Limerence for a friend
Limerence doesn't discriminate when it comes to choosing its target. It can strike with a stranger across a crowded room, with a colleague you barely know, or devastatingly—with someone you've known and trusted for years. When limerence takes hold of a friendship, it creates one of the most psychologically complex and painful scenarios imaginable.
You've been friends for months, maybe years. You know their favourite coffee order, their annoying habits, their deepest fears. The relationship has been comfortable, safe, predictable. Then something shifts. Maybe it's the way the light catches their eyes during a particularly vulnerable conversation, or how they touch your arm when they laugh at your joke. Suddenly, your brain rewrites the entire script of your friendship, and you're no longer just friends. You're in a growing romantic story they never signed up for.
The Unique Agony of Friendship Limerence
What makes falling into limerence with a friend particularly brutal is that you've already established a baseline of genuine connection. Unlike limerence with a stranger, where you can dismiss the feelings as fantasy based on limited information, friendship limerence forces you to grapple with the reality that this person genuinely cares about you but not in the way your limerent brain desperately wants them to.
The pain cuts deeper because you're not just losing the fantasy of what could be; you're potentially losing what actually is. The friendship that once felt like solid ground beneath your feet becomes quicksand. Every shared laugh now carries the weight of unspoken desire. Every casual touch becomes electric. Every conversation becomes an opportunity to search for hidden meanings that probably aren't there.
Your brain starts playing that familiar limerent movie, but this time the script is even more convincing because it's built on real shared experiences. You know they trust you, they enjoy your company, they value your opinion. Surely, the thinking goes, it's just one small step from deep friendship to romantic love? This is where limerence becomes particularly deceptive.
The Trap of False Familiarity
Here's where your motivations can trick you completely. You tell yourself you're being patient, that you're building something meaningful, that good relationships grow from friendship. But if you look honestly at your internal experience, you'll likely find something else entirely: you're strategically positioning yourself.
Every act of friendship becomes calculated. You're there for their breakups not just because you care, but because you hope they'll finally see you as relationship material. You remember their important events not just because you're a good friend, but because you want to prove you'd be a perfect partner. You offer support during difficult times not purely from altruism, but because you fantasise about being their emotional anchor.
This isn't necessarily conscious manipulation, limerence rarely is. Your brain is simply incredibly good at creating narratives that serve your obsessive needs while disguising them as noble intentions. The friend who's struggling with their mental health becomes someone who "needs you." The friend who's unlucky in love becomes someone who "just hasn't found the right person yet" (spoiler: you think it’s you).
Wondering If You Should Pull Away
This brings us to one of the most difficult but potentially life-saving strategies when dealing with friendship limerence: temporary withdrawal. When you're caught in the storm of obsessive thoughts and emotional dependency, a healthy options can be to create distance until the limerence dissipates.
This doesn't mean you have to become cruel or dramatically cut all contact. It means recognising that continuing to operate within the friendship while experiencing limerence is fundamentally dishonest—to both yourself and your friend. You're not actually being a friend anymore; you're being a secret admirer playing the role of a friend.
The withdrawal serves several crucial purposes. First, it breaks the cycle of constant triggers. Every interaction with your limerent object feeds the obsession, keeps the fantasy alive, and prevents your brain from learning that life continues without them at the centre of it. Second, it gives you the psychological space to remember who you are outside of this consuming preoccupation. When someone takes up 85% of your mental energy, you forget what your own thoughts, interests, and goals actually are.
Most importantly, pulling away forces you to confront the reality that your friendship has become something else entirely. You can't simultaneously be someone's friend and their secret pursuer. The roles are incompatible, and trying to maintain both creates the psychological torment that makes friendship limerence so particularly agonising.
The Path Back to Genuine Friendship
The hopeful news is that friendship after limerence is possible but usually after the limerent episode has truly ended. This isn't the kind of ending where you still check their social media daily and analyse their messages for hidden meaning. This is the kind of ending where thinking about them doesn't trigger that familiar surge of longing, where their happiness with someone else doesn't devastate you, where you can honestly say you want what's best for them even if it has nothing to do with you.
Recovery from friendship limerence often takes longer than other forms because of the genuine foundation that existed. Your brain has to learn to separate the real person and the real relationship from the idealised version that limerence created. This process can't happen while you're still in regular contact, trying to maintain normal friendship behaviour while internally experiencing anything but normal friendship feelings.
When you eventually reconnect, and this might be months or even years later, the friendship likely be different. Of course, there are no guarantees that things will be the same or they’ll want to get close again, but can you continue being their friend whilst being limerent for them? You can, but it’s going to be tougher on you, and who knows if you act out because of the state you are in.
Understanding the Real Motivation
The most difficult truth about friendship limerence is that it forces you to examine whether you were ever truly friends at all, or whether you were always, on some level, hoping for more. This doesn't invalidate the genuine care and connection you shared, but it does complicate the narrative you might have about yourself as a good friend who "just developed feelings."
Sometimes, the kindest thing you can do for both yourself and your friend is to acknowledge that the friendship has become unsustainable in its current form. This doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you someone who's honest about the psychological reality of limerence and willing to do the difficult work of prioritising long-term emotional health over short-term connection.
The goal is to not punish yourself for developing limerence toward a friend, nor blame them for not reciprocating feelings they never knew existed. You can recognise when a relationship dynamic has become harmful to your wellbeing and to take the necessary steps to restore your psychological balance.
Your friend deserves to have friends who aren't secretly hoping for more. And you deserve to have friendships that don't cause you suffering simply by existing. Sometimes, the most loving thing you can do is step back, do the work to heal, and return as someone capable of genuine friendship—if that's what you both choose.
The stages of friendship limerence follow the same pattern as any limerent episode: the spark, the crystallisation, the obsession, and eventually, one of the three endings. The difference is that with friendship limerence, you have the added complexity of an existing relationship structure that makes the whole experience feel simultaneously more real and more impossible. Understanding this can help you recognise the pattern and choose your ending rather than letting limerence choose it for you.
