Is it 'true love' or 'limerence'?

I had mixed feelings about being so open about this. Because ‘obsession’ was a word used negatively growing up and I’m not totally open on why this word has such negative connotations - that part is personal, but not personally my story so I will leave it out.

I experienced moments of obsession in my teenage years - with pop-stars (god I still cringe at meeting Westlife, telling one of the boys I LOVED him -ughhh) and just relationships in general. I WAS obsessed - but then again, weren’t we all at a young age?

I had my first crush on a boy at intermediate when I was about 11. I actually went as far as cutting his face out of our class photo and putting it in a heart locket necklace I had - ‘weirdo’. I don’t know what drove me to that, but I guess I felt like it was my secret, and I felt ‘seen’ by him from him perhaps joking with me. At 11 years old, I had braces, I was not ‘hot’, and no one really paid me attention like that, so I lived in my own world - pretending all of Mariah’s albums and lyrics contained, were about my love interests at the time.

This was my ultimate daydream. To be ‘in love’ with someone was enough. And really, at 11 years of age, I was never going to actually be in love - so what was that?

As I grew older, entering my 20’s I had ‘relation-shifts’ I call them. Where I would be slightly infatuated with a guy, and then he would do something stupid like, compare me to an ex - and then I’d lose interest. That happened a few times to be honest. And back then, I didn’t really have the same fire and stamp to well, stamp it out. I just took the hit. And little by little my heart just sank further and further into my chest. I started to believe that all men were the same, or that I attracted the same type of man - over and over and over again.

If love was just, meeting a man who vaguely liked me, I was flattered and I learnt to love him. He could have been an alcoholic, and I would have manipulated myself to become more like him (not saying I was an alcoholic), but the point was, I decided that I wasn’t okay with being myself, because I wasn’t loveable if I was me. But if I were more like ‘them’ then I could fit in with everyone else. What a way to live!

One day in my mid 20’s, and I’m not really entirely sure how old I was, I was invited to a gig on Waiheke Island. I had recently broken up with my ex and I was not looking for any kind of romantic connection. It was far from my mind. In my single era, I was focused on having fun with my girlfriends and honestly I couldn’t have been more surprised at meeting Ned*

Ned was also recently single and while I cringe writing about him (because he’s not really someone I want to remember, but need to recall if I am to tell you about this story), he was everything I had nothing in common with. He was from a rich family and from Saint Heliers and I was a Maori/Samoan girl from South Auckland with no savings to my name. He drove a limited edition Ford, I drove a Nissan Pulsar which was worth a measly $4k. We were from different worlds.

He was funny and gentle and seemed to know how to get me to chase him. And chase him I did. I mean, of course I did, I didn’t know how to let someone chase me. And beyond my abandonment issues, I had no chill. I mean I tried, but I’m not very good at playing games anyway.

After a few months of seeing each other, we both admitted to each other that we had fallen in love (during an Easter holiday trip to Sydney, and outside the Opera house of course). Now, locations matter. Because every time he did something, he did it with purpose, and that made me fall in love with him even more. To me, he was a ‘unicorn’, a rarity. My dopamine was through the roof with his over-the-top gestures. I never valued gifts as much as memories or shared experiences - if I had to name it, my love language was quality time. He didn’t buy lavish things, but he let me into his world, and in those moments, I truly felt loved and seen.

He was away a lot for work. With his absence and my insecurity in myself, I started to unravel. I begged for reassurance but I shouldn’t have. What I should have been, was secure in myself before I got into that relationship, but I didn’t have time to get there. I didn’t know how. I questioned myself all the time. I didn’t love myself and I didn’t know why. And none of that was actually his fault.

After 2.5 years, he ended things with me. On that day, I knew the break up was coming. It was everything I couldn’t imagine myself today being - messy, lost, broken. I actually remember how he did it, what I was wearing, what he was wearing. It was all etched into my brain like a movie that replayed over and over. Flashbacks of every memory we ever made. As he left my mum’s house, I ran to the door, I howled like an animal begging for him to come back. To this day, I remember mum snatching me back from the door, hugging me as we both fell to the floor. Her and I crying. She felt my pain more than ever.

This was the beginning of the end. And honestly, it gets way more messed up. So if you think that I was here to tell you about a love story, you’re sadly mistaken.

