The following is a letter sent by Dorothy Tennov in response to an inquiry from the Oxford English Dictionary, asking when the term "limerence" was first used. The letter is published in Dorothy Tennov's collected works, A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It Limerence (2005, eBook, p. 28).
In the letter, she mentions Helen Fisher (whom she had corresponded with in the 1990s), and expresses that she does not want "limerence" to be seen as a synonym for "infatuation" or "being in love", but does not clearly explain herself.
Dear Fiona McPherson,
In response to your inquiry regarding the origin of “limerence”, I believe you are correct that the word first appeared in the London Observer following my first use of the term at a psychology convention. I did give a paper at the Eastern Psychological Association on romantic love in 1973, butif memory serves me, I had not yet coined the term at that time.
Dr. Mark Morton of the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg is writing a book on the etymological origins of words pertaining to love and sex. He emailed that he knew that I had invented the term “limerence” in the late 1970s and asked whether I had derived it from a Greek or Latin source, or was it a nonce-formation.
The book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love was published first in 1979 (Stein & Day) and reprinted with a new preface in 1999 (Scarborough House). Although I gave a paper on limerence at the International Society for Human Ethology in Toronto in 1994, and contributed a chapter (titled “Love Madness”) to Victor de Munck’s (ed.) “Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior” in 1998 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company), there have been a few articles in magazines and newspapers, but no critical reviews (that I know of) in the professional literature (but see Amazon). The New England Journal of Medicine and John Leo in Time magazine wrote columns that ridiculed the topic. Simone de Beauvoir (who I had met in Paris and interviewed for a PBS documentary) gave it a nice blurb that the publishers put on the cover.
Recently, I found about 50 anonymous letters from readers on the Internet posted by a posting called Life Tips on Love and Limerence. In content, they resemble the many letters I have received. This provides public exposure of the type of further confirmation that I had been receiving but had not found a way to publish.
Incidentally, the confusion shown by professionals was revealed in an email correspondence in 2000 with the well-known evolutionary anthropologist, Helen Fisher. She has written several books on what she considers to be evolutionary aspects of romantic love and has cited Love and Limerence. However, in her books she uses “infatuation” never “limerence”. Since, she explains, she writes for a popular audience, she declines to use “unknown” terms.
I rejected “infatuation” because although the meanings of the terms overlap in some respect, they differ in meaning, and evoke different connotations. Fisher is doing the kind of brain-circuitry research (at Rutgers U.) that I would like to see done, but I suspected that her subject selection techniques would be inadequate for clearly differentiating the state of limerence from other forms of attraction.
My suspicions were confirmed when she said that subjects were “easy to find” because they were “everywhere”. In point of fact, the letters I have received, as well as the people I interviewed, often spoke of hidden limerence. They often try not to show it and often never reveal the true nature of their feelings. (It is probably significant that my research has always focused on individuals, not on relationships.)
By my definition, limerence is distinct. It is involuntary and its course depends largely on
external circumstances (social barriers to a relationship and the behavior of LO). Limerent attraction is always for a potential sexual partner although its primary goal is reciprocation, not the sexual act, which is often more symbolic of mutuality than an end in itself.
Please freely request additional information. A letter writer predicted in 1980 that the word would find its way into the OED in ten years. If it is included, I would hope that the definition is clear, that it is not seen merely as a synonym for infatuation or for being in love. That may be the way it is used by those who don’t understand, but it is not the technical definition. People who have never undergone the experience find it difficult to conceive of it.
Best regards,
—Dorothy Tennov
Confusingly, Tennov has also considered limerence to be synonymous with love madness, and stated that "the condition is well known":
Many people have seen being in love as a madness. [...] A 750-word magazine article about limerence research using the term “love madness” rather than “limerence,” brought a response of several hundred letters from people who wrote much the same kinds of things as did readers of Love and Limerence. And several of those said they didn’t even wait to finish the book. The implication? That the condition is well known. (Tennov, 1998, "Love Madness", in Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior: Perspectives From the Social Sciences, edited by Victor de Munck, pp. 79, 86)
Fisher and her colleagues screened their brain scan participants to make sure they were really madly in love:
In humans, the attraction system (standardly called romantic love, obsessive love, passionate love, being in love, infatuation, or limerence) is also characterized by feelings of exhilaration, 'intrusive thinking' about the love object, and a craving for emotional union with this partner or potential partner. [...] [A] list of 13 psychophysiological properties often associated with this excitatory state was compiled (see Fisher, 1998; Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986; Harris, 1995; Tennov, 1979). [...] Then 72-item questionnaire was compiled, based on these common properties [...]. [...] So this questionnaire was subsequently administered (along with several others) to all participants prior to their participation in Phase II of this study which involved fMRI of the brains of individuals who reported that they had 'just fallen madly in love.' (Fisher et al., 2002)
They have also stated in a later paper that the participants were obsessive thinking >85% of their waking hours (Fisher et al., 2016). The brain scan experiment in question (published Aron et al., 2005) can be seen as people experiencing what Tennov calls the 'ecstatic union' (i.e., people madly in love, but who are in a reciprocated relationship).
