Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today, and if you've listened before, welcome back.

Today we're talking about Limerins. It's a form of intense, involuntary, and usually one-sided romantic obsession. And over the last few years,

Limerins has become an incredibly popular topic online. But for whatever reason, for all of its

popularity, there is no formal definition of Limerins. There are very few experts on the topic,

and there are only a handful of papers and studies that have been written on it. And because of this, when I knew I wanted to do an episode on the topic, and there are only a handful of papers and studies that have been

written on it. And because of this, when I knew I wanted to do an episode on the topic, I had a

difficult time finding the right person to talk to. And that's part of why I'm so excited to be

joined by today's guest, licensed clinical social worker and therapist Brandy Wyant. So Brandy,

thanks for joining me today. Thank you so much for us.

I'm very excited to be here. Thank you so much also for bringing attention to this topic.

I know a lot of my colleagues are talking about it a lot in the online communities I'm part of

with eager for more content. So yeah, really, I'm really glad. Yeah, glad for the visibility.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. And you wrote one of the very few journal papers that I was able to bump into on limerence. It was titled, Treatment of Limerence using a cognitive behavioral approach, a case study. A spoiler, you were the case in this case study, but we'll talk about that a little bit later. That's right. And you published it, and I think it was the Journal of Patient Experience a few years back. And I thought that you'd be a great guest here because you were both a clinician and somebody who's experienced limerence yourself. So you're bringing kind of both of those perspectives to the table. So maybe we start with what's limerence? I gave kind of a little definition of it in the intro, but you could probably do this a bit better than me. Well, I don't know. I think that's

part of why we're here, you know, I think there's some disagreement. And I know there's some

academics and researchers who would disagree that there is a distinction between Limerins and

romantic love. I think that ultimately we may end up with

more than one term to describe this. I think people are using the term limerance to refer to a

broad spectrum of feelings of love, attachment, infatuation, and we may end up needing to get more

specific. And what I have drawn from, there was a, of course, Dorothy Tenelves' original book,

Love and Limerance came out in the 70s.

I would say that Limerance is experiencing obsessive thoughts about another person,

having an obsessive interest in them.

...