Limerence While in a Relationship: Attraction, Fantasy, Boundaries, and What It Can Mean
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 26, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Limerence while in a relationship can be profoundly disorienting. You may love your partner, value the life you have built, and still find your attention repeatedly pulled toward someone else. The other person can become unusually vivid in your mind: conversations replay, imagined futures expand, small signs of interest feel disproportionately important, and ordinary moments with your partner can suddenly be compared with the intensity of fantasy.
The most important starting point is that these are different psychological questions. Feeling attraction is not the same as choosing a behavior. Fantasy is not the same as intention. Intensity is not the same as compatibility. Limerence is not evidence that your current relationship is secretly wrong, and it is not proof that the person you are preoccupied with is a better partner.
Limerence is a research and descriptive psychological construct rather than a standalone diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR or ICD-11. Recent research has begun to measure it more systematically, including the 2025 development of the Limerence Questionnaire-11 and a large 2026 study of impairing limerence and real-time cognition. The literature is still emerging, so the strongest conclusions concern phenomenology, measurement, associations, and functional impact rather than a single cause or a validated treatment protocol (Marshall et al., 2025; Evans et al., 2026).
This article focuses specifically on limerence that occurs while you are already in a romantic relationship. It separates the internal experience of attraction and fantasy from behavior, relationship agreements, commitment, and decisions about the future. Infidelity and betrayal recovery are separate topics and require their own evidence base.
Can You Experience Limerence While You Are Already in a Relationship?
Yes. Being partnered does not make attraction to other people psychologically impossible. Relationship science has documented extradyadic attraction — romantic or sexual attraction to someone outside an existing relationship — among adults who describe their primary relationships as exclusive.
That evidence matters because it prevents a common interpretive error: assuming that attraction to another person must mean the existing relationship has failed. In a 2025 longitudinal study of people in exclusive relationships who reported a crush on someone else, many participants maintained their primary relationships without corresponding deterioration in relationship quality. Some participants did show declines in romantic or sexual satisfaction over time, particularly when relationship quality was already lower at baseline, but the study could not establish that the crush caused those declines (O'Sullivan, Belu, & Tramonte, 2025).
A separate four-month study also found that stronger attraction to an alternative was associated with lower quality in the primary relationship, while relatively few participants actually became romantically or sexually involved with the crush. Lower primary-relationship quality predicted later desire for infidelity and breakup, but the design does not support the conclusion that attraction itself inevitably leads to betrayal or dissolution (Belu & O'Sullivan, 2025).
These studies concern crushes and extradyadic attraction, not limerence specifically. They are adjacent relationship science. Their value is narrower and important: attraction to someone outside a committed relationship can occur without automatically determining what the primary relationship means.
For a broader definition of the limerence construct itself, see Limerence: What It Is, Signs, Causes, and What Research Shows.
Limerence Is More Than Simply Noticing Someone Attractive
An ordinary attraction can be brief, pleasant, inconvenient, or easy to place in context. Limerence is usually described as a more dominant pattern of romantic preoccupation centered on a particular person and on the possibility of reciprocation.
The 2025 LQ-11 validation study identified two dimensions in its samples: Intense Need for Attachment and Neglect to Self and Others. The instrument was validated across two samples of people who reported current or past limerence, with exploratory and confirmatory analyses supporting the two-factor structure (Marshall et al., 2025). The LQ-11 is a research measure. A score is not a psychiatric diagnosis and should not be used as one.
The 2026 Acta Psychologica study examined impairing limerence in much greater depth. Its first study included 1,647 participants, and its second used experience sampling with 51 participants over seven days. In that selected high-severity sample, thoughts about the person of focus were extremely frequent, often intrusive, and closely tied to mood; immersive and distracting fantasy was especially prominent (Evans et al., 2026).
Those findings help explain why limerence can feel categorically different from a passing crush. They do not provide a population prevalence estimate, and they should not be used to conclude that everyone with a strong attraction has the same degree of impairment.
What Limerence While Partnered Can Mean — and What It Cannot Tell You by Itself
The experience can carry information, but it does not arrive with a built-in interpretation.
It may tell you that another person has become unusually salient to your attention. It may tell you that uncertainty about that person's interest is consuming cognitive bandwidth. It may reveal that fantasy is supplying novelty, possibility, validation, escape, or imagined intimacy. It may expose genuine dissatisfaction in your primary relationship. It may also occur in a relationship that is broadly satisfying.
