That Ping Called Love

There is a moment that almost everyone today has lived through. You send a message to someone you care about. You are uncertain about how they are feeling about you. You watch the ticks turn blue (or maybe not even that). And then…..nothing. No reply. You put the phone down. Pick it up again. Check. Put it down. The silence stretches. You wonder if maybe you have been blocked or ghosted. You use AI to research the signs for being blocked, and then check back again. Still nothing.

What is happening to you in those minutes is not you feeling love. It is something older, more feverish, and considerably less rational. It is limerence.

The psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the word in 1979, after interviewing hundreds of people about romantic obsession. Limerence, she found, is an involuntary state of intense longing for another person, characterised by intrusiveness (they colonise your thoughts, you wake up thinking about them and they are your last thought before sleep), a desperate craving for reciprocation, and what she called "crystallisation": the tendency to find every detail of the beloved utterly perfect, every flaw somehow endearing. It feels like love. It is not love. It is love's impatient, slightly mad predecessor.

What separates them

Love, in its mature form, is a different animal entirely. It is steadier, quieter, less cinematic. It contains frustration and forgiveness in equal measure. It does not require the beloved to be mysterious, to always behave perfectly. It does not depend on uncertainty for its charge. It requires patience and understanding. Love is what happens, as the writer Julian Barnes put it, not when you look at each other but when you both look in the same direction.

The cruel irony is that limerence feels more like love than love itself. It is more vivid, more urgent, more all-consuming. A text message from the object of your limerence can cause a physiological response, elevated heart rate, a surge of dopamine, that genuine, settled love rarely produces. And lack of those messages can pierce like an arrow.

We are wired, it seems, to mistake intensity for depth.

WhatsApp and the limerence machine

Consider what the smartphone has done to this dynamic. It has created a technology perfectly engineered to sustain limerence indefinitely.

The blue tick. The "last seen" timestamp. The typing bubble that appears, then vanishes (why didn’t she finish the sentence?). These are uncertainty-delivering mechanisms. And uncertainty, as Tennov established, is the essential fuel of limerence. The person who replies immediately, consistently, fully, who makes themselves entirely legible, becomes, paradoxically, less limerence-inducing. The person who keeps you guessing, who takes three hours to reply and then sends only "haha" or an ambiguous emoji, that person has you. Not because they are more loveable. Because the variable-reward mechanism of intermittent reinforcement, which behaviourists use to train animals, is operating on you, and you are not immune. And they may well be doing this on purpose: of you respond in 5 minutes, they will take 10 for their next message.

Tuesday, 11:14pm

I keep thinking about what you said at dinner. About how you want things to feel real again.

I think I know what you mean.

Delivered ✓✓

Wednesday, 9:47am

😊

That type of exchange, which millions of people have experienced in on form or another, tells you almost nothing about another person. But it produces an enormous amount of feeling. And an enormous amount of angst and uncertainty.  This is the paradox of digital intimacy: we have more channels of communication than any generation in history, and we are, by many measures, lonelier and less understood.

What the long letter gave us

Before the telephone, people in love wrote letters. Real ones, sometimes five, six, eight pages. John Keats to Fanny Brawne. Napoleon to Joséphine. Camus to Casarès. These letters were not necessarily more eloquent because their writers were superior beings. They were more eloquent because the form demanded it. You could not write "😊" to someone you loved. The medium compelled something deeper.

"I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for their religion, I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more, I could be martyred for my Religion. Love is my religion.  I could die for that."

John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 1819

A letter took effort, which was itself a communication. It required you to sit with your feelings long enough to articulate them. The gap between sending and receiving, days, sometimes weeks in the past, meant you had to truly feel what you wrote. You considered the words, the sentence, you scribbled out or crumpled up pages before you reached the right words, the right tone. You could not send three hedging messages and then claim later you were joking. You had committed yourself to paper.

More than that: a letter required you to construct an imagined reader. To write to someone is to think carefully about who they are, their intelligence, their humour, their sensitivities, and to address that specific person. Knowing that the reader creates the letter as much as the writer. Such writing is an act of genuine attention. It is, in a small way, an act of love.

