Limerence: Four Things it Means When We Fixate on Someone

When I dug up my old journals to process my patterns of trauma bonding, I cringed. There’s a reason I don’t regularly re-read my life’s scribbles.

Pages and pages and pages fixated on this boy, or that boy, this friendship, or that friendship.

I wanted to slam the journals shut and scream, “He’s just a dude! He wasn’t even that impressive! He abused you! Your life is way better off!”

It’s embarrassing to see myself fixated on people who were not worth the pedastal I’d propped them onto.

In garnering self awareness, I could see that my romantic partners and friends were, just like myself, nuanced and imperfect human beings struggling with mental health issues.

It’s also difficult to look back on my reflections without recognizing the ways I was being obsessed over and stalked by narcissists.

Because I had such low self worth and deemed myself so uninteresting, I could never imagine anyone becoming fixated enough to stalk me; thus, I was a perfectly oblivious stalking victim.

I didn’t realize the danger of a stranger’s attention on me until I was face to face with the life or death consequences of someone else’s limerence.

Even now, two years after my stalking and sexual assaults, I still think of my stalker every day. He’s like a ghost that haunts me.

Like him, I, too, have been prone to limerence since I was a child.

Whether it was my favorite celebrity or my crush at school, when I developed affection for someone, they flooded my brain — a rash of endorphins, adrenaline, and cortisol.

But no one person could be singularly special enough for the kind of obsession that limerence causes the brain.

So, what does it say about YOU psychologically if you fixate on other people?

What does it mean when we obsess about someone?

1) You Have Unprocessed Despair

A person afflicted with limerence is a person who has buried grief they’ve not processed.