Dorothy Tennov

Tom Bellamy is a neuroscientist and author of the book Smitten, which is all about the neuroscience of this state called limerence.

Limerence is a term coined by a psychologist named Dorothy Tennov in the 1970s, and Tom says it's essentially when you get an extraordinary natural high from being with or around another person.

You feel euphoric and exhilarated, and you have this strong desire to bond with them, typically romantically or sexually.

And that's not always bad, right? You might feel limerence in the early stages of a healthy mutual relationship.

Tom started writing about and researching this topic after he experienced this kind of limerence, limerence that was a problem.

He was happily married, but that didn't stop him from developing this craving for somebody else.

My first thought obviously was, well, what's going on in the brain? What's happening to me? How can I make sense of this experience that I'm going through? And so I then came across the book Love and Limerence by Dorothy Tennov and realized that this described exactly what I was going through, but that I had a perspective on it with an additional sort of forty, fifty years of, of neuroscience research.

I had a completely different perspective on limerence compared to when the book was written in the 1970s.