Limerence

单相思之情

Overthink

2025-10-21

59 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

Why does falling for someone so often feel like a painful obsession? In episode 144 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss the unspoken difficulties of limerence, or the state of falling in love. What is the difference between love and limerence, and why do we confuse them so frequently? How does social media fuel limerent reactions? And is limerence inherently selfish? They discuss how limerence can be formative to our personal identities, whether a limerent object has ethical obligations to those who obsess over them, and how modern dating norms might direct us all towards limerence rather than love. In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts get into the relationship between self-worth and limerence and whether it’s possible to have reciprocal limerence. Works Discussed: Tom Bellamy, Smitten: Romantic obsession, the neuroscience of limerence, and how to make love last Stendhal, De l'amour Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-2019) Enjoy our work? Support Overthink via tax-deductible donation: https://www.givecampus.com/fj0w3v Join our Substack for ad-free versions of both audio and video episodes, extended episodes, exclusive live chats, and more: https://overthinkpod.substack.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • Hello and welcome to Overthink.

  • The podcast where two philosophers explain the theoretical dimensions of your pain and suffering.

  • I'm David Peña-Gusman.

  • And I'm Ellie Anderson.

  • The French author Stendhal wrote a personal collection of essays about the experience of being in love.

  • It's very creatively titled On Love de l'amour.

  • And in these writings,

  • he reflects on the experience of loving somebody while knowing that they may never love you back.

  • You know, not a great place to be,

  • but maybe it's a place where a lot of us have found ourselves at some point in our lives.

  • And it turns out that he was inspired by his own life in thinking about this.

  • So it turns out that he, in the 1800s,

  • was obsessed with this Italian woman named Metilde Viscontini Dambowski.

  • And long story short, she was just not.

  • into him at all,

  • which caused him to obsess more and more and more about her so much so that he ended up writing a whole book about the passions of love and obsession and infatuation.

  • Actually, on that point, so I was really into this book in college.

  • Oh, really?

  • Because there's a whole section, Cures for Love.

  • And I think I actually read an excerpted version of the book that was like a mini book called Cures for Love.