by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Getting Out of Limerence by Returning to REALNESS
Have you ever felt so absolutely “in love” with somebody that it reached the point of almost feeling like madness or insanity?
It might’ve felt a little like this:
Your thoughts revolved around them, your mood would rise and fall depending on their responses, you’d replay conversations over and over again in your mind, you’d analyse the tiniest gestures and so a simple smile became a signal or a chance encounter became your destiny, and if they replied to your text it would make your day but if they ignored it it would ruin your whole week (or beyond)…
Experiences of ‘love’ like this can feel completely intense, intoxicating, and strangely meaningful – as though fate itself has intervened in your love life – but, beneath the excitement, something else often lurks: anxiety, obsession, and a growing sense that your life has somehow become smaller and more dramatic than it needs to be.
This kind of experience has a name: Limerence.
Understanding it – and how to move beyond it – can help you return to something far more powerful and stable than the maddening kind of obsession that we call “love”: your REALNESS.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Limerence & Realness: What We'll Cover in this Article
- Getting Out of Limerence by Returning to REALNESS
- What Is Limerence?
- The Void: Life After Losing Touch With Ourselves
- The Ache of the Void
- Limerence: When We Try to Fill the Void With Another Person
- The Two Possible Outcomes of Limerence
- Why Uncertainty Makes Limerence Worse
- The Biggest Illusion of Limerence
- Limerence & Returning to Realness
- The Path Out of Limerence
- Changing Your Relationship With Uncertainty
- More Practical Steps to Break Free From Limerence
- The Final Word: The Real ‘Cure’ for Limerence
What Is Limerence?
The term limerence was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in the 1970s while she was attempting to study romantic love scientifically.
What she noticed was that what many people describe as “being in love” often includes a very specific set of psychological symptoms:
- Intrusive thoughts about the other person.
- Emotional highs and lows depending on how they respond.
- A desperate need for reciprocation.
- Hyper-sensitivity to small signals.
- Idealisation of the person.
- Intense longing and emotional dependency.
In other words, limerence is less like stable, real love and more like an emotional rollercoaster:
It feels intoxicating because the brain is constantly searching for signals that the feeling is mutual and so when a signal appears, we experience euphoria but when it doesn’t, we crash into despair.
From the outside, then, limerence can look romantic but from the inside it often feels closer to obsession and starting to move past it is about understanding the deeper truth which is that:
Limerence isn’t really about the other person but it’s about what’s happening inside us.
To understand why this is we need to start by exploring what I call the Void:
The Void: Life After Losing Touch With Ourselves
Many people move through life carrying a sense of inner emptiness:
They may function well on the surface in their jobs, relationships, and routines – for example – but something feels missing underneath it all.
This ‘missingness’ is the Void:
The Void appears when we become disconnected from the truth about ourselves and life in our REALNESS and this always happens because we pick up shame, guilt, and/or trauma along with some kind of social conditioning that teaches us that very real ‘parts’ of ourselves are unacceptable.
To survive and be accepted in the world, we hide these parts away in what’s known as the Shadow Self but they never disappear (because what’s real is always real) – instead, they simply move into the background of our psyche where they continue influencing us unconsciously.
Whilst all of this is going on, we develop a kind of protective mask – a kind of character designed to help us navigate the world without the ‘parts’ that we’ve attempted to hide from or send into exile:
This mask is the Ego and it’s not evil or anything like that because it’s just a survival strategy – unfortunately, it holds us back because of a simple truth about life:
The ego can only ever react to the Void – not to reality itself.
When we live according to the ego alone, then we’re no longer responding directly to life but end up reacting to a distorted inner landscape created by fragmentation (disconnection from the self and life in wholeness).
It’s this fragmentation that creates a powerful sense that something is ‘missing’ and that we need to find something ‘out there’ in the world to feel complete again.
The Ache of the Void
When we’re disconnected from realness and enter the Void, then life begins to feel incomplete and so there’s often a subtle ache or longing in the form of a feeling that there must be “more” to life than this (and, there is – the realness that we became disconnected from).
Because we don’t realise the problem is an inner split but think it’s just the way life is or whatever, then we start looking for solutions outside ourselves.