The evidence does not support a rule that limerence is always a symptom of an unmet need in the current relationship. It also does not support the opposite rule that the primary relationship is irrelevant. In partnered-attraction research, lower relationship quality and stronger extradyadic attraction are associated in some samples, but the direction of influence is difficult to determine. Dissatisfaction may make alternatives more salient; a powerful attraction may change how someone evaluates the relationship; both may shift together; or a third factor may influence both (O'Sullivan et al., 2025).
A 2026 study of extradyadic infatuation developed and tested the Extradyadic Infatuation Scale across three studies with a total sample of 546 participants. Higher scores were associated with lower emotional intimacy and respect toward the current partner and greater jealousy, as well as with infidelity-related variables. These are associations. They do not establish that infatuation causes lower intimacy, that a dissatisfied relationship causes infatuation, or that a particular person's motives can be inferred from a scale score (Huțanu & Holman, 2026).
This is why the useful question is not “What does limerence prove?” but “What parts of this experience are feelings, what parts are fantasies, what parts are repeated behaviors, what parts concern my relationship, and what decisions do I want to make deliberately?”
Attraction, Fantasy, Behavior, and Relationship Decisions Are Four Different Layers
Attraction is an affective response. You can notice that someone feels compelling without having chosen that response.
Fantasy is an internal imaginative process. It can include rehearsing conversations, imagining reciprocation, constructing alternate futures, replaying memories, or sexual and romantic imagery. Fantasy can intensify emotion, but the existence of fantasy does not demonstrate an intention to enact it.
Behavior includes what you actually do: seeking contact, messaging, arranging private encounters, monitoring social media, flirting, disclosing intimate information, hiding interactions, or creating opportunities for closeness. Behavior is the layer most directly governed by boundaries and relationship agreements.
Relationship decisions are broader choices about commitment, disclosure, exclusivity, repair, separation, or redefining agreements. Those choices deserve to be made using the actual state of the relationship rather than the intensity of a single emotional state.
Research on sexual fantasy provides a useful adjacent distinction. In a 2026 study of 546 people who had been in committed relationships for at least six months, fantasy content varied depending on whether fantasy occurred during solitary masturbation or partnered sex, and some solitary fantasies focused on someone other than the relationship partner (Gormezano et al., 2026). That study was about sexual fantasy, not limerence, and should not be generalized into a theory of romantic obsession. It does show why internal fantasy content and enacted relationship behavior should not be treated as identical categories.
The same distinction is central when comparing limerence with love. A detailed evidence-based comparison is available in Limerence vs Love: How Obsessive Longing Differs From Romantic Love.
Does Limerence Mean You No Longer Love Your Partner?
No scientific test can infer the presence or absence of love from the fact that you are limerent toward another person.
Romantic relationships contain multiple processes: attachment, care, desire, commitment, habit, shared history, interdependence, sexual attraction, companionship, conflict, and future planning. Limerence adds another intense motivational and cognitive process; it does not mathematically erase the rest.
Research on alternatives is consistent with this complexity. People in committed relationships can experience attraction outside the relationship, and many do so without ending their primary partnership (O'Sullivan et al., 2022; O'Sullivan et al., 2025). A 2025 multi-study paper on love and romantic alternatives also found that love did not simply eliminate the effects of desirable alternatives on relationship satisfaction, challenging overly simple models in which loving a partner automatically closes down attraction to everyone else (Conroy-Beam et al., 2025).
That does not make extradyadic attraction meaningless. It means the relationship must be evaluated on its own evidence: how partners treat each other, whether needs can be discussed, whether agreements are respected, whether there is trust, whether commitment is wanted, and whether the relationship is workable over time.
Does Limerence Mean Your Current Relationship Is Wrong?
Not by itself.
A powerful contrast often develops between an established relationship and a limerent fantasy. The established partner is known in ordinary life: routines, responsibilities, bad moods, disagreements, compromises, bills, fatigue, and history are visible. The limerent person may be known only partially, often through selected interactions and imagined possibilities. Comparing these two representations is not a neutral test of compatibility because one contains much more reality than the other.
The 2025 longitudinal crush study is especially useful here. Some participants showed an attraction trajectory that coexisted with relatively stable commitment and satisfaction, while other trajectories were associated with worsening relationship quality. The authors explicitly noted that the design could not establish causality (O'Sullivan et al., 2025). This supports individualized interpretation rather than a universal rule.
A relationship can have real problems that deserve attention independently of limerence. Limerence can also create a perceptual contrast that makes ordinary attachment feel unusually quiet. Both possibilities can exist, and neither should be assumed before examining the relationship directly.
