Limerence and maladaptive daydreaming

[Yukia]

Limerence is a word that I came across a few times and forgot its definition as soon as I was done reading. Recently, YouTube recommendations gave me several videos to taste the topic itself, and what I watched was extremely interesting. To begin with, many symptoms of limerence overlap with maladaptive daydreaming:

• limerence and maladptive daydreaming are not recognized as an official medical or psychiatric diagnosis despite people's many accounts on those conditions driving their lives into near-ruin;
• limerence and maladaptive daydreaming are both slippery terms without a concrete definition;
• both are considered natural processes made worse by some kind of psychological distress;
• both are built on an idealized, fictional plot, causing conflicting feelings of craving real-life experiences but fearing that they will fail to live up to imaginative ideals, what results in pushing away and curtaining the reality;
• neither is a voluntary state of mind, making people who experience it feel helpless, broken and incapable;
• both are classified as behavioral addictions rushed by dopamine with the possibility to start seemingly out of nowhere, lasting for months or even years;
• limerence is debated over between two schools of thoughts, such as whether it's meant by evolution to act as a survival mechanism, therefore it might be a strange but an acceptable form of lifestyle, or maybe it's a serious fault on a neurological level that doesn't do severe damage to the brain but forces one's thoughts into a direction that is satisfying and shameful at the same time, much like maladaptive daydreaming isn't agreed upon in that regard;
• last but not least, limerence and maladaptive daydreaming make you look socially awkward at best and deeply disturbed at worst.

And of course, there are differences.

First, limerence is about an uncontrolled romantic infatuation. Yes, maladaptive daydreaming can generate stories about you and your crush being lovey-dovey, but, unless you have it along with limerence (my condolences), you're much more likely to focus on characters (notice how I don't say "people") entirely made up by you, for you. By contrast, someone who suffers from limerence can become suddenly attracted to another person they can't have (i. e. outside of marriage). However, even though the person is real, someone with limerence wants their own interpretation of them and not the person themselves.

Secondly, limerence is driven by hope for one's feelings to be reciprocated. While we may argue that maladaptive daydreaming represents this type of hope to some degree, it is channelled into a mostly fictional dimension with maybe a few exceptions based on people you know, and they're unlikely to be key characters of your obsessive behavior. Limerence calls for an object of obsession that exists in the material world, and every little interaction with them is a trigger, perhaps similarly to how music or certain scenes in movies trigger a maladaptive daydreamer.

Nonetheless, in the end of the day, limerence and maladaptive daydreaming have different objects of obsession, but very similar behavioral patterns. Identical, even. And again, neither there is an apparent cause or sufficient resources to get help (read: be taken seriously).

Anyway, learning about limerence was exciting even though I haven't studied it that much. I wouldn't call it another form of maladaptive daydreaming, especially because limerence by itself incorporates intrusive daydreaming but isn't limited to that.

I hope that one day in future all people with these conditions can understand them better. Normally, I wouldn't encourage being armchair psychologists, but since these two conditions are so poorly researched, it looks like we don't have a choice but to talk more about them.

Do you think limerence and maladaptive daydreaming are related evolutionally? Or just on their own? Is it possible that maladaptive daydreaming is also a form of love, just like limerence is? Have you ever experienced limerence as a maladaptive daydreamer?