Why You Can’t Get Someone Out of Your Head & Why Midlife Makes it Worse.
Your heart leads but your brain can’t find the breaks.
Kylie was onto something when she sang “I just can’t get you out of my head” and i’m seeing this increasingly with clients in midlife in my therapy room. They sit down, slightly embarrassed and tell me they cannot stop thinking about someone. A colleague, an old flame who reappeared on social media, someone they met at a work event. It’s not love, it’s not an affair. They understand it isn't real but can't prevent their intrusive thoughts. It had been enjoyable at first, awakening long dormant feelings, but their fantasy life is now infiltrating their everyday, it feels like an unhealthy obsession and it’s snowballing and making them confused and unhappy.
What they are describing has a name. It’s called limerence. I couldn’t believe I had lived this long and never known this word. While researching this topic (who knew there was SO much information on limerence out there?) I have noticed that younger generations seem more familar with the term than Millennials and Gen X. The irony that I am obsessed with learning about limerence is not lost on me! It is far more common in midlife than most people realise.
What is limerence?
The term was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in her 1979 book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. It’s a brilliant, eye-opening book. Tennov spent years collecting thousands of firsthand accounts of romantic obsession and identified something distinct from love, attraction, or even infatuation. Limerence is an involuntary, intrusive state of intense longing for another person, characterised by:
· Obsessive, intrusive thoughts about the person (the "limerent object")
· Acute sensitivity to their words, tone, and behaviour, scanning for signs of reciprocation
· Fantasy and rumination that can occupy hours of your day
· Physical symptoms including racing heart, difficulty concentrating, and mood swings
· A powerful idealisation of the other person, with flaws minimised or unseen
· Emotional highs when they respond warmly, and crushing lows when they seem distant
· A craving for reciprocation above almost everything else
It is important to say: limerence is not a choice, and it is not a character flaw. It is a state the mind can enter, and it can happen to thoughtful, grounded, self-aware people. You may understand it as how you once felt as a teenager with an intense all-consuming crush.
Why midlife?
In my practice, I see limerence most often in clients who are navigating something difficult in their lives. A marriage that has become transactional or distant. Grief. A career that no longer feels meaningful. Children who have grown up and left a quieter house in their wake. The accumulating weight of responsibilities, dealing with ageing parents, with very little space for joy or aliveness. Changes in hormones around mid-life can also cause instability that drives limerence.
Midlife is often a time of profound and cumulative losses. Not all losses are bereavement, but sometimes the slower erosion of things we thought we would always have: energy, possibility, a sense of forward momentum. When a person appears who seems to see us differently, who reflects back at us something we feared we had lost, it can be electrifying. The limerent object is not just a person. They become a symbol. A mirror. An open door that you can’t resist.
In that sense, limerence in midlife is often less about the other person and more about their own unmet or unspoken needs: for validation, for excitement, for evidence that something in them is still vital, alive and desirable.
At first, it can feel wonderful. There is genuine aliveness in limerence. The world becomes more vivid. You get dressed more carefully. You feel more present. There is something in the neurochemistry of this state, a flood of dopamine and noradrenaline, that genuinely does make people feel more energised and engaged with life. Great right?
When limerence tips into something complicated
The difficulty is that this does not always stay manageable. What begins as a pleasant background hum can, quite quickly, begin to hijack your thinking. You find yourself checking your phone compulsively. Replaying conversations. Constructing entire futures in your mind around someone you may barely know in reality. You become distracted at work, less present with your family, irritable when the intrusive thoughts are interrupted.
The gap between the fantasy and your actual life begins to feel unbearable. And because the limerent object exists largely in your imagination, they are perfect. They never leave their socks on the floor. You never need to tell them to put their plates in the dishwasher or argue about who is the most tired. They always say the right thing. The contrast with the ordinary reality of your actual relationships can make those relationships feel bleak by comparison, which is rarely fair, and rarely accurate.
This is where limerence becomes destabilising. It doesn’t solve the problems it was, in some ways, a response to. It amplifies them.
How therapy can help
In therapy, we don’t start by trying to make limerence disappear. We start by getting curious about it. What need is it meeting? What does the limerent object represent that feels absent from your life? What are you longing for that you have stopped believing you could have?
Limerence is, in my experience, one of the most honest symptoms a person can bring to a therapy room. It is the psyche waving a flag and saying: something is missing. I need to be noticed. I need to feel alive. The work is in finding out what that something is and working out how to begin meeting it in ways that do not cost you the life and relationships you have built. People blow up their lives as a result of limerence and this does not have to be the case.
Sometimes that means honest conversations about loneliness in a long-term relationship. Sometimes it means grief for a version of yourself you have not fully mourned. Sometimes it means reconnecting with parts of life you have abandoned. This work is always worth doing.
If any of this sounds familiar, you may just be at a crossroads that deserves proper support and attention.
If you would like to explore what limerence might be telling you, I offer in-person sessions in Alderley Edge & Wilmslow and online sessions across the UK. You can find out more or get in touch via the contact page.