Girl on Girl Limerence
Why we become obsessed with other women, how it hurts our personal development, and what it’s like to be someone else’s secret fixation.
“Right after hitting “send” on my thirtieth job application that night, I did one final scroll on my main feed and noticed an old classmate’s boss promoting a few openings at Jetto, an e-commerce startup that helped small businesses with guaranteed two-day delivery. I did a quick search on the company and stayed up for another hour stalking all current employees.
That’s when I first saw her.
Her profile picture showcased a cascade of loose, red curls framing a welcoming, yet detached smile. She was a few years my senior and studied business in college, then went on to work in sales at various startups in New York. She had won “Salesperson of The Year” at two of those companies, and was even featured in a Forbes article, “Ten Women Doing Big Business in the Big Apple.” I read the article in-full. I watched hours of her panel appearances on YouTube. I listened to her podcast features. I disassociated a bit, and by the time I returned to my body, it was 4 a.m., and I could hear the birds chirping outside my bedroom window.
Darcy’s most recent LinkedIn post indicated she was part of that big Jetto hiring sprint. She was looking for a Junior Sales Rep to support her category, selling the company’s two-day shipping tools to hardware stores in the Northeast. I pulled up the company website, found the sales rep application portal, and answered every question in thoughtful, meticulous detail.
Two days later, she emailed me. I was being summoned for an interview.
I knew I wanted the job by Darcy’s third question.
‘So let’s cut the bullshit, then. Who are you, Alexis Ecker?’ she asked pointedly, her eyebrows raised in curiosity.
‘I’m whoever you need me to be,’ I said - and I meant it.
Even though it felt a bit like a downgrade, going from a notable magazine to cold calling hardware stores, I was enamored with her. She was kind, competent, and effortlessly stylish, her head-to-toe black ensemble and glossy military boots giving Victoria Beckham sophistication with a sprinkle of Hot Topic. Classy, but with a hint of every-girl grit. As she shook my hand goodbye and told me to look out for an email with next steps, there was something in those grayish blue eyes, some current that ran between us. It felt like she had found something in me. A missing piece.
She was beautiful, poised, and self-assured. What could she possibly have been missing? What was she looking for? I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. Not yet.
Because I had this pulsing intuition that we were meant to find each other, that I would reach my maximum potential as long as Darcy was leading the way.
Jetto’s Human Resources Department sent me their offer that Friday. I didn’t negotiate. I didn’t hesitate. I signed right then and there, eager for my first day on the job, ready to make Darcy proud.
It felt so good to finally be chosen.
Especially by her.”
What is Limerence?
In my upcoming fiction thriller, The Raise, protagonist and narrator Alexis Ecker develops a parasocial internet obsession with Darcy Lyons, who shortly becomes her manager, then later, her co-founder. Alexis - lost, stagnant and desperate for status after her family’s financial collapse - develops an image of Darcy from afar based on her interviews and public persona, then uses that constructed image as a prototype for who she can become if she enters Darcy’s orbit. You have just watched Alexis experience the first phase of limerence: infatuation and idealization.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term “limerence" in her 1979 book, Love and Limerence, explaining that it’s an intense, involuntary emotional state in which a person becomes obsessively preoccupied with another person (the "limerent object"). According to Tennov, the limerent person is unsure if their feelings of closeness are reciprocated, and this uncertainty fuels the emotional intensity they experience. Limerence, critically, is not love, because it is underpinned by a lack of genuine understanding of the other person, rather than a mutual emotional bond.
Limerence can happen from afar, like in the instance I just illustrated, where Alexis doesn’t know Darcy, but becomes hyper-fixated nonetheless. Or it can happen up-close, wherein someone grows a bit too fond of an acquaintance, or even a close friend.
Limerence is a spectrum, just like love and attraction are a spectrum, but the main hallmarks of limerence, and what make it unique, are as follows:
The feeling is involuntary, as Tennov explains, and deeply hard to shake - no matter how hard you wish it away or direct your focus elsewhere.
