The author's yearbook photo from her sophomore year of high school (1996).

“I can’t stop thinking about him,” my client said. “I even daydream about our wedding.”

She stared at me intently from across the coffee table where our two cups of peppermint tea sat untouched. When I didn’t respond, she lowered her voice and said, “I just feel like we’re meant to be together.”

I’d been counselling this client long enough to know the “him” to whom she was referring was not her husband of 15 years. Instead, it was the much younger man she’d met two months prior at a yoga retreat.

“OK,” I said, reaching for my mug. “Let’s try to figure out why this person has such a hold on you.”

My client could have easily spent another hourlong session obsessing over “hot yoga guy” — which she’d done many times before — but I wasn’t going to let her. My job as a therapist was to help bring deeper awareness to her emotional experience and to identify what was simmering just beneath the surface, driving compulsive thoughts and behaviours. In this case — limerence.

***

Almost everyone, at some point, has experienced a romantic crush. However, unlike a typical crush, limerence is defined by obsessive ruminations, deep infatuation and a strong desire for emotional reciprocation — an unfulfilled longing for a person.

According to Dorothy Tennov, American psychologist and author of “Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love,” limerence “may feel like a very intense form of being in love that may also feel irrational and involuntary.”

Tennov identified the most crucial feature of limerence as “its intrusiveness, its invasion of consciousness against our will.”

Limerence differs from the liminal dating phenomenon known as “situationships,”or “we’re dating but we’re also not quite dating.” While both feed off uncertainty, when someone is experiencing limerence, they often prefer the idea of their limerent object (LO) over being with that person in real life. In fact, they might actually feel something akin to disgust when in the physical presence of their LO. I understand this feeling all too well — my own limerent object held my heart and mind hostage for years.

***

Levi and I met on the first day of my sophomore year of high school in the mid-’90s. I was wearing baggy denim overalls and combat boots, and my blond hair was long and parted down the middle. I’d just gotten my braces off and my teeth were the straightest they’d ever be. Our relationship unfolded to the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo Juliet” and “August and Everything After” by The Counting Crows. There were knowing looks and homemade mixtapes — filled with Dire Straits, Jewel and Better Than Ezra — passed discreetly in the hallway between classes. We were running through the wet grass, desperately wanting, but never quite having. We never actually dated.

Earlier that summer, my family — minus my father — had moved to Woodstock, Vermont, from Boston. My parents were unhappily married, but instead of divorcing, they decided to lead two separate lives. My mother, a retired school administrator and former nun, moved to rural Vermont, and my dad stayed behind to work at his law firm.

Levi wanted to be my boyfriend. He was unwavering and absolute with his feelings as only a love-struck teenager could be. In response, I held him at arm’s length while dating other people. But late at night, I’d let him sneak into my bedroom on the top floor of my family’s rambling farmhouse and we’d lie tangled up together underneath the shiny soccer medals and enormous round window that hung above my bed. By homeroom the next morning, it was like it never happened.

The author's family home in Woodstock, Vermont.

Nobody needed to tip-toe around my house. After the move, my mother’s drinking escalated to the point where she often passed out in her bedroom before dinner. My father visited us once or twice a month. He spent the weekend arguing with Mom and left without saying goodbye. On Monday morning, I’d wake to find him gone and a pile of cash on the kitchen counter. By the time I left for college, my sister and I were basically parenting ourselves.........

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