Limerence & Avoidant Attachment: It’s Not Your Fault

A major commonality among people that struggle with limerence is, unfortunately, the shame of struggling with limerence.

My most significant memory of limerent-attachment happened to me when I was 17. I was suddenly completely struck by someone, a complete stranger. My body was immediately flooded with knowing. He was everything I’d ever wanted. Did we speak? No. Did we even make eye contact? Can’t remember. But I knew in my heart that he could be the one.

I went home and thought about him profusely. I wrote a letter to my future self and in it I made sure to ask about him. Had we spoken yet? Had we started dating? Were my intuitions right? I visualized us being together. I saw a future in which ending up together was inevitable.

This was a memory I had repressed until recently as I’ve been practicing parts work. The irony is that this man could have been a significant person in my life if I had been able to approach him. But it was as if approaching him wasn’t necessary. His very existence now gave me all I needed. Any real-life interaction was a risk my nervous system was nowhere close to taking.

Being avoidantly-attached is learnt. There is not a single baby that comes into this world that is just chill without intimacy. And for highly sensitive, neurodivergent individuals, emotional experiences are all the more intense. The higher your awareness to the unspoken inner world of your caregivers, the more intense the pain of being missed is going to feel.

As an adult, you believe intimacy is not safe because you have already experienced it. Your body remembers the sting of rejection, the anxious feeling of ‘need’ in your body and the confusion as to why it didn’t seem to go away. Eventually you may have learned through trial and error what times you’d be most likely to successfully have those needs met. You became attuned to your parents’ emotions first over your own, because making your needs known wasn’t always met with care, and often made things worse.

As children we will do absolutely anything to repair a fractured relationship between our Caregivers- including being OK with emotional distance or numbing ourselves so all of it just hurts less.

But when intimacy is not safe, the desire for it doesn’t necessarily go away. I think for a lot of us it goes undercover. And how it manifests undercover is different for everyone.

Some people find safety in relationships with other avoidantly-attached individuals. A surface-level, enjoyable connection that never quite cuts into deep wounds and triggers. Some people lean into hyper-independence where no other can let them down because they don’t give them the opportunity to.

But for the highly sensitive, avoidantly-attached, (often highly intelligent) individual, there is a way to meet these emotional needs — it’s limerence.

Limerance becomes the perfect escape — we get to experience glimmers of intimacy in a world where no one can hurt us.

We desire intimacy so intensely inside ourselves that we can’t help but create it on our own terms. For some of us, we dream up these narratives with people we’ve just met, sometimes never even spoken to. For others it can be this inability to stop thinking about an ex, or mentally crafting this perfect soulmate who you believe you’re destined to meet. You know how good it could be, so you imagine scenarios in which your body gets to feel a glimpse of it in reality.

But it isn’t reality. That is the problem. It’s a highly functioning brain doing what it’s supposed to do: surviving.

See your limerence as your survival, the refusal of your heart to go numb.

Your heart clings to imagined attachments because your subconscious knows you are wired for intimacy — it just doesn’t know how to get there.

My limerant-attachment is perfect because he can never hurt me. And somehow, even though he exists in my mind, he still feels real. But over time, and with increased self-awareness, he starts to feel more apparition-like.. as if I’m haunted by a ghost of someone. I know this isn’t what I want deep down. I know I want the real thing. But the real thing is going to take me places I’ve never been on my own. And it will be terrifying. But so be it.

Healing the primal fear of intimacy is not easy, but it is possible. You can rewire your brain and re-experience closeness with people if you feel that you are a) worthy of love and b) brave enough to walk the path.

I can’t heal my limerance until I’m aware there is basic goodness here. That I deserve the life and love that waits ahead. This ‘basic goodness’ in you that may have not been mirrored to you in early life, but exists nonetheless. Chogyam Trungpa calls this awareness the ‘warrior spirit’.

I cultivate mindfulness around this warrior spirit, because if I don’t, my body that remembers the shame and confusion of my early life takes over. She is desperate to remind me of all the ways I’ve failed to somehow make sense of my past suffering- that there was something wrong with me and that’s why my needs were never quite met. And all my failures since then mean something about me. But warrior spirit moves beyond these narratives with courage.

For a lot of us, healing a fear of intimacy doesn’t look like meeting someone tomorrow and starting a longterm relationship. Sometimes it is sitting at home alone and practicing feeling the truth of your basic goodness. And trusting that the intelligence of the universe will bring the right people into your life at the right time to mirror your worth to you.

Love is simply that mirror. Intimacy is the safe environment necessary for that mirroring. Real Love knows that its mirroring isn’t always going to feel particularly dreamy or good. I want my future partner to be able to mirror my pain, to respond to my hurt. It is only in intimacy that I know it is fundamentally OK for this spectrum of human experiences to exist. Intimate love says ‘you being here is good.’ And if me being here is good, then my pain is OK. And THAT is the crux of what the nervous system of an avoidant needs to re-experience.

Let the intensity of your desire for Love drive you to break free from limerence. Practice feeling a deep knowing in your body that you deserve the love you crave. And the love that you can see so clearly in your mind’s eye, I like to think, is a whisper from your future. It is coming for you, it’s just waiting patiently for you to believe that you deserve it.