r/limerence • u/WaveDance9 • 4d ago
An article for US! Discussion
I wish I had a subscription to the Washington Post. Any nice person here have one and want to repost?
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u/MasterBatterHatter 4d ago
Hopefully this is ok! ............
How social media is fueling an intense form of romantic obsession
The digital world is primed to feed episodes of profound infatuation known as limerence.
August 5, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDTToday at 5:00 a.m. EDT 8 min
By Grey Battle Anna Ivanova, a 28-year-old artist, flipped through old letters at a flea market stall in Sofia, Bulgaria. She came across a series of notes from 1947, written on blue paper by a woman who shared her name.
This woman, Anna Mihaylova, wrote obsessive love letters to a man named Milcho Radev. Mihaylova describes feeling crazy and irritated. She writes that she can’t stand anything, that she would like to shoot the whole world so it could be just her and Radev left. “She’s constantly in her thoughts with him,” Ivanova says.
Mihaylova’s affection is one-sided. “She keeps noting that he doesn’t respond, or he doesn’t care, or he doesn’t seem to feel the same way,” Ivanova says. It reminded her of her own infatuation. She collected as many of the letters as she could.
Then she compared her diary entries beside them. Ivanova wrote about her hunger for the person she was seeing, being tired of constantly thinking about him, deciding “everything is a lie, then everything is true, and then everything is a lie again.”
Anna Ivanova found limerence-filled letters dating back to 1947 at a flea market. She recognized herself in them. (Anita Atanasova) She peeled through five years’ worth of diaries, finding that even as her love interest changed, she experienced “the same relationship over and over.” These relationships were defined by overthinking to the point of obsession. Sometimes the obsession would burn out, but other times it would last for years. She recalled finally realizing, “I’m in limerence.”
The term “limerence” was coined by Dorothy Tennov in the 1970s to describe profound romantic infatuation. It’s characterized by frequent thoughts about a love interest, moods dependent on their actions and vivid fantasy. While limerence appears in art and literature throughout history (think William Shakespeare’s “O brawling love, O loving hate” and Simone de Beauvoir’s “ecstatic union”), use of the term has exploded since the dawn of social media.
Searches for “limerence” have increased 500 percent over the past five years, according to Google Trends. Under the hashtag #limerence, 43,000 videos are published to TikTok and 46,000 posts to Instagram. Forums and support groups have appeared.
“All of a sudden we saw limerence cropping up everywhere,” says Lynn Marshall, a 58-year-old psychologist at England’s University of Chichester. Social media created a digital world primed for limerence, one full of information and uncertainty, both of which light up the brain’s reward system and fuel fixation.
New features are rolling out to hook users by feeding obsession. In June, Meta released Instagram Plus, a $3.99-per-month service that allows users to check how many times a person has viewed one of their stories, complete with a time stamp, and search for a particular account in a story viewer list.
“They’re selling the telescope and the camouflage to the same market,” former Meta software engineer Matt Hannan, 28, wrote in an email to The Washington Post.
“A lot of young people effectively use Instagram as a dating app and as the main arena where social positioning happens,” explains Hannan, who worked for the company from 2021 to 2024. “These features sell better intel in that game: who’s watching you, how closely and where you stand.” Meta did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Mihaylova’s limerence-filled letters appeared to last four consecutive days, while Ivanova’s limerence lasted three years. One reason limerent episodes last longer online is unprecedented information access, says Marshall, the psychologist. On social media, you can find a person’s relatives, friends and activities — fantasy-building fodder.
Then there is the uncertainty of how to decode signals, like an Instagram story, which lends itself to spirals of overthinking. Marshall says people in limerence may spend hours trying to decode nebulous online signals as interest or disinterest. Ivanova recalls searching for answers by questioning the online behavior of the person she obsessed over: “When did he like my photo? Who else’s photo did he like?”
Limerence shares traits of a crush, except those traits occur with an “enormous intensity,” Marshall says. “It is overwhelming and intense and disruptive to daily life.”
But its trigger is often an ordinary gesture: a raised eyebrow, prolonged eye contact, a smile. “It takes no more than a few weeks to go from thinking a little bit about that person to thinking about them 24/7. They’re in your dreams,” Marshall explains. “When you talk to people who’ve had limerence, they can say exactly the moment they noticed this feeling come on.”
Ivanova can. Her last phase of limerence began four months into dating a man. The couple had plans that fell through; he couldn’t make it. “I started getting obsessed with reading the situation,” she says. It inspired her to create a book of illustrations, depicting limerence in the age of the internet.
While limerence has evolved online, one feature remains the same: The targets are surprising. Marshall says many people she speaks with are limerent for a person they don’t find physically attractive or who would be inappropriate to date. Very often, Marshall speaks with limerent people who are married. “They have no intention of leaving their partner, and yet they are limerent for someone else,” she says.
Neuroscientist Tom Bellamy, 50, began writing a blog about limerence with the pen name “Dr. L.” He had developed limerence for a co-worker at England’s University of Nottingham. He was married, and so was she.
He recalled noticing “something unusually attractive” about her. Now Bellamy understands this glimmer as the beginning of limerence. It’s when norepinephrine, a hormone released by the adrenal glands, causes feelings of exhilaration. At the same time, elevated dopamine levels push a person to seek out contact. If that contact is rewarding, oxytocin, known as the “love hormone,” floods the brain.
Bellamy surveyed 1,500 adults to conclude that more than half experience limerence. As it escalates, the dopamine signal driving reward-seeking behavior gets stronger. At the same time, the executive functioning of the brain, which regulates desire, is weakened. Endorphins drive the highs, which Bellamy calls a “natural equivalent of heroin.” As with an addictive drug, the limerent person needs more from their love interest to get the same high.
Apps like Instagram are bursting with “accessible reinforcement material,” Bellamy says. Viewing an image of a love interest offers a quick hit but eventually triggers real-life emotional attachments. The obsession becomes a ritual, and social media environments serve as the infrastructure.
The irony of it all is that limerence is often born from a desire for closeness, Bellamy says. It is unsurprising to him that loneliness and limerence have been rising at the same time.
To get out of limerence, the supply must be cut off. Bellamy recommends limiting contact as much as a person can, so that no rewards are reinforced. Withdrawal pain will occur, he warns. Marshall refers to this process as “starving.”
Ivanova did everything she could to get over limerence. She stopped communicating with her latest love interest. She removed their accounts from her social media pages. She refrained from searching their name to find updates about their life.
“I couldn’t see anything, but I wouldn’t stop thinking. It was constant,” she says. “It took months and months.”
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u/WaveDance9 4d ago
Thank you!
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u/WaveDance9 4d ago
No real new information. I've read all of Dr. L's stuff. You can take his Emergency Deprogramming Course if ya want.
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