Word: tennov
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...Tennov says the average limerent love affair lasts about two years. In the first wave of passion, the limerent thinks of the LO about 30% of the time, but in the second wave, which hits some months later, it can rise to 100%. The poor limerent is so hooked that nothing matters except the beloved, and feelings swoop between ecstasy and pain. This can be a drawback. You spend much of your time writing letters or diaries; you can't get your work done; all your friends decide you are a bore (mostly because you are). Limerence can strike...
Feminists, if they come down with it, have it worse than anyone else. This is because limerence depends on game playing, coyness, trial balloons and all sorts of other manipulations that the women's movement can't abide. And besides that, Tennov says, limerence tends to re-create the old me-Tarzan-you-Jane sex roles -once the game gets started, a perfectly sensible woman becomes dithery and feebleminded and every spidery little fellow starts pounding around like Mean Joe Greene. And heaven help the woman who takes her limerence problem to a shrink! Tennov thinks that limerence...
...unsolved psychic problem, and seems to offer a solution to it. The beloved, glimpsed across a crowded room, may resemble a parent, grandparent or sibling. Family Therapist Norman Paul of Boston says the beloved "tends to match someone else in your life that you've forgotten about." Tennov thinks the process is far simpler. The limerent scans the field and picks out the most attractive available lover that can reasonably be expected to return one's love...
Still, most people probably can't do much about their limerence (or non-limerence). The problems come when a limerent hooks up with a non-limerent, and each tries to guide the other into behavior that does not come naturally. Tennov found that some non-limerents manage to con themselves into thinking they are limerent, just to please a flagrantly limerent LO. Others feel suffocated by the constant demands...
This never works, Ralph, and I must tell you flat out that I am not a limerent. In fact, I am what Tennov calls a "pseudo-limerent nonlimerent." If I were a limerent, believe me, there is no one else I'd rather limer with than you, and I mean that most sincerely. You and I are caught in a world we never made, but in the future limerents and non-limerents will identify themselves at the very start of an affair. Tennov says so right on page 263. Until then, the only thing a limerent...