*When was the Last Time You Fell in Love?*

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To celebrities, as usual. >_>

i never "fell" in love.
i never even "stood" in love.

i have liked a few people extremely in my life, but i do not know about the "romeo and juliet" variety of love that is what people are talking about.

i have no idea about how men who have lots of testosterone and physical drives feel about their "romantic" objects of affection.

one person i think i can say i loved was from when i was 3.
i was in a preschool in the section for "special children" (psssss) and there was a girl who was extremely autistic to a profound degree. even i saw that at three years old.
she could not communicate with anyone, and she dribbled and she had a patch over one eye, and wore glasses that were extremely magnified on the non eye patch side, and empty of a lens on the eye patched side.

she was never on her feet, and she was usually on her back dribbling and babbling.
i was reasonably severe, but she was very much more severe than me.

i used to be transfixed on patterns that i traced around the room, and i could not be jolted out of it, but, amazingly, she used to shriek at times when i found a new pattern, and i would look at her, and i found she was smiling and having fun and looking where i was earlier looking. (i may have been wrong because i was 3.5 years old)

i decided that me and her had an unspoken connection. and one day i started to tickle the palm of her hand with my finger. it felt very very nice for me and her and i know it. after a while, i kissed her forehead as i tickled her palm of her hand, and she calmed into a way where she looked like a relieved princess, and i felt i wanted to protect her and have her be with me for my whole life.

but after a few weeks, she was taken away and i never knew until years later that she succumbed to a brain tumor.

i can not be bothered going through that again because i felt totally hollow for years when she was taken away. no one was her.

so i learned that "to have loved and lost is worse than to never have loved at all" by age 4.

i still feel inclinations to protect certain people, but it is not love like i had for that girl

Been in love many times before but not the "right" one.... recently found the "right" one I believe after a long while hoping... he's my best friend and that makes it even better.

I never have yet. There are a few girls I've liked but not enough to warrant falling in love. Most girls I liked in the past never knew I liked them which is for the best. After a while though, I eventually get over them if they get out of my life.

Hhhmmmmm, how about, NEVER! You know, I don't understand romantic love, I don't trust in romantic love, but even so, I know it exists. What I've felt in my life up to now has only been infatuation and lust, the product of loneliness and raging hormones that have yet to be satisfied. Romantic love sounds like little more than a silly fairytale nowadays to me, after all, we are VERY conditionally about our love, and our own arrogance and superficiality causes us to ignore those whom we might really love the most, including myself.

What is this 'Love' of which you speak???

I thought I'd fallen in love maybe 10 times by the time I was 30. Only reciprocated in one case, then rejected. The feelings were always so intense, so overwhelming. The rejections were painful, the acceptance was arguably worse! I vowed I would never get myself in such a state again, and have stayed with that vow. I failed to see anything positive about it, couldn't understand why people sought out this state that clearly lowered your functioning as a human being to the state of an out of control idiot.

The next part of the mystery was the birth of my first child. I felt such strong love for her from the moment of her birth and this has continued as strong as ever to this day. Yet this was a very different 'love' to that 'love' I'd felt for attractive females. It has fewer negative aspects, it makes me a better functioning human being, gives me immense energy to negate my own ego to care for my children. Why the same word for two states of mind that seem very different to me?

Then a year or two ago somebody posted about Limerance on WP. Aha!! !! Then I realised that what I'd felt when younger and felt towards women was not love at all, it was limerance! And the plot thickens when I realised that almost everything I've ever heard about 'love' between adults, ever seen in films, read in books, actually seems to describe Limerance not Love. I think of the friends and people I've known who change from sane beings into irrational blobs of selfish out of control machines, all because they have fallen "in love with someone new". It was Limerance all along.

Love can be so painful, I guess that nature uses limerance to trick us into kick starting a relationship that makes little objective sense. When it wears off (after about a year at most), if lucky, you have the foundation for real love. More often, the other person by now even *looks* different. Why didn't I notice how plain they look and how irritating their habits are? How boring their speech is? When the brain is flooded with chemicals, my perception gets so radically distorted, who knows what can happen?

In one sense, I feel we really do "fall" in love. I never want that again, I want to "rise" in love! That's my experience. As ever, your mileage may vary.

I'm still not sure what love actually is, but I have a good idea. With that in mind, it's happened twice.

I hadn't heard of limerence, or not consciously anyway, until sinsboldly posted about it on this thread. In fact for a while I thought it was a misspelling of something, but googled it, and found the excellent wiki page explaining it. It was certainly helpful, even illuminating. I suddenly realised that of the 7-8 biggest "fallings in love"/important "loves" that I had experienced 4 of them were limerence.

The odd thing is that I "stopped" myself from indulging in yet another limerence about 4 years ago when I started to get "those" symptoms when thinking about someone, the mist before the eyes, the faintness, the weak and trembling knees, the painfully hollow feeling in my stomach, the despair, etc, ( wiki describes it very well ), which I suddenly realised felt like fear, and "put a stop to", because I no longer wanted to "do that".

