. Another aspect some people are aware of, although so far as I know it isn’t backed up by any research, is that it can be a mid-life crisis-type thing. That was obviously not true of me. Going back to the first two, the mind tends to find things to occupy itself in a vacuum. I’ve already mentioned the Ganzfeld state of consciousness, and there are other happenings such as Charles Bonnett Syndrome. The brain will often attempt to fill in blanks where input is not available, particularly when someone is quite imaginative. Therefore it’s possible to be quite reductive about this and look at it as a pretty straightforward process of one’s romantic proclivities colonising the empty space one wishes to be occupied by the object of one’s affections. The practice of constantly doodling love hearts and playing with the person’s name and initials comes to mind.
Unrequited love has serious consequences for the person feeling it. It can lead them to end their lives and break up their real, long-term relationships such as marriage. Other psychologists are not keen on the concept for some reason I haven’t been able to fathom. There’s also the question of cross-cultural applicability, since romantic love is not considered significant in every culture. Most of Tennov’s research used American cases. The idea of a biological drive that fuels this is also very much of its time, since she published in 1979 and it comes across as quite “Selfish Gene”-y, in the sense that it uses quite crude understandings of evolutionary psychology.
So there’s that. I should probably talk about personal experience although it seems quite egoistic.
When I was about sixteen, one of my teachers said that when one has fallen in love, the question doesn’t even occur to one that one is in love. This set the bar high for deciding what was love, because I question everything. Consequently throughout my late teens and early twenties I doubted my own feelings. I do believe that in the earlier case, I was more in love with the idea of being in love than actually in love, and there were complicated things going on there. That situation persisted for four and a half years from the age of fourteen. There was then a very sudden transfer of affection to Vicky. It became very urgent to “inject a bit of reality into the situation”, as I put it at the time. That is, find out what the real situation was and use that to defuse the “love bomb” and get past it. It did seem very likely that she would be in a relationship, but my feelings ran away with me. And I will say that. They did run away with me. I didn’t indulge them, fantasise about romantic love or anything like that. I simply had no control. The way I’d addressed the previous situation was to become friends with the girl, later woman, in question, and that persisted and went excellently. According to a friend of Vicky’s, she was not keen on having friendships with men and was very motivated by sexual attraction instead, which meant that wasn’t a viable route out of the situation. I have no idea if this is true or not.
Here’s a checklist to distinguish between love and infatuation:
(from Quora, will be removed on request, annoying typo).
I would say that my feelings for Vicky followed the list on the left. Although I’ve said that the transfer of affection was sudden, it had in fact been building for about nine months by the point it became frustrated. It was all about caring for her, it lasted years but it could not be honest because the situation made it impossible to talk to her about it. It was not based on physical attraction, which in fact I found off-putting. Since I don’t experience jealousy, that’s probably not worth including. Therefore, if this list is reliable (what do you think?) it really was love.
Incidentally, I don’t want this to be all about me in the sense that she is just some untouchable perfect being on a pedestal or something. I liked Vicky because her values and political beliefs were similar to mine, because she was a political activist and because she was somewhat academically inclined. She was also quite laid back and easy to relate to. I thought at the time that she would be one of a number of people who had those qualities, because it’s almost a stereotype of a lefty woman student, but strangely that combination never came up again. I didn’t meet one other person like her either at Leicester or Warwick.
One of the problems is that you can think you’ve got past it and then it all comes back again. Around eighteen months into my obsession, I realised I was still bent out of shape by her when she and her boyfriend split. Her relationship afforded me a degree of stability and even happiness while it was still happening, and I know I was particularly happy at that time, though possibly because that stability was able to hide from me the fact that there was still something there. In the meantime I did attempt to kindle interest in other people, which didn’t go well, hoping that that would get me past her. The trouble is that it was forced and I was not generally considered attractive either in appearance or personality. I also took great and futile care to present my image as uninteresting and neutral, which is of course impossible. Neutral, that is. Boring is easy.
I should of course talk about stalking, which is one way in which this can go very badly indeed. Another aspect of stalking is that prevention focusses on what happens after the fact when it seems much more likely that it can be prevented more effectively by including some kind of emotional literacy training in the school curriculum, or ensuring that as a home edder that you have “the talk”. The types are: intimacy seeking, incompetent, predatory, rejected and resentful. I have actually been stalked by two different people that I know of in my life, so I don’t take it lightly.
