Tennov puts the duration somewhere between six months and two years. Sadly, these intense feelings never last. If limerence is returned, the feelings intensify and the couple end up ignoring their friends.
When someone is under the spell of limerence, not even being rejected dampens down the madness. However, the potential for mating is felt to be there, or the state described is not limerence.' Selection standards for limerence are, according to my informants, not identical to those according to which mere sexual partners are evaluated, and sex is seldom the main focus for limerence. Tennov confirms: 'Sexual attraction is not enough. He put the attraction down to 'lust', yet the affair had been mostly non-sexual. I'd ache if she didn't call.' Twelve months later, when the affair had ended, Martin realised that they had little in common. 'It was impossible to get down to work until we'd had our morning talk. The obsessive, intrusive nature of limerence would be immediately recognisable to Martin: 'I met her at a salsa class, the attraction was instant and we ended up exchanging telephone numbers, even though I knew she was married. To distinguish between these overwhelming emotions and the more stable, domestic feelings experienced by long-term couples who are only too aware of their partner's failings, Tennov coined a new term: limerence. Love is, in other words, blind, deaf and completely oblivious to foolishness. Tennov also discovered 'a remarkable ability to emphasise what is truly admirable and avoid dwelling on the negative'. The basic components were: intrusive thinking (you can't stop daydreaming about them) an aching in the heart an acute sensitivity to any act or thought which can be interpreted favourably fear of rejection and unsettling shyness in their presence intensification through adversity (at least up to a point) and a disregard for all other concerns. She interviewed 500 people from different backgrounds and age groups, both gay and straight, about falling in love, and found a startling similarity in how each respondent described their feelings. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov has already taken the first step towards this goal. What we need is a new lexicon, something to help us negotiate and understand all the different types of love. We all instinctively agree there is a huge difference between liking and complete infatuation. They list almost two dozen definitions - including affection, fondness, caring, liking, concern, attraction, desire and infatuation. Social biologists have scanned our brains and identified three chemicals - dopamine, phenyl ethylamine and oxytocin - which they claim attract us exclusively to our mates for long enough, in their opinion, to conceive and give the offspring a secure start.Īll of this is mildly diverting, but of no use when someone looks into your eyes and tells you that they love you. Freud dismissed romantic love as the sex urge, blocked. The pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis provided a famous but entirely incorrect mathematical formula: love = sex + friendship.
Scientists have been trying to define love according to their frame of reference for a very long time.
How can one little word cover so many different nuances of feeling? More importantly, if love means different things to different people, how can we ever effectively communicate it? The problem is further compounded because we generally also feel tremendous love for our mothers, our children, our friends - even chocolate. On the one hand, love can lift us up on the other, it can destroy us. But when we come to ask what love is, we are overwhelmed by a myriad different ideas and experiences. Every popular song is about it, half our books and films obsess over it, everybody wants it.