Limerence Is Not Love: A Tender Letter for Anyone Still Reaching

My dear lovely friends, I am thinking of all of you who are reaching for love today. The ones lying awake at three in the morning replaying a single text. The ones rehearsing a conversation that may never happen. The ones whose chest tightens every time the phone lights up - or doesn't. The ones who keep walking back, again and again, to a person, a memory, a possibility that never quite forms into anything real.

I have been one of you. I have sat with thousands of seekers across more than thirty years of readings, and I can tell you with certainty: there is something pure in your reaching. Even when what you are feeling has been distorted, masked, or wearing a face that isn't yours - the longing underneath is sacred. It is just you, the soul of you, trying to come home.

But today I want to speak gently about something that has hurt many of us. Something that disguises itself in the robes of love and asks us to bow before it. Limerence. And it is not love - though it can sparkle in a similar way. It can dress like love, dance like love, even taste like love for a few stolen hours. But limerence is something else entirely. Embodied disappointment. The ego draped in a delicious costume. An involuntary, often obsessive trance of romantic infatuation that mimics the real thing - but, over time, leaves you starved.

If you are reading this and your chest is tightening - sweetheart, slow down. Take a breath. You are not broken. You are not foolish. You are caught in a very old human pattern, and naming it is the first sacred step out.

What is actually happening in your body

Limerence is what happens when the nervous system mistakes intensity for intimacy. Stephen Porges, the polyvagal theorist, would tell you that what you are feeling is not connection - it is activation. The same dopamine and norepinephrine cocktail that fuels addiction, laid over a story you are weaving about one specific person. It feels like destiny. It feels like recognition. It feels like the universe is finally answering a prayer you have been whispering since you were five years old.

That is what makes it so cruel. Because the feeling is real. The longing is real. The ache in your body when they don't text back is unmistakably real. But the story your nervous system is generating to soothe an ancient wound - that this person is the one, that they will eventually see you, that the connection is mutual and simply buried beneath their fear - that part is the trance.

Limerence is, at its core, an unhealed part of you reaching for someone who cannot meet you, and calling that reach love. It is the inner child running across the room toward whoever vaguely resembles the parent who never quite arrived. And the longer you stay in it, the more you forget what real love even feels like in your body.

The carousel that circulates and never advances

Limerence is a fantasy where we ride a carousel that circulates - and never advances. We go up and down with the texts, the looks, the maybes. We mistake the motion for progress. We mistake the dizziness for chemistry. We tell ourselves just one more turn, just one more night, just one more sign - and the carousel keeps spinning, and the years quietly walk past us.

It is driven by three engines, my friend, and you should know each of them by name.

The first is uncertainty. Limerence cannot survive in clarity. It needs the maybe. It needs the unanswered text, the cryptic emoji, the warm Tuesday and the cold Thursday. The moment a person becomes fully present and consistent, limerence loses its fuel. This is why we so often fall into limerence with people who are unavailable - emotionally, geographically, romantically, energetically. The unavailability is not a flaw in the situation. It is the engine.

I remember a night in an ashram long ago when Amma’s embrace held me in a silence deeper than words. My chest was tight, the usual restless mind quieted not by effort but by sheer presence. It was in that stillness, the raw ache of wanting and not having, that I felt something crack open inside-a letting go that was less about loss and more about finally dropping the story I’d been telling myself. Years ago, before I left the tech world, I led a workshop in Denver on shaking and breath work to release stuck emotions. One man came in carrying a weight so dense I could see it in his posture. As we worked, his body trembled, tears streaking down as old grief surfed through him. I didn’t offer platitudes. I just stayed with the tremors, the raw release. Watching him finally exhale the years of tightness-that’s when I knew this was the real work of love.

The second is the ache for reciprocation. Limerence is not really about the other person. Read that line again, slowly. It is about the fantasy of finally being chosen. Every breadcrumb is filtered through the lens of an ancient hunger - the hunger to be seen, to be picked, to be enough at last. We are not falling in love with them. We are falling in love with the idea that they might one day prove we are worthy of love.

The third is the addictive pull of validation. The dopamine hit when they reply. The crash when they don't. The compulsive checking. The mental rehearsing. The hours and hours of internal narration. This is not romance. This is your beautiful brain caught in a slot machine - and the house always wins.

The sacred you we hand away

When entranced by limerence, we abandon ourselves - often forgetting the magic that makes us who we are. This is the part that breaks me open. Because the souls who fall into limerence are usually some of the most beautiful, sensitive, deep-feeling humans on this earth. People with enormous capacity for love. People who feel everything. People who have been waiting their whole lives for someone to actually see them.