Why Uncertainty Can Make the Other Person Harder to Stop Thinking About
Relationship uncertainty is an established construct in relationship science. It concerns uncertainty about one's own involvement, a partner's involvement, or the relationship itself. It is especially relevant to limerence because an unresolved question — “Do they want me?” — can keep attention oriented toward new information.
Foundational longitudinal and dyadic research found that relational uncertainty can shape how people evaluate relationship conversations and whether they avoid them (Knobloch & Theiss, 2011). A 2025 cross-sectional study of 276 partnered adults found that relationship uncertainty statistically mediated associations between attachment insecurity and lower commitment; because the data were cross-sectional, that mediation model should not be read as proof of a causal sequence (Şenkal Ertürk, Akyüz, & Büyükşahin Sunal, 2025).
Fresh 2026 daily-diary evidence strengthens the connection between uncertainty and repetitive relationship thinking. In a study of 202 dating partners followed across 30 days, days with more-than-usual rumination were associated with more-than-usual relational turbulence, and greater turbulence predicted more rumination the following day. Individual differences in relationship uncertainty also predicted person-specific patterns of daily rumination and turbulence (Goodboy et al., 2026).
That study was not about limerence. It provides established adjacent relationship science showing that uncertainty and repetitive relationship thinking can become dynamically linked. It does not prove that uncertainty causes limerence or that removing uncertainty will reliably end it.
For limerence specifically, direct 2026 evidence shows that intrusive and immersive thinking is central in severe cases (Evans et al., 2026). Together, these literatures make uncertainty a plausible amplifier of preoccupation without turning it into a universal single-cause explanation.
For a mechanism-focused review, see Why Does Limerence Feel So Powerful? Attention, Fantasy, Reward, and Uncertainty.
Does Limerence Mean You Are Emotionally Cheating?
The feeling itself is not a sufficient definition of infidelity. Infidelity is a behaviorally and relationally defined concept, and couples differ in what they consider a violation of exclusivity.
Research on extradyadic attraction shows exactly why this boundary is complicated. Participants in committed relationships often described attractions that remained uncommunicated and were not expected to become intimate relationships (O'Sullivan, Belu, & Garcia, 2022). At the same time, people can regard behaviors such as private intimacy, secret communication, sexual interaction, or deliberate romantic escalation as violations of their agreements.
A useful distinction is therefore between involuntary internal experience and chosen conduct. You do not need to declare an unwanted thought to be a betrayal. You do need to take responsibility for behaviors that affect another person or cross agreements you have made.
Whether a specific interaction counts as infidelity depends on the relationship's actual agreements, explicit or implicit, and on the behavior involved. The broader topics of infidelity, disclosure after betrayal, trust repair, and affair recovery belong to their own clinical and relationship-science literature and are outside the scope of this article.
Boundaries Matter Because They Govern Behavior, Not Because They Erase Feelings
When someone is limerent while partnered, boundaries are often described as a technique for “killing the feelings.” That framing is too narrow. Boundaries are a way of deciding what behavior is consistent with your values and commitments while your emotional state is still unsettled.
There is no randomized clinical protocol establishing one universal boundary plan for limerence. The practical steps below are evidence-informed rather than a validated treatment package.
Define what you are trying to protect
Before choosing a boundary, identify the goal. You might want to preserve an exclusive relationship, protect work or family functioning, stop an attraction from escalating into secrecy, reduce the amount of time lost to checking and fantasy, or create enough psychological distance to evaluate your relationship more clearly.
The same boundary can have different meanings depending on the goal. Avoiding private late-night messaging may be about honoring an exclusivity agreement. Muting someone's social media may be about reducing a stream of cues that repeatedly pulls attention back to them. Limiting one-on-one contact with a coworker may be about creating a workable professional structure rather than punishing yourself for attraction.
Track behavior more carefully than emotion
A feeling can surge without permission. A behavior creates consequences.
Instead of asking yourself every hour whether the limerence is “gone,” it is often more useful to notice the behaviors that keep the person cognitively central: rereading messages, checking whether they are online, creating reasons to see them, replaying interactions for reassurance, searching for hidden meaning, or maintaining secret channels of contact.
Direct limerence research shows how intrusive cognition can dominate attention in severe cases (Evans et al., 2026). It does not establish that every checking behavior is a compulsion or that every form of contact is harmful. The practical rationale is simpler: if your goal is to reduce the amount of your day organized around the person, repeatedly building contact opportunities works against that goal.