So what is left is what wiki describes as "New Relationship Energy", which fits in 4 of the other situations. And it is true that those four relationships left the most positive traces; were in fact milestones of growth and connection.

I don't believe though that limerence is a "natural"/genetically induced phenomenon; I think it is more likely to be the result of "nurture"; culturally/socially/parentally induced.

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I have just read about limerence on Wikipedia now and I’m surprised how much the description matches me. For example, it says 'fantasies may include "rescuing" the limerent object from a situation of peril and being rewarded in some way implying reciprocation. Another example of limerent fantasy would include a limerent object proclaiming love in a climactic fashion, such as in dying moments.' and I have two recurring fantasies of this girl, one where I save her from a situation of peril and one where she says she loves me in a dying moment. It also says 'Limerent fear of rejection is usually confined to shyness in the presence of the limerent object' and I am a very shy person.

I don't think I have ever been in love.
I don't think I understand what love is.
To me it's just a word that people wave around. I've been told that when you love someone you know. How do you know? How do you know it's not just lust, or affection, or attraction, or friendship? Where is the line between that and love?

I think it was about this time last year and still love her!

Being in love:

It is when all those cheesy, lame songs on the radio about relationships that you normally think is crap, actually make sense

Thinking about limerence, or "falling in love" in that way, and wondering whether the reason so many people want it to happen, ( permit/encourage it to happen, however unconsciously ), is precisely because it feels as if have no control over it, as if there is nothing that they can do about it one way or the other; it feels like an act of god, out of their hands.

Of course everything is like that, but perhaps the attraction of "falling in love"/limerence is that a big part of its effect is feeling overcome, compelled by the universe, driven, taken over, ... this is a heady sensation in a culture which believes in free-will, puts pressure on people to be "self-determining", in which we are perceived, and learn to perceive ourselves, as individual/separate autonomous/independent creators of our own destiny, who should be in control of our lives.

Perhaps limerence is a temporary way to "escape"/take a holiday from the pressure of belief in free will which is pushed at one from all directions in modern society, ( it is certainly a mostly/relatively modern phenomenon, rare in ancient times ); a "loss" of free will which is excused by "romance", as in the case of the "crime passional" in France, ( killing a sexual partner out of desperate jealousy was until recently less seriously punished because of the "passion" ).

If society stopped pushing belief in free will limerence might disappear.

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Something to do with wanting to be 'rescued' from how ordinary our ordinary life really is. And the belief that one can't do this oneself, you need another to do this. And, like the duckling that imprints the idea of 'mother' onto the first object it sees, we imprint the desired characteristics onto some poor soul who wanders across our field of vision. (Tangent Warning) I believe that we make up, imagine, fantasise etc most of what it is that attracts us to another person anyway. If harsh reality was all there was, 99.9% of us are just so plain ordinary (and 50% of us can't even rise to the level of 'average'), we could never attract a mate!

I'm speculating that as I get older, wiser and more 'complete' in myself (on a good day, at least...) there is next to no chance of my ever falling into limerance again. Whatever imbalances it corrected, are not there to that extant any more. It's nothing to do with being bitter and twisted after countless rejections, honest

That's why I say it may be a relatively modern phenomenon, because in a society which believes in free will, as ours does, people grow up thinking that they do do things by themselves/on their own, whereas in fact everything we do is the universe acting. Nothing that we do is us "on our own", independent of the world. In more ancient times more people understood this, and I get the impression that limerence was rare/infrequent compared to now.

The danger of a widespread belief in free will is that when people want to escape its artificial pressures, the almost inevitable feelings of oppression, ( aswell as the actual oppression that it justifies ), and do it through "love"/relationships and not some other activity, they will imagine all the power of the universe embodied in just one person! Look to one person "to do/achieve something", ( as you say ), as if one person could be the whole universe.

Society still prefers people to do that, however unhealthy it is, rather than admit that we have no free will, that everything we do has the power of the universe in and behind it, that each person, each object, each piece of data that reaches you, each influence, each bit of food, each event that pushes you, teaches you, affects you, is the universe, and that you too are a part of the universe acting on others.

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After reading about limerence I'm actually feeling less of it. The fact that every single sentence said about it on Wikipedia matches me so perfectly, makes me feel kind of.........normal. It makes it seem that lots of people have gone through the exact same situation as me, it makes my love for this girl seem like nothing. It makes me feel like some kind of puppet. I nether fought I would ever be saying this but it makes me actually want to be less normal. I feel like I'm being blinded by this 'limerence', like I'm being made just like everyone else, and for some reason that scares me. I don’t know why. It's like I've been dragged back by fate all my life. It's strange, all my life I've been trying to be more normal, and now I'm trying to be the opposite.