This is a general overview of how limerence and anxious attachment are sometimes conflated (starting from Tennov’s material, but continued throughout various academic literature).
On the outset, I should say that anxious attachment clearly seems to make limerence worse for people, and it's possible that anxious attachment increases how often people experience it. There are also a number of studies showing a correlation between anxious attachment and different obsession measures (1, 2, 3, 4). They're just different things.
However, there are some people (academics, even) who actually seem to think that limerence and anxious attachment are the same thing and don't understand that there's actually a whole other thing which Tennov is trying to describe. One paper even outright says this, and several others refer to that paper or allude to the theory by referring to a concept called desperate love (which is related to anxious attachment).
Brief overview of Tennov’s definition of limerence
I highly recommend reading this post first: incurable romantics.
Tennov has compared limerence to “romantic love” many times.
One of the most illuminating sessions was when Dorothy Tennov [...] described her attempts to find a suitable term for 'romantic love.' [...] 'I first used the term "amorance" then changed it back to "limerence,"' she told her audience. 'It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever.' (The Observer)
Limerence has been called “romantic love” as opposed to “real love” because to a vocal and often very articulate segment of the population it is unreal. But even when limerence is not believed in, or believed in only secretly, it still makes a good tale. (Love and Limerence, p. 161)
Writers have been philosophizing, moralizing, and eulogizing on the subject of “erotic,” “passionate,” “romantic” love (i.e., limerence) since Plato (and surely long before that). (Love and Limerence, p. 172)
Tennov appears to be using a definition of “romantic love” which relates to the literary tradition (often stories about tragic love) or love which is intense in a fantastical kind of way but impractical. (Limerence is real; she just uses these stories as a template for what she's talking about.)
Tennov has also specified that while “nonlimerents” reported obsession to her, limerence for her is defined in terms of intrusive thoughts:
Such synonyms as “being in love,” “romantic love,” “passionate love,” and “erotic love” were all used in descriptions of sexual companionate relationships by people who were later recognized as nonlimerents through their responses to key questions that referred, for example, to intrusiveness of thought. (Love and Limerence, p. 116)
Nonlimerent lovers interviewed also used the word "obsession" to describe their reaction to a new lover, particularly during the early "courting" phase of the relationship. But this obsession seemed more like the kind of intense interest a person might have for a new hobby or possession rather than like true limerent obsession. Nonlimerent lovers do not report intrusive preoccupation, but rather that thoughts of the person are frequent and pleasurable. The only disadvantage to this "obsession" is that they might get carried away in conversation with others (much as might the owner of a new racing car). (Love and Limerence, pp. 114-115)
Later in her career, Tennov has compared limerence to love madness.
(As a side note, in the modern day, some people also compare limerence to a crush which takes over their life. There are also some people who report more unusual stuff, like not being able to stop thinking about a person and not really understanding why, yet not really identifying as "in love" at all, or platonic limerence. By comparing limerence to love madness, I'm not forgetting about these other sorts of things. Human experience has more variation than these simplified concepts usually allow for. We have to start somewhere though, by understanding Tennov's concept here.)
Tennov’s concept can be understood as the intersection of a number of things.
She basically has an overarching theory that these are all related somehow: that love madness occurs in these “romantic” situations as a result of separation, infrequent encounters, uneven reciprocation, etc. (see e.g. pp. 56-57). The component listing she gives on pp. 23-24 is basically "being lovesick". (People happily in love don't need "fleeting and transient relief", for example. Her component listing is not just "being in love".)
According to Tennov's theory (in her later writing), limerence begins before you have a relationship and before you know for certain whether the feeling is reciprocated. Tennov is concerned with falling in love in a particular way in a type of situation. There's some sort of a separation or ambiguity (uncertainty) and this creates love madness or sickness. Sometimes it turns into a relationship or sex, but usually it's more tragic. That's basically her concept.
There are actually people who say they feel "madly" in love even after 10+ years, and there are brain scans of this. However, they don't exhibit the same level of obsessive symptoms as people experiencing limerence. In her original writings, Tennov seemed to think that limerence is the only way to fall in love (or to fall in love intensely), but she was definitely wrong about that. This is kind of an issue, because it's unclear how the word is supposed to be used: does it refer to a psychological state (like "madly in love")? Or does it require this type of situation?
