Dear Jessi:

You asked me: “does limerence makes you exaggerate attributes or qualities?”- if you look at the post I submitted to you yesterday, it included the quote from Wikipedia about limerence: “attractive characteristics are exaggerated“.

Elsewhere I read about limerence (LO stands for Limerent Object, in your case it is the woman your boyfriend is obsessed with), that a major characteristic of limerence is “a powerful perception that the LO is nearly flawless (good qualities are magnified; bad qualities strongly minimized)”- so yes, exaggerating the LO’s positive attributes or qualities is a necessary part of limerence. If a person does not exaggerate the other’s positive qualities- then it’s not limerence.

Other characteristics of limerence are: obsessively thinking about the LO to the point of ignoring things that need attention/ everyday productivity suffers, feelings of euphoria or ecstasy when he imagines that she is reciprocating his emotions, and sexual desire for her.

Every time the LO responds to him, she is feeding his limerence.

And I read, that if a person gets together with the LO, living together, the limerence fades, the person sees the (no longer) LO’s faults, becomes very distressed about it and blames her for the ending of the relationship that he wrongly believed would be the best thing ever, ecstasy or euphoria forever-after.

I’ve been active here for over five years and came across lots of women who placed men on pedestals, seeing them as perfect, and I came across men who did the same- it is very common. But never did I read such an extreme description of placing a person on a pedestal such as what you described. Your extreme description brought me to the term limerence, a term I didn’t think about earlier. Your boyfriend puts his LO on such a pedestal that he sees her as curvy when she is actually thin; he sees as Marilyn Monroe look-alike when (you say) there is no resemblance, etc.

Limerence is not a psychiatric term, but I have no doubt it could  be, reads like a mental illness to me.

I have a question for you, Jessi: how do you manage this, how do you maintain an intimate relationship with your boyfriend knowing he is .. well, “definitely not normal”???

anita

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