limerence
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.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term "limerence" as an alteration of the word "amorance" with no other etymology to describe a concept that had grown out of her work in the 1960s, when she interviewed over 500 people on the topic of love. 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.'" She coined the term to distinguish between this and other less-overwhelming emotions and to avoid implying that people who do not experience it cannot experience love.
According to Tennov and others, limerence can be considered romantic love, passionate love, infatuation, lovesickness or even love madness. It's also sometimes compared to a crush, but contrasted as being much more intense.
Love and Limerence has been called the seminal work on romantic love. Anthropologist and author Helen Fisher wrote that data collection on romantic attraction started with Tennov collecting survey results, diaries, and other personal accounts. Fisher (who knew Tennov and corresponded with her) has commented that Tennov's concept had a sad component to it.
Limerence is associated with dopamine reward circuits in the brain. The early stage of romantic love has been called an altered mental state and compared to a behavioral addiction. Brain scans suggest that people experience motivational salience in response to a loved one. A long-running theory also compared the associated intrusive thinking to obsessive-compulsive disorder with a hypothesis that this is related to lowered serotonin levels in the brain, but the experimental evidence for that is ambiguous.
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