Limerence
Love in Four Acts: What is Romantic Love?:
The romantic couples who have been together for half their lives have something quite different from romantic love. Johnson calls it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love – “it represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks … to find the relatedness, the value, the beauty, in the simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama … or an extraordinary intensity in everything” (pg. 195). In a strange way, this is true love because it can be everlasting, but this is not the love script that we are bombarded with from every literary or entertainment form in our lives.
This article talks about “limerence”, which was a new word for me; it means romantic love. We are all familiar with its intensity… and also how short-lived it is. A theory posits that limerence exists so that a couple is together long enough to support a child until it walks. The timing does seem to match up, but I wonder if limerence could even persist in the absence of the cultural trappings and traditions we have woven around nascent romantic relationships.