Sadly limerance

Sadly, the closest thing to love some people will ever know is limerance. It mimics devotion with its trembling urgency, but beneath the surface is a hunger that feeds on fantasy rather than intimacy.

It flares like a match hot, brief, and blinding then leaves the soul colder than before. Limerance is not rooted in knowing another, but in the projection of need onto a blank and glittering screen.

Limerance is the desire to be seen without the vulnerability of being known. People mistake it for connection because it mimics the heartbeat of passion, yet it withholds the tenderness of presence.

Love asks us to stay through silence, through ordinariness, through disillusionment; limerance demands perfection and disappears when the illusion breaks.

The tragedy is not in the longing, but in the refusal to outgrow it. For many, love remains an unreachable horizon, because their maps are drawn by childhood wounds and their compasses spin wildly at the first sign of reality.

Limerence flatters the ego while starving the soul. It idolizes the other, but only to feel chosen, only to avoid the terror of loneliness. It’s a theater of feeling where no one truly takes off their mask. And when it inevitably collapses, it leaves people convinced that love is either a lie or a punishment.

True love, by contrast, is quieter, more enduring, less cinematic but infinitely more healing. But if all you've known is limerance, love can feel like absence, like boredom, like too much space. So they keep chasing the high, and missing the home.

Sadly…