Limerence
To Ache Is to Almost
Limerence
/ˈlɪm.ər.əns/ – A state of intense infatuation, where desire masquerades as destiny.
n. A psychological phenomenon defined by intrusive thoughts, emotional dependency, and euphoric highs tempered by agonising lows, all tethered to the object of affection.
To the outsider: an obsession. To the insider: a revolution.
Limerence is a ghost-making machine. Between limbo and limerick, where the action is the constant lowering and raising of a bar, and the conclusion is “oh that silly old man!” Is it enough to be muse? Must we be immortalised (like this)?
Anaïs Nin – "I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason."
It is the almost that fills your lungs, slips down the cracks, the ache that sits too comfortably in your ribcage. Once a bell is struck here, it never stops ringing.
The desire to be desired. The desire to desire yourself.
The “falling” part of “falling in love”. The grazing of the knee, the nettles finding where your socks end, hitting the ground chest-first, that dip in your stomach as you race across a bridge on a country lane. Can’t help.
Tennessee Williams – "Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly."
The clinical speaks of attachment systems misfiring, while the afflicted call it magic, call it curse. You can call it trauma-induced, trauma-affected, trauma-inspired, you can call it a lost and lonely search for divine truth and longing in another. Recognition - shards of truth in a darkening universe.
It’s “I got the blues” or “I want the blues” or “blues for my baby” or “blues is a way of living(the only way I know)” or “still got the blues”. It’s jaunty dropped notes out of bebop ricocheting over surfaces in search of reflection, refracting colours through you to keep you warm for a little while in the light of the silv’ry dark side of the moon. And you blow a little deeper, and Coltrane rattles through A Love Supreme. All four parts.
Acknowledgement/
Resolution/
Pursuance/
Psalm.
It is a spell cast by a glance, a hand lingering too long, a conversation that unfolds like prophecy. These words were always meant to be spoken. I will hang on your every word, even if my own tongue remains eternally free from erratic lunatic clutches of knowing. It’s tapping one foot along to the music of you blowing through the leaves outside my window. And knowing I recognise the melody, but can’t quite stick a harmony.
Rumi – "The wound is the place where the light enters you."
It is the if only, the what if, the when. It is seeing them everywhere, even when they're nowhere. It’s a mixed tape in a handmade heart-shaped box left in a hedge outside your house. A morning walk with a guitar and thirteen roses. Every delicately ornate book from an antiquarian haven’s shelves. I bring you pebbles in this torrential rain and the orchestra pit strikes out, warming up, ready for their recurring swell between interlude and reprise.
To those who linger here:
You are not alone in your longing.
We build cathedrals of fantasy, endless temples of "what could be."
But they are made of glass, and we are the ones who shatter them, over and over, just to feel the sharpness. And when the splinters are dullened by time, we seek new stained glass iconography to worship.
To live with limerence is to live inside the space between the body and the dotted tail of a question mark—stretching out, pulling thin, wrapping yourself in the threadbare edges of almost. It’s not an answer but the shape of an answer you once dreamed about - in intimate ink-blotted detail. It’s a breath held just shy of relief, an ache lodged somewhere between your ribs and your throat. It hurts if you don’t let it sing out of you just a little.
Jeanette Winterson – "You said, ‘I love you.’ Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?"
For me, as a bisexual man, my life is a knotted tapestry of questions. Each thread hums with possibility, but also contradiction. Do I yearn differently depending on the object of my longing? Does desire shift with its reflection? And if so, does that reflection say more about them or about me? Do I want or want to be?
There’s no resolution here, no satisfying conclusion to tie up the loose ends. But maybe that’s where its beauty lies. Limerence is raw, tender, reckless—a quivering vulnerability that asks you to risk everything for the faint promise of something extraordinary. And it will always be promising just that.
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again."
Sylvia Plath
And yet, there’s an undercurrent that complicates it further—the pressure to conform, to pick a side, to declare allegiance to a love that feels definitive and final. For some, this might just be compulsive heterosexuality (comp-het). Is bisexuality, then, just a stop along the way to some inevitable queer destiny, to the "completion" of homosexuality or heterosexuality? And in that case, is there a limerence of compulsive homosexuality hidden within bisexuality itself? Or is it just thinly veiled internalised biphobia? The curse of the in-between is that it doesn’t answer anything. It just keeps demanding.
I feel like I’m dressed as the fucking Riddler most days, full of questions, sharp angles, and riddles I can’t ever hope to solve. Barely getting away with it. A villainous imposter with a syndrome for longing.
"I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees."
Pablo Neruda
Limerence is an unravelling. It blurs, smudges, and bends the light until you can’t tell if you’re reaching for connection or simply escaping yourself, a restorative vacation in another. It leaves you floating in the in-between, caught between the world’s demands—be this, love that—and your own voice whispering, what if?
These questions aren’t meant to be answered—they’re meant to be lived. Limerence is raw, chaotic, tender. And when it inevitably ends—as it always does—you’re left not with clarity but with its echoes: a poem, a memory, a ghost of a self you’re yet to fully understand.
Do I want to connect, or do I want to be free? Do I ache because I love, or because I long to love myself? Is there ever an answer, or just the elegant disaster of always reaching? Do I love because I ache?
Perhaps, in living these questions, we find the edges of something real. Something worth writing down. Something worth becoming.
"For love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two eyes, two hearts; but there is only one voice, one breath."
