LOVE AND LIMERENCE: The Experience of Being in Love

A mostly silly attempt to distinguish love, as in concern and affection, from being in love, which the author inexplicably dubs ""limerence."" The voyeuristic appeal of questionnaire, interview, and diary excerpts from ""limerents"" in agony is probably the main point here, but Dorothy Tennov (Psychology, Univ. of Bridgeport) does attempt to connect the dots from time to time: limerence does not strike everyone; it feeds most profitably on a combination of hope and despair with respect to its primary goal, ""mutual reciprocation""; and it produces excessive preoccupation with the ""LO"" (""Limerence Object""). Tennov unwisely tries to anchor an already sinking ship in the mire of philosophers, psychologists, and historical or literary figures; she finds that ""Like Heloise, the majority of 778 undergraduate college students who answered an anonymous questionnaire eight centuries later reported that love was intensified after a sexual relationship had begun."" Romance has never been so prosaic.