In Helen Fisher's work (on limerence, arguably—see here), she uses the term "romantic love" to refer to the psychological state, but doesn't require a type of situation. Love research terminology is pretty confusing.
Most people on the internet today seem to me to be using the term "limerence" to refer to "romantic" love (in the sense meant by Tennov, outlined in that book chapter by Tallis), although they're unaware that the term "romantic love" was originally invented to refer to this. In this sense, limerence is impractical love, often destructive to the person experiencing it, "unreal" in the sense that some people wouldn't even believe you if you tried to explain it to them, and so on.
As a side note, I ignored "crystallization" in my diagram because it's complicated to categorize. It seems to be a normal aspect of falling in love (related to psychological state) but the degree to which a person crystallizes is probably related to how well they know the person and how well the person fits an actual ideal.
The diagram is meant to illustrate how Tennov's concept has a number of components which are separable. One question we're wondering here is whether limerence happens inside relationships. If it does, according to Tennov's descriptions, we are also wondering if it's really the same phenomenon as limerence outside relationships.
Anxious attachment as it relates to limerence
Tennov appears to have conflated her concept with the anxious attachment style, I suppose based on misunderstanding stories she heard in interviews (i.e. people who thought they were talking about limerence because of the superficial similarities, but actually weren’t). Tennov then appears to have drawn inferences about how limerence works based on these observations. This contaminated her overall theory.
For example, on pp. 136-137 she talks quite a bit about “nonlimerents” reporting their experiences in relationships with “limerent” people, but the descriptions appear to actually pertain to anxious attachment:
But nonlimerents often find themselves the unwitting causes of suffering that seems real but that they are at a loss to comprehend. A young woman described her relationship with several men:
“It seemed that I was more in love, at least at first. I would become attracted, want to spend a lot of time with them, enjoyed the process of discovering common interests, and even found myself creatively inspired by the relationship. But after a while, things would suddenly change and I would be asked where I thought the relationship was ‘going.’ This was a question that always puzzled me, because I was quite happy about where it was and didn’t feel any need for it to be more than what it was.”
In such cases (I found that there were many), the partner seemed stricken with a kind of insatiability; it seemed that no degree of attentiveness was ever sufficient.
“For example, they would call and wonder what I was doing when I really had something to do that was important to me and had nothing to do with them. They acted as if everything I did absolutely had to involve them all the time, at every turn.
“But it is not as bad as it used to be because I have learned to be very clear and definite. I recognize the signs of trouble, and when it starts, I simply leave. After a while, maybe four or five months, I can go back and things will be civil. They simply have to learn that if they want my companionship at all, they must let me breathe.”
The word “suffocation” was used repeatedly in reports by interviewees fitting the nonlimerent pattern. As one said about “in love” lovers:
“They are always being ‘hurt,’ and it’s impossible to predict what will hurt them. I’ll have a good time at a party only to be hit on the way home with something like, ‘Why did you ignore me all evening?’ Really, it’s exasperating!”
People on Reddit, for example, say that anxious attachment is “like walking on eggshells” and “suffocation”. They say almost the exact same things.
Another story on p. 133 sounds like two people who are anxiously attached, or maybe just young and inexperienced:
“Throughout our entire relationship, it was always apparent to me, and I believe equally apparent to Emma, that one or the other of us was more in love. Sometimes she was the one; sometimes it was me. We always seemed to know who it was. It was a very unstable situation, because as soon as she seemed interested in me, my anxiety lessened, and that nervousness that I lost turned out to be a part of the love. Or so it seemed. It was dumb. I know it was dumb, but that’s the way it went, just the same, for the whole two years before we finally broke up.”
Another story on pp. 53-54 seems to detail the relationship between an anxious attached man (or he could be secure) and an avoidant woman:
Gregory had been married to Beatrice for 25 years and had feared that she would leave him at any moment throughout almost the entire period. This uncertainty perpetuated his limerence, providing both fear—and joy.