There is an element of preoccupation. You can love or be attracted to someone without feeling “preoccupied” with them, their whereabouts or their moods. With limerence, though, there is a constant hum of preoccupation. The person’s name floats into your consciousness involuntarily, and you immediately wonder what they’re up to or what they’re thinking about. It’s kind of like being 13 and having a middle-school crush.
There is a desire for closeness that is coupled with constant anxiety. You are always questioning how the person feels about you, whether they match your desire, and if you’re positive emotions are entirely one-sided. With this, you take everything they do as a signal of confirmation or rejection. They are either signaling “yes, we’re as close as you think, and we’re on the same page,” or “no, you feel more strongly about me than I do about you.” This ping-ponging only makes you want the person more, and your self-worth or self-concept hinges on if the person is actively confirming or rejecting. You are tossed between euphoria and agony.
Limerence is a huge theme in my upcoming book, but I am not the first author or creative to use non-romantic limerence as the fragile thread connecting my hyper-real female characters.
Limerence in Literature
In Conversations with Friends, Frances is deeply “limerent” toward Bobbi: she is immediately infatuated with her self-assuredness and sharp wit. As their friendship progresses, Frances measures her self-worth based on how Bobbi treats her, she desperately seeks Bobbi’s approval, and she is constantly preoccupied with Bobbi’s opinions and reactions to other people. In Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, we are blessed with, what I’d argue, is one of the most compelling examples of non-romantic limerence in literature. Elena is obsessed with Lila: her brilliance, her fearlessness, her writing. Elena oscillates between thinking Lila is superior to and inferior to her, depending on the intensity of her intrusive thoughts and her confidence in her own identity at any given moment. When Elena has sex with Nino, a childhood acquaintance that sleeps with both women, she imagines she is Lila - literally - giving us full-blown enmeshment porn. As they get older and their paths diverge, Lila’s presence still shapes Elena’s sense of self to the point where she can’t really discern where Lila ends and she begins. This is because “Lila” only exists as a pinball bumper for Elena’s many insecurities. She is not a full, nuanced person to Elena - she is a mythical creature of sorts, like any proper limerent object.
I could name a zillion other examples, though: Black Swan, The Girls, Mulholland Drive, Jennifer’s Body, Euphoria - “girl on girl” limerence underpins a lot of delicious work. Because it sells.
And because limerence is something all women experience to some degree, whether we’d like to admit it or not.
Chances are, if you’re reading this and you identify as a woman, you are:
Actively obsessing over someone on social media. Maybe it’s here, on Substack. Or maybe it’s over on Instagram or Tik Tok. You love their style. You love their turn-of-phrase. You covet their success. Your brain lights up when you consume their content and (I’ll hold your hand when I say this -) you get a little Alexis-y slash Frances-y slash Elena-y and compare yourself to them with some regularity.
Catching light, limerent feels for some cool gal IRL. Maybe she’s an EHG, or the jet-setting EIHG, or a contemporary in your field who you met at a meetup or a party. You liked her style, you liked her energy. She had that je ne sais quoi, and she’s been on your mind since this chance encounter.
The limerent object. Someone in your life, or multiple onlookers, have put you on a pedestal and idealize you and your traits. This idealization, though, also comes with waves of resentment. If you are quite close, the person who feels limerent toward you may have some emotional dependency on you and feel oddly attuned to your moods.
I’ll pause here to explain that I am knowingly and a little cheekily expanding the definition of limerence every-so-slightly. I want to put that on the record, and also remind you that I’m not a therapist, psychiatrist, or anything close to it. The limerence I am talking about is what I will all LimerenceLight™️, or diet limerence - not full-blown, full-sugar limerence ala Hedra in Single White Female.
