The Latest in Love & Dating News:
'Limerence' Makes the Heart Grow Far Too Fonder
By SHARON JAYSON, USA TODAY
Posted: 2008-02-08 14:34:21
Are you crazy in love or just plain crazy?
It all depends on whether new research into a condition called "limerence" leads to the creation of a new psychiatric diagnosis.
"It's that first stage of attraction where there's that bliss and euphoria and the newness of love," says Brenda Schaeffer, a psychologist from Minneapolis.
That's the upside.
But there is a dark side, too.
"It is obsessive-compulsive when you're feeling it. It's the center of your life," says Arthur Aron, a psychology professor at State University of New York-Stony Brook.
"Is it a mental illness? People are crazy when they're in love. It's extremely common to be intensely in love, but it's temporary." Two psychology researchers will be in Las Vegas today to present new work on limerence to the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences.
One is Albert Wakin, an assistant psychology professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. He was a colleague of the late psychologist Dorothy Tennov, who used the term in her 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Wakin knew Tennov at the University of Bridgeport but didn't assist in her research.
Over the past year, however, he and graduate student Duyen Vo of Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven have begun screening for limerence, which they liken to obsessive-compulsive disorders and addiction behavior.
"It's difficult to tell in the first few months of a relationship whether they're developing a healthy love relationship or an unhealthy limerent relationship," Wakin says. "In a love relationship, the feelings give way to a more predictable relationship and it feels good. In a limerent relationship, those longings tend to intensify. Over time, it doesn't feel good."
Helen Fisher, a research professor at New Jersey's Rutgers University who studies romantic love, says limerence is romantic love, with all its feelings and behaviors. "They are associating the negative aspects of it with the term, and that can be a disorder," she says.
Of about 200 who have agreed to participate in the study, the researchers suspect 50 or 60 have at one time experienced a limerent relationship. Some have had a series of such relationships, and others have had none. For many of those who do, it's a one-time experience.
"What we have found is that the limerent person is capable of having healthy love relationships with other people, but for some reason, with this particular person, a limerent relationship develops," Wakin says.
Limerence subsides if the love is returned, but the researchers say for unrequited love, their advice is to cut off contact and hope that time will lessen its disruptive effects.
They say it's premature to ask that limerence be classified in the American Psychiatric Association's handbook of mental disorders because much more research is needed. The next publication is in 2012.
But, Wakin says, "if our research continues to go in the direction it has been going and that we expect it will go, ultimately what we want to move toward is diagnosis, prognosis and treatment."
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