“I lived in constant fear of divorce. The only times I even felt at all safe were when she was pregnant or had a small child. It just didn’t seem likely that she would walk out under these conditions. Not that walking out was really the issue. I’d feel uncertain and “put out” even when there was nothing I could quite put my finger on, nothing I could actually accuse her of. I would do everything I could think of to try and win her affection. I’d buy flowers, take the kids out, mow the lawn, paint the kitchen, just about anything I thought she’d like. Sometimes she’d give me a look of real appreciation; other times she’d get angry. She was unpredictable. I could never be sure of how she’d react, whether something I’d do to please her would have the right effect or its opposite.
“And it was all done very subtly, no fighting or screaming or anything crude like that. And another thing, she was always beautiful. From the day I met her until the day she died, she was the most beautiful woman on earth. And she really was. Other men thought so, too. She never got fat or let herself go, and she wore clothes with elegance. She was a real queen and she ruled my emotions for a quarter of a century. It’s completely different now with Beth. She and I are more like equals, like really good friends.
It's also interesting that Greg reports a “completely different” relationship with Beth (who we could assume has a secure attachment style, unlike Beatrice). It could be something else too, but that's how it would be interpreted through attachment theory. It makes more sense than interpreting this as limerence.
Tennov's discussion of "uncertainty" and the Romeo and Juliet effect is actually inside this section of the book (on fear of rejection), which I think is a good indication of how Tennov is drawing inferences here.
"Uncertainty" is also sometimes interpreted as intermittent reinforcement (ala this article, though it's actually originally from a paper by Sternberg). There are other ways to interpret uncertainty theory, but when Tennov is talking about it (when she invented it), she's talking about fear of rejection, anxious attachment, playing hard-to-get and the Romeo and Juliet effect. Looking at Tennov's actual text (rather than reinterpreting it) will help us understand her theory, and also help us understand why other people have different impressions when reading it. Uncertainty theory can be reinterpreted as relating to addiction mechanics, but Tennov was not aware of this in her time and her section on uncertainty doesn't appear to be talking about this. In Tennov's original text, uncertainty mostly relates to fear of rejection and separation.
Limerence would also make a person feel anxious (or uncertain, in Tennov's nomenclature), but what's interesting about the above stories is that they actually seem to not be about limerence at all. Adult attachment styles didn't exist until the 1980s, so Tennov would not have been aware of the concept.
When Tennov introduces her fear of rejection concept (pp. 48-49), she seems to be talking about being shy or overly nervous because of limerence—with the quote from Sappho and the truck driver story. This type of thing is a component of infatuation (measured by Sandra Langeslag's infatuation scale) and Helen Fisher has a theory that this has to do with increased dopamine concentrations. It's probably a different thing from anxious attachment, which Tennov also talks about in the same section. In other words, Tennov uses the term "fear of rejection" to refer to multiple things. Some of it is related to anxious attachment, some of it isn't.
I don't think Tennov is actually trying to ascribe anxious attachment to limerence. Anxious attachment, for example, is sometimes associated with self-esteem, and Tennov seems to decry the idea that limerence is caused by low self-esteem (pp. x, 185).
I started to think that Tennov actually misunderstood these stories about anxious attachment to be limerence when they aren't. (I mean, the other possibility is that anxious attachment is supposed to be a component of limerence, but it doesn't seem so based on her other writings.)
Other authors with similar writings
In Cindy Hazan & Phil Shaver’s original 1987 paper saying that adult relationships are attachments, they suggest that an avoidant partner can make a secure partner think and feel anxious. (Similar to the story with Greg and Beatrice.)
The anxious/ambivalent subjects experienced love as involving obsession, desire for reciprocation and union, emotional highs and lows, and extreme sexual attraction and jealousy. They provided a close fit to Tennov's (1979) description of limerence and Hindy and Schwarz's (1984) conception of anxious romantic attachment, suggesting that the difference between what Tennov called love and limerence is the difference between secure and anxious/ambivalent attachment.
[...]