The English Hub's focused guide Social Media and Limerence: Checking, Digital Cues, and Obsessive Preoccupation examines digital checking separately.
Reduce deliberate “fuel” without pretending you can command the mind
Trying to force a thought out of consciousness can become another way of monitoring it. A more workable target is voluntary elaboration: the repeated choices that turn a spontaneous thought into a long fantasy sequence, an hour of profile checking, or another round of decoding ambiguous messages.
There is not yet direct trial evidence showing that a specific “do not feed the fantasy” method treats limerence. This is an evidence-informed attention-management principle, not a medical protocol.
If you catch yourself entering an imagined scene, the task is not to prove the fantasy wrong. It is to notice what is happening and decide whether to continue investing attention in it. Over time, the goal is to make ordinary life less subordinate to the internal relationship.
Create contact rules that fit the real context
“No contact” is widely recommended online, but science has not established it as a universally necessary or universally sufficient limerence treatment. Sometimes it is practical and helpful; sometimes it is impossible or disproportionate.
If the person is a coworker, the realistic boundary may be work-only communication, avoiding unnecessary private channels, keeping meetings task-focused, and not manufacturing extra contact. If the person is a friend, you may need to decide whether continued emotional intimacy is consistent with your relationship agreements and your current ability to regulate the attraction. If the person is someone you can easily avoid and every interaction predictably restarts hours of rumination, greater distance may serve your stated goal.
The principle is behavioral clarity. The exact rule should match the relationship, the setting, safety, consent, and existing commitments.
Decide how much privacy and secrecy you are creating
Privacy is part of ordinary psychological life. People do not owe partners a transcript of every thought, fantasy, or moment of attraction.
Secrecy is a different issue when it is used to sustain behavior that you know conflicts with a relationship agreement. Hidden messaging, deleting conversations, lying about meetings, or constructing plausible explanations for contact are behavioral facts. Whether they constitute infidelity depends on the couple's agreements, but they are more informative than the mere presence of an involuntary feeling.
This distinction can reduce two opposite errors: confessing every thought as though thought itself were wrongdoing, and minimizing deliberate behavior by calling it “only limerence.”
Do not use disclosure only as a way to discharge your own anxiety
“Should I tell my partner?” has no universal answer.
Disclosure can support honesty and collaborative boundary-setting when the attraction is materially affecting the relationship, when behavior has crossed an agreement, when the partner is already noticing withdrawal, or when the couple has an established norm of discussing attractions. Disclosure can also be destabilizing when it is impulsive, unnecessarily detailed, or primarily used to transfer guilt and uncertainty onto the partner.
There is no limerence-specific trial showing that disclosure is always therapeutic. The purpose of the conversation matters. A useful conversation is usually about reality and choices: what has been happening, what boundary is needed, what the primary relationship needs, and what agreements both partners want. It does not require dramatizing the other person as a destiny figure or comparing the partner with an idealized fantasy.
If there has already been a breach of relationship agreements, the question has moved beyond internal limerence and into the separate domain of infidelity and trust.
Reinvest in the parts of life that have been crowded out
The LQ-11 validation work identifies neglect of self and others as one dimension of limerence in its research samples (Marshall et al., 2025). This suggests a practical target that is broader than suppressing attraction: restore the domains that preoccupation has displaced.
That may include sleep, work, exercise, friendships, parenting, creative activity, ordinary recreation, and time with your partner. Reinvestment is not evidence that a relationship should be saved at all costs. It gives you a less distorted platform from which to decide what you want.
If your primary relationship is important to you, reinvestment can also mean deliberately creating shared attention: conversations that are not about the limerent person, mutually chosen activities, sexual or affectionate connection if both partners want it, and direct discussion of neglected relationship issues. These are relationship-maintenance choices rather than a limerence cure.
What If the Person You Are Limerent About Is a Coworker?
Coworker limerence has a special difficulty: complete avoidance may be unrealistic, while repeated exposure is built into the environment.
The useful distinction is between required contact and elective contact. Required contact includes the communication necessary to do the job. Elective contact includes extending conversations without a work purpose, arranging unnecessary one-on-one time, using private channels when official channels would work, or treating professional contact as an opportunity to test reciprocation.
A clear professional boundary can reduce ambiguity without requiring hostility. Keep work interactions respectful, ordinary, and proportionate. If the situation is affecting concentration, attendance, decision-making, or professional conduct, those functional effects deserve attention in their own right.
