Limerence and the divine

The first stanza of Conrad Aiken’s high-poem, Tetelestai goes:

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,

The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?

Is there a horn we should not blow as proudly

For the meanest of us all, who creeps his days,

Guarding his heart from blows, to die obscurely?

I am no king, have laid no kingdoms waste,

Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs

Of weeping women through long walls of trumpets;

Say rather I am no one, or an atom;

Say rather, two great gods in a vault of starlight

Play ponderingly at chess; and at the game's end

One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor

And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece

Forgotten there, left motionless, is I....

Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,

Am only one of millions, mostly silent;

One who came with lips and hands and a heart,

Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.

Say that the fates of time and space obscured me,

Led me a thousand ways to pain, bemused me,

Wrapped me in ugliness; and like great spiders

Dispatched me at their leisure.... Well, what then?

Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,

The horns of glory blowing above my burial?

Harold Bloom once claimed that nothing can explain the meaning of a poem except another poem, but the thrust of this is, in a way, simple. A dead or dying man says: “Look, I have nothing to bring before you, I have no great achievements, but I lived, and I was human. Whatever else you might say or insist, my death is a momentous event, because every life is a world, and a world has ended. Come then, mourn me in glory.”

The moment of death is in some ways just another moment, I could say the same at every moment. I am a member of a species that is the closest thing to Gods, so far at least, that we have ever observed, or at least have definitive records of observing. Why am I wallowing down here? Why are any of us wallowing down here?

Since Plato, at least, people have thought that one ladder out of the mundane world may be love. While Plato’s account seems to me to have been wrong, I did feel like being in ‘love’ lifted me to a realm that felt more real. More made of narratives, less made of mere concrete stuff.

Recently I went to a talk by Samuel Shapall on limerence and philosophy. These are my reflections.

I

Limerence is a state of romantic obsession with a particular person. It is far from universal- Tennov, the inventor of the term, thought that only 5% of the population was capable of it. It is common in OCD and Borderline Personality Disorder, two otherwise very different mental illnesses. It is not only found in mental illness, healthy people can experience it. As Sam argued in his talk, it can be wholly healthy, especially when reciprocated. It is important, I think, not to over-define it. It’s a state of romantic obsession. Wikipedia’s opening paragraph is perfectly sufficient, if anything it probably includes extranea:

Limerence is a state of mind that 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.

My stab at a definition would be:

1. Romantic feelings,

2. Obsession, i.e., powerful intrusive thoughts, spending hours thinking about the person, which flow from the romantic feelings. Obsession is a powerful state of emotional and cognitive entracement, not just a few stray thoughts.

It has many other features, of course. You could spend a lifetime studying the features of limerence, but these other features are not, I think, essential to defining it.

What I remember about the experience of limerence was escaping other fears, at least for a time. I wonder if this helps explain its frequency in OCD. Of course, Limerence becomes involved with obsessive fear itself, but unlike all of the other fears, it offers a measure of transcendence.

To be in that fire negates the dull grinding fear of death, of public shame, of ordinary failure. It throws you into another world, a world of stories and gods. A world full of terrors, to be sure, but fresh terrors- to have OCD is not just to be afraid, be to be so tired of being afraid in the same ways. It's an obsessive substitute for boring obsessions and there is beauty in it too, not just variety. It crowds out the mechanical destruction of your mind by itself. I can even remember being attracted to it for exactly that reason- almost to the point of tactical choice- it's like a riot against an occupying power in your mind. It gave me a sense of freedom of movement. Or perhaps it was like being riddled with calcified, freezing structures to the edge of immobility, and suddenly they melted. The gorgeous relaxation of muscles, the relief of warmth the extended range of motion. It subverts the mechanism- of OCD "You demand an obsession? Okay, how about this then".

The thing about defense mechanisms is that they're not a long-term option, but for some people, they might make a short-term difference that keeps them going

II

Something that interests me about limerence is the way it's associated with a desire to sacrifice, almost like the sacrifices one would offer a divine being. People will say things like "I wanted to give him everything", “I would have changed myself into anything for him”, “I would have given up anything he wanted me to” and of course, old reliable “I would die for him”. There is a sentiment here that goes at least a little beyond a willingness to sacrifice to a positive urge to sacrifice.

At Sam’s talk, someone spoke of pop songs and their limerent element in arguing against the claim that only 5% of the population can experience limerence- if this were so, why does almost every singer sing of it? And why does it resonate with their audiences? The pop song I've heard lately that best captures limerence captures the sacrificial element, "My Youth" by Troye Sivan. The singer describes his feelings in terms of the ecstatic sacrifice of his youth:

I have a long-term interest in human auto-sacrifice in art. The sacrificial element really sticks out to me in limerence, particularly in relation to the claim that limerence is inherently objectifying. Something about the nature of wanting to sacrifice to a thing seems to me to embody relating to that thing as a subject rather than an object.

Now when I put this to Sam, and to a friend of mine who had also experienced limerence, they responded that this wasn’t quite right because the sacrifice that the subject contemplates is to secure something for themselves- viz, the limerent object. It is not altruistic.

