Relationship education
Limerence While Married or In a Relationship
You are committed to someone, you may even be happy, and you cannot stop thinking about someone else. It is one of the least talked-about forms limerence takes, because the people in it are ashamed and the people around them would rather not know.
What it does and does not mean
Dorothy Tennov, who coined the term in the 1970s and set it out in her 1979 book, described limerence as an involuntary state centred on the new person and driven by uncertainty about whether they feel the same. Nothing in that description requires an unhappy relationship at home. The feeling responds to the new person's availability and ambiguity, not to an audit of the existing relationship.
The research on extramarital involvement points the same way. Allen and colleagues found relationship dissatisfaction to be one predictor among many, alongside opportunity, personality, and context. Selterman and colleagues identified a range of distinct motives, including anger, wanting sexual variety, low commitment and situational factors such as being drunk; only some reflect problems at home, and their sample was mostly young adults. So the inference “I feel this, therefore something must be wrong at home” is not supported. Sometimes something is wrong at home. The limerence is not the evidence.
What it does mean is narrower and more useful. You have met someone who is ambiguous and partly unavailable, and your attention has locked on. That is the shape of every limerent episode, and it would have happened to the same brain in a different marriage.
Why the comparison is rigged
The most damaging thing limerence does to a committed person is force a comparison that the existing relationship cannot win, because the two things are not the same kind of thing.
| Dimension | Limerence for the new person | The relationship you are in |
|---|---|---|
| What it feels like | Electric. Every exchange matters; you replay them for hours. | Ordinary. Most exchanges are about logistics and you do not think about them again. |
| What you know about them | Their best hour of the day, curated, with gaps you fill in generously. | Everything, including the parts no one is at their best in. |
| What is at stake | Nothing yet. No shared bills, children, grief, illness, or 6 a.m. | All of it. Which is why it cannot feel like the other thing. |
| What sustains it | Uncertainty. Not knowing how they feel is the engine. | Certainty. Knowing they will be there is the point, and certainty does not produce euphoria. |
| What it tells you | That you are capable of intense attraction. That was never in doubt. | What you have actually built, which only shows when it is tested. |
Imaging studies make the same point from a different angle. Early-stage attraction engages reward circuitry in a way that looks like craving. Long-term love, in the small study that has looked, engages reward with little of the obsession. A marriage that does not feel like limerence is not failing. It is doing what long relationships do.
Cannot wait
The decisions that need making this week
- Stop feeding it. Not because feeding it is immoral but because it is the only lever you control. Reduce contact with the person to what is unavoidable. No private channels, no one-to-one time you do not have to have, no checking their profile. Limerence starves on clarity and routine and you can supply both.
- Decide whether you have already crossed a line, by your own standard. Not the legal one. Secret conversations, messages you delete, plans you would not describe to your partner. If yes, that is a fact about your relationship now, separate from the feeling, and it needs handling as one.
- Do not make any structural decision while limerent. Do not leave, do not confess to the new person, do not tell your partner you have “fallen for someone” in the first weeks. Every one of those acts on a conclusion the state is not qualified to reach. Give yourself a fixed period, three months is common, in which the only decision is to not decide.
Should you tell your partner?
There is no universal answer, and anyone who gives you one has not thought about it. Some considerations that actually help:
- If nothing has happened and you are actively reducing contact, many therapists would say a passing attraction you are managing is yours to manage. A detailed confession can transfer your distress to your partner without giving them anything to do with it.
- If something has happened, or if the secrecy itself has become a wall between you, the calculation changes. Concealment is its own injury and it compounds.
- “I have been feeling distant and I want us to work on it” is true, useful, and does not require naming anyone. It is often the right first sentence.
- A couples therapist or your own therapist can help you decide what to say and when. That is a better use of a session than almost anything else right now.
What to look at once the volume drops
Limerence is not evidence about your marriage, but it is sometimes a flare that lights up terrain worth looking at. Once the episode has lost its grip, and only then, ask:
- What did the new person seem to offer that I have stopped asking for, or stopped offering, at home? Attention, curiosity, being seen as interesting, being desired.
- Is this the first time, or is there a pattern of limerence across my life? A pattern points at you and is covered on limerence and anxious attachment. A first episode in year twelve of a marriage points at something else.
- What else was happening? Limerence often arrives alongside grief, a career stall, a health scare, children leaving, or a birthday ending in zero. It is frequently about time, not about the person.
Some people finish this process and leave, having discovered the marriage was already over. Most do not. The point is that the decision gets made by a person who can think, not by the state.
Getting through it
The general sequence on how to get over limerence applies here with one adjustment: you have an existing relationship to put attention back into, and doing so deliberately, even before you feel like it, is both the recovery and the repair. For the thoughts themselves, which tend to arrive at home and at work, the seven steps on how to stop thinking about someone else start with cutting what feeds them. The limerence self-reflection is useful for checking whether what you have is limerence at all, rather than a crush you can simply let pass.
Two books worth reading
Tennov's Love and Limerence is the source text and still the most accurate catalogue of what the state feels like from inside. Tom Bellamy's Smitten is the practical one, including how to starve a limerent attachment. Both are reviewed, with the rest of the attachment reading list, on the books page.
When to ask for outside support
Limerence is not a diagnosis. Consider a licensed therapist, for yourself or as a couple, if the preoccupation has lasted months, if you are concealing contact, if you are close to a decision you could not reverse, or if the shame is affecting how you function. If you may harm yourself or someone else, contact your local emergency or crisis service now.
Sources and evidence notes
Evidence checked September 28, 2026. The infidelity and romantic-love research below is established. We found no study of limerence in married or partnered samples specifically, so the guidance here combines Tennov's descriptions with general findings on committed relationships and is offered as reflection, not prescription.
- Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love
Dorothy Tennov (official publisher page). The 1979 book in which Tennov set out the term. She described limerence as an involuntary state centred on one person and driven by uncertainty about whether they feel the same.
- Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Contextual Factors in Engaging in and Responding to Extramarital Involvement
Allen et al., Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice (2005). Review of predictors of extramarital involvement. Relationship dissatisfaction is one factor among many; opportunity, individual traits, and context matter too.
- Motivations for Extradyadic Infidelity Revisited
Selterman, Garcia & Tsapelas, Journal of Sex Research (2019). 495 people, most of them young adults, reported why they had been unfaithful. The motives included anger, sexual desire, falling out of love with the primary partner, low commitment, esteem, wanting variety, neglect and situational factors such as being drunk. Only some reflect problems at home.
- Neural Correlates of Long-Term Intense Romantic Love
Acevedo et al., Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2012). fMRI study of 17 people married about 21 years who reported intense love. Their partner's photo activated the same reward region as early-stage love, and obsession scores were generally low.
- Romantic love: an fMRI study of a neural mechanism for mate choice
Fisher, Aron & Brown, Journal of Comparative Neurology (2005). 17 people early in intense love. Early attraction engaged dopamine-rich reward regions, which is why a new person can feel so compelling. It is not a verdict on a long relationship.
- Development and Validation of the Limerence Questionnaire (LQ-11)
Marshall et al., Psychological Reports (2025). Early-stage limerence measurement. We found no study of limerence specifically in married or partnered samples.