In this 10‑minute monologue, relationship coach Matthew Hussey explains the psychological phenomenon of limerence—an obsessive, hope‑driven, and uncertain desire for another person’s love. He defines limerence, outlines its two core ingredients (hope and uncertainty), and describes how it fuels constant rumination that hijacks daily life. Hussey connects limerence to his own four‑level framework of relationship importance (admiration, mutual attraction, commitment, compatibility), showing that limerence typically operates between admiration and mutual attraction, but can persist even into committed relationships when uncertainty remains. He emphasizes that limerence disregards compatibility, often leading people to chase partners who are fundamentally unsuitable. To break the cycle, he advises creating distance from the limerent object (“getting out of the orbit”) and rebuilding self‑worth through confidence work. He promotes a free 30‑day confidence challenge launching July 15, offering daily missions, a community, and a sign‑up link (mhchallenge.com). The video ends with a call to comment, share experiences, and join the challenge.
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In the next few minutes, I want to help you avoid wasting precious years of your life thinking about, obsessing about and pining after someone who is wrong for you. And I'm going to do it by talking about a concept that so many of you have been asking me to talk about for literally years. And that concept is limerence. This is the original OG book on limerence by Dorothy Tenov, Love and Limerence. I have been digging into this book on your behalf so that we can talk about it today in relation to someone you may be thinking about right now. So let's start with what limerence actually is. Limerence is the obsessive desire to have someone who we have fallen for love us back. It is the relentless obsessing over this person. The desire to be with them, to own them, to have them yesterday, today and for all of time. It is the hope that this person is thinking about us in the ways that we are thinking about them and the inability to stop thinking about them in every moment we have available and even in the moments we do not have available, when we are at work, when we are supposed to be spending time with other people, when we are supposed to be doing important things that move our life forward and we cannot focus, all we can do is think about and fantasize and dream about this person and what could be with them if they felt the same way about us. Now, what is needed for limerence to take place? How do we become limerent about a person? We have to have two elements, hope and uncertainty. So what tends to happen in limerence is it's perpetuated by this hope that we're reading signs from this person that they're interested in us. The uncertainty of not knowing for sure if they're interested in us, and the deep fear of actually acting on our feelings and ruining this idea of what we have in our mind and the possibility of it going somewhere because we come on too strong and we scare someone away. The worst thing in the world for a limerent person is to be rejected by the person they are limerent about, because at that point it turns into a full obsession. One of the most negative effects of limerence is on our confidence and our sense of self worth. I have been there myself in a situation where I truly lost myself and in doing so I lost connection to what was valuable about me, to what was important about me. I put all the importance on the other person and it took me time to rebuild my confidence after that. If you are feeling that way and you want a plan for rebuilding your confidence and rediscovering your sense of self worth. I am holding a 30 day free confidence challenge that starts on July 15th where I'm going to be taking thousands of people from all over the world through a 30 day process of completing five missions that are designed to measurably increase or help rebuild confidence. If you haven't signed up yet, you can do so@mhchallenge.com I'll leave a link below. Join the thousands of people that are going to be going through this with me. I've created an entire free community that you're going to get access to when you sign up and we'll go through it together. If you've read my new book Love Life, which is behind me right here, you'll know that I talk in the book about the four levels, levels of importance in any situation or relationship, and they are admiration, mutual attraction, commitment, and compatibility. And as we go through these stages, we get to relationships that I believe we should value more. Admiration alone shouldn't be a reason to think that someone is right for us. Mutual attraction doesn't mean that someone is capable of committing, and commitment doesn't guarantee compatibility. But limerence doesn't care about any of these levels. Limerence is something that typically takes place between level one and level two, between admiration and mutual attraction, because between admiration, which is essential for limerence, is that we admire someone. And what happens with limerence is we start to idealize that person. As Dorothy 10 of puts it, it's not that we make up good qualities about that person, is that we over emphasize their good qualities while not focusing on any the signs that this person isn't as great as we're making them out to be. But that is the admiration. Admiration is in full effect. It's mutated into an idealized version of that person. But the uncertainty is I don't know where I stand for sure with this person. So I'm not clear that there's mutual attraction. But maybe there have been some signs that have led me to believe that this person does like me. And by the way, here's the fascinating part about limerence. People can even think that the absence of obvious signs that this person likes them are signs that this person likes them. Because only a person who likes me would spend this much time trying to ignore me, to pretend that they didn't like me. So we can find any justification, if we want to, for the idea that maybe someone does in fact like us. Which is why hope doesn't always come from the real world. It can just come from our mind, our imagination, our perception of events, especially if we have a strong desire to feel limerence, to be in limerence with someone. So limerence often takes place between level one and level two, between admiration and mutual attraction. But here's the interesting part. Limerence can even take place beyond mutual attraction, even into level three, commitment. What's fascinating about that is we would think that if we were in a relationship with someone, if we had commitment from someone, we would no longer be limerent because there would be no more uncertainty. But even within a relationship, both hope and uncertainty can be present. You may have been in a relationship before, I know I have. Where you never really felt like you were safe, where you never fully felt like you had that person, where maybe you never quite felt good enough for that person, where you were always worried about your inadequacy, where you spent the entire relationship trust trying to impress that person or trying to maintain that person's love for you and therefore never actually progressed beyond limerence. You were stuck in a limerent pattern, even in a relationship where someone was your partner. If you have experienced that before, leave a comment below right now and let me know. So you can experience limerence even within a committed relationship. Now, you may be wondering, in my four levels of importance, how does limerence relate to the fourth level, compatibility? And this part's pretty fascinating, because limerence doesn't give a shit about compatibility. That's the bottom line. Someone can be completely wrong for you in every way and still become your limerent object. The person that you obsess over, the person you cannot stop thinking about, the person you think would complete your life. You may be able to think of someone in your life from the past who at one point you felt limerent over. And you can look back now and go, that person would have me miserable that I dodged a bullet by that person never reciprocating and wanting me. Well, don't discount the possibility that the person you may be feeling this over now is entirely incompatible with you. And if it helps, I don't believe that anyone who isn't actually reciprocating can be compatible with us, because a huge essential part of compatibility is two people who mutually want each other and are committed to each other. One of the proven ways that people can start to lose their limerence for someone is by getting out of the orbit of that person. Limerence is something that feeds on itself. When you're close to someone, when you're interacting with them, when you're able to perceive more signs of their interest, whether they're real or imagined. We give ourselves more and more ammunition to think about them, to fantasize about them, to think about what could be, to write notes in our diary, to imagine scenarios in the future. And then those thoughts replicate and they feed on themselves. When we get out of the orbit of someone, we give ourselves space to have new thoughts and to have thoughts about them less. And over time they gradually subside until the point where we are sober again. In the meantime, one of the things that can actually help you develop the courage to do that is building your own confidence and your sense of self worth, connecting to what you are worthy of. And as I said earlier in the video, the place where I'm going to be helping people do that beginning July 15th is in the 30 day confidence challenge. The event is free, so come sign up. You have nothing to lose and especially if you're going through a hard time right now, I promise you, us going through this together is really going to leave you feeling differently. At the end of 30 days. The link to sign up is mhchallenge.com It'll take seconds and once you're signed up I will send you all of the details for how to access everything. Thank you for watching. Leave me a comment, let me know what you thought and I'll see you soon.
