Do You Have Limerence?

Why you can't let them go.

Hi there,

There is a question I hear in many forms, across many different people, in many different stages of life:

Why can’t I stop thinking about this person?

Why, after all this time, after everything I know about why it didn’t work, am I still here, still obsessing, still reaching, still unable to fully close the door?

I want to offer you a different way of thinking about this. Because in my experience, the obsessing is almost never really about the person.

The Person Is a Metaphor

When we cannot let go of someone — whether it is a relationship that ended badly or a person we barely knew who somehow hijacked our entire interior life — we tend to treat it as a problem of attachment. We analyze the connection. We replay the moments. We try to understand what it was about them, specifically, that made them so impossible to release.

But the person, in most cases, is not the real subject of the obsession. They are a symbol. A metaphor. A screen onto which we are projecting something that belongs entirely to us: a longing, a fear, an emptiness, a question about our own lives that we have not yet been willing to face directly.

Let me explain.