This is why you see so many people in the world attempting to fill the Void with all kinds of substitutes:
- Money
- Status
- Shopping
- Sex
- Power
- Achievement
- Endless entertainment
- Literally anything
Many of these things aren’t ‘bad’ in themselves – in fact, they can be perfectly ‘good’ healthy parts of life as a whole but the problem arises when we start treating these ‘god’ things as the ultimate solutions to our problems.
The truth is that literally nothing in the external world can permanently fill the Void because the Void was created by losing connection with the truth about ourselves and life and so the only thing that can overcome that split is truth itself.
Until we realise this, however, we keep searching for substitutes and one of the most powerful substitutes humans reach for is romantic love in the form of LIMERENCE.
Limerence: When We Try to Fill the Void With Another Person
Limerence happens when we unconsciously decide that another human being will fill the Void for us.
We see someone and feel an immediate emotional pull – instead of simply experiencing attraction, then the odds are that we’re just projecting all of our unmet emotional needs onto them.
What this means is that they become the symbol of everything we believe we’re missing in our relationship with ourselves and life.
(For example, happiness, completion, validation, meaning or whatever else the Void has caused us to feel is missing).
In other words, they become the ultimate thing.
Once this happens, the mind begins constructing a fantasy around them and so we idealise them, put them on a pedestal, and interpret everything they do through the lens of our longing – this process is usually unconscious, which is why it feels so powerful and mysterious.
As Carl Jung famously said:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
In other words, the destiny narrative we end up constructing around the object of our affections (the “limerent object”) is actually just a projection of what’s going on inside ourselves – not reality itself.
The Two Possible Outcomes of Limerence
Limerence like this usually plays out in one of two ways:
1. The Feelings Are Reciprocated
Occasionally, the person we idealise returns our feelings:
At first, this can feel like confirmation that the universe has delivered exactly what we needed but relationships built on projection tend to become dramatic.
This is for one pretty simple reason:
Anything placed on a pedestal must eventually fall off it.
Over time, reality breaks through the fantasy of projection and the real person emerges and – as the projections collapse – disappointment follows and what began as magical can quickly become chaotic.
2. The Feelings Are Not Reciprocated
More commonly, the limerent object does not fully return our feelings and this just ends up creating lovesickness which is a painful cycle of hope and despair.
People in this state often spend years searching for signs that the other person secretly feels the same way:
A smile becomes evidence, a casual message becomes a signal, a coincidence becomes destiny.
The mind begins interpreting neutral events as confirmation of what it wants to believe rather than what is actually true and what’s scary is that this cycle can last years – sometimes even decades or whole lifetimes.
Why Uncertainty Makes Limerence Worse
One of the most powerful drivers of limerence is uncertainty because it creates two psychological traps:
1. It Creates Emotional Tension
When we don’t know how someone feels about us, the mind stays alert, searching for clues and this constant anticipation generates a kind of emotional suspense that keeps us hooked.
2. We Project Into the Unknown
When information is missing, the mind fills the gap and – when we’re in limerence – it fills that gap with our own feelings.
For example, we start assuming the other person must feel the same way – even when there is little evidence.
This is because uncertainty becomes the perfect canvas for projection and so we can fill it with whatever we WANT (instead of questioning it to find out the TRUTH and start overcoming the Void).
The Biggest Illusion of Limerence
Perhaps the most dangerous belief in limerence is when we start thinking things along the lines of:
“My feelings are so deep that they must mean something is true”.
This is such a common trap that people fall into (especially if they’re really struggling with the Void) but the bottom line is simle:
Depth of feeling does not equal truth.
Feelings are powerful but they are also fragments which means that they shift, conflict with each other, and change or disappear over time.
On the other side of the coin, the TRUTH, is about wholeness which means that it’s stable and unchanging.
When we place feelings above reality, we begin distorting life itself in order to maintain the emotional story we want to believe but that distortion always creates friction and suffering.
Part of the way forward is realising that it’s not about believing what we WANT to believe but about learning to believe what’s actually true.
Limerence & Returning to Realness
The way out of limerence is not to suppress feelings or become emotionally numb but to return to reality because reality is always medicine:
That might sound dramatic but all it means is that when we stop prioritising our emotional projections and start prioritising truth again then the fantasy dissolves and other person stops being the centre of our world.
Life itself becomes the centre of itself again.
This shift requires a change in priorities because instead of making another person the ultimate thing in our lives, we make our relationship with life itself the ultimate thing.