In general, we have probably overemphasized the degree to which attachment style and attachment-related feelings are traits rather than products of unique person-situation interactions. Attachment researchers often vacillate between using the terms secure, avoidant, and anxious/ambivalent to describe relationships and using them to categorize people. We have focused here on personal continuity, but we do not wish to deny that relationships are complex, powerful phenomena with causal effects beyond those predictable from personality variables alone. A secure person trying to build a relationship with an anxious/ambivalent person might be pushed to feel and act avoidant. An avoidant person might cause a secure partner to feel and act anxious, and so on.
John Alan Lee has also discussed similar things in relation to love styles. (See here for introduction to love styles. Limerence is the most similar to mania.)
Eros is a conception of love centered on an expectation of intense emotional and physical attraction to the beloved. [...] If the would-be erotic love is going to succeed in this lovestyle, he or she must have a high level of self-assurance. Otherwise, the lover is likely to slip into a manic lovestyle.
Ludus (lew-dus) comes to us from the Latin (play or game) and was first described by the ancient Roman poet Ovid. [...] As with eros, the player of ludus who lacks sufficient ability is likely to slip into mania.
Mania is an obsessive, possessive, over-intense, anxious approach to love. [...] The lover is in desperate need of repeated reassurances of love, but even if these reassurances are offered, the manic lover cannot believe them. (Ideologies of Lovestyle and Sexstyle, in Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior, 1998, edited by Victor De Munck, pp. 36-37)
There is one exception to the rule of proximity: mania and ludus. They are close enough on the chart, but hold very different definitions of love. If you are looking for a happy, mutual love, these two do not match. The chart, however, is not entirely misleading about these love-styles. It is surprisingly common to find relationships in which one partner is manic, the other ludic. These two loves do have a fatal attraction for each other, and a manic-ludic match is bound to be interesting, if not happy. (Love-styles, in The Psychology of Love, 1988, edited by Robert Sternberg, p. 54)
According to analysis by Karandashev, the corresponding love attitudes can be categorized as following: eros-secure, mania-anxious, ludus-avoidant. The interactions observed by Lee can also be interpreted through attachment theory. "Slipping into mania" for Lee is like a person becoming anxiously attached.
Interestingly Lee has also written that separation can force an eros lover into mania (i.e. limerence, or it could be interpreted as separation causing attachment anxiety):
After an erotic love is more fully developed it can tolerate longer periods of separation, but the lover will never lose his reliance on physical expression. [...] A person newly in love is often tempted to test his experience to prove that it is really love. Usually such tests are based on a monotypical concept of love, and are therefore frequently mistaken and disastrous. In the case of eros, testing the love by arranging a total separation of a week is likely to shift the type of love expressed by the lover into mania, while at the same time reducing the chances of a mutual erotic response from the partner. (The Colors of Love, 1977, p. 29)
Mania and limerence are basically the same thing, but Lee's focus on anxious attachment is more pronounced than Tennov. Lee talks about anxious attachment fairly often (saying e.g. that the manic lover needs to be often reassured of being loved), but not by name because like Tennov he was writing about this in the '70s before adult attachment styles existed. Lee also associates mania with some features which Tennov denies (jealousy, possessiveness—characteristics sometimes called obsessive love).
Lee has also written that both eros and manic lovers report intense preoccupation:
In the case of the obsessive, jealous love which I eventually labeled mania, the lover's experiences were often similar to those associated with eros as I had redefined it, but there were some important differences. Both types of lovers were emotionally upset by early encounters with the beloved, but in eros the emotions were hopeful anticipation and delight, while in mania they were emotions of hesitation and self-doubt. Eros and mania also shared intense preoccupation with the beloved, but in eros the thoughts were optimistic, while manic lovers went half way to meet trouble. (The Colors of Love, 1977, pp. 89-90)
Eros is basically a "romantic" love style in that they experience passionate love (or i.e. infatuation), but they're more secure than manic lovers. They know what they're looking for and they don't fall in love too early. It sounds to me like eros lovers are people who could experience limerence (if they made a mistake) but they have a healthier attraction pattern. See here for some other differences. Typically manic lovers recall an unhappy childhood, and eros lovers recall a happy one. (Again, like I mentioned earlier, Tennov's taxonomy is too simple and she seems to have just missed that there are people who actually fall in love in a way besides limerence. Eros is regarded as a healthy love style.)
