Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

In lay terms limerence is romantic love, crazy love, lovesick, mad love, amour fort. You see a theme in the words crazy, sick, and mad. In this condition, one's body drugs itself mightily with hormones that create a feeling of joy. The rapture is balanced with the panic and dread that it could end. And it will. Limerence has a shelf life. By most estimates, you're lucky to get 12 months.  Dorothy Tennov, PhD, author of the groundbreaking 1979 book Love and Limerence, is the woman who originated the term.  Popular culture has done us a great disservice in our understanding of romantic love. From a young age, we watch movies and read books that form the scripts of our adult relationships. But popular culture usually gets it wrong, often in the name of entertainment, and ends up confusing love with limerence, which is precisely what most of us do. Limerence has been described as "an involuntary interpersonal state that involves an acute longing for emotional reciprocation, ...

The best way to get over a failed relationship is to be completely honest with yourself.  The worst thing you can do is spend time imagining how things “could have been” or what “might have happened.”  The relationship failed, and that’s all there is to it. Maybe it failed because your partner wasn’t faithful, maybe your personalities just didn't "click", or maybe you both got bored with each other.  There are plenty of reasons why relationships fail. The first thing to do is give your old relationship the funeral it deserves.  This goes for a lot of things in life outside of relationships.  You have to move past the hurt feelings and the disappointment.  The better your relationship was, the worse this process may be. A lot of it also depends on how long the relationship lasted. The old adage of "well, we can just be friends"  is very difficult to make work; it's better to just make a clean break and forget everything - the sooner, the better...

Have you ever wondered, "why did the person I was with cheat so much? Has this person any clue how much their actions have hurt me?" Not all sociopaths are unfaithful. But a large proportion are. Simply being unfaithful is not part of the criteria for sociopathy, in fact it’s not even in the DSM checklist. But many sociopaths are unfaithful; why is this? Why do sociopaths cheat? Boredom Poor impulse control Lack of guilt Lack of empathy To boost narcissistic ego Lacking in emotional connection Opportunistic Additional source for supply The sociopath rarely cheats because he/she has met the love of his life. He cheats, because the opportunity is presented to him. The sociopath will take on the persona of people that they are around, so being close to other people gives new dimension to their own personality. Quite simply, the sociopath cheats, because he can. Without guilt or remorse, there is no reason not to. He doesn't particularly make long term plans, and tends to act...