Romantic Love: The problem with Western cultures
nickyee.com
nickyee.com
-Ambrose Bierce
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Limerence-Experience-Being/dp/081...
While it's short on prescriptions for actually overcoming limerence, I found it helpful in at least understanding the mechanisms driving my limerent feelings. If you want help coping with limerence, the tribes.com forum may be of some help (though a fair amount of it is simply people broadcasting their neuroses). I have found some nuggets of good advice however:
http://tribes.tribe.net/limerence
It's hard to say whether limerence is in and of itself a problem. Tennov takes a NPOV. Certainly, if you're supposed to be working and instead you're daydreaming about someone it's a problem. Like a lot of things, it lies on a spectrum from pleasurable to pathological or dangerous. Still, I would agree with the author's point that understanding the distinction between limerance and love can be helpful.
Basically, what you do is that as soon as you start thinking of this person, imagine a series of events, starting with this person actually becoming yours, that lead to your utter fall and destruction. Like : "We fall in love, I go broke, cockroaches swarm all over the house". Done for two to three weeks, it basically cured me of all these feelings.
Here's a good example of one in action: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cgot5/askreddit_h...
The person whom I was most strongly limerant with was both unmarriable and not someone I want to be connected to by a kid for the rest of my life. Using my brain, or perhaps rather the rest of my brain, and not treating limerance as some mystical holy thing is probably in the top three best decisions I have ever made in my life, along with marrying the person for whom I never had a lot of limerance (a smidge, I suppose, but nothing by comparison), just shared values, life goals, senses of humor, and the ability to have a strong truth-based relationship with each other. You know, all that unimportant stuff next to the question of whether I feel floaty around her.
Use your brain. All of it. Nobody will save you if you don't; they all think this same stupid thing.
(For that matter, it's also dangerous to think that a relationship must be built on limerance and once it fades it's "over". I suppose there are more reliable ways to fail at relationships, but this is up there. The question is not whether it'll ever be "over", the question is, what will you have left once it's "over"?)
That brings about all sorts of meta-questions. I mean, for starters who's to say that's true? Is what's best for you really whatever makes you happy, or is what's best for you what's best for your genes?
Personally, I wouldn't consider marrying someone unless I had limerance for them at some point in our relationship. I wouldn't marry someone while I am in the state of limerance because that's a potential recipe for disaster, but I want to know that if I'm with someone for the rest of my life, I can rekindle the fire that once was.
Of course, never say never.
If I understand you correctly, you're basically saying what is more bluntly phrased, "get a life," or "get out more," in which case I entirely agree with you.
As someone who once lost an object of limerant obsession, I can say the worst thing you can do is stay in the same place, doing the same thing. I noticed when traveling last year, I bumped into a number of freshly broken-up people. They are clearly wiser than I was.
My problem is that it tends to go away after awhile...
My ex was convinced with the right person, limerence will last forever. Maybe she was right, but I very very very strongly suspect she was not.
Overcoming it is useful because:
1: It will eventually end
2: When it does end, you'll be in for a shock- to say the least
Essentially, if it lasted forever things would be great and this wouldn't be a problem. Since it doesn't, the sooner you get past it the better as far as making life choices goes.
Know that it doesn't last, enjoy it while it's there and try to lay the foundations for an adult relationship in the meanwhile, so that you could get past the infatuation phase (which, as you say, is inevitable) without breaking up.
Being with a partner who thinks it can last forever if they just find the perfect person can be a recipe for disaster, though one would hope most people grow out of that state of mind after a few attempts.
life-changing decisions aren't going
to sit around and wait 3 years for
limerence to wear off.
I guess the best choice in that case is to recognize the situation and try to rationally analyze it (e.g. "I'm not really in a good position in life to marry that women/have kids/move thousands of kilometers to a different continent to peruse this cute girl I've met 3 days ago while backpacking in the Himalayas[1]") and act accordingly - even though that's not very romantic.
Easier said than done, though.
[1] Unfortunately that one comes from personal experience.
I am sure you can get infatuated with another person while being in a loving relationship, but I tried not to put myself in a situation where the possibility of 'something just happened' even arises in the first place.
As a programmer who works in a >90% male environment and whose hobbies are similarly male-dominant, that might be easier for me to achieve than for some people.
With that disclaimer in mind, my opinion is that if you've let yourself fall in love with someone else you either:
1. Didn't really love your spouse (or thought you could do better) and might have subconsciously tried to break up or make your spouse break up with you (another declaimer: I am not a psychologist either).
