Falling In Love With Shadows
I've spent quite a lot of time learning and thinking about neurochemistry. Finding out about neurocellular anatomy, the dynamics of inter- and intracellular signaling, and the particulars of neurotransmitter function has helped me to better understand what goes on in my own quirky skull. The science has illuminated many of the hitherto unknown processes that have driven my emotional life, and this knowledge has helped to minimize my fear.
My continuing research has yielded some quite practical results. For example, my discovery that pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) is a sympathomimetic amine that mimics the effects of adrenaline prompted me to stop taking the stuff for allergy relief, because its neurochemical activity was creating anxiety and other fight-or-flight nonsense.
This practice--research, and the application of that research to my life--has given me the ability to evaluate myself and my behavior objectively. I'm not always good at at it. In fact, I'm often spectacularly bad at it. But like all practices, you have to keep at it, and the longer you do, the better you get. Every so often, I'll come across a new concept that's a perfect mirror.
Most communities develop their own terminology to describe their unique characteristics, and the polyamory community is no different. Some of the terms, however, aren't necessarily unique to the practice of polyamory, and are more community slang than anything else. "NRE" is such a term, and stands for "new relationship energy." It's a concept that will be familiar to anyone who's been in any kind of romantic relationship: the sort of fuzzy, buoyant feeling that occurs when everything in the relationship is new, and you're finding out all sorts of wonderful things about each other, and everything's happy and full of cute plush animals with a minimum of rats. Also called "the pink fluffy stupids."
The unique element within a polyamorous relationship is that partners may experience NRE alongside older, more established relationships, where things have settled down a bit. How well such a relationship fares depends on how well the partners balance these two experiences. Watching your partner react this way towards someone else presents ample opportunity for jealousy, possessiveness, and insecurity to emerge.
However, NRE is not what caught my attention. Instead, a related concept sprang from the page: limerence. (I'm going to quote chunks of the Wikipedia entry, but I do recommend reading the whole thing.)
Limerence, as posited by psychologist Dorothy Tennov, is an involuntary cognitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person (the limerent object). Limerence can often be what is meant when one expresses "having a crush" on someone else although limerence, unlike a crush, can last months, years or even a lifetime. It is characterized by intrusive thinking and pronounced sensitivity to external events that reflect the disposition of the limerent object towards the individual. It can be experienced as intense joy or as extreme despair, depending on whether or not the feelings are reciprocated.[...]
Tennov differentiates between limerence and other emotions by asserting that:
- Love involves concern for the other person's welfare and feeling, while limerence does not require it, although it can be incorporated. The theory that love is a shared emotional bond between two people also prevents limerence being a case of actual love, as the affection may not always be reciprocated.
- Affection and fondness exist only as a disposition towards another person, irrespective of whether those feelings are reciprocated, whereas limerence demands return.
- Sex with the object is neither essential nor sufficient to an individual experiencing limerence, unlike one experiencing sexual attraction.
- Limerence is much longer-lived than feelings such as infatuation, romantic passion, and puppy love, enduring for months or even years.
[...]
Limerence has certain basic components:
- intrusive thinking about the limerent object
- acute longing for reciprocation
- some fleeting and transient relief from unrequited limerence through vivid imagining of action by the limerent object that means reciprocation
- fear of rejection and unsettling shyness in the limerent object's presence
- intensification through adversity
- acute sensitivity to any act, thought, or condition that can be interpreted favorably, and an extraordinary ability to devise or invent "reasonable" explanations for why neutral actions are a sign of hidden passion in the limerent object
- an aching in the chest or stomach when uncertainty is strong
- buoyancy (a feeling of walking on air) when reciprocation seems evident
- a general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background
- a remarkable ability to emphasize what is truly admirable in the limerent object and to avoid dwelling on the negative or render it into another positive attribute.
What really caught my attention was the following simple assertion: "Limerence is first and foremost a condition of cognitive obsession."
I'm no stranger to cognitive obsession. More to the point: I'm no stranger to limerence.
I wish Will Smith was here, so I could record him saying, "I mean...damn," and put up the .MP3 for you to hear.
One of the reasons I study neurochemistry and own a copy of the hated DSM-IV is that there is a certain satisfaction in discovering that I am not the only person in the world who feels or behaves a certain way. It can be disconcerting to recognize some of my own personality or behavioral traits in a textbook. But it is also comforting to realize that these "disorders," so-called, are as much a part of the human condition as love and death.
Thirty years after Dorothy Tennov published the results of her research, limerence is a word that still can't be found in most dictionaries. But there it is, in handy bullet points in a Wikipedia article: a delineation of an experience that I have had repeatedly in my life, distilled from a psychologist's interviews with 500 people.
And in the midst of it, that piquant phrase: cognitive obsession.
Limerence isn't love. It isn't infatuation, or lovesickness, or NRE, or pink fluffy stupids. It can turn into those things, but most often it's a condition. A confluence of psychology and neurochemistry that produces an intensely dramatic physical state which is overwhelming, even devastating. Like all such obsessions...it isn't real. There is no foundation to it outside the boundaries of our skulls.
I firmly believe that it's as possible to become addicted to the chemicals produced by our own brains as it is to chemicals that we introduce into our bodies. I think it's equally possible that there are many people, polyamorous and otherwise, who are drawn to situations that will produce the cascade of neurotransmitters which accompanies that fine old limerent feeling. Sure, the lows are really low, but the highs...man, the highs...
Knowledge is power. Having put a name to this thing, I can put it to rest.