This is pretty much the only thing that can help us to get out of limerence and to do it we need to move through three stages:
The Path Out of Limerence
These three stages (Awareness, Acceptance, and Action) are the three stages I build my coaching containers around when working with clients.
They can help us with any transformational journey we’re going through in life:
1. Awareness – Deconstruct the Ego
The first step is always recognising what’s actually happening by raising awareness of how our self-image is holding us back.
In the case of limerence, you can get started by asking yourself things like:
- What needs am I projecting onto this person?
- What do I believe they will ‘fix’ in my life?
- What needs do I think this person will meet that I can only meet myself?
Simply becoming aware of projection begins weakening its hold and, when you see the pattern clearly, it loses much of its power.
2. Acceptance – Integrate the Shadow
The next step is to turn towards the parts of yourself that you’ve been (unconsciously) avoiding.
Usually, limerence appears and takes a hold of us when we’re disconnected from our own sense of worth, purpose, or emotional wholeness and so – instead of chasing validation externally – healing begins by accepting the parts of yourself you’ve pushed into the shadows.
This includes:
- Acknowledging emotional wounds.
- Accepting imperfections.
- Recognising unmet needs.
- Taking responsibility for our inner world
Integration reduces the fragmentation that created the Void in the first place by returning you to a sense of wholeness.
3. Action – Trust Yourself and Life
Finally, we need to start redirecting our energy back into life instead of into our fantasies and so instead of obsessing about another person, we start building something real.
This means:
- Creating a meaningful vision for your life.
- Breaking that vision into goals.
- Developing habits that move you towards growth.
As you invest energy into real life, your sense of identity becomes rooted in something stable again which means that the limerent obsession can finally fade because your life becomes larger than it.
Changing Your Relationship With Uncertainty
Another crucial step on the journey to overcoming limerence is learning to work with uncertainty rather than projecting into it.
Uncertainty is not a problem – it’s just a feature of life.
When we create a vision and move towards meaningful goals then we take a degree of control over our lives because it allows uncertainty to become a space for growth rather than a space for fantasy.
For example, instead of asking:
“Do they love me?”
You begin asking things like:
“What kind of life am I building?”
This shift moves your focus from outside-in living to inside-out living and so you don’t need to regulate yourself based on how something external is treating you but how you treat yourself.
If you want to go deeper into your realness and leaving the void then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
More Practical Steps to Break Free From Limerence
If you find yourself caught up in limerence, then the following steps can help you return to realness instead:
1. Stop feeding the fantasy: Limit behaviours that reinforce your obsession like constant social media checking, re-reading messages, or analysing every interaction and looking for meaning that aligns with what you want to believe more than the truth.
2. Write down the projections: List what you believe the person represents like love, security, validation, or whatever else and then ask whether those things can actually come from your relationship with yourself and life instead.
3. Reconnect with your life: Redirect energy into real activities that serve your growth like work, creativity, friendships, physical health, and getting out in nature. Life expands and the Void closes when attention returns to life itself.
4. Accept uncertainty: You may never know exactly how the other person feels and that’s okay. Remind yourself constantly that truth doesn’t require perfect certainty to move forward (it requires trust).
5. Build a vision: Define the kind of person you want to become and the life you want to build then break this vision into goals and habits.
6. Remember that feelings are not truth: Feelings are information about your automatic reactions to life – not reality itself. Remind yourself that truth emerges from wholeness, not emotional intensity.
The Final Word: The Real ‘Cure’ for Limerence
Limerence can feel overwhelming because it seems like the other person holds the key to your happiness but the deeper truth is more simple:
The key is your relationship with yourself and life first and foremost.
Limerence isn’t proof that you’ve met “the One” (plus, there are many of “the ones” for everybody) but it’s a sign that you have temporarily lost contact with yourself.
The cure isn’t in finding the perfect person but in is returning to realness which is a state of being rooted in truth, connection to life, and where you’re no longer searching for substitutes to fill an inner void.
When you live from that place, relationships are no longer desperate attempts to fill the emptiness of the Void but something much deeper:
Two whole people meeting in reality.
This kind of connection doesn’t require obsession but TRUTH.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start overcoming the Void and growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start raising awareness, cultivating acceptance, and taking real action.
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