2. Were not acting as a responsible adult, otherwise you would have seen it coming and taken measures against it.
3. Are confident that your relationship can survive 'harmless' affairs and craved the thrill and excitement but didn't want to leave your partner for it.
I don't think there is necessarily anything morally wrong with that last possibility, although one would hope you've discussed being in an open relationship with your partner beforehand.
I think you can probably use it loosely as a synonym with infatuation in most contexts but the meaning is ever so slightly different.
I never heard it before today either, English has a far too many words.
It's a strange neologism, too, that doesn't sound right to my ear. What's the etymology? The only thing I can think of is limen (threshold) as in liminal and subliminal.
I also find myself feeling slightly uneasy when confronted by a word without etymology. Knowing it was consciously made up is somehow reassuring.
Because that was the term used in the article.
edited to add: Though, to me, you're right: I don't see much difference between limerance and infatuation.
Best article I've read in months.
Of course I wasn't interested in living this way so I married a European. :)
In any case, every time I tried it it seemed to work and every time I deviated the relationship ended. Hardly scientific proof but the source I read had spent years surveying women to arrive at his conclusions.
Hopefully it's rather high :-/
I eventually found the term, and looked at it closely. Sadly I could describe my two other 'loves' of my life (or what I thought was the feeling of love then), as simple limerence.
:(
But I guess, the shattering of an illusion is a price you pay for maturing up.
Real love is something that grows and the article would have done well to just use the word "crush" because that's what it is describing. Crushes can grow into love, but clearly don't have to.
For example, I have experienced limerence with several women who were completely untenable. The primary example was deep into recreational drugs, and my basic sensibilities knew enough to fight back. I WANTED to do something, but I didn't even have to engage my higher brain and think about it to know it was a bad idea. Only problem is that limerence is over 3 years old and still not dead.
I wonder if the reticular activating system has anything to do with it.
As I remember from the director's commentary track on some Almodovar film: Love isn't love unless there is reciprocity. (This was when some male character is stalkily going through the things in a woman's abode)
The central paradox of limerence is that someone who is actively limerent feels like they are experiencing the most unique, rapturous experience in the world even though limerence seems to have fairly universal characteristics (at least in Western cultures, although it could be argued that traditional Asian cultures do understand limerence but don't use it as a basis for marriage)
Of course it's not as simple as that. Even in the West there are many different, and complex, reasons that people chose to get married, and I am sure the same is the case in Asian cultures. But as a culture-wide generalisation, I guess there is some truth in it.
The thing I find peculiar sometimes in the West is not so much the fact that so much emphasis is placed on the limerence phase, but that the companionate phase is so... almost scorned. I am pretty sure that biologically and culturally the point of the former is to get us to the latter.
Quite honestly I don't think I've ever experienced this feeling. I have been the "limerent object" as a teenager, though. It felt simply horrible that someone was intrusively obsessing about me for years, seemingly with no regard for how I actually felt about it.
For a long time afterwards, I was convinced that "love" is a socially acceptable front for something entirely selfish which has nothing to do with communication or compassion.
You think you see something amazing. You really want that. You are a human, with a brain, which is flexible and adaptable. So if you don't get what you want, you adapt and try to make the best of it, rationalizing further and further from the truth. The mind, if resolved, can adapt and see the better parts of things. A monk who lives in a post-apocalytic world could, for example, really enjoy a blooming daisy. Same pattern.
But then other things come along. And finally you move on.
Re: [oatmeal]...this is true love because it can be everlasting, but this is not the love script that we are bombarded with from every literary or entertainment form in our lives.
I would just say, in defense of fairy tales, that some nice morals are (a) it's good to be optimistic and (b) you should step up and win. It's good practice. Seems unrealistic or even unhealthy to promote such behavior sometimes. And there is a balance. But sometimes you should step up and win.
This is particularly because human infants cannot cling onto their mothers the way all primate infants can (a consequence of hairlessness and shorter arms).
Awesome.
...the optimal middle area...
What? That's wrong. Premature optimization. There's nothing wrong with more diversity, esp. regarding immune systems.
For as long as we project god-like idealizations onto our romantic partners and demand that they make us happy as the fairy tales describe, we will never truly love them as human beings.
Yeah, but clearly the qualities of steadfastness and adaptability in limerence can also be found in the qualities of steadfastness and adaptability in marriage. The difficult parts, in limerence and in marriage (though the latter I am just guessing about) are in those moments of honesty with yourself and reality.
"In the end, the basis of a stable relationship is founded on a love that emerges not in spite of but because of the other person’s flaws and weaknesses, because ultimately it is our imperfections that make us human."
It seems more logical to me to love someone in spite of their flaws.
