“Love Will Hurt You, but Limerence Will Destroy You”: The Etymology of Limerence & Its Digital Discourse

Abstract

The term “limerence” has experienced a resurgence in modern social vocabulary since the early 2020s, long after its coining in 1979 by psychologist Dorothy Tennov, who aimed to distinguish an obsessive, uncertain conception of love (limerence) from authentic, healthy love. While it now is used to define an unhealthy and harmful time period/uncontrollable experience of obsession, it originally circulated among scholarly communities as a mental disorder or illness that could be utilized in psychological and sociological analyses of traits characterized in disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), erotomania, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and others. In 2026, the social media platform TikTok’s psychology and self-help community space has co-opted the rise of interest in this term. Licensed clinicians and random users alike are using the tag #limerence to warn against or commiserate with others who have experienced its intensity. With this new rise in interest and attachment to the term, this thesis aims to identify the connecting and contrasting factors between its current usage and association with scholarly inquiry into its inception and utilization, and aims to understand why its resurgent hazy definition has captured the attention in current online culture. Online TikTok videos were extracted from application programming interface (API) software and then analyzed recurring themes, which were then coded into categories to identify video type/theme. Users on TikTok agree and disagree in ways familiar to scholarly research but prioritize some definitions over others. My findings suggest that while TikTok focuses on the experience and stages of limerent attachment, literature primarily focuses on connection to neural/mental diagnoses. TikTok also almost exclusively focuses on the intersection of sexuality and neurodiversity rather than other marginalizations such as socioeconomic status or gender.