Incompetent stalkers are usually motivated by lust and/or loneliness, and the problem arises because they are insensitive to their target’s emotions. It tends to happen with neurodiverse people or people with learning difficulties.
Intimacy seeking stalkers tend to be erotomanic, a subject I’ll return to. They are also lonely and are often motivated by delusional beliefs about their target. Clearly someone who is delusional is not going to say they are in the midst of everything, so if I was in this category this would amount to my perception that Vicky was attracted to me. However, I’d like to emphasise that I didn’t stalk her. In fact I tried to avoid her in the hope that my feelings would pass.
Rejected stalkers have usually been in an intimate relationship with their target (incidentally I’m using the word “target” because I don’t want to say “victim”). They will usually either seek to get back together with the person or want what they think of as revenge. I have never and would never do this.
Finally, predatory stalkers usually wish to indulge a non-consensual and probably violent paraphilia with their targets and the act of stalking is gratifying in itself. I would say this gives people with paraphilias a bad name, and it should be stressed that they are not something which you should ever accept shame about. The problem with these people is that they are excessively focussed on the kink itself at the expense of seeking intimacy or using it as a symbol of closeness in consensual sex.
A few pieces of advice about stalkers. If they are seeking to mend a relationship or become intimate, targets are advised to state clearly and unambiguously that they reject their attentions. This is at least as much for the target’s peace of mind as it is for the stalker’s sake. Having said that, I have also to say that it seems unlikely that that would work. However, it does stop the target from feeling guilty and blaming themselves later.
If you’re being harassed on the ‘phone by a stalker, another piece of police advice is to install a new ‘phone line and tell your friends the number while leaving an answerphone on the old one. This helps you to gather evidence against the perpetrator. However, it also sounds quite outdated in today’s world of social media and the like.
Due to my later obsession, I was widely regarded as persona non grata by my acquaintances. Although this is understandable, it didn’t help. The widespread attitude towards me in any case was one of disrespect and keeping me at an emotional distance. It’s been suggested that this situation isn’t even really about Vicky but about being in the social outer darkness. That said, I did have real friends too, so I’m not sure about that. But being in that darkness is not helpful because it was merely an opportunity to ruminate unhelpfully. What was missing in all of this was feedback. Then again, nobody owed me anything so I don’t know where that left me.
Erotomania is alleged to be a rare mental condition where someone is fixated on the idea that someone is secretly in love with them. For once I have professional backing for saying that this does not describe the situation I was in, as a psychiatrist looked into it for me. One of the perks of having started a degree in psychology. It’s a type of delusional disorder, which is what we used to call “paranoia” in the widespread inadequacy of psychiatric terminology where relatively useless and vague terms replace formerly quite accurate ones. The patient may not even know the person on whom they’re fixated, or they may be dead. Ian McEwan did an excellent job of describing someone with erotomania in his novel ‘Enduring Love’, in which he portrays an otherwise heterosexual non-religious person becoming convinced that God wants him and another man to be together. Although erotomania is more common in women, men are more likely to act on it. It can occur alone, with no other sign of psychopathology, or may be associated with psychosis of other kinds. It can be worsened by substance abuse, including alcohol, and antidepressants. Stalkers sometimes believe their target is stalking them. It also happens that Leicester Uni specialises in stalking research.
What may be missing from this account so far is how I felt about all this, and of course it’s also important what Vicky felt, but all I can really get from that is that she was very uncomfortable being in my company, but about a year later things seemed to be okay and we did sort of become friends again although she was said still to be nervous around me. Apart from anything else, it was annoying that the whole time I was an undergraduate I was basically tied up with an obsession with a woman, because it probably did have quite a negative impact with how well I enjoyed myself and performed in both academia and elsewhere. I tried really hard to put myself off Vicky, for instance by concentrating on the actions she undertook which made herself attractive to many people, but this didn’t work. The reason for this, I think, is that there comes a point where you cannot disentangle yourself because you have fallen in love with the image but stay in love with the person. I was frustrated and annoyed with myself because I couldn’t dislodge the obsession no matter how I tried. At no point after the initial incident did I consider the prospect of a relationship either realistic or desirable. My attraction to her was a problem to be solved, rather an intractable one. And the irony was that what I thought I was aiming for was being honest with myself that I did find that construction of stereotypical beauty attractive, but that it was a way of being less serious about the prospects of being in love.