The limerence in Single White Female, Black Swan or Mulholland Drive is the type that may dovetail a tried-and-true Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) diagnosis, two mental health conditions that can cause intense and unstable attachment. This type of limerence, and the mindset it induces, is often compared to substance abuse, because it is characterized by “compulsion, obsession, and lack of control.” It’s important to note that the key feature of limerence is that the intrusive and obsessive thoughts, the fear of rejection by the limerent object and the preoccupation with their mood and whereabouts is “uncontrollable and all-consuming.” It’s giving Cassie in Euphoria - obsessing over Nate, idealizing him despite knowing he’s toxic, changing her entire appearance for him and mirroring his ex-girlfriend’s outfits with no shame, beautifying herself for hours at 5am before school, and allowing his hot-and-cold behavior to dictate her emotional reality. But the limerence I’m talking about in this piece is LimerenceLight™️. It’s the limerence of literature - of Frances, of Elena, of Alexis. It still qualifies because it has the three hallmarks of limerence - involuntary fixation, preoccupation and anxiety - but without any murder, stealing your best friend’s boyfriend or suicidal self-destruction.
Limerence in Our Lives
LimerenceLight™️ is social media fixation. It is recurring Instagram stalking. It is letting another woman’s success make you feel insecure for a period of time at the expense of your own confidence. It is putting another woman’s life or career on a pedestal when you know absolutely nothing about her, the realities of her bank account, or the truth behind her day-to-day. It’s the knee-jerk compare-and-contrast we see from the literary characters I mentioned above: they view and define themselves in relation to their limerent object, bouncing their identity off of another woman’s to mold, shape and understand their own. It is, in essence, using another woman as a moodboard, measuring stick or goalpost for your Highest Self.
LimerenceLight™️ is what permeates our everyday. It is the quiet hum underpinning every social interaction we have online and IRL - whether we like it or not. In a culture that’s become increasingly obsessed with self-improvement, annual planning, personal style and personal brand, it’s hard not to feel like everyone is mining for inspiration - everywhere.
Jen wants to de-clutter and bring ease and calm to making meals at home. She may seek inspiration from content creators and influencers who explicitly share content on this topic - but she may also snag ideas from a chic, organized new friend who has her over for dinner. Then, after dinner, Jen may stalk that new friend online when she hadn’t prior, screenshotting pics of her kitchen and adding them to her “Kitchen Inspo” album on her iPhone. In another example, May has thought of building a “personal brand” for the longest time and really admires how her friend Nina shows up on Tik Tok and Substack. May, unsure of her own “why” and hazy on her own content pillars, starts posting content in order to promote her new business, but it looks and feels a lot like what we’ve seen from Nina. Is this kosher? You tell me. Are these people creepy? I don’t know. Is this very human behavior. Well, yes. Because the thing about LimerenceLight™️ - about cultivating girl-on-girl obsession and contorting toward what you admire - is that you may not even do it consciously. Or purposefully.
Limerence - the full-sugar kind - may be more likely to occur for those with anxiety or depression, or those who experienced early childhood neglect or abandonment. If you couldn’t form healthy attachments in childhood, it may impact your ability to form healthy emotional bonds as an adult, which totally tracks. Limerence is not a clinical, DSM-diagnosable disorder, but when taken to the extreme, ala Cassie in Euphoria, it’s clear there are or may be other clinical disorders woven into the limerence experience.
But as for what Jen and May are doing and LimerenceLight™️, well, this diet, low-grade fixation can plague anyone experiencing insecurity, professional overwhelm, or a desire for more than they have. So basically - all of us. Things like influencer culture and the worsening wealth gap - now on prominent display thanks to IG and Tik Tok, put us all in a position of ongoing, aggravated limerence. This, to me, is why r/nycinfluencersnark exists (hi ladies😘). Why are anonymous women feverishly monitoring the social accounts of women they don’t, and will never know? Because while on the one hand, limerence looks like growing positively attached to people on the internet and in your orbit who have things and qualities you want to emulate, it also looks like anxiety, resentment, and agony. The idealization of the limerent object is paired with preoccupation and disdain - much like what we see with Elena toward Lila in My Brilliant Friend, or with Alexis toward Darcy in my book, The Raise. R/nycinfluencersnark is a living, breathing study of limerence, a place where you can watch women go from: “I LOVE her content! She has such a healthy relationship with food and is really lovely to watch” to “She’s veeeerrrry close to losing that spark that made everyone like her and going off the insufferable deep end that comes with influencer fame. Another one bites the dust.”
