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Limerence, or hopeless longing, tends to be looked down on as a waste of time.

Limerence-related stress or heartbreak can lead to objective damage to health and psyche.

But limerence can have a plus side, at least in the arts: it has spawned numerous masterpieces.

Someone I know well recently attended a Buddhist retreat at which they described their heartbreak at learning a person they were in love with—a person with whom they knew they had no future—had started, quite openly, to date someone else. The teacher told them, "You are addicted to hopeless... tragic longing," adding the student would never have pursued that relationship if there'd been a chance of winning the beloved. (The student, for the record, vehemently disagreed.)None of this was meant as a compliment, and it got me thinking about the kind of longing that has no chance of being fulfilled—after all, a not uncommon human emotion—and why it is so often treated with disapproval, if not pity or even contempt.

The most specific term for hopeless longing, coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in the 1970s, is "limerence," a state of intense, involuntary romantic attachment to a person who does not........

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