Limerant
Limerence is a state of mind resulting from romantic feelings for another person. It typically involves intrusive and melancholic thoughts, or tragic concerns for the object of one's affection, along with a desire for the reciprocation of one's feelings and to form a relationship with the object of love.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term "limerence" as an alteration of "amorance" without other etymologies to describe a concept that had grown out of her work in the 1960s, when she interviewed over 500 people on the topic of love. In her book Love and Limerence, she writes that "to be in a state of limerence is to feel what is usually termed 'being in love.'" She coined the term to disambiguate the state from other less-overwhelming emotions, and to avoid the implication that those who do not experience it are not capable of experiencing love.
According to Tennov and others, limerence can be considered romantic love, passionate love, infatuation, lovesickness or even love madness. It's also sometimes compared to a crush, but contrasted as being much more intense.
Love and Limerence has been called the seminal work on romantic love. Anthropologist and author Helen Fisher wrote that data collection on romantic attraction started with Tennov collecting survey results, diaries, and other personal accounts. Fisher, who knew Tennov and corresponded with her, has commented that Tennov's concept had a sad component to it.
Limerence is associated with dopamine reward circuits in the brain. The early stage of romantic love has been called an altered mental state and compared to a behavioral addiction or an addiction to a person. Brain scans suggest that people experience motivational salience in response to a loved one. A long-running theory also compared the associated intrusive thinking to obsessive-compulsive disorder with a hypothesis that this is related to lowered serotonin levels in the brain, but the experimental evidence for that is ambiguous.
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