the glossary · word
what is a limerent object?
limerent object · also called LO
A limerent object, usually shortened to LO, is the specific person a limerent state has latched onto. The phrase sounds cold, and it's meant to. It makes a point that's hard to hear: in limerence the person is often less the cause of the feeling than the screen it gets projected onto. That's why you can know almost nothing real about your LO and still feel like you would rearrange your life for them. And it's why, when one becomes truly unavailable, the state can find someone new within weeks. The intensity belongs to the state. Not to them.
how to tell
- you can describe how they make you feel in enormous detail, and their actual personality barely at all
- the imagined version of them is more vivid than any real conversation you have had
- the feeling survives long stretches with no contact at all
this one has a whole chapter under it. read: is it love, or limerence? →
what to read on this
- Love and Limerence Dorothy Tennov the 1979 book that named the thing. intrusive thinking, the need for them to reciprocate, the fear of rejection, and a burn that runs eighteen months to three years. if you read one book off this page, read this one.
- On Love Stendhal where crystallisation comes from. a novelist mapped projection in love in 1822, two centuries before the researchers got to it, and nobody has described it better since.
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also asked
can you have more than one limerent object?
Usually not at the same time. Limerence tends to be exclusive while it runs, which is part of what makes it feel like destiny. It moves on sequentially instead, and watching it transfer to someone else is often the moment people realise it was never about the first person.
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this is one of about thirty words i have collected for feelings most people never got names for. i send one a week, with the reason it works that way.
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