Virginia Woolf
Infatuation: The Spark That Burns the Room Down
There is a moment—always a moment, it’s that fleeting—when the gaze shifts. You notice them noticing you, or you notice yourself noticing them noticing you. The rest of the world becomes poorly rendered, like a background glitch in a low-budget video game. Visions of love refracted through pixelated coding of desire. You exist only here, in this clarity, this disorienting sharpness. Is it love? your mind whispers. No. Not yet. Maybe never. But let’s play along and see what emerges.
They ask if you’ve read Euripides. You haven’t, but you nod along, feeling the thrill of proximity to something profound. It’s not the bookshelves you’re falling for, it’s the way they tilt their head when they say tragedy. You’d reshape yourself to fit the silhouette of their admiration. You begin. You become. You help them clamber up the branches of you into the inner sanctum atop the pine needles and snow-tipped cones.
This is the essence of limerence: a cocktail of dopamine and delusion, shaken until the self is dissolved. A stirred up flurry of emotions that makes an antique spoon stand by itself between the waves of confusion.
"If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me."
W.H. Auden
Crystallisation: The Edges of Illusion
Compulsory heterosexuality (comp-het) is its own kind of limerence: a socially ingrained script whispering that love looks a certain way. That attraction follows rules. That what you feel isn’t infatuation but a rehearsal for forever. It’s the intrusive bedfellow of reproductive futurism.
Queerness complicates this. Limerence, for the queer person, often mirrors identity formation itself: the wanting, the yearning, the trying-on of selves. Do you desire them, or their freedom? Do you want to touch them, or to inherit the audacity with which they inhabit their skin? In the crystallisation phase, this ambiguity becomes your religion. Each interaction feels divine, even as the weight of what-ifs begins to settle into the cracks. Making you feel whole with golden stripes all aglow.
You memorise their favorite drink, the way they wear their exhaustion like a badge of honour, the constellation of freckles near their outstretched limpened wrist. You carve them into poetry, but it’s not them—it’s the shadow they cast across your unwritten pages that you sketch around with smudged left-handed ink. You read Euripides because they do, and you smile at how profoundly it speaks to you, even though you’ve yet to understand what it means. You throw your rocks of adoration into the seams, snipping at the cords that connect your overflowing cups.
“All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—'I love you.'"
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Deterioration: The Breaking Point
This phase is less cinematic. It doesn’t announce itself. It sneaks in between text messages left unanswered, plans deferred, the moment you finally catch yourself asking, Do I want you, or do I want to be you? Its a love left on read. The person who once seemed infinite now appears finite, human, flawed. You notice the crookedness of their smile, the way their laugh echoes just a second too long. And as it decays, you fall in love with the flaws, as the original fires and foundations wither away.
If limerence is the fever dream of connection, deterioration is the cold sweat that wakes you. It’s the realisation that what you were chasing was never them but the version of yourself reflected in their gaze. They never existed. You made a ghost of you into a shroud that conveniently fit over their head for a short time. You miss them, of course, but you also miss the way they made you feel about yourself—important, alive, seen.
And then it’s gone. A whisper.
And the ghost that is left behind is just a knackered old bedsheet with holes that don’t align with your own eyes anymore. And you write the story of O along the frayed hem where the mud crept in, soddened and stained. The next wearer awaits your help down from the tree-house of your devotions.
"This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."
T.S. Eliot
Limerence (A Thr’p’nny Opera) I. K-I-S-S-I-N-G Flipping blackened & whitened jazz cool cat mewing sweetly, a siren call Derided & deliriumming, thrumming, humming, becoming – Adrift in the shallow waters of you, subtly abyssal beneath my curling toes, You ask me if I read Euripides, and I laugh, and say no, of course I haven’t read Euripides. But I love that for you. A distant flash in the pan. I’ll be your baby, any time. Even if it must be rotten work. Your heels fit deftly in the crook of my neck, and I render us a two-piece jigsaw, Carefully hiding the scissors and sticky tape. Lust-cum-love, in pieces. II. Sticks & Precious Stones We sun ourselves out on a windowsill, grinding thoughts of “us” into the dust between our separate bones, make us daily bread from the stray basil petals – interwoven here, there, and everywhere. Time makes a light ribbing (for my pleasure) into words adrift on the breath that binds & entwines, but stillens a crackling lungful of thickening air as you approach the ground again. And I refrain from my habit(ual) catch(ing) reprisal. Grains ricochet through my fingering out to a semi-forgotten guitar solo. Crying bluesy bewitch’d nonsense into the cracks of your porcelain edges. III. Royal Autumnal “We” Return tickets are a luxury – not afforded to everyone. You leave me here, an intricate series of stilted steps, I cradle echoes between my cheek and shoulder, and rock to a fading lullaby we once knew the words to sing. And now I’m reading Euripides, but each page turned is a tear/tear – dragged in the hearts of our shared technicolour/dreamcoat, threadbare lapels clinging onto heavying shoulders, And limerence auto-corrects to Liberace in my phone. And all this pattern recognition tells me this is about the long and short of us. I fail to ask myself, yet again “do I want you or want to be you?” I always thought I liked curly hair – only on other people. & if not for you, I’d have been me everytime.
Suggested Further Reading:
A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes
Crush by Richard Siken
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum
Cures for Love by Stendhal
"I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year."
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Let’s just embrace the all-fucking-consuming ache of it. Let’s write through and out of, beyond our yearning, sing out our transformations, and sit with the brocaded discomfort of what it means to fully and humanely desire. Because even in the breaking, there’s beauty. And even in the wanting, there’s power to be drawn, drafted, and absorbed.
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Leave traces of your ghosts here. This post is a haunted house for your longings. Turn them into ethereal limericks. Oh, what a silly man.
Poet Chaotique. x
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