If there is a power imbalance, supervisory relationship, or workplace policy issue, organizational rules and professional ethics may matter more than romantic interpretation.
What If the Limerent Person Is a Friend?
Friendship can make the boundary problem more ambiguous because emotional closeness may already be legitimate and meaningful.
The central questions concern behavior and agreements. Are you using the friendship as a covert romantic relationship? Are you increasing intimacy specifically because you hope the friend will eventually choose you? Are you sharing material with the friend that you intentionally withhold from your partner in order to preserve a special romantic charge? Are you able to remain a friend without repeatedly testing for reciprocation?
Research cannot determine a particular friend's motive or future behavior from these patterns. The purpose of asking the questions is to clarify your own conduct.
If friendship repeatedly functions as a platform for romantic escalation, a temporary or durable change in contact may be more honest than maintaining a formally platonic label while privately building another relationship.
What If the Limerent Person Is an Ex?
An ex can carry a dense archive of real memories as well as imagined alternatives: what happened, what could have happened, what might still happen, and what the past supposedly says about the present.
Limerence after rejection and relationship endings has its own cognitive dynamics and should not be collapsed into the partnered-attraction question. If your preoccupation is specifically organized around rejection or a past relationship, see Limerence After Rejection: Why Obsessive Thoughts Can Continue After the Relationship Ends.
While you are in a current relationship, the practical issue remains the same: separate memory and fantasy from current behavior. Contact with an ex may be neutral, necessary, friendly, or boundary-crossing depending on context. The label “ex” does not answer the question for you.
What If the Limerence Is Toward Your Current Partner?
Limerence can also be organized around the person you are already dating or partnered with, especially when commitment, reciprocity, or the future still feels uncertain.
Being “in a relationship” does not guarantee that uncertainty has disappeared. One partner may be unsure about exclusivity, long-term commitment, emotional availability, or whether the relationship has the same meaning for both people. Relationship-science research shows that uncertainty can shape rumination, turbulence, and communication (Goodboy et al., 2026; Knobloch & Theiss, 2011).
If the limerent focus is your current partner, the key distinction is between normal desire for closeness and a pattern in which your attention, self-worth, or daily functioning becomes disproportionately dependent on signs of reassurance from them.
That pattern still does not diagnose anxious attachment, OCD, or another disorder. General attachment theory belongs to a broader evidence base; the dedicated article Limerence and Attachment Styles: Anxiety, Avoidance, and Relationship Uncertainty reviews what current evidence does and does not support.
Should You Compare Your Partner With the Person You Are Limerent About?
Comparison is almost inevitable, but the comparison is often structurally unequal.
You know your partner across ordinary time. You know how they handle stress, disappointment, logistics, boredom, illness, conflict, responsibility, money, family, sex, and repair. You may know the limerent person through fragments: selected conversations, attractive traits, moments of chemistry, digital traces, and imagined futures.
Limerent fantasy can fill missing information with coherence. The absence of mundane data leaves more room for projection. That does not mean the attraction is fake. It means the mental representation may contain a much larger proportion of inference.
A useful comparison therefore asks like-for-like questions. What do I actually know about this person's values, reliability, conflict behavior, compatibility, and willingness to build a reciprocal relationship? What is observed, and what is imagined? What am I comparing: a long-term partner's full reality with another person's best moments, or two realistically known relationships?
This is also why intensity should not be used as a compatibility score. The strongest feeling in the room may reflect novelty, uncertainty, hope, risk, selective attention, or fantasy as well as genuine attraction.
Does Limerence Mean You Should Leave Your Relationship?
Limerence alone does not answer that question.
A relationship decision can take limerence into account without making limerence the decision-maker. Evaluate the primary relationship on its own dimensions: safety, respect, reciprocity, affection, sexual compatibility, practical compatibility, conflict patterns, shared goals, trust, commitment, and whether both people want to keep building it.
Then evaluate the limerent attraction separately: what is known about the other person, whether the attraction is reciprocal, whether any relationship with them actually exists, how much of the bond is fantasy, and whether your judgment changes when contact or uncertainty changes.
Finally, evaluate your own conduct: which agreements you want to honor, which boundaries you can realistically maintain, and what kind of person you want to be while you are uncertain.
This approach does not guarantee an easy answer. It creates a decision based on more than emotional intensity.
When Limerence Starts Affecting the Primary Relationship
The most clinically and relationally important question is often functional impact.
