A wife in one of our recent coaching sessions asked us something that comes up more than most people would guess.
“He talks about her like he’s talking about a drug he can’t put down. Is that real, or is that just an excuse?”
If you’ve asked a version of that question, we want you to know it’s a fair one. You’re not being naive by wondering if there’s more going on than a plain, cold-hearted choice. And you’re not making excuses for your spouse by asking it either. You’re trying to understand something that doesn’t make sense from the outside, because it wasn’t designed to.
This article is meant to walk alongside Why An Affair Can Feel Like Love. That piece looked at the deceitfulness of the heart. This one looks at something more physical: a real, researched, named experience called “limerence”, and what it can teach both spouses as you rebuild.
As before, this isn’t written to hand your spouse an excuse. It’s written so that understanding can do what it’s meant to do: soften despair, without softening truth.
A Feeling With a Name
In 1979, psychologist Dorothy Tennov published a book called Love and Limerence after years of interviewing hundreds of people about the experience of falling head-over-heels for someone. She coined the word “limerence” to describe a specific, intense state: obsessive thinking about another person, a craving for their attention and approval, and emotions that swing between euphoria and despair depending on how the other person responds.
Tennov noticed something important about how limerence works. She described it as “an interpretation of events, rather than the events themselves.” That means a limerent person doesn’t just notice what’s happening between them and the other person, they read meaning and significance into it that may not actually be there. A text message becomes proof of destiny. A shared laugh becomes evidence of a soul connection. This is part of why an affair can feel enormous and undeniable to a wayward spouse, even when, from the outside, it’s built on very little.
This isn’t a fringe theory invented to let people off the hook. It’s a well-documented pattern that researchers have studied for decades, and it maps closely onto what modern neuroscience has found happening in the brain and body during intense infatuation.
LIMERENCE ISN’T AN EXCUSE SOMEONE MADE UP. IT’S A DOCUMENTED PATTERN RESEARCHERS HAVE STUDIED FOR DECADES.
What's Actually Happening in the Body
In 2005, researcher Helen Fisher and her colleagues put people who had “just fallen madly in love” into an fMRI scanner and studied their brain activity. What they found was that intense romantic infatuation lights up dopamine-rich regions of the brain associated with reward and motivation, the same basic reward circuitry involved in craving and pursuit. Harvard Medical School’s own summary of this research describes what happens: when we’re falling for someone, reward-circuit chemicals flood the brain, producing racing hearts and flushed cheeks, while stress hormones rise and calming neurotransmitters drop.
A separate study from researchers in Italy found something else striking. They compared the blood serotonin levels of people who had recently fallen in love to those of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and found the two groups looked remarkably similar, both notably lower than a group of unaffected controls. In plain terms: the same brain chemistry associated with intrusive, repetitive obsessive thoughts in OCD shows up in the early, infatuated stage of falling for someone. That may explain why a wayward spouse’s preoccupation with the affair partner can feel less like ordinary thinking and more like something they can’t switch off.
It’s worth saying clearly: none of this happens only in affairs. The same reward-circuit activity has been found in long-married couples who report still being deeply in love with their spouse after decades together. God built the human body and brain to bond intensely, and that capacity itself isn’t sin. As author Gary Thomas has put it, “God created the romantic component of our brain chemistry,” and healthy marriages are meant to hold onto some of that wonder. What makes limerence in an affair so destructive isn’t the chemistry. It’s what, and who, that chemistry has been misdirected toward.
GOD DESIGNED YOUR SPOUSE’S BRAIN TO BOND DEEPLY. THE PROBLEM ISN’T THE CAPACITY. IT’S WHERE IT GOT POINTED.
Chemistry Explains. It Doesn't Excuse.
This is the part we want to say most carefully, because it’s easy to misuse.
Understanding that something is happening biologically does not mean your spouse had no say in what happened. The Bible never treats us as though we’re at the mercy of our impulses. Galatians 6:7-8 says plainly, Do not be deceived: God is not mocked. For whatever a person sows he will also reap. For the one who sows to his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one who sows to the Spirit will reap eternal life from the Spirit. Sowing and reaping assumes a chooser. Somewhere, at some point, your spouse made choices: to keep texting, to keep the secret, to walk toward instead of away.
And the Bible also promises that even strong pulls of desire are never inescapable. 1 Corinthians 10:13 says, No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to humanity. God is faithful, and he will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation he will also provide a way of escape, so that you may be able to endure it. A brain flooded with dopamine is not a brain without an exit. It’s just a more challenging exit.
