Regarding Danny Yee’s review of Love and Limerence

Danny Yee's book reviews provide an excellent guide to important ideas as expressed in current literature. His review of my recently reissued book, Love and Limerence: The experience of being in love (LL), is one of the first occasions in which a topic viewed by many as beneath consideration is treated with appropriate seriousness. Such attention as Yee has given the subject may help awaken concerned attention to a phenomenon central to human experience, of widespread depiction and incidence, and yet thus far beyond the range of scientific scrutiny.

Below are excerpts from Yee’s review interspersed with my comments. (For the uninterrupted review, go to http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/book-reviews/h/Love_Limerence.html.)

Yee: Books on love and romantic entanglements abound on the shelves of bookshops, but there are few that take a step back and attempt any kind of hard-headed general investigation. Love and Limerence (reprinted now after twenty years) moves a little in that direction . ...

DT: "Limerence" was stands for a distinct state reported by multiple self-observers interviewed regarding their experiences and opinions concerning romantic love. Questionnaires and overt behavior tallies were unable cut through the clutter, confusion and mist of romantic and sexual attractions, affections, and affiliations. The experiential methods of limerence research uncovered constants across the tales independently told.

Yee: Tennov's central argument, illustrated with accounts from individual experience, is that there is a well defined and involuntary state "limerence" (a term chosen to avoid the confusion surrounding "love"), roughly equating with "being in love". Key features include obsessive thinking about the limerent object, irrationally positive evaluation of their attributes, emotional dependency, and longing for reciprocation. Not all people experience limerence, but it is a normal and non-pathological condition. The negative side of limerence is apparent in the effects of unrequited limerence and the problems limerent behaviour can pose the non-limerent.

DT: That’s a good summary.

Yee: Tennov goes on to look at limerence more broadly, again using accounts of personal experiences. Socially it has widespread effects, most dramatically in marriage and youth suicide.

DT: My (wild) guess is that limerence may be found to be implicated as a causal factor in as many as 80% of divorces, suicides by healthy people, and "passion" homicides.

Yee: Limerence has received generally negative press from psychologists and philosophers.

DT: Despite frequent citation, limerence theory has largely been ignored or misinterpreted rather than seriously criticized by writers in the journals of the human sciences. This is probably at least partly because the introduction of a newly invented term is a hard nut for many to swallow. Unfortunately, a term separate from "love" (with all its many and varied meanings) was needed.

Yee: Turning to sex differences, Tennov finds surprisingly few differences between the sexes in limerence.

DT: Failure to obtain sex differences in the reported nature of the experience was unexpected. Not finding differences does not mean they do not exist, but the research procedures (nonrandom sampling) used in limerence research thus far do not permit comparisons among categories of people.

Yee: Despite taking a broad approach, Tennov skims over some obvious questions. Is limerence really cross-cultural? Almost all of the personal accounts offered are from the United States and all we are given no evidence for generalization (apart from a stray comment about love magic being universal).

DT: Interviews were also conducted in London and Paris. Especially within the past five years, anthropologists (e.g., Helen Harris, Victor de Munck, and Helen Fisher) have reported evidence of limerence in other cultures. Furthermore, the folklore and literature from many cultures describe limerence-like states. This is true even of societies in which romantic love is suppressed. I expect, given the similarity of verbal reports, that the underlying neurological mechanisms will be found to be a species constant.

Yee: What biological basis is there for limerence?

DT: It remains to be seen. So distinct a state is likely to have reliable physiological (and possibly some behavioral) correlates.

Yee: All we are offered is some fairly naive sociobiology (no doubt reflecting the late 70s date).

DT: By the mid-seventies, I had been influenced by such evolutionary writers as George Williams, E. O. Wilson, and David Barash. In LL I drew on examples available at the time that help to place the phenomenon of limerence in the biological context in which I conceived it. Although I have largely resisted the temptation to speculate about the adaptation history of limerence, two features would appear to enhance offspring survival by stabilizing parental relationships, at least for a period of time, are: (1) when the limerence takes hold, "the gates close" thereby rendering the limerent person immune to the attentions of objectively more attractive other possible mates, and (2) limerence demands monogamy.

Yee: But Tennov acknowledges the limitations of Love and Limerence herself, concluding with suggestions for research and writing, "This is a preliminary report. Its purpose is to open a field for investigation".

DT: Yes, yes, yes. LL represents a very small step toward scientific understanding. On the other hand, it is a step not easily taken. Traditions, academic reward structures, and personal experience get in the way. (Why such a small step was so hard to take, and why the next step may be even harder is the subject of an article in preparation in which I speculate about how the nature of limerence, the nature of research traditions, and the nature of human nature combined to inhibit investigation of this aspect of the human condition.)

Yee: Given that love and limerence have become more respectable topics for serious enquiry, however, Love and Limerence really needs to be updated to reflect work done in the last twenty years.

DT: Although love theories and research on relationships has greatly increased since the time of publication of LL, there is little in the literature at this time that is directly relevant to limerence theory. Mostly, "love writers" in and out of academia speak from questionnaire surveys, clinical experience, and personal opinion that too often obscure the distinctiveness and involuntariness of limerence beneath a blanket of irrelevance, vagueness and definitional deficiency. Furthermore, many psychological writers moralize and categorize in ways entirely inappropriate to limerence (notwithstanding their possible value in other situations).

Yee: It won't be of much benefit to the unhappily limerent, but Love and Limerence may contribute to both individual understanding and social policy.

DT: I hope so. The social implications appear to be profound, frightening, fascinating, and ultimately inescapable. The only solace LL provides the lovesick is reassurance that love madness is not true madness. Despite the disruptiveness it causes, it happens to otherwise normal, even quite ordinary, people. Thus it remains for future researchers to discover what calls it into existence and with what circumstances it is associated.

Yee: It can also be read simply as entertainment.

DT: Assuming Danny Lee was referring to the various dramatic soap opera case histories in the book, I’m still waiting for Hollywood to tap me on the shoulder. Sean Penn, do you hear? J !!

Incidentally, a Hollywood movie ("Falling in Love") conceived a few years after publication of LL, but so far as I know, independently of it, portrayed a sequence of steps through which mutual limerence was triggered into existence. Fifty years earlier, David Lean directed the British film "Brief Encounter," a painfully accurate accounting of the same theme. In both treatments, temptation overwhelmed resistance at a critical moment. The somber and compelling realism of the earlier film set in a pre sexual revolution time as well as the pain of parting excruciatingly portrayed by Meryl Streep and Robert de Niro in the more modern post sexual revolutionary time underscore the ubiquity if not the universality of the phenomenon.

Major life decisions forged by limerence may be regretted when limerence wanes. While unrequited or insufficiently requited limerence may die only with the end of life itself, mutual limerence tends to diminish to nonexistence three or four years into marriage, if not sooner. Some people claim that marriages based on passionate attractions are less likely to endure than marriages entered into more realistically, or even matings decided on by nonprincipals. But it is also possible that how good the marriage turns out to be is independent of the circumstances that brought it into being in the first place. Although intensity of mutual limerence may not be a good predictor of successful marriage, surely limerence-based marriages sometimes turn out quite well.

19990904 from Dorothy Tennov