A Leeds woman spent six weeks obsessing over someone she barely knew. Then she found the word for it — and finally understood what was really going on.
My name’s Hannah, I’m 31, and I live in Leeds. I met him twice. Two coffees, three weeks apart. And for the six weeks after that, he lived in my head rent-free, all day, every day.
I’m telling you this because nobody warned me it had a name.
I thought I was falling in love. I told my friends I’d met someone special. What I’d actually met was a stranger and a story I’d written about him, and I couldn’t tell the difference.
So here’s what it actually felt like. Maybe you’ll recognise it.
The first hour after he texted
It was a high. An actual chemical high. He’d send something completely ordinary — “how was your day?” — and my stomach would drop like I was sixteen again.
Then I’d spend forty minutes drafting a reply that had to be perfect. Funny but not trying. Warm but not keen. I rewrote one message eleven times. Eleven. For a man I’d spent roughly two hours with in total.
And when he didn’t reply straight away, I’d unravel. I’d check my phone every ninety seconds. I’d reread our old messages looking for proof he liked me. I’d find a full stop where there should’ve been an exclamation mark and decide it was over.
None of this was about him. I barely knew him. It was about the not-knowing — and what the not-knowing did to me.
When I finally looked it up
I typed something into Google at 1am that I’m a bit embarrassed by. “Why can’t I stop thinking about someone I barely know.”
The word that came back was limerence.
Limerence is the state of being completely consumed by someone — intrusive thoughts, mood that rises and falls on their attention, a desperate hunger for them to feel the same. It was named by a psychologist called Dorothy Tennov in the 1970s. And the key thing about it, the thing that floored me, is this: it feeds on uncertainty.
It isn’t love. Love is calm. Love knows where it stands. Limerence is the opposite — it’s an itch that only gets worse the more you scratch it, and it thrives precisely because you don’t know how the other person feels.
That’s why I’d been obsessing. Not because he was the one. Because I had no idea what he was, and my brain hates a gap. So it filled the gap with him, on a loop.
The cruel little trick of it
Here’s the part that stung. The less he gave me, the more I wanted him.
A clear, keen, “I really like you, let’s make a plan” — that would’ve calmed the whole thing down. But he was vague. Warm one day, quiet the next. And every silence sent me spinning further in.
That’s limerence working exactly as designed. The drip-feed is the drug. If he’d been straightforwardly into me, the fantasy would’ve had nowhere to grow.
I see it everywhere now that I have the word for it. The people we can’t stop thinking about are so rarely the ones being kind and clear with us. They’re the ones leaving us guessing.
What actually broke the spell
Two things, in the end.
The first was naming it. Once I knew it was limerence and not love, I could see my own thoughts from the outside. The 1am spiral lost some of its grip the moment I could say, out loud, “this is the uncertainty talking, not him.”
The second was getting actual information. I stopped reading tea leaves in his punctuation and just asked him to meet for a proper drink. He said he’d “see how the week panned out.” That was my answer. The fog cleared almost instantly.
It turns out certainty is the cure. The fantasy can’t survive a real, ordinary human being who either shows up or doesn’t.
Why I date differently now
I use Wisp these days, and honestly the format saved me from myself. The whole point of it is you don’t sit in weeks of messaging — you match and you go on the actual date. Wisp’s own data shows most users meet within a few days of matching, not a few weeks. For someone like me, that’s everything. There’s no six-week runway for the fantasy to take off down.
Because I know now what my brain does with empty space. It builds a person who isn’t there.
If you’re lying awake reading someone’s full stops like they’re tarot cards, I’m not going to tell you it’s love. I’ll tell you what I wish someone had told me. You’re not addicted to him. You’re addicted to not knowing.
So go and find out. Ask the real question, plan the real date, get the real answer. Whatever it is, it’ll be kinder than the loop.