What our phones have actually given us

It would be too easy to simply lament those days gone by. The smartphone has genuinely changed intimacy, not only degraded it. The ability to send someone a photograph of something funny you just saw is a form of sharing that letter-writers could not have imagined. The good-morning message, the "thinking of you" sent from a train, the “missing you”, the voice note that lets you hear someone's real voice, these are not nothing and I personally treasure them. They are small acts of contact that maintain the texture of closeness across distance and in the moment.

Long-distance relationships that would once have deteriorated slowly through silence now sustain themselves with daily presence. People keeping in touch over FaceTime from another continent. The lost souls who find community at 3am when no friend is awake. These are real things.

And yet.

And yet the phone has also given us something that actively corrodes love: it has given us a hiding place.

What we hide on our phones

A locked screen is one of the most private objects most people own. More private than a diary, because a diary can only record what you write in it, while a phone contains what you have actually done, the evidence of your actual choices. The person sleeping next to you does not know what you searched for at midnight. They do not know who you have been messaging, in what tone, with what subtext. They do not know that you spent forty minutes this morning looking at the Instagram of someone you once kissed as a teenager. This is not necessarily infidelity. It is something more ambient and harder to name: the ability to maintain a parallel interior life that the person who loves you cannot see. We have always had private thoughts. But we have never had private thoughts that came with an interface, an inbox, and a swipe-to-delete function.

The phone has also made it possible to sustain limerence almost indefinitely in situations where, in previous eras, it would have been forced to resolve. It gives the means to feed infatuation, the WhatsApp thread, the 11pm "just thinking about you", are always in your pocket.

There is also a specific modern pathology worth naming: the Instagram relationship. You will recognise it. Photographed meals. Matching outfits. A grid full of beaming, tanned, well-lit couples in locations that suggest both wealth and spontaneity. The anniversary post that begins: "To my best friend, my partner, my everything..."

The Instagram relationship is limerence made permanent, or rather, made to appear permanent. It is the crystallisation that Tennov described, the process by which the limerent person finds everything about the beloved perfect, fossilised into content. The couple in the photograph is always in the limerence phase. They never argue about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher or put the bins out. They never experience the specific deadness of a Tuesday evening when you are both tired and there is nothing to say and that is fine, actually, because you are comfortable enough with silence.

What the Instagram couple cannot show, because it does not photograph well, is the thing that actual love is mostly made of. The showing up. The conversation you have at 2am about something that frightened one of you. How you kept someone company when unwell and put tissues by their bed or bought them cough medicine in case of need for their trip. The way you learn, over years, exactly how someone needs to be comforted, and you do it without being asked. And with patience.  With love.

Can we still love?

Yes. Of course we can. Human beings loved before the alphabet was invented. We will love after the tech platforms have collapsed and the servers have been switched off. The capacity for love is not going anywhere.

But it requires more deliberate resistance than it once did. The limerence machine, the slot-machine notification, the curated Instagram life, the blue tick left unacknowledged, does not make love impossible. It makes love harder to choose. It offers so many of love's mimics, excitement, obsession, validation, desire, without any of love's requirements: commitment, vulnerability, the willingness to be fully known.

Being fully known is the thing. It is the core of love and the terror of it. Those long conversations, seemingly always late at night. Those moments of vulnerability. Limerence protects you from love by keeping the beloved partly mysterious. Instagram protects you from it by letting you perform a version of your relationship without living inside it. The phone protects you from it by giving you a place to hide.

Love, in the end, has always been the same project: the sustained, deliberate, imperfect attempt to make yourself known to another person, and to receive them in return. Not the best-lit version of them. Not the version they curate for public display. The version that exists at 2am, uncertain and unfiltered and entirely real. The version whose hand you hold through the night in a state of wonder.

The joy, the genuine joy, is that this is still available to us. It was always available to us. It is available now, tonight, in the house or flat where you live. If you put the phone down long enough to find it.

Now to go write another letter, another card, sending love……

 ______________________________________________________________________

Steve Robson is a lapsed French literature academic, sometime transaction banker and existential son who divides his time between a Liverpool Street tower, arthouse cinemas, second hand bookshops and French cafés. A true believer that the unexamined life is not worth living and living proof that there is never an angst too far, he somehow manages to believe in nothing aside from a Camus inspired philosophy of human salvation and love, his hero’s passion for the beauty of an indifferent earth and more personally the élan and elegance of the Roger Federer backhand.