Nothing really related to Hacker News, but that's one of the reasons why I "love" the site... those great off topic articles that apply to almost everybody and that let you see that there is a world beyond bits and bytes.
Best thing in this case is to see what that is in ourselves. Cherish the relationship, while knowing the other is not neccessarily what we project on them, but a catalyst for us to know ourselves better.
Same thing goes for intense hate by the way. It's all towards unowned features of ourselves, but we project it on the other when they have the slightest resemblence to it.
Like the old bard said: "There's so many different worlds / So many different suns / And we have just one world / But we live in different ones"
The notion of world-as-machine is becoming dated I think, as a more organic understanding arises, both from the mixing of western and eastern ideas, as well as better physics.
There is no shortage of humans in the world.
It comes back to the universal problem of how to focus ones mind in order to become more productive.
That's basically the plot of every mind-poisoning, B.S. movie fed to American (all Western?) youth.
So many men, especially young men, believe in this concept of winning over their love. Somehow he'll make her love him (creepy overtones of misogyny). He'll convince her that he's worth loving.
If you really like yourself, then that's good enough. If you're not happy with yourself, yeah, improve. But don't ever think you need to improve for someone else[1]. Anyone who actually responds to this is a manipulative jerk who will gradually up the stakes to watch you dance.
If X doesn't win over Y, he should consider whether he feels he needs to improve in any areas, pursue any changes, then see how things go when he bumps into Z, having forgotten about Y.
[1] - exception: unquestionably defective personality traits (alcoholism, gambling addiction, abusiveness) when you're in a long-term relationship and you both agree to work on it.
The films you talk about usually show a very superficial process of improvement, typically involving dressing in cooler clothes, lots of silly shenanigans, taking on some new hobbies, and going places to 'hang out.' I'm talking about actual achievements, starting with getting yourself in shape and becoming more entertaining, but extending to meeting your academic potential, finding a good career, developing new skills, committing to side projects, establishing a network of admirable friends, broadening your horizons etc. Things that would serve X well regardless of whether they really do impress Y in the end. With the quality of life possible in the West on a meagre wage, it's tempting to coast through life achieving a fraction of your potential
Er, are you talking about trashy movies? I don't really know any that tell you not to achieve things.
> The films you talk about usually show a very superficial process of improvement
It seems to depend on the sex of the character. Females have to lose the glasses and wash their hair with conditioner. Men seem to have to prove themselves, learn stuff, go to ridiculous lengths of sacrifice thereby proving to the female lead that they're worthy, etc.
> it's tempting to coast through life achieving a fraction of your potential
It sounds to me like it's more tempting to waste your time obsessing on the pursuit of money and success in the eyes of others, rather than doing what makes you happy and brings you closer relationships.
Also I think you imply a false dichotomy between 'the pursuit of money and success' and doing what makes you happy and brings you closer relationships.
You cut out the critical "in the eyes of others" part.
As for a "false dichotomy," spending your life trying to make more money and present the image of success is not a path to happiness. It's quite well documented that the best thing you can do for happiness is to improve your personal relationships. As for money, it doesn't lead to happiness. A lack of money leads to unhappiness, but you only need enough.
Anyway, I really think you're missing my points entirely. I'm not saying you shouldn't seek self improvement, and I'm not saying you shouldn't try to achieve things (which may or may not lead to riches). I'm saying do what you want to do for yourself and focus on your relationships. Don't be led around by false ideals implanted in your psyche, and don't try to be "good enough" for others, as it will only make you unhappy.
If you try to make the most of yourself and feel you've succeeded, and you are still not 'good enough' for someone else, then I don't think that would make you unhappy. At that point you'd probably peacefully accept that something wasn't to be and that you were not to blame. On the other hand, if you never fulfill your potential, if you never really give it a try, and are left wondering what might have been, that seems a surer root to unhappiness. Though it will creep up on you after years of just having 'enough' money and maintaining the same relationships.
Value isn't just the domain of money, it's also the domain of creativity and of personal qualities/virtues. Relationships, self esteem, etc, are not exempt from the concept, recognition and exchange of value. Although a lot of people talk like they are, which I think is at the bottom of this argument here.
And what in the world might be the proposed derivation of "limerence"? Wikipedia offers no hint, though it does use the word "crystallization", which Stendahl I believe popularized in this context.
Thank you,
Trend Guardian publisher
In the mean time, if you google "Love in Four Acts", Google has the article in its cache. Sorry for the inconvenience all.
Nick
I think if we recognize that human organism -the individual system called human body- is a programmable organism like a computer -and tv and movies program this organism- then we would be taking a step toward understanding this concept called -love-