I was recently reminded of the concept of limerence, or involuntary and obsessive infatuation for another person, by a Lucy Dacus song. Limerence is one of those internet psychology buzzwords—like codependent, trauma, trigger—that…well, trigger me. They trigger me not because I think they are illegitimate concepts, but because of how the “wellness” industry has co-opted them to sell self-help books and life coaching programs and other late-stage capitalism junk.
But also because they feel familiar. Limerence, in the world of Wellness, is shorthand for love addiction. Codependent is shorthand for needy. To be addicted to love and to be needy for it and within it implies a lack of independence and ambition. I like to think of myself as independent and ambitious, but if I can relate to these psychological concepts, can I really claim to be?
Jenny Slate is a writer whose work I admire for its sensitivity and wit. Her 2024 memoir Lifeform is billed as a motherhood memoir, because that’s ultimately what it is, but I encourage everyone to read it because it’s also so much more. She starts with reflections on being single and seeking partnership. In an essay remembering a visit to Stonehenge when she was 16 and on her period, addressed to an imagined Doctor from whom she’s seeking guidance, she describes a feeling:
“Have you any experience with patients who suddenly understood something, and then even though they had other things to do, they could not stop fixating on that new understanding? I guess the question is: How many patients of yours are affected by arresting revelations? Like the revelation itself is saying, Keep thinking about me, there is more, don’t let go of me, keep digging? Is this a common occurrence?…What I understood, sitting on the rug and looking at these pictures taken by my sixteen-year-old self who was outfitted with a small plank of bloody gauze in her underwear, was that Stonehenge, these huge silenced rocks from long ago, is Witches That Got Turned into Rocks.”
She imagines the Witches That Got Turned into Rocks as having been persecuted, the way Witches usually are, but they are also patient, and someday there will be a great big storm and they will wake up and emerge from their rock prisons and “come back down here to do big work, but within small stories.” They do this by rewarding the people who are trying to be good and make life more beautiful by making their lives good and beautiful.
“They perform small acts, constantly. They are listeners and listen without ever stopping. They listen up for people saying thank you to strangers and send them great ideas, good dreams, or general good fortune that runs on its own…They touch the evening right on the sky and make it romantic or significant, and many people feel that they are encountering the auspicious, and they are.”
But the Witches “waited too long in their stones,” and because the people of Earth are not always good and not always beautiful, Slate understands that, one day, “people will go from being like, ‘What actually is Stonehenge?’ to being like, ‘Why did the Witches have to wait so long in their rocks? What delayed the storm?’” And it is in this question that Slate identifies a shame that feels familiar to her, like my familiarity to limerence and codependency. “I guess my question is,” she writes,
“Knowing you have my blood and pictures of my skeleton, is there any chance that I too have been out cold in a standing stone for a long time? I ask this because I feel a kinship to the stones and what I now understand about the Witches, and the work that they do. I ask because even though I have all of these pictures and they are evidence of my living, there is a lot of my life that seems like it happened while I was stuck inside of something.”
I also feel a kinship to the Stone Witches as Slate describes them and to the work they do. For most of my life I have felt as if I was walking along a fault line in the Earth, pointing at the rushing of the universe under my feet and begging other people to stop and look at it, to acknowledge that it’s there. I have stood there for so long, agog, that people have learned to simply walk around me instead of stopping, or sometimes they even notice me and tell me “Don’t move, stay right there or else.” It has been so long that the Earth has grown around me like a protective shell and not let me go. I have felt stuck inside the isolation of this experience, and that stuckness has led me to make choices I now regret.
“You can be asleep in a stone for so long, and so much can happen without your consent, and so much can happen because you are awake in the stone but afraid to even make a peep. But once you are out, once you get busted out, you can work freely and make up for lost time. You can respond.”
Limerence has kept me asleep to the things happening to me; the things other people have done to me without my consent. Codependency has kept me quiet, even in my awareness. I am ready to bust out, but I don’t want to be bitter at my own laziness when I do—I don’t want to question why it took me so long or be so bitter at myself that that I punish the people who stopped me from busting out sooner. As Slate puts it,
“I do not wish to live forever in the poisonous fantasy where I punish perfectly and perpetually. I do not want to be as cold as a stone and dirty with what splatters back at me from my own combat. I want to be as warm as a live person and I want to be clean enough to be around the very young or the very vulnerable. I want to live in reality and spin my rage into something new, edible.”
If I’m addicted to love, it’s because I’m full of it. If I become codependent to the people I love, I am only dependent on the love that I have created. The mistake is not the wanting and the needing, it’s the wanting and needing the wrong people—the people who walk around me or warn me not to move while I stand guard on my fault line, or who tell me my work is not worthwhile. The hard part isn’t forgiving them, though, it’s forgiving myself for believing them and for getting stuck.
"I think that the storm came down and woke me up because it knew that I finally wanted more than to sit and stew and bitterly snarl about what I find to be ‘bad.’ I believe that my storm came when it knew that I wanted to be free and that I was ready to do my new work. The new work is to be able to forgive not just the ones who hurt or frightened or trapped me, but of course, it is the slow work of forgiving all of the specters inside of me who still spit, ‘Why were you even around those stones in the first place?’ and ‘Why didn’t you bust out earlier?’ One by one, I must forgive the shames and cruelties I have slung at myself for choices made at desperate moments, or for spending so long waiting for literally anyone but myself to tell me that I am indeed the creature that I suspect I am.
I am a witchy creature who notices the cracks in the surface of the Earth and sees the universe rushing inside and stops to look. I am a Witch Who Got Turned into Rock because I stood there for so long, begging passersby to see what I saw. I got so distracted by no one seeing that I stopped looking. Like Slate, “the only debt I have to pay” is “forgiveness by forgiveness until I have brought myself far from any spooky stones and foggy fields and I am in my own arms again.”
I am independent because there is no one else standing with me doing my witchy work, but I do it anyway. I am ambitious because I am seeking someone to do the work with, and because I refuse to believe that doing it alone is better. Even the Witches That Got Turned into Rocks stood in a circle, together. I am a lot of things, but I’m certainly not better or wiser than Stonehenge.
Slate ends Lifeform with a prayer, which I’ll excerpt here:
“O dear infinity-number of deities, please to not let me be the master of the regretful smile.
Please do not ever let me be the compulsive sidearm flinger of the involuntary scoff.
Let me be the clean-mouthed laugher with tears running down the cheeks, and make it be that I am only weeping because I am too full of and spouting a syrup from surrendering to sweetness.
Make it be that I am the fountain of it all. I will work hard to remember that I am not required to be in combat anymore, and that I am doing the silky work of forgiveness now. Let me live like this, and when I die, mark my place with a fountain that feels encouraging to look upon. Don’t even write what my name was.”
When the storm comes, I will be glad that I was one of the people who stopped to look at the rushing of the universe; who watched the Stone Witches touch the evening right on the sky and felt that I was encountering the auspicious. I will stand on my crack in the Earth as a fountain of love and sweetness. Who cares if I got stuck? I am doing the silky work of forgiveness now. At least I was there.