Another similar concept here is Michael Sperling’s desperate love. Sperling has said in his master’s thesis that desperate love is not the same thing as limerence. Rather, desperate love is basically the same as mania, and can be thought of as a subset of limerence.
Whether using the term desperate love, limerence, mania, or anxious attachment, the themes of insecurity, need for reciprocation, urgency and affective extremes are common throughout. Yet even with these broad similarities there are slight but important differences which have led to use of the term desperate love. For example, in addition to the illogical construction of the word, limerence is a more general concept highlighting the need for reciprocation and affective extremes without adequately stressing the insecurity and neediness of the individual. In this sense desperate love can be thought of as a subset of limerence. Anxious attachment is described more as a style of behavior than a style of love relationship. it certainly is encompassed within the constellation of behaviors characteristic of desperate love, but is not unique to desperate love. Mania, or obsessive love, is basically descriptive of the identical phenomenon as desperate love. (Discriminant Measures for Desperate Love, Master’s Thesis, Sperling, 1983)
Desperate love is supposed to be passionate love plus anxious attachment (again, similar to mania):
Discusses desperate love as a style of relating that incorporates the behavioral and affective dimensions of passionate love with the intrapsychic dynamics of much anxiety associated with attachment and an extraordinary need for interdependence. (Sperling, 1988)
So overall, we can see these authors think there's some sort of a relationship between lovesickness and anxious attachment.
Going back to Hazan & Shaver's original paper, we can notice the following quote:
...the difference between what Tennov called love and limerence is the difference between secure and anxious/ambivalent attachment.
Hazan & Shaver were originally saying that they thought limerence and anxious attachment are the same thing.
In fact, in a 1985 book chapter, they also say this:
In Love and Limerence, Tennov contrasts "love," which other writers (e.g., Berscheid & Walster, 1974; Kelley, 1983; Walster & Walster, 1978) have called "companionate love," with "limerence"—passionate or romantic love—a phenomenon so remarkable when examined in detail that Tennov felt compelled to coin a new name for it.
So Hazan & Shaver actually considered limerence to be passionate love at this point. In 1987 then, they seem to be arguing that passionate love is anxious attachment, while calling it limerence. Since they want to say that secure attachment is "love", they call anxious attachment "limerence".
When Feeney & Noller tested this theory, they found that the anxiously attached group scored highly on their custom limerence instrument, but also found considerable overlap between all attachment styles and limerence. This study basically disproved Hazan & Shaver's theory, although Feeney & Noller present their result as if it supports the theory. (See this article for the quote from their paper and more commentary.) Feeney & Noller only showed that people with an anxious attachment style feel more intense romantic love (i.e. anxious attachment enhances limerence—something like that).
Also, just for rhetorical reasons, I want to point out that in Feeney & Noller's study, the anxiously attached group also scored high on the agape measure (self-sacrificing love). However, they don't conclude that anxious attachment and agape are related.
Reciprocation theory
Tennov appears to have basically incorporated her observations of anxious attachment into her theory that 1) the “goal” of limerence is reciprocation and 2) limerence ends when reciprocation occurs.
The objective that you as a limerent persistently pursue, as is clear in the fantasy that occupies virtually your every waking moment, is a “return of feelings.” The ecstatically blissful moment, toward which your long fantasies progress and your short fantasies depict in living color, is the moment in which LO gives what you accept as clear indication that the limerent goal has been achieved. But what actions on LO’s part are required? What, truly, does “return of feeling” mean?
