The Intensity What Feels Like Love Part 1 of 2

A personal note before we begin, as always.

I don't write about theory from a distance. Everything I share here comes from a genuine belief that the most powerful thing we can offer each other is honesty. Not something carefully curated. But something brutally real. Because growth and healing come from the ability to be vulnerable and authentic. And this is what trembles sometimes as it finds its way onto the page.

There is a feeling most of us know.

It arrives without warning and takes up every room in your mind. Washes over you with such intensity you feel you’re drowning in it. It’s almost ecstatic.  You find yourself thinking about one person with an almost ridiculous frequency. Replaying conversations. Reading into silences. Feeling your chest tighten when their name appears on your phone, and again, differently, when it doesn't. Everything feels heightened. Significant. Charged.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a thought surfaces with complete certainty: This must be love.

I've been there. And for a long time, I believed it too. Because the brain does a brilliant job at making you believe even the unbelievable.

But How?

This overwhelming feeling has a name, and I hate to break it to you, but it isn't always love. Psychologists call it limerence, a state of involuntary, obsessive attachment to another person, saturated with longing, fantasy, and an aching need for reciprocation. It was first described by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in the 1970s, and if you've ever felt it, her description will stop you in your tracks with how precisely it captures something you thought only you had ever experienced.

Limerence feels extraordinary. It also has very little to do with who the other person really is.

But it has everything to do with your nervous system.

When we encounter someone who triggers that flood of feeling, what's often happening underneath is a pattern recognition. The nervous system, shaped by every relationship you've ever had, is scanning and finding something familiar. Something that resonates with an old emotional frequency. And it responds by lighting up. Loudly. Because our brain always seeks patterns and what is familiar and responds to it.

For those of us with anxious attachment, that lighting up is often the most powerful around uncertainty. Around someone who is inconsistent. Present and then distant. Warm and then cool. Because the nervous system that learned early that love is something you have to work for, prove yourself worthy of, and never quite feel secure in, doesn't recognise steadiness as love. It recognises the chase. But to also warn you, manipulative people often use this trick against you. Exactly because it’s so powerful. It’s free, yet stronger and more addictive than any substance. And the anxiety itself becomes the signal. If I feel this much, it must mean something.

The Dopamine Loop Nobody Warned You About

There's a neurological reason why inconsistency is so intoxicating.

When affection or attention is unpredictable, our brains release dopamine not in response to receiving it, but in anticipation of it. The same reward circuitry activated by gambling. The not-knowing becomes the hook. And the moments of connection, when they do come, feel so disproportionately wonderful precisely because of the anxiety that preceded them.

This is why relationships that are objectively chaotic can feel so passionately alive. And why, from the inside, the intensity genuinely does feel like proof of something real. Something worth fighting for.

It's not necessarily manipulation, at least not in a traditional sense. It’s your brain, with its neurochemistry, manipulating you more than anything. But understanding that doesn't make it less consuming while you're in it.

I know. I've sat in that particular fire and called it home.

Things We Were Never Taught About Love

We were handed a very specific story about what love is supposed to feel like.

Films, songs, novels, the entire architecture of romantic culture, it all points in the same direction. Love is electric. Love is all-consuming. Love makes you feel like you're losing your mind slightly, ( and you kind of are ) and that loss is beautiful and proof of depth. If you're not a little undone by it, it probably isn't love.

Nobody sat us down and said: In fact, that feeling you're chasing might be your attachment wounds looking for a familiar kind of pain. That the electricity might be anxiety in a prettier outfit. That the intensity you're reading as passion might be your nervous system recognising a pattern it knows how to survive, not thrive in.

And so we kept falling. Hard and fast and certain. Into people who kept us guessing. Into dynamics that felt more like weather than warmth. Into that specific kind of longing that hollows you out and calls itself devotion.

And when something quieter came along, something kinder, something that didn't make your heart race in quite that way, it was easy to pass it by. To decide there was no spark. To keep waiting for the flood.

Here is what I was made to learn slowly and not without resistance:

The feeling of intensity and the suffering it produces are both real. Just like the longing you feel. But real feeling isn't the same as right feeling. And the most consuming experiences of my life have not been the most loving ones nor the most intense. And this is a difficult thing to write. And even more difficult to truly believe. Because it means looking back at some of the relationships that felt the most significant and asking a different question. Not did I feel a lot? But was I actually being loved? And sometimes, the answers point in two completely different directions.

I'll leave you there for now, sitting with that question.

Because Part 2 is where we go to the other side of it. What it feels like when someone is genuinely, quietly, consistently loving you well. Why that can feel strange at first. Why the nervous system sometimes doesn't trust it. And what it means to finally let it in.

Part 2 coming soon.