The experience deserves more attention when sleep is repeatedly disrupted, work or study deteriorates, parenting or caregiving is neglected, friendships shrink, sexual or emotional presence with the partner collapses, substantial time is spent checking or fantasizing, spending or travel is organized around the person, or boundaries are repeatedly crossed despite intentions to stop.
The 2026 impairing-limerence study is directly relevant here because it selected people for whom limerence was already causing impairment. It documented high levels of intrusive cognition and substantial co-occurring symptom burden, but the sample should not be treated as representative of everyone who experiences limerence (Evans et al., 2026).
A 2025 scoping review also emphasized the limited state of the limerence literature and examined possible escalation from fixation and rumination toward harmful behavior in a forensic context. That review should not be interpreted to mean that limerence predicts stalking or that people with limerence are dangerous. Its relevance is narrower: behavior, consent, and escalation matter independently of the intensity of private thoughts (Bradbury, Short, & Bleakley, 2025).
If you are repeatedly contacting someone who has asked you to stop, monitoring them, following them, accessing private information, or creating unwanted encounters, the issue is no longer only an internal romantic experience. Their boundary and consent take priority.
Limerence, OCD, Attachment, and Other Labels
Limerence should not be used as a shortcut diagnosis.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder can involve intrusive thoughts, doubt, checking, reassurance seeking, mental review, avoidance, and compulsions. Limerence can also involve intrusive romantic thoughts and repeated checking. Similar surface behaviors do not establish the same mechanism.
The dedicated differential article Limerence vs Relationship OCD: Intrusive Thoughts, Doubt, and Compulsions separates romantic preoccupation from obsessions and compulsions using the OCD evidence base. A person should not infer OCD from limerence or infer limerence from OCD-like symptoms.
The same principle applies to attachment. Recent limerence research has found associations with insecure attachment in selected samples, and 2025 relationship research links attachment insecurity, relationship uncertainty, and commitment (Evans et al., 2026; Şenkal Ertürk et al., 2025). These findings do not establish that “anxious attachment causes limerence,” nor can another person's attachment style be diagnosed from whether they reciprocate, withdraw, send mixed signals, or maintain ambiguous contact.
“Dopamine addiction,” “trauma bond,” and “nervous system dysregulation” are also frequently used online as total explanations. Current limerence research does not justify treating any of these phrases as a universal mechanism.
When Professional Support May Be Useful
Professional support is reasonable when the preoccupation is causing substantial distress or impairment, when you are struggling to maintain boundaries, when the experience is entangled with depression, anxiety, compulsive behavior, sleep disruption, or other symptoms, or when the primary relationship is entering a crisis that you cannot navigate constructively.
There is no established limerence-specific clinical guideline or validated treatment protocol. A clinician's role is therefore not simply to confirm a label. They can assess the actual pattern: intrusive thoughts, compulsions if present, mood symptoms, anxiety, functioning, relationship context, consent and boundary concerns, and any diagnosable condition that has its own evidence-based treatment.
If the central problem is the limerent preoccupation itself, practical strategies can be organized around reducing cue-driven checking, restoring neglected life domains, clarifying boundaries, and tolerating uncertainty without repeatedly seeking another “answer.” These are evidence-informed targets. They should not be presented as a proven limerence treatment package.
For a dedicated practical guide, see How to Stop Limerence: What Helps, What Can Make It Worse, and When to Get Support.
A Practical Way to Think Before You Act
When limerence is intense, every cue can feel like new evidence that demands an immediate conclusion. A steadier approach is to separate observation from interpretation.
Start with what is observable. How often are you thinking about the person? How much time are you spending seeking cues? What contact actually exists? Has the other person clearly expressed romantic interest, or are you inferring it? Which relationship agreements are relevant? What has changed in your primary relationship independent of the limerence?
Then identify interpretation. “They are my real soulmate,” “my partner is no longer right for me,” “this intensity proves something,” and “if I do not act now, I will lose my chance” are meanings assigned to the experience. They may or may not be true. Intensity does not verify them.
Then identify your chosen behavior. You can decide what contact is appropriate, what digital behavior you want to stop, what you need to discuss with your partner, whether you need outside support, and how long you want to observe the situation before making a major relationship decision.
This sequence creates a gap between feeling and action. That gap is where boundaries become possible.
What the 2025–2026 Evidence Changes
The newer evidence makes this topic much clearer than it was only a few years ago.
First, limerence now has a validated self-report research measure. The LQ-11 offers a more systematic way to study intense attachment need and neglect of self and others, but it remains a research measure rather than a diagnostic test (Marshall et al., 2025).