Uncertainty about LO’s true reaction is an essential aspect of your own limerence. Removal of the uncertainty is the goal, and because your desire is so unrelenting, so imperative, you continually search for the meanings underlying events. (Love and Limerence, p. 57)
The goal of limerence is not possession, but a kind of merging, a “oneness,” the ecstatic bliss of mutual reciprocation. (Love and Limerence, p. 120)
In a later essay, Tennov has also plainly stated that she believes limerence ends with this perceived reciprocation:
A's condition continues to be controlled by perception of LO's behavior until [...]: [...] LO reciprocates and enters into a committed and monogamous relationship with A. However, not even marriage necessarily satisfies this condition if LO, as spouse, continues to emit behaviors interpreted by A as nonlimerence. Only if the reciprocation is sustained and believable will limerence intensity diminish. In the ideal situation, it will be replaced by another type of love.
Again, this seems based on Tennov’s perception of stories which are actually describing anxious attachment. There are actually modern authors who think romantic obsession inside a relationship is related to anxious attachment (Acevedo & Aron, Graham). If that's true, it would kind of explain whatever Tennov thought she was observing. (I'm not sure at the moment if that means limerence can actually be perpetuated inside a relationship by having an anxious attachment style, or if this type of romantic obsession would be different from limerence.)
A different, more modern theory is that limerence diminishes with habituation to the loved person (Bellamy) or is related to oxytocin (Zou et al.). This explains, for example, why limerence is perpetuated by intermittent reinforcement (Tennov, Sternberg).
One thing to note here is that Tennov thinks limerence ends with mutual limerence, but this is contradicted by the story she tells on p. 133—the supposedly mutually limerent relationship perpetuating itself uncomfortably. That story bugged me for a long time until I realized Tennov is probably talking about attachment styles without realizing it sometimes.
For what it's worth, John Lee thinks a manic lover is best paired with an eros lover. This is similar to a limerent-limerent relationship with one person having a secure style and the other anxious. From what I know about attachment styles, secure-anxious is a "correct" pairing, so Lee's recommendation is in line with other authors. Tennov might have called eros nonlimerent, but it's a good partner for a limerent person.
"Modern" limerence papers
For anyone unfamiliar with this subject, there's a string of papers which were written starting in 2008, supposedly about limerence but they're trash. They're written by fringe authors outside major journals. Most of them aren't even peer-reviewed. The people writing them don't have credentials. I have some comments on the Wikipedia talk page, if anyone wants to learn more about this: starting here and downwards. These papers are basically clumsily arguing that limerence (the construct in Tennov's book—which is actually being lovesick or madly in love) is a disorder, and they attribute its properties to other things (OCD, anxious attachment).
(By the way, OCD theory actually comes from mainstream romantic love research. See here for a list of papers.)
The misunderstanding that limerence is anxious attachment continues into the literature of these modern authors. For example, in Albert Wakin’s paper, he appears to be describing anxious attachment in places:
At this point, L’s mood becomes highly dependent on LO, spanning from the extreme of ecstasy to that of depression, rendering a distinctive pattern of affective lability. L begins to feel somewhat out of control. L may wish and even intend to reduce or stop L’s thinking and behavior, or even to terminate the relationship. However, because of the involuntary nature of limerence, L is unable to successfully execute his/her intentions, thereby inducing deep feelings of powerlessness. This creates pronounced feelings of anxiety [...]. This in turn motivates L to undertake compensatory behavior [...]. Since L’s behavior is continually recalibrated, LO’s responsive feedback is correspondingly altered, resulting in more uncertainty and anxiety, ultimately perpetuating the overall cycle. L’s increasing preoccupation with and absorption in LO becomes such that L withdraws from and neglects other aspects of his/her life, resulting in his/her functioning being impaired. However, since L is unable to successfully reduce or stop his/her thinking and behavior despite the desire and intention to do so, L is confronted with deep feelings of shame and guilt. To reconcile the cognitive dissonance that involves remaining in a relationship despite evident discomfort and distress, L is likely to cope by cognitively justifying the overall experience by placing greater emphasis and importance on the relationship. This further increases the acuteness and urgency for emotional reciprocation, thereby reinitiating the entire limerent cycle and subjecting L to a type of self-entrapment.
Wakin has also stated in internet articles that limerence actually never ends, even with reciprocation:
"A man or woman suffering from limerence is in a constant state of compulsory longing for another person," Wakin tells me over the phone. "It doesn't matter if their affection is returned; nothing will satiate their need for emotional reciprocation."
