On Business Limerence
The peculiar comfort of the version that only exists in your head.
I didn’t have my first kiss until I was 23. Not something I ever imagined feeling comfortable sharing on the internet. But here we are.
A mixture of low self-esteem and a (long left behind) Christian upbringing meant that romantically, I was a late bloomer. Then at 22 I found myself in therapy, and despite many other big things going on in my life, my lack of romantic relationships became a lot of what we talked about.
The reason, when I eventually understood it, was this: I had developed a very particular skill. I was extraordinarily good at being in love with people I had never actually spoken to about it. I could construct entire relationships in my head. Full, detailed, emotionally rich relationships without any of the terrifying mess of actually being involved.
One of my most mortifying moments ever was when a guy I had one of these crushes on at university said he didn’t like vacuuming. Because I had spent so much time imagining our married lives together - and to my later horror - I replied “that’s ok, I love vacuuming”. I had quietly decided that would be my contribution to our entirely imagined relationship. He looked at me like I’d grown a second head. We had never been on a date. The memory still makes me die inside. I don’t even like vacuuming!!
There is a word for this. It’s called limerence.
Limerence is the state of obsessive romantic preoccupation with another person. That intense, intrusive, involuntary attachment where you think about someone constantly and build elaborate fantasies around them. It's not quite love, because love requires the other person's actual participation. Limerence is a relationship you're having entirely by yourself, and crucially, it feels almost as good as the real thing. Sometimes better. Because in limerence, you never get rejected, the timing is never wrong, and nothing is uncertain. It thrives on that not-knowing, on the possibility that it could still be everything you've imagined. The moment reality enters, the spell is broken.
I was, it turned out, a limerence specialist. And it was keeping me utterly stuck.
After many, many sessions my therapist gave me the challenge to ask someone out. As I talked myself round and round about how I was ever going to admit (by this time to a different beardy man to the vacuum hating guy) that I liked him, she said one of the most transformative things anyone has ever said to me.
“You could do all of that, or you could just stop making it such a big deal.”
Oph. But also ha!
I felt immediately liberated. I could just stop making it such a big deal. That could be it. I could choose for it to be lighter. I could actually take action.
So I left that session and went and asked a wholly unsuitable man out. And he said “absolutely not.”
Brutal! And yet I did not die. Not even close.
Suddenly I had survived my biggest fear. I was free. My first kiss came a few weeks later (not with that inappropriate beardy man, but with another one. Possibly even more inappropriate). Things escalated quickly from there and it was a glorious phase of sluttery in the most positive way!
I have been thinking about this story a lot lately, because I’ve noticed something.
We experience limerence within our businesses.
Not just with our offers, although that’s part of it. With the whole thing. With the version of our business (and ourselves) that exists so completely and so vividly in our imagination that it almost feels real. We think about it on walks. We make notes at midnight. We tell our coach about it. We tell our business buddies in long Whatsapp voice notes.
We can describe it in extraordinary detail: what it looks like, who it’s for, what it will mean, who we will be when it finally exists.
And then, because the imagined version has become so real to us, we feel almost as if we’ve already done it. Our brain cannot fully distinguish between the thing we have imagined and the thing we have built. The neurological experience of having it exist is already there. And so the urgency to make it tangible quietly diminishes. The thing stays, perfectly formed and perfectly safe, in our heads.
Meanwhile in the real world: it doesn’t exist yet.
This is business limerence. And it shows up in more ways than you might think.
Offer limerence You’ve been building something in your head for months, maybe longer. You’ve thought about the people who’ll come, the transformation they’ll experience, the version of your business that will exist on the other side of it. You’ve refined the imagined version so many times it feels almost finished. And yet it hasn’t been put out into the world, because the imagined version is safe and the real one introduces the most terrifying variable of all: other people. Other people who might say no. Other people who might say yes and then not like it, Other people who might comment negatively on your pricing, or worst of all ignore the offer all together. In the imagined offer, everything goes the way you picture it. The real offer doesn’t come with that guarantee.
Visibility limerence is subtler. This is the version of you that shows up boldly, consistently, with something real to say. You can picture them clearly. You know what they post about, how they speak, what they stand for. You’ve been meaning to become them for a while now. But because they exist so fully in your imagination, their absence from your actual feed feels almost temporary. Like you’re just about to step into them. Like they are right there, almost ready. But they are never quite ready, because they only becomes themselves by actually showing up. The imagined version, however vivid, cannot do that part for you.