Now, I know there were many events that took place that led me to this longing and fantasising of this old flame. As much as I tried to get over him, Ned seemed to have other plans. I will never know how much of what he told me was true, like how he told me he put a ‘tracking device’ in my phone (that he gave me) and somehow found me at a bar in Ponsonby after a date with another guy and YES I was single, so really free to do what I wanted. He had told me when he bumped into me, that he ‘wanted to feel what it was like to see me with someone else’ and then didn’t talk to me again for months until he did again.

He would continue to, for years and years, message me photos of keys/belongings asking if they were mine, asking what I was doing and then when I would reply, he would message me the next day saying ‘sorry I fell asleep’. It was like he was checking in, just to check in but then, he didn’t actually want to be with me, or be friends. He just kind of kept me there. I felt soul-tied to him. And every time I wanted to move on, he would show up in my messages or in person at an event. I wanted him to tell me he loved me and that he wanted me back, but he never did.

I tried to move on, but there was a message that had been running through my head. Not long before we had broken up, he had told me he was on a plane and was sat next to a godly man who told him that I was his ‘life partner’. Stupidly I believed this was a sign. And this is what kept me hanging on to him for YEARS.

Every once in a while, those messages appeared. And usually it was after he had broken up with someone. He would just send really vague messages and I would light up like a Christmas tree over them. My heart raced and I was full of hope. And then nothing. He’d be gone again. I realised he had done this a lot in our relationship too, and I had grown so used to it it was like a tug of war with my emotions. When I’d receive his messages I would get my dopamine hit and it would be back to that strange pattern of romantic obsession and withdrawal mode. The attention was given inconsistently and made me even more hooked. And because of my attachment wounds, I would be fixated on ‘winning him back’ - not that I went out of my way to, but that I just made myself so stupidly available to respond to him when he contacted me.

Trying to make sense of why I loved him so much was tearing me apart. I found it incredibly difficult to trust anyone, to love anyone the same or different, and I just had no room in my heart to love myself. I confused attachment with care and the more he treated me badly, never giving me any type of closure and always holding me at arms-length, the more I pined for him. But I would never tell him either.

It took me a decade. A decade of searching for answers to questions like:

• Why am I like this?

• Was that intermediate crush, the feeling of exhilarating obsession what I was experiencing then (feeling like a giddy school girl?), what I lost over the years, finally back?

• Why him?

• Why all this time?

• Are we ‘life-partners’ - WHAT/WHO THE HELL WAS THAT?! and

• Is this what love is supposed to feel like?!

And you guessed it, I never actually got answers to any of those questions except maybe ‘Why am I like this'?’

Because once I truly realised who I was, I understood that I deserved someone to love me and not make fun of me, or put me down. That I deserved to have someone not tell me they couldn’t commit because they couldn’t own up to their own faults. I realised, and this was so difficult, but the spiritual ties I had to him, were keeping me from growing. Life was out there, and I was watching it from behind closed windows - peering out every so often hoping someone would find me and love me like the love I was holding onto, wanting to give it to someone deserving.

And I think of those moments where I felt alone and lost wanting to be loved, like that video clip ‘Another chance’ by Roger Sanchez. (Go watch it and tell me you didn’t cry).

Limerence was keeping me from living wholeheartedly. It was a brain glitch, where neural circuits were firing off because of past dopamine pathways and not because he was right for me at all.

Do I still think obsession is a negative word? No. And it doesn’t mean I was weak to feel that way. I know now that I am wired for deep compassion and understanding. I want so much to be able to talk about all the intricacies of life and love and loss. It’s not such a bad thing to feel so deeply, and I think after so many years of looking inward and finding out more about myself, I know that I just love deeply.

Some don’t feel the same way, and some may never find what or who they truly love, or even what love feels like. Some paint a picture of love, but they never really step into it - never sharing all their fears and deepest needs and desires. Ned is one of those people to me. And that doesn’t mean he will be like this with someone else (by God’s grace, he will have changed). But for me, his inconsistency became my home to land upon because I had no solid ground within myself. His fleeting affection felt like stability simply because it was something for me to hold onto.

But now I know the difference - between attachment and connection and yearning to be loved and the quiet steadiness of true love.