The Science of Unrequited Love

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We have all wanted loves that we knew were impossible. Such crushes can burn intensely, especially when we are young and inexperienced, but they tend to ignite almost as quickly as they ignite. As we get older, many of us learn to love people who will love us back in equal measure. But some continue to cling to one-sided loves. And when this unrequited love becomes obsessive, all-consuming, even involuntary and addictive, when it drags on for years, we have left the territory of crushes for a much stranger and more loving land: the land of limerence.

The term limerence was coined in the 1970s by psychologist and philosopher of science Dorothy Tennov, who drew on a decade of her own research, including thousands of questionnaires and case studies, as well as published autobiographies and personal diaries. She noticed that many people, across a wide range of time periods, backgrounds, and life circumstances, shared unrequited romantic experiences that had remarkably consistent characteristics. In his 1979 book, Love and LimerenceTennov defined limerence as “an uncontrollable, biologically determined, intrinsically irrational, instinct-like reaction.”

One of the most fanciful characteristics of limerence is the patient’s ability to temporarily satisfy desire with imagination. As Tennov writes, people with limerence have “an acute sensitivity to any act, thought, or condition that can be interpreted favorably, and an extraordinary ability to conceive or invent ‘reasonable’ explanations for why the neutrality that the disinterested observer might see is actually a sign of hidden passion” on the part of the object of interest.

Circumstances today may be ripe for a surge in romance, according to a recent study: It’s easier than ever to feed a romantic obsession with a constant diet of idealized images and stories of a person’s daily life on social media. And in fact, an entire community of people suffering from limerence exists on Reddit, with 40,000 weekly visitors. But limerence is not a formal diagnosis. There is also no clear overlap with existing clinical disorders, such as erotomania, also known as Clérambault syndrome, a paranoid state in which a person believes that another is in love with them.

Despite the lack of psychological studies on limerence, some clear parameters have been established: People with limerence typically crave affection rather than sex and only entertain these feelings toward one love object at a time. A force that sustains us is the uncertainty of whether someone’s affection will be returned: she loves me, she loves me not. The more uncertainty, the greater the potential for obsession, rumination, and desire.

On his popular blog The marginalessayist and author Maria Popova writes that limerence is “an attachment style whose origins are not yet clear” and that many people who suffer from it are “otherwise reasonable and successful.” Although race, gender, age, or sexual orientation do not seem to have any influence on who is limerent, it does seem to tend to affect more people in creative professions, which she attributes to the fact that “the very process of limerence is in a sense a creative process—a process of sustained attention and selective amplification.”

One of the most classic cases of love in literature might be Jay Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy Buchanan in the 1925 novel. The Great Gatsby. To be honest, this is not the real Daisy that Gatsby likes. It’s an idealized version of her, of what she represents. Daisy ultimately does not return Gatsby’s affections, but his obsession with her consumes his entire life. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald writes: “There must have been times even this afternoon when Daisy failed to realize her dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of her illusion. »

A certain measure of illusion fuels all forms of love, but limerence suggests that too much fantasy can ultimately leave us adrift and unmoored on the high seas of one-sided romance.

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Main image: Nicoleta Ionescu / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on October 28, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.