This is a useful distinction to hold onto: understanding an addiction doesn’t excuse the first drink. It explains why walking away afterward is so much harder than most people assume. The same is true here.
CHEMISTRY EXPLAINS THE PULL. IT NEVER ERASES THE CHOICE.
Why the Obsessive Thoughts Feel So Hard to Stop
If your spouse describes not being able to stop thinking about the affair partner, that lines up with what the research shows about intrusive, obsessive-style thinking in early-stage infatuation. It doesn’t mean the thoughts are true or trustworthy. It means they’re loud.
The Bible speaks directly to this kind of battle. 2 Corinthians 10:5 calls believers to work at taking every thought captive to obey Christ. That’s not a quick fix, and it was never meant to be one. It’s a discipline, repeated, deliberate, and often exhausting, of noticing an intrusive thought and choosing not to follow it. The neuroscience explains why this feels like such hard, repetitive work in the early months. The Bible explains why it’s still worth doing anyway.
THE CHEMISTRY EXPLAINS WHY THE THOUGHTS FEEL LOUD. IT DOESN’T MAKE THEM TRUE.
It Doesn't Last Forever
Here’s something we want every hurting spouse to hear clearly: limerence, by its very nature, is temporary. Researchers who study it generally place its natural life span somewhere between about eighteen months and three years, with the most intense and destructive period often falling in the first year or so. It isn’t designed to be permanent. It’s an intense, disorienting phase, not a new emotional baseline.
What tends to prolong it is exactly what affairs run on: secrecy, uncertainty, and the emotional whiplash of inconsistent contact. What tends to shorten it is exactly what recovery requires: confession, full transparency, no contact with the affair partner, and real accountability. This is part of why we’re so insistent on those steps in coaching. They aren’t just moral requirements. They’re often what allows the fog to clear.
Contrast that with the kind of love the Bible calls us to. 1 Corinthians 13 says love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Limerence, almost by definition, does end. Covenant love is the kind that’s built to outlast it.
LIMERENCE WAS NEVER DESIGNED TO LAST. COVENANT LOVE WAS.
A Word to the Wounded Spouse
If you’re the one who’s been betrayed, please hear this: understanding what’s happening in your spouse’s brain and body does not require you to minimize what happened, rush your own healing, or pretend the affair wasn’t sin. Grace and clarity are not opposites.
What this understanding can offer you is a different lens on behavior that has felt utterly baffling. The person who lied so easily, who seemed to not care, who chose someone else over years of shared history: that behavior may make a strange kind of sense once you see it as a mind and body caught in a temporary, hijacked state, rather than as proof that your marriage or your worth was never real.
It’s also fair to hold a boundary here. This information isn’t a tool for your spouse to ask you to hurry up and get over it, and it’s not a reason for you to demand instant emotional clarity from them either. Bodies take time to come back to baseline. Trust takes even longer. Both are allowed to be true at once.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR SPOUSE’S BRAIN DOES NOT REQUIRE YOU TO MINIMIZE WHAT HAPPENED. GRACE AND CLARITY ARE NOT OPPOSITES.
What This Means for Rebuilding
As secrecy ends, as no-contact holds, and as truth replaces confusion, the neurochemical storm your spouse has been living in tends to quiet down, but usually not without real repentance and real accountability behind it. Understanding is not the same as healing, but it can be the doorway into it. It can help you both stop asking “was any of this real?” and start asking better questions: What was he actually chasing? What was the need underneath it? What has to change so it never has this kind of power again?
TRUTH IS WHAT LETS THE FOG FINALLY CLEAR.
You are not walking through this without help, and you’re not the first couple to walk through it. This is the work we do, side by side, every day.
A few of the sources behind this article, for anyone who wants to dig deeper:
- Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love (1979)
- Aron, A., Fisher, H., Mashek, D.J., et al., “Reward, Motivation, and Emotion Systems Associated with Early-Stage Intense Romantic Love,” Journal of Neurophysiology (2005)
- Marazziti, D., Akiskal, H.S., Rossi, A., Cassano, G.B., “Alteration of the Platelet Serotonin Transporter in Romantic Love,” Psychological Medicine (1999)
- Acevedo, B.P., Aron, A., Fisher, H., Brown, L., “Neural Correlates of Long-Term Intense Romantic Love,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2012)
- “Love and the Brain,” Harvard Medical School
- Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture references are from the
Christian Standard Bible (CSB).