Second, severe limerence has been studied in a large quantitative sample and with real-time experience sampling. That work supports the importance of intrusive cognition, immersive fantasy, mood dynamics, and impairment while also highlighting the limits of generalizing from an impairing sample (Evans et al., 2026).
Third, partnered attraction has stronger longitudinal evidence. The 2025 study of extradyadic crush trajectories shows that attraction outside an exclusive relationship does not have one inevitable relationship outcome. Some trajectories coexist with stable relationship quality, while others are associated with decline (O'Sullivan et al., 2025).
Fourth, 2026 work on extradyadic infatuation is beginning to operationalize the tendency to think, feel, and desire someone outside a committed relationship, although this construct should not simply be treated as interchangeable with limerence (Huțanu & Holman, 2026).
Fifth, fresh daily-diary research shows how relationship uncertainty and rumination can fluctuate together over time in ordinary dating relationships (Goodboy et al., 2026). That supports uncertainty as an important scientific bridge for understanding persistent romantic thinking while leaving the limerence-specific causal question open.
The overall picture is more nuanced than the popular internet formulas. Limerence while partnered can be psychologically real, intensely disruptive, and ethically consequential without being a diagnosis, a verdict on the relationship, or proof that attraction must become action.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you be genuinely happy in a relationship and still experience limerence for someone else?
Yes. Research on extradyadic attraction shows that people can experience attraction to someone outside an exclusive relationship without corresponding deterioration in their primary relationship. Some people do show lower or declining relationship quality, so the attraction should be interpreted in context rather than treated as automatically harmless or automatically diagnostic of a bad relationship (O'Sullivan et al., 2025).
Is limerence while in a relationship the same as having a crush?
Not necessarily. A crush is a broad colloquial term for attraction to someone. Limerence usually refers to a more consuming pattern of romantic preoccupation, intrusive thinking, longing for reciprocation, fantasy, and difficulty disengaging. Recent limerence research has focused especially on intense or impairing experiences (Marshall et al., 2025; Evans et al., 2026).
Does limerence mean I am going to cheat?
No. An internal state does not determine future behavior. Studies of crushes in exclusive relationships found that relatively few participants progressed to romantic or sexual involvement with the crush over the study periods (Belu & O'Sullivan, 2025). Risk is better discussed in terms of behavior, opportunity, agreements, secrecy, relationship context, and choices rather than treating limerence as destiny.
Is fantasizing about someone else cheating?
There is no universal scientific rule that defines private fantasy as infidelity. Couples differ in their agreements and meanings. Research also shows that fantasy and behavior are separable phenomena. If a fantasy is accompanied by secret contact, deliberate romantic escalation, or conduct that violates an agreement, the behavioral question becomes more important than the existence of the fantasy itself.
Should I tell my partner about my limerence?
There is no evidence-based universal rule. Consider why you would tell them, what has actually happened, whether any agreement has been crossed, whether the attraction is materially affecting the relationship, and whether disclosure will support honest decision-making or simply transfer your distress. If behavior has violated an agreement, the situation is different from merely having unwanted thoughts or attraction.
Should I go no contact with the person?
No-contact advice is common, but there is no limerence-specific randomized evidence showing that it is always necessary or sufficient. Greater distance may be useful when contact repeatedly intensifies preoccupation or when your goal is to protect an existing relationship. In workplaces, families, co-parenting situations, or established friendships, a more specific behavioral boundary may be realistic.
Can limerence coexist with love for my partner?
Yes, in the sense that the existence of one intense attraction does not scientifically establish the absence of love for a current partner. Love, attachment, commitment, desire, and limerent preoccupation are related but distinct constructs. Whether your relationship remains one you want to choose is a separate question.
Does limerence mean my partner is emotionally unavailable or avoidantly attached?
No. Your limerence does not diagnose the other person. A person may be unavailable, inconsistent, uncertain, uninterested, conflicted, or simply behaving in a way you find difficult to interpret. Attachment style cannot be inferred reliably from one behavior pattern or from your emotional reaction to it.
Is limerence caused by anxious attachment?
Current evidence does not support that causal statement. Insecure attachment is associated with impairing limerence in recent research, and broader relationship science links attachment insecurity with relationship uncertainty. The evidence is primarily observational and does not show that anxious attachment is a necessary or sufficient cause of limerence (Evans et al., 2026; Şenkal Ertürk et al., 2025).
