Limerence: When Obsession Feels Like Love
Understanding Obsessive Romantic Thoughts Through Parts Work
Limerence is having a moment on TikTok—and for good reason. If you’ve ever found yourself obsessively thinking about someone you barely know, fantasizing about your future together, or feeling like your day hinges on whether they text back… you’re not alone. That’s limerence.
What is limerence?
Limerence is a state of intense romantic infatuation, marked by intrusive thoughts, emotional highs and lows, and a deep longing for reciprocation. It can feel like love, but often, it’s more about what the person represents than who they are.
Through an IFS (Internal Family Systems) lens, we can understand limerence as the experience of a part of us trying to meet core needs like feeling safe, seen, valued, or chosen.
This part creates a fantasy world where the other person is the solution. They’ll finally give us the love we didn’t get. They’ll finally make us feel secure. When we enter that fantasy, it brings comfort and hope. But it also creates confusion. The part mistakenly believes that the person is the source of those good feelings, when really, it’s the fantasy that’s generating the relief.
In other words, the comfort, safety, or aliveness you feel when imagining them… that’s you. That’s your system responding to the idea that your needs might finally be met.
The good news? Those feelings don’t come from the other person. They come from within you. The fantasy activates a deep internal yearning—and temporarily soothes it. But the warmth, hope, and aliveness you experience aren’t generated by the other person or the part alone. They reflect your Self, that core, spacious presence inside you that holds the capacity for calm, compassion, and clarity. The part is temporarily accessing those good feelings through the imagined relationship. This means that those feelings are already available within you, not because of them but because of you.
When you realize this, something shifts:
You don’t have to chase the person.
You don’t have to try to make them give you something.
Instead, you can turn inward, get to know the part that’s doing all the hoping, and begin to meet its needs directly—with compassion, curiosity, and Self energy.
When we slow down and get curious, limerence can become a self-understanding portal. It reveals what’s still unmet, what young parts of us still long for. IFS offers a path to identify and build relationships with the parts involved and to meet them with the care they’ve always needed.
Instead of outsourcing our sense of worth or safety to someone else, we can begin to meet those needs ourselves. We can reparent the parts of us that were once abandoned or ignored. And when that happens, we become more grounded in our relationships—able to be curious about who someone is, rather than who we hope they’ll be for us.
Limerence isn’t something to shame or fix—it’s something to listen to. There’s wisdom in the longing. And when we listen well, magic happens!
Sam (they/them) is an IFS and Somatic Therapist based in Vancouver, offering trauma-informed therapy for individuals and couples.
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