I realized then that I hadn’t put my point quite right. When I said that the desire to sacrifice in limerence makes limerence less objectifying, I did not mean it because the sacrificial desire was a form of altruism. No, I agree the desire to sacrifice in limerence is often deeply selfish, but it still relates to the other as another. The other looms, like some God you’re trying to bargain with. Sacrifice is the mark of the divine.

It’s objectifying in the sense that in many cases you’re not really relating to the person, you’re relating to a fantasy you’ve created. it’s not objectifying in the sense that you are relating to a person, a kind of super-subject superimposed on the real person. It has many of the dangers of objectification, but objectification seems like the wrong psychological process to describe, in fact it seems like the exact opposite of what’s going on in some ways. It’s more like personification of something that’s already a person. If there must be a word, super-subjectification. It is not unlike going around the world and assigning gods to things. For example, imposing the soul of a god on the sea and then trying to bargain with it through imaginary contracts and real sacrifices- except if the sea were, also a real person and not a god.

III

I loved someone once if you want to call limerence love- and why not, it’s what most of the poets call love. I still think about him from time to time, he seems to be doing well, which makes me happy, though he appears to me now as an ordinary, if attractive and confident man, and not a god.

He assaulted someone once with a golf club in three-quarters justified but certainly not fully justified circumstances. He avoided prosecution. At the time I knew. I had no doubt that it was a wrongful act, but the darkness of it seemed alluring. During the question time for Sam’s talk, I suggested that the view that limerence makes you see only the positives in people is wrong, rather you find yourself thinking “his darkness for me be light”.

Tennov and Stendahl talk about a process called crystallization, whereby the limerent begins to see the limerent object as flawless, perfect, and beautiful. While Stendahl seems to have been mostly talking about physical beauty in relation to crystallization, I took it from Sam’s talk that Tennov saw the process as extending to the psychological- as rationalizing all imperfections. This was not my experience, I did not see my limerent object as perfect.

I would see my experience as more akin to mythologization. When we read about Zeus or Poseideon’s appetite for rape, Thor’s willingness to kill innocents, etc., etc. we do not relate to them negatively as a result because they are, so to speak, beyond good and evil. To call them perfect or imperfect would be to miss the point. They are divine. We’re not really allowed to judge them, or if we do, despite ourselves, we are being cheeky and not wholly serious, or we have stopped relating to them as mythical at least for a time. All their evil, and all their good, become just aesthetic richness. Likewise, the limerent object was as a god to me. I wonder if my experiences are not atypical- if, for many people apparently rationalizing the beloved’s moral flaws is psychologically shallow and the real process is in exalting them above such thing. If indeed:

“That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”

Love, even when it is not limerent, always picks out something as anointed, it always toys with the divine and can either bestow the lover as divine, the beloved as divine or both. The daring specificity of specific love, the arbitrary quality of its providence and election in a world full of people who all deserve love, both embraces the moral aesthetic of the divine and is beyond good and evil. No wonder because these two tend to go together.

An ancient problem, our strongest love is generally for particular people, but we need to make a world that cares for everyone. How to make a society that cares for everyone impartially without making the insane demand that individuals should all act and feel impartially? It sounds insane, but it’s an engineering problem we’ve already made great progress on and we can make more.

A few details have been changed to protect the more-or-less innocent

IV

Is there a politically radical and subversive potential to this divine aspect of limerence? I think so. I saw a bag at a queer conference once that said "Lovers are brave" and I've thought about it ever since. Queer love has been reimagined by liberalism as something that fits comfortably into existing structures, responsible, mutually fulfilling relationships etc. Yet limerence is explosive- it rages against structures- poverty, borders, queerphobia, etc. that seek to contain it. One might say that it is apolitical because it is individualistic- yet it can have an oddly egalitarian-universalist aspect "This is beautiful and everyone should have it". "The barriers to this must be destroyed, not just for me but for everyone". Like Plato's conception of love, love, especially love that is opposed by oppressive social structures, ultimately points to something beyond a particular love, and also like Plato's conception of love, it points to an idea of the good- something like society as a commonwealth of potential lovers, free in their capacity to love. A world more, for want of a better word, cosmic and thus by necessity freer of petty tyrannies. Of course, love in general has this effect but the explosive, and unplanned, quality of limerence makes the question of freedom especially salient.

Some have argued that love has taken the role of religion in our society. To the extent this was ever true, I do not think it is true anymore. Love has taken quite the reputational hit, and to the extent it is still valorized, it is whittled down in definition to capture something safe, orderly, and encompassed by liberalism. Limerence represents a different possibility. Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say a better possibility- a world run on limerence would be both impossible and insane, but at least limerence doesn’t take our world’s apathetic cruelties at their face.

V

To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet done a really good omnibus study on what features are empirically associated with limerence. If such a study were conducted I’d want to know:

1. Which of the big five traits is limerence associated with

2. Is limerence associated with high or low altruism

3. Is limerence more left or right-wing?

4. What’s the gender breakdown

5. Age at onset of various episodes

6. Overall prevalence

7. Relationship to culture

8. Socioeconomic breakdown

9. What percentage of limerence is reciprocated

10. What percentage of cases of limerence are ultimately remembered as positive