He has never presented evidence for this. If this theory is based on real observations, it could be like Tennov, i.e. actually observations of anxious attachment in relationships.
Robin Banker’s theory is largely derived from the attachment theory papers by Hazan & Shaver and Feeney & Noller as well as superficial comparisons between limerence and anxious attachment. (Also comparisons with “perfectionism”—basically narcissism—see here.) However, she ignores the fact that Feeney & Noller found limerence across all attachment styles. Banker lays down her argument on pp. 52-54 of her paper (pp. 60-62 of the pdf) if you want to read it. Her entire paper is just her making stuff up without evidence.
Willmott & Bentley refer to Sperling as if desperate love is comparable to limerence:
Limerence may also be associated with attachment disorders, as recognised by Sperling (1985) in his description of Desperate Love (akin to Limerence), with the potential role of early caregiver attachments highlighted regarding some positive, but mostly negative experiences (Willmott & Bentley, 2012).
Willmott & Bentley also seem to not understand what the psychological state of limerence denotes, as they describe it this way:
The [limerence] themes primarily regard experiences of ruminative thinking, free floating anxiety and depression temporarily fixated and the disintegration of the self. These themes are further linked to an inclination to reintegrate unresolved past life(s) experiences and to progress to a state of greater authenticity (i.e., being truer to one's inner self). A paradigm shift is identified in the realization that both a real and idealized Limerent Object are involved which may relate to attachment anxieties.
They might have presupposed that limerence is related to anxious attachment, so they describe it in terms of rumination and attachment anxiety. However, limerence is so much more than that. One of Tom Bellamy's readers says "I feel like I'm going crazy". Here's a story from Reddit which I think is useful. It's unclear how Willmott & Bentley's description relates to a story like that.
Bradbury et al. is also under a misconception that desperate love is the same thing as limerence:
Limerence has also been defined as an attachment disorder (Sperling 1985) and a separation anxiety disorder (5th ed.; DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association 2013) (Willmott and Bentley 2015).
Bradbury even falsely attributes this claim that limerence is an “attachment disorder” to Sperling. All of these people just make things up like this. Recall that Sperling says that desperate love and limerence are actually different things in his paper (the one Bradbury cites). Sperling specifically says that limerence doesn’t have the same qualities of “insecurity and neediness of the individual” he attributes to desperate love.
I suppose that none of these authors has ever experienced love madness to understand what state limerence is actually supposed to denote. Their material is almost entirely based on superficial semantic comparisons (like "this sounds similar to that"), usually in reference to Tennov's material, and almost never in relation to real cases.
Lynn Willmott's paper isn't a scientific study. There's no hypothesis testing or experiment. The worst part about her paper is that she never actually asked her subjects what attachment style they have, whether they actually had childhood trauma or what their relationship was with their parents.
There is some real research on attachment styles (linked at the beginning of the article) and even on childhood trauma (from John Lee's research, because he asked people if their childhood was happy or not). These limerence papers are just bad papers.
For good measure, here are also some examples of contemporary internet authors who seem to think limerence is related to anxious attachment:
[...] having an anxious attachment style or expecting another person to fill the inner void caused in childhood, may increase the likelihood of experiencing limerence.
Importantly, limerence is not caused by the LO – it’s caused by the limerent’s anxiety and insecurities. (Simply Psychology)
Limerence is distinct from love as it tends to includes idealising the object of affection (the “limerent object”), experiencing intrusive thoughts about them, and an intense desire for reciprocation, which are not primary elements of secure love. When delving into this complex emotional state, we find intricate layers of emotions and motivations, including attachment issues. (North Brisbane Psychologists)
In relationships, someone with an anxious attachment style experiences preoccupation with the relationship and their partner, is emotionally dependent, and has low self-esteem. They base their self-esteem on the approval and acceptance of others, which creates a strong fear of rejection and failure to please their partner. This is very similar to the profile of limerence and, thus, in many cases, it’s likely that limerence stems from an anxious attachment style. (Attachment Project)
As outlined here, however, this problem even dates back to Tennov’s original material.