What Jen and May are doing by copping inspo from their friends and acquaintances is not, to me, explicitly malicious or single-white-female-y. And it’s nowhere near as depraved as what’s happening on Reddit. But it is an example of a slippery slope we are all on right now, where, driven by limerence, we vision-board our aspirational futures using real snapshots of other people’s current lives.
The Reference-ification of Everything
We’ve fully normalized cobbling together images of other girl’s outfits and apartments and closets to manifest our goals for the year or for the quarter.
We’ve normalized hiring other people to style us so we can blend in with the women we feel limerent toward.
If we can’t afford a stylist, we can stalk our limerent object on social, and then rent their clothes on Pickle.
We’ve normalized copying an influencer’s makeup routine or hairstyle via their YouTube tutorials or Vogue breakdowns or Tik Tok how-to’s, and now, we can buy their recommended products on ShopMy in just a few taps.
To me, all of this stems from social-media driven insecurity and an algorithmic dulling of personal style, but also - a larger cultural shift that has made women more ambitious and eager to match their outer shell to their inner voice. They are attending and graduating college at higher rates than men, are starting businesses at higher rates than men, and their overall workforce participation has reached historically high levels. They want to look the part, and are turning to aspirational women for how to do it. Slay. This is not a bad thing. We should all be helping and inspiring each other - of course.
But the question is: How do you stay YOU while being inspired, while being influenced? How much referencing is TOO much referencing? When, like with Elena toward Lila in My Brilliant Friend, does it become impossible to discern where your reference ends, and you begin? Or, dare I say, with Amelia Gray and Gabriette? Which, admittedly, is a more physical example than what I’m about to discuss - but still. Uncanny! And I think a VERY good visual representation of my point…
From my own personal experience, limerence, and this always-on referencing, can 100% threaten your own personal development.
How Limerence Hurts Personal Development
To cede your identity and the formation of your identity to someone who isn’t you - whether it a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger - is one of the most destructive and dangerous things you can do for your sense of fulfillment, mental health and earning potential. It’s tempting to do this, though, because people are promoting themselves and their lifestyle and their job as THE BLUEPRINT for ultimate success or work-life balance or blah blah blah. Or again, you may slip into limerence inadvertently out of a sense of insecurity or anxiety, not knowing what your true path is or where you’ll find your ultimate purpose.
But if you build your life on a pile of references or in the shadow of a girl or a group you blindly admire, you will end up living a life you don’t recognize, living and breathing as an avatar of an X - a “founder,” a “media personality,” a “banker” an “influencer” - instead of as the person you genuinely are and would be happiest being. I think this happens to more people than we’re willing to understand or admit. This life will burn you out, make you resentful, and shove you into a victim mindset that will take time to shed and erase. This mindset is not helpful for making money, and it is not helpful for cultivating community.
And while it’s wise to have mentors and models to map yourself to, this is fundamentally different from making someone or a group of people your “reference.” You can only benefit from a mentor or a “model” once you do the introspection and inner work necessary to build an identity and a set of goals that are all uniquely yours. Glomming onto a girlie who “has it all figured out” is not the same thing as thoughtfully choosing a guide who has hit the professional milestones you want to hit, and finding ways to involve them on your journey or in your life.
In the former, you’re doing exactly what Alexis did in the opening chapter of this Substack: you are forming an idealized version of someone’s existence or career with no data, then hitching your salvation to living like them. In the latter, you have the data on who you want to be, and how you want to live, backed up by some self-awareness. And - most critically - you have the agency to understand that no one is coming to save you.
Ever.