Identity limerence is often the deepest one. It’s the expanded version of who you are in your field. The body of work that finally reflects your real depth of knowledge and experience, the unique take that distinguishes you, the thing that means people understand not just what you do but who you are when they encounter your work. You know this person intimately. You are, in many ways, already them. But the tangible evidence hasn’t caught up yet. And until it does, you exist in a strange in-between state: fully formed in your own understanding of yourself, not yet legible to the outside world.
I know this one all to well right now.
I have been working on something for a long time. A body of work around what I describe as the hidden money patterns. They are based on the deep, largely invisible stories and behaviours that shape how we relate to money in our businesses.
I can see exactly what it wants to be: a private podcast, a course, a framework that draws on years of work with clients and my own ongoing relationship with all of this. I can see how it will change things, both for the people I work with and for how I’m understood in my field. I know that when it exists, it will shift my identity from money coach to something more - someone with a distinctive, hard-won, deeply researched point of view.
I already am that person, for what it’s worth. I just want to say that clearly without it sounding like bragging: the knowledge is there, the experience is there, the point of view is there. But my body of work doesn’t reflect it yet.
And of course, the dreaming itself is not the problem. In fact it’s often where everything begins. It’s where the idea takes shape, where you figure out what you actually want to build, where you let yourself go bolder, it’s the way the vision gets clear enough to move towards.
There is real creative value in the imagining. Some of the most important work happens there. The problem is when the dreaming stops being a departure point and becomes a destination. When the imagined version is so vivid, so complete, so satisfying in itself that it quietly becomes a substitute for the real thing rather than the beginning of it. That’s when limerence sets in. And that’s when the dream, however beautiful, starts to work against you.
And yet I have struggled to move out of the dreaming so far this year, to get this work out there. As some of you will know I have been waiting for a thyroid operation. Twice delayed, then finally scheduled (it’s tomorrow (hopefully!) as I write this).
Health stuff has a way of making everything else feel both more urgent and completely impossible at the same time. The work I want to do has had to live somewhere while my body was doing other things, and for a long time the only place it could live was in my imagination.
Which means I have been in full business limerence with my own vision for months.
And I’ve noticed what that does. The imagined version has kept growing. It has become more elaborate, more fully formed, more complete in my head. The gap between it and what currently exists has started to feel enormous, almost unbridgeable. Which has made it harder, not easier, to begin. Because now the real version has to live up to something very large indeed.
This is what limerence does, romantic or otherwise. The longer you stay in it, the more the imagined version grows, and the more daunting the real thing becomes by comparison.
I think it’s also worth noting that we are all living through a period of profound external uncertainty - the economy is unpredictable, the political landscape is frightening. Many of us are watching systems we thought were stable reveal themselves as anything but.
When the world outside feels that unsafe, it is not irrational that our nervous systems reach for the imagined and the controlled. The version of your business that exists in your head is yours entirely. Nothing out there can touch it. Of course it feels safer to stay there.
And sometimes life genuinely intervenes - health, family, circumstances outside your control and the dream has to live in your imagination for a while because there is nowhere else for it to go. That’s all part of being human.
But here is what I’ve had to sit with: the imagined version, however beautifully detailed, however necessary it was as a place to hold the thing while real life was happening, cannot do anything. It cannot help anyone. It cannot build the body of work. It cannot make you visible. It cannot earn money. It cannot bring into being the version of you that you already are but that the world can’t see yet.
Only the real version can do that. And the real version begins, always, with something imperfect and incomplete stepping out into the world anyway.
Here is what I learned at 23, asking out that wholly unsuitable beardy man who said absolutely not:
You cannot know whether you can cope with rejection until you’ve been rejected. You cannot build resilience to things not landing until something hasn’t landed. The fear of those things, when you’ve never experienced them, is boundless - it grows to fill any space you give it. The actual experience is almost always survivable. More than survivable, actually. There is something that becomes available to you on the other side of trying and failing that is simply not available any other way.
The offer that doesn’t sell teaches you something the imagined offer never could. The post that lands to silence tells you something about your audience, your timing, your framing, that all the imagining in the world couldn’t. The identity that you step into imperfectly, before you feel ready, becomes more itself with every clumsy, vulnerable, not-quite-right step you take in public.
Your business doesn’t come alive in your head. It comes alive in contact with reality, with the person who reads your email and thinks oh, that’s for me, with the client who reflects back to you what your work actually does, with the audience that starts to form around what you’re genuinely saying rather than the perfectly calibrated version you’ve been imagining.
Everything before that is just you, alone, in love with something that doesn’t exist yet.