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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I've only seen this word limerance on dcum, and I don't understand its usage.  (Or maybe l do lol.)  It seems like the cheated-upon use it to downplay the severity of their spouse's affair.  Or someone who wants to get over someone tells herself her feelings aren't real, they're just limerance.  As if it's a clinical condition with no basis in real emotions.

IMO, limerance is another word for crush...and ALL romantic relationships start with a crush.  So why differentiate, OP?  Either their relationship will stand the test of time or it won't, but it is a relationship, and your partner is choosing to have that relationship with someone else.  That is all that matters.[/quote]

No, limerence describes a state of mind during a set of actions — so it’s more than a crush. A crush is “oh, I think the pool boy is hot and maybe I will daydream of becoming Mrs. Pool Boy.”

Limerence is going out of your way to try to seduce the pool boy, who is returning the interest on some way. It’s carrying on in that manner with no regard for your actual life responsibilities, believing you won’t get caught, engaging in revisionist history about your existing relationship to create unfavorable comparisons with the pool boy. It’s infatuation plus some kind of action and usually there is reciprocation of some sort, even if not physical.[/quote]

Right. It's like an addiction, and there's a willingness to let everything else burn to the ground around you for it. My XH lost his job, his marriage, and any sort of normal relationship with his kids all to make the AP happy. He would feign work emergencies and leave the kids (who were preK aged at the time) at daycare just to get 15 more minutes with the AP. He got into a fistfight with his own brother when my former BIL told him he was behaving like a crazy person. He cut his best friend out of his life because the AP didn't like this guy that my XH had been friends with since babyhood. It was like watching the Hindenberg go down, as my ex just set his entire life and support structure on fire for this woman.

I'm not sharing this to let my XH off the hook - he made a series of deliberate and considered choices that led to that all-encompassing infatuation. His AP wasn't some sort of temptress or witch. She was just a normal person who may even have wondered what she got herself into. He could have stepped off that conveyer belt at any point before it hit a crisis point. But the folks talking about "crushes" are overlooking just how insane some folks behave while in the midst of these types of feelings. [/quote]

I guess we got off lucky that my spouses midlife crisis was an online sex arrangement with little emotional feeling.  There wasn’t that burning infatuation and drive to have to see her because he didn’t really like her as a person. So contact was fairly infrequent.  No intention of ever anything more.  It was internal messed up crap midlife which thankfully he recognized, dumped her and got help all before I even knew about it.  It still almost completely destroyed everything.  And he was tossed out of the house for a bit.

These limerent type affairs, on the other hand. are intense and cause people in them to literally become temporarily insane.  My heart goes out to the betrayed spouses because it was so traumatic.  I can’t imagine how much harder it is if spouse was still wrapped up in it, not caring about consequences/family and not actively seeking to end it.

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