And in the trance, they hand themselves over.

They start contorting. Editing texts thirty times before sending. Pretending to like things they don't. Pretending not to need things they do. They stop calling friends. They stop creating. They stop sleeping. They stop praying, walking, dancing - the practices that once anchored them in their own light. They begin running every small decision through a single internal question: what will they think?

Here is the cruelest truth, beloved. The more we abandon ourselves, the less of us there is for the other person to actually love. We become a shimmering projection of who we imagine they want - and a shimmering projection cannot be loved. It can only be admired from a distance, possessed, or eventually pitied. Real love requires a real person standing in her own bones. And in limerence, we slowly disappear from our own life.

The grief at the bottom of the well

Hidden within limerence is sadness, grief, and the inability to accept our relationship is not what we believe it to be. This is the truth at the bottom of the well, my love. And it is worth going down there with a candle.

Limerence is, almost always, grief refusing to be felt. Grief for the parent who could not see us. Grief for the partner who left - or the one who stayed but never arrived. Grief for the version of ourselves we set down somewhere along the way when life got hard. Grief for the love story we wanted but did not receive. Limerence takes all that unbearable grief and wraps it around a single person - because it is somehow easier to obsess about one human than to feel the totality of a life that did not love us the way we needed.

Gabor Maté has said that addiction is not the problem - it is the painkiller. Limerence is the same. It is medicine for an ache the soul has not yet been allowed to weep over.

When you let yourself feel that grief - really feel it, in your body, with tears, with shaking, with the long slow exhale that comes after - limerence loses its grip. Not because the person stops mattering. Because you finally do.

What love actually is

Love is grounded, sovereign, supportive, awakening, clearing - and slow-built. Love is always bound by respect - and rooted in mutual trust and full acceptance.

Read those words again, beloved. Let them settle into your bones.

Grounded - real love does not send you spinning. It steadies you. It feels like the earth meeting your feet, not the floor falling away.

Sovereign - real love does not require you to disappear. It honors your edges. It celebrates the parts of you that are entirely your own and asks for nothing in exchange but presence.

Supportive - real love wants you well. It wants you fed, slept, creative, in your body, in your purpose. It does not want you waiting by a phone.

Awakening - real love expands you into more of yourself, not less. After time with someone who truly loves you, you feel more like you - not less.

Clearing - real love brings what is hidden into the light. It does not require games, tests, or performance. It is honest, even when honesty is hard.

Slow-built - real love is not a lightning strike. It is a garden. It is tended. It is fed. It is watered through ordinary Tuesdays and difficult Februarys. It deepens through the unsexy work of showing up.

This is what you deserve. This is what you are made of. And anything that demands less of you - any carousel, any costume, any beautiful intoxicating maybe - is asking you to settle for a counterfeit of the real thing.

Coming home

Having lost ourselves in the mirage, we might struggle for a time to regain our position as a self-loved, mature, positive, and powerful human being. I want you to know - this struggle is allowed. It is not a sign that you are broken. It is the slow, holy work of returning to yourself.

Start small. Eat a real meal. Walk outside without your phone. Call the friend you have been ignoring. Cry, if the tears are there. Sit with the silence. Notice - without judgment, without shame - every time the mind tries to drift back to the obsession, and gently, gently, bring yourself back to your own breath.

Pray, if you pray. Meditate, if you meditate. Move your body. Feed the magic that makes you you - the music, the writing, the cooking, the gardening, the strange beautiful thing that is yours and yours alone. Amma teaches that the love we are seeking has been inside us the whole time, and that the work of awakening is simply the slow turning of the head toward what was always already here. The Advaita teachers said the same thing in fewer words: Tat tvam asi. You are That. You always were.

The longing is the love trying to come home.

When you turn toward yourself with the same tenderness you have been pouring into the fantasy - when you become for yourself the witness, the parent, the beloved you have been chasing in someone else - the spell begins to dissolve. Not all at once. Not cleanly. But surely. Day by day. Breath by breath.

You are not the one who got away from someone else, my friend. You are the one you have been waiting for.

So now I will ask you the only question that matters. Will you keep riding the carousel - or will you step down, on shaking legs, and walk back into your own life?

I love you. Keep going. Real love is real, and it is coming - but first, come home to yourself. The carousel will keep spinning without you. You have a garden to tend, a soul to feed, and a thousand more years of joy to live.

May you be free. May you be loved. May you remember who you are.

With love,

Paul