Researchers are learning more about “limerence,” a term for obsessive, involuntary love that often goes unrequited.
WWe were all longing for a love that we knew was impossible. Such passions can burn hot, especially when we are young and inexperienced, but they tend to fizzle out almost as quickly as they ignite. As we get older, many of us learn to love people who will love us equally. But some continue to cling to one-sided love affairs. And when this unrequited love becomes obsessive, all-consuming, even involuntary and addictive, when it drags on for years, we leave the territory of falling in love for a much stranger and more love-stricken land: the land of the famous.
The term “fame” was coined in the 1970s by psychologist and philosopher of science Dorothy Tennow, who drew on decades of her own research, including thousands of questionnaires and case studies, as well as autobiographies and published personal diaries. She noticed that many people from a wide variety of time periods, backgrounds, and life circumstances shared unrequited romantic experiences that had some remarkably consistent features. In his 1979 book Love and LimerenceTennov defined fame as “an uncontrollable, biologically determined, inherently irrational, instinctive reaction.”
One of the most quixotic features of fame is the ability of the sufferer to temporarily satisfy his desires through the imagination. As Tennow writes, people with fame have “an acute sensitivity to any action, thought or condition that can be construed positively, and an extraordinary ability to invent or invent 'reasonable' explanations for why the neutrality that a disinterested observer might see is actually a sign of hidden passion” on the part of the object of their interest.
According to a recent report, today's circumstances may be ripe for a surge in prominent love affairs. review: It's easier than ever to feed a romantic obsession with a steady diet of idealized images and stories about a person's daily life on social media. And indeed, whole community people suffering from fame exist on Reddit, which receives 40,000 visitors a week. But fame is not a formal diagnosis. The condition also does not have obvious overlap with existing clinical disorders such as erotomania, also known as de Clérambault's syndrome, a paranoid condition in which a person believes that another is infatuated with them.
Despite the dearth of psychological research on the subject of fame, some clear parameters have been established: People with fame tend to crave affection rather than sex, and only maintain these feelings for one love object at any given time. One sustaining force is the uncertainty of whether one's affection will be returned: she loves me, she doesn't love me. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the likelihood of obsession, rumination, and angst.
In her popular blog MarginalEssayist and author Maria Popova writes that limerence is “an attachment style whose origins are still unclear,” and that many people who suffer from it are “otherwise intelligent and high-functioning.” While race, gender, age or sexual orientation do not appear to have any impact on who is famous, they do seem to tend to affect people in creative professions more, which she attributes to the fact that “the process of fame itself is in some sense a creative process—a process of sustained attention and selective amplification.”
One of the most classic cases of extraordinary love in literature may be Jay Gatsby's obsession with Daisy Buchanan in the 1925 novel. The Great Gatsby. To be honest, Gatsby doesn't love the real Daisy. This is her idealized version, what she represents. Daisy ultimately does not return Gatsby's affection, but his obsession with her consumes his entire life. Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, “There must have been moments, even in that day, when Daisy lost her dreams—through no fault of her own, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusions.”
A certain amount of illusion fuels all forms of love, but fame suggests that too much fantasy can ultimately leave a person adrift and unmoored on the high seas of one-sided romance.
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