I still don’t understand why she knew me for nearly a year without doing the “boyfriend mention”. It must’ve been obvious that I was attracted to her. I can think of a couple of reasons. One is that her man was constantly in the background of her life and had been for five years by that point, so their relationship was taken for granted. Another is that I was so far beneath her idea of anyone she might consider going out with that she didn’t consider it worth mentioning. Or, it may simply have been out of respect that she considered friendship with a man to be entirely feasible, and in fact I agree with that. The only trouble is, apparently she didn’t.
As I’ve said before, one long-term issue is that I long ago ceased to trust my intuition, which was telling me, despite all rational indications to the contrary, that she was in fact attracted to me. This assumes there is no “league” of course. This distrust of intuition has been mentioned since by some people, for instance my first girlfriend who was aware that I consciously chose to discount my intuitive insights, and this goes far beyond relationships. Another consequence was that just as I set the bar high for the idea of being in love, I also set it, well, infinitely high for the prospect of anyone being attracted to me in that way. This is quite a depressive thing to do. There’s also the issue that in a sense, initiating a relationship is a bit like applying for a job. That’s a horrible, soulless way of putting it, but it means that the analogy between ruling out the possibility of a relationship and ruling out the possibility of getting a “proper job” means that from that point onward the idea of successfully applying for one went out of the window. It’s also been said that the prospect of starting a relationship is the opposite of getting a job, which I have to say I don’t really understand. To me, it seems there’s a clear parallel between dating to see if you are compatible and going to a job interview to see if you’re a suitable potential employee. I also internalised the negative messaging people around me were giving me, making me feel worthless, irreparably damaged and a nasty person to be around, and that’s not a good attitude to have going into a job application. I’m also unaware of any of my strengths and weaknesses, which is probably also connected.
Now in theory I could get over that. However, as I age there are various consequences of having adopted that attitude long term which means that it’s now probably a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is basically a massive domino effect from this single misunderstanding, or whatever it was, from the age of eighteen, and no feedback is possible from it because Vicky and I haven’t been regularly in touch for thirty years. It probably isn’t even worth trying to fix, because the problems are now systemic in my life.
It is important not to over-estimate the influence of this experience on my life, because part of the key is probably not to be that person. It’s possible to get over all of this emotionally, and in fact I have, but I believe I can still see the consequences.
There is a more peculiar consequence of all this: I am not metaphysically naturalistic. Because I had the dream in 1983 which appears to predict me meeting her, and the “instructions” to go to a particular place at a particular time to encounter her and attempt to resolve the situation, I believe that there has to be something going on psychically under the surface. It could also be that if I did trust my intuition, I would have picked up on many examples of this happening. But it puts me in a fairly unpopular category of being a philosopher who believes in the supernatural. If I didn’t, I’d be ignoring those experiences. I don’t know what to make of them. For instance, it could be that this was just a spirit messing with my head for its own purposes or just for none, and even saying that makes me doubt my sanity. But one can be both sane and accept the existence of the supernatural. Because of these two incidents, it may have been harder for me to lose my Christian faith and it probably makes it more likely that I’d be theist. But I cannot for the life of me account for these incidents naturalistically and it seems perverse to do so.
Finally, I want to reassure you. I did eventually meet Sarada and we got married and had two children and have now been together for twenty-eight years. I am not by any means hung up on this person I haven’t seen for decades, which is quite fortunate for me as my work in the group demonstrated that many more people still are after many years. Anyone who knows us offline, and maybe even online, will be aware that we love each other deeply and are utterly committed. The Vicky incident hasn’t have long term effects in that way, but in other areas it has. The healthy thing is to get past this, but I still wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t met her. I strongly suspect there would either have been another “Vicky” or some other non-relationship issue which would have blighted my life in some other way. After all, I have the personality that I have, and maybe some things are just inevitable.
A Box Of Chocolates 