Exploring how attraction can illuminate unmet needs, deepen self-understanding, and bring new questions to marriage
You sit in your car outside the grocery store staring at your phone, drafting a message only to delete it. You lie awake beside your sleeping spouse, replaying a brief conversation by the coffee maker and your colleague’s lingering look. You notice yourself drawn to someone who seems vibrant, attentive, or adventurous, and then comes the uncomfortable part: the guilt and the questions. What does this say about your marriage? About you? About the life you have chosen?
The urge to act can become surprisingly strong. The mind wants an answer, but perhaps even more than that, it wants relief from not knowing. Sending a message, making a subtle confession or finding