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Limerence
Romantic love, the state of being in love, lovesickness or even love madness / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Limerence is a state of mind which results from romantic feelings for another person, and typically includes intrusive, melancholic thoughts, or tragic concerns for the object of one's affection as well as a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and to have one's feelings reciprocated.
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Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term "limerence" as an alteration of the word "amorance" with no other etymology[1] to describe a concept that had grown out of her work in the mid-1960s, when she interviewed over 500 people on the topic of love.[2] 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.'"[3] She coined the term to distinguish between this and other less-overwhelming emotions[4] and to avoid implying that people who do not experience it cannot experience love.[5]
According to Tennov and others, limerence can be considered romantic love[1][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], passionate love[14][10][12] or infatuation.[15][8] It's also sometimes compared to a crush, but contrasted as being much more intense.[16]
Anthropologist and author Helen Fisher has written that data collection on romantic attraction started with Love and Limerence, with Tennov collecting survey results, diaries, and other personal accounts.[17] Fisher (who knew Tennov[18] and corresponded with her)[19] has commented that Tennov's concept had a sad component to it.[18]
Limerence is associated with dopamine reward circuits in the brain.[10][20][21][8][16] A long-running theory compared intrusive thinking associated with romantic love (and limerence) to obsessive-compulsive disorder[13] with a hypothesis that this is related to lowered serotonin levels in the brain,[19] but the experimental evidence is ambiguous.[12]