Is limerence a form of OCD?
Limerence is not an OCD diagnosis. The two can overlap phenomenologically in intrusive thoughts or checking, but OCD requires assessment of obsessions, compulsions, distress, impairment, and diagnostic criteria. See Limerence vs Relationship OCD for the full differential.
Does a high LQ-11 score prove I have limerence?
No. The LQ-11 is a recently developed research questionnaire with evidence for a two-factor structure and validity in the samples studied. It is not a DSM or ICD diagnostic instrument, and the validation study did not establish a clinical diagnosis from a single score (Marshall et al., 2025).
Can limerence fade without ending my relationship?
Yes, but there is no universal timeline. Extradyadic attractions can change in intensity over time, and longitudinal crush research shows multiple trajectories rather than one inevitable course (O'Sullivan et al., 2025). Limerence-specific duration data remain limited and are drawn largely from selected samples. For the dedicated evidence review, see How Long Does Limerence Last? Duration, Recurrence, and What Research Shows.
What matters most if I want to protect my current relationship?
The most actionable variables are behavior and agreements. Clarify what you want to protect, reduce voluntary behaviors that keep the attraction central, set realistic contact boundaries, avoid building a secret parallel relationship, restore neglected life domains, and address problems in the primary relationship directly rather than treating the limerent person as the explanation for everything.
Related Articles
References
American Psychiatric Association. (n.d.). Updates to DSM-5-TR criteria and text. https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/updates-to-dsm/updates-to-dsm-5-tr-criteria-text
Belu, C. F., & O'Sullivan, L. F. (2025). It's just a little crush: Attraction to an alternative and romantic relationship quality, breakups and infidelity. The Journal of Sex Research, 62(4), 515–528. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2024.2310702
Bradbury, P., Short, E., & Bleakley, P. (2025). Limerence, hidden obsession, fixation, and rumination: A scoping review of human behaviour. Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 40, 417–426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-024-09674-x
Conroy-Beam, D., et al. (2025). The function of love: A signaling-to-alternatives account of the commitment device hypothesis. Evolution and Human Behavior, 46(2), 106672. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2025.106672
Evans, C., Panton, S. O., Strawson, W. H., Floyd, E., Kellett, S., & Poerio, G. L. (2026). Love, longing and obsession: Features, correlates, comorbidities, and real-time cognitive-affective dynamics of limerence. Acta Psychologica, 267, 107043. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2026.107043
Goodboy, A. K., Dillow, M. R., Bolkan, S., Chiasson, R. M., & Vendemia, M. A. (2026). Relationship uncertainty and person-specific dynamics of partner rumination and relational turbulence in day-to-day life. Human Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqag001
Gormezano, A. M., Kutchko, V., Chadwick, S. B., Burns, J., Hunker, K., Konermann, M., & van Anders, S. M. (2026). Sexual fantasies across solitary and partnered contexts: Exploring eroticism/nurturance and fantasy target. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 55(3), 1139–1159. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03410-8
Huțanu, T.-E., & Holman, A. C. (2026). Longing for another: Extradyadic infatuation and its associations with features of the primary relationship and infidelity. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, 20. https://doi.org/10.1177/18344909261416561
Knobloch, L. K., & Theiss, J. A. (2011). Relational uncertainty and relationship talk within courtship: A longitudinal actor-partner interdependence model. Communication Monographs, 78(1), 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2010.542471
Marshall, L., Waldeck, D., Pancani, L., Churchill, S., & Tyndall, I. (2025). Development and validation of the Limerence Questionnaire (LQ-11). Psychological Reports. https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941251394980
O'Sullivan, L. F., Belu, C. F., & Garcia, J. R. (2022). Loving you from afar: Attraction to others (“crushes”) among adults in exclusive relationships, communication, perceived outcomes, and expectations of future intimate involvement. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 39(2), 413–434. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075211038612
O'Sullivan, L. F., Belu, C. F., & Tramonte, L. (2025). Do crushes pose a problem for exclusive relationships? Trajectories of attraction intensity to extradyadic others and links to primary relationship commitment and satisfaction. Personal Relationships, 32(4), e70033. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.70033
Şenkal Ertürk, İ., Akyüz, A. N., & Büyükşahin Sunal, A. (2025). Attachment insecurities and commitment: The mediator role of relationship uncertainty. Psychological Reports. https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941251351244
World Health Organization. (2024). Clinical descriptions and diagnostic requirements for ICD-11 mental, behavioural and neurodevelopmental disorders. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240077263