To give you a very concrete example:
REFERENCE GONE WRONG (so embarrassing - prepare yourselves):
When I was publishing my first book in 2021, which was about building and selling my retail technology company, I felt limerent toward a well-known female entrepreneur who I wrote about. I thought her life was so amazing. She had more money than me. She had a bigger name and platform. And a tiny little part of my lizard brain figured: oh my god, if I can get this book to her, and she sees what I wrote about her, we’re going to connect, and I’ll level-up. I REALLY wanted to send her a copy of the book, which I was able to do successfully. But then, I took things too far, and did a weird virtual panel essentially about her and her business without her involvement (I’m literally killing myself and cringing as I type this), and it all just got… so fucking weird. She called me out on it, and I… I just. It was a limerence-led effort, it was a glomming, it was gross. What’s so bizarre is that ultimately, I already knew by that point that I didn’t want to hit her professional milestones! I knew that she’d be a shitty mentor or model because I didn’t technically want to accomplish the things she had accomplished. But the essence of her LIFE just felt like SUCH A COMPELLING REFERENCE. So in one swoop, I was violating my own identity formation and furthering some self-denial, and also, really weirding this girl out. Sick.
THOUGHTFULLY CHOOSING A GUIDE:
While working on my second book in 2023, which is fiction, I struggled with plot. I thought through how to find the right mentor. I knew I needed someone who was a great writer. I knew I needed someone who had hit various professional milestones in fiction writing that I wanted to hit. New York Magazine had called this author and her book, Self Care, ”Highbrow, brilliant.” The book was ranked by nearly every internet publication as one of the “Best Books of Summer 2020.” And The New York Times gave the book a glowing review, and her, a dedicated interview. Who am I talking about? Of course,
. She agreed to be my book coach after I attended one of her virtual workshops and sent a thoughtful follow-up email with my first few chapters, and she has since become a forever mentor and friend (until she, too, decides I’m a fucking creep. Just tell me nicely, thanks).You see - this was not using someone as a blueprint or putting someone on a pedestal and then deciding their path is my path because they are so cool and successful or this-and-that.
This was, two years after my GLOMMING INCIDENT (I LITERALLY CAN’T. I HATE MYSELF FOR THIS - STILL), pursuing a relationship very intentionally with my own sense of identity and purpose. Of course Leigh is #goals and of course so many aspects of her life and her world are worth coveting and emulating, but I never thought of Leigh as a limerent object, or as a reference. I thought of her as a fully formed person that’s working, struggling, failing, and winning to achieve her goals, just like me. And by asking her to guide me, I gained from her. But she was never the key to me “leveling up” or my “highest self.”
She never held my salvation.
My upcoming thriller, The Raise, takes all of this to the extreme. It’s about what happens when you use someone else’s life as a reference for your life. It’s about what happens when you let a pathological need to be chosen, liked and loved override the natural order of things - which is - to be yourself. It’s about building your identity off of a reference, then watching your reference die, and not knowing who you’re supposed to be anymore once the blueprint’s gone.
I loved writing this book because I’ve always struggled with limerence. As a creative and imaginative girl, my limerence is very powerful. Not sugar-free. I know my Substack often covers semi-taboo topics, or themes that are vulnerable and a little grimy from time-to-time.
But I’m excited, with The Raise, to show you what limerence really looks like .
To show you how dangerous it can be.
Have you ever had a limerent episode? Do you struggle with referencing your life away? Do you often find yourself in a volatile, push and pull relationship with someone in your life? Can you tell Amelia Gray and Gabriette apart?
Talk Soon,
Ali 🧘♀️
Why is this my life right now, and the thing is this person isn’t a huge influencer she just has something I want (which is being desired) and because of this I’ve put her on this pedestal and automatically want her entire life even though just one aspect of her life appeals to me. All of a sudden she’s occupying my thoughts and I want to keep tabs. I really hate this feeling.
You are a dream client! It is interesting to think about the relationship between limerance and parasocial relationships… is the person in a parasocial relationship oblivious to their limerance? Or can limerance go too far and turn into fantasy of relationship that doesn’t exist?