Dorothy Tennov

Dorothy Tennov (August 29, 1928 – February 3, 2007) was an American psychologist who invented the term "limerence".

• It is not love. It is the force of evolution
  expressed as the compulsion for the particular,
  this particular one above all others. Often,
  it is called love. . .
  • Love and Limerence, p. viii

• Reaction to limerence theory depends partly on acquaintance with the evidence for it and partly on personal experience. People who have not experienced limerence are baffled by descriptions of it and are often resistant to the evidence that it exists. To such outside observers, limerence seems pathological. The phenomenon that provides the subject of much romantic poetry and fiction has been called an addiction, an indication of low self-esteem, irrational, neurotic, erotomanic, and delusional. To those without direct experience it seems inconceivable that a sane person could attach so much importance to another individual.
  • Love and Limerence, p. x

• Many writers on love have complained about semantic difficulties. The dictionary lists two dozen different meanings of the word "love." And how does one distinguish between love and affection, liking, fondness, caring, concern, infatuation, attraction, or desire? The Group was overwhelmingly of the opinion that loving and liking refer to quite different feelings, but what, precisely, constitutes the difference? Acknowledgment of a distinction between love as a verb, as an action taken by the individual, and love as a state is awkward. Never having fallen in love is not at all a matter of not loving, if loving is defined as caring. Furthermore, this state of "being in love" included feelings that do not properly fit with love defined as concern. As de Rougement said, being in love is not the same. One is a state; the other, an act, and an act is chosen, not something merely endured.
  • Love and Limerence, p. 15

• I coined the word "limerence." It was pronounceable and seemed to me and to two students to have a "fitting" sound. To be in the state of limerence is to feel what is usually termed "being in love."
  • Love and Limerence, p. 16

• Writers have been philosophizing, moralizing, and eulogizing on the subject of "erotic," "passionate," "romantic" love (i.e., limerence) since Plato (and surely long before that). And more often than not, what is said is enough to make a limerent dissolve into the walls in embarrassment. It can be dangerous to stick your neck out on the subject of love—dangerous to your self-esteem and to your reputation.
  • Love and Limerence, p. 172

• It is safer to write as a moralist, as an observer and evaluator outside personal involvement who may not know the precise nature of the subject matter, but who can indicate clearly what others ought and ought not do. Much of the writing in the literature of love was written by persons, who, perhaps never having suffered the insanity themselves but having observed its outward manifestations, are adamantly opposed to it. Limerent persons, sufferers of an unallowable condition, find themselves speechless save for ambiguity of "poetic" expression.
  • Love and Limerence, p. 172

• I rejected "infatuation" because although the meanings of the terms overlap in some respect, they differ in meaning, and evoke different connotations.
  • A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It "Limerence": The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov, p. 28

• To explain why the environment of our ancestors "selected" limerence, we might consider the behavior it induces. Some limerence-inspired actions are socially undesirable, even socially disruptive. Limerence intrudes, deflecting interest from affairs of business, of state, even of family. In the midst of battle, the soldier's despair over a letter of rejection from LO is not forgotten. A king gives up his crown. An artist's career languishes. But such visible disadvantages should not constitute the sole basis of judgment. The most consistent result of limerence is mating, not merely sexual interaction but also commitment, the establishment of a shared domicile in the form of a cozy nest built for enjoyment of ecstasy, for reproduction, and for the rearing of children.
  • "Love Madness" in Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior (De Munck, 1998), pp. 81-82