Love and Limerence by Dorothy Tennov

Author:Dorothy Tennov [Tennov, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: emotion, limerence, Psychology
ISBN: 9781589796553
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 1998-12-29T08:00:00+00:00

LIMERENCE IN WRITING AND MUSIC

And to think that I have wasted several years of my life, and that I have wanted to die, that I have had my greatest love, for a woman who was not my kind.

—Marcel Proust38

The personal journals which were made available to me, including the story of Fred and Laura, were examples of but one of the major forms of unpublished limerent writing. The other two are poetry and personal correspondence with LO. It appears to be characteristic of the state of limerence that you are inclined to express your feelings in writing. But since the limerent state is unknown to or denied by many, and since it so often involves behavior not in accord with the best interests of the actor, shame prevents public display. The fullest expression of limerence in published writing occurs in fiction and in song. Stendhal hesitated about publishing his diaries with their revealing self-disclosures. Instead he published novels. The statement quoted above was what Proust had his character Swann say about himself, not what Proust said about himself. The impulse, described by many interviewees, to tell all, is often stifled in anticipation of dire social consequence.

What cannot be told as reality may be acceptable as fantasy, as romance, or as adventure. Some years after the breakthrough transatlantic flight with Helen Payne, the first person I had heard confess to lifelong nonlimerence, I asked her why the nonlimerent person not only can tolerate but apparently enjoy the portrayal of the limerent state in drama and fiction. Her response was that she had always viewed it as romance, as opposed to reality. She explained that just as a person who has never set foot on an oceangoing vessel may enjoy an imaginative account of high seas’ adventure, the person who has never experienced limerence may enjoy what to them is an entirely unreal and imaginary account of enchantment by another person and the “noble suffering” of the romantic lover. The same material, of course, elicits different reactions depending on the reader’s state. 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.

Morton Hunt reported that the East Germans attempted for 20 years to rid the society of romantic love, which they called “bourgeois trash.” But their attacks proved futile, and they encouraged their writers to produce again the love stories the people appeared to need.39 Writers who, like Communist officials maintain a culturally determinist position that the experience of being in love results from its ubiquitous portrayal, find it hard to believe that the reverse may in fact be true.40

Story writers use a multitude of devices to keep their characters from experiencing premature reciprocity, at which point the story would end and the lovers go off into mutual bliss that might be ecstastic for the participants, but would not hold the interest of the reader for very long.

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