Coming to you from the most brightly lit Corner that I could find in the hotel room I’m currently staying in and it felt like the right time to make a video that I’ve been thinking about making for quite some time so shortly I’m going to be attending the wedding of two people who I think are beautifully well suited to each other which is always a wonderful thing to witness and I wanted to address what the difference is between compatibility so two people whose Lifestyles and personalities and values just naturally align versus limerence, which is a topic that we cover extensively on this channel.
So if you don’t know what I mean when I say the word limerence I will link a video in the description of this one where I go over what it is and how you can recognize it. But today what I’m predominantly want to do is make some distinctions between the feeling of meeting someone who you are super compatible with and excited about versus experiencing limerence or romantic obsession
Frequently get when I post videos about limerence is some version of isn’t this just normal at the beginning of a relationship to feel like the sun shines out of someone’s butt and you can see none of their flaws is that not just the honeymoon period
So today I want to go over some of the questions you might want to ask yourself if you know that you are someone who is prone to limerence to distinguish whether you are just happy about a new relationship or a new prospect or whether developing crush is kind of falling into limerence territory.
So there’s this tweet that I remember going viral I think earlier this year that said a crush is just a lack of information and that’s actually kind of the premise that I want to base this video on.
So when we first meet someone who we have a romantic interest in it is of course natural to fill in a few of the blanks with fantasy. And to do a little bit of imagining around what it might look like to be with that person.
But for the rest of this video I’m going to break down how someone who’s approaching a crush from a secure I’m okay you’re okay worldview, would fill in those kind of blanks differently,
as they get to know someone, then someone who’s developing limerence would.
so I actually think there’s a lot of Truth to that tweet right when we have a crush on someone it’s often because we don’t know that much about them yet. And we’re thinking about them in a very favorable way.
Now the main difference here is that those who air more secure are going to go about filling in the blanks of what they don’t know about their Crush in a very realistic and measured way.
Versus someone developing limerence is likely to strategically select pieces of information in the getting to know someone process that fits their Fantasy around that person and unconsciously reject all evidence that does not fit their fancy of that person.
So without further do we’re going to go into five questions I encourage you to ask yourself that might help you pinpoint whether you’re just forming the basis of a long-term highly compatible love relationship, or whether you’re in the early or mid-stages of developing limerence.
So question number one, in my opinion this is the most important one, how big is the gap between the way that you think of your relationship in your mind, versus the relationship that exists with this person in reality?
And as a kind of litmus test for this, how would you feel if you had to confess to your crush all of the fantasies you have about them inside of your mind?
Literally picture yourself doing that and see what comes up. And the reason this serves as a relatively good litmus test for limerence is because if you’re non-limerent, so if you’re at the beginning of getting to know someone in a relatively secure way, the way that you think of this person is likely to not be too many steps ahead of where you are in reality.
So if you’ve had one or two dates with them and you’re coming at the relationship from a more secure place it’s likely that the things you’re imagining are what you’re going to talk about on your third date. You might have some kind of questions around compatibility, or what they want out of a relationship, or whatever it is.
But what you’re unlikely to be spending a lot of time doing at this stage, if you’re coming at it once again, from a more secure place, is spending a lot of time on fantasies that exist way in the future and feeling kind of attached to those fantasies already.
So, if I’ve had one coffee date with someone, but I walk away from that date with some elaborate fantasy, about us getting married in a foreign country, in a hot air balloon while string quartet is playing from a hot air balloon that’s hovering nearby, I would probably be pretty
embarrassed to let that person know that that’s what my thoughts are focusing on.
However if I’m approaching the relationship from a more secure place, they’re going to be natural curiosity that crop up about the person. But it probably wouldn’t be that weird if you had to let them know that those were the things you’ve been thinking about.
if you have been obsessively thinking about romantic fantasies involving a person you’ve only had one coffee date with it’s likely that those fantasies don’t have all that much to do with the actual person. Because you probably don’t know the actual person that well. Definitely not well enough to predict how they would behave if you were to spend the rest of your life together after the air balloon reaches the ground and you write off into the sunset for your honeymoon.
But let’s say you’ve been dating someone for multiple years and you’ve gotten engaged, now it’s probably not that weird to disclose your wedding fantasies to them because even if you know you can’t afford those things, the level of commitment that your relationship has does reflect the fantasy you’re having,
So again there’s no hard or fast rule here yes it is normal even if you are securely attached to have a few thoughts and Fantasies around what a life might look like with someone that’s also just part of the getting to know each other process of what you’re looking for is a long-term relationship.
But I really think the litmus test here does come down to, if they could peel open your brain look inside and see the fantasies that you’ve had about them would you feel absolutely mortified because you kind of been objectifying them inside your own mind or would you be like yeah I wish you weren’t looking at my fantasies but there’s nothing really off the rails in there, right.
Nothing that would make me want to kind of shrink away and disappear. And what I want to make clear at this point is that I’m not trying to shame any of us for experiencing limerence and a lot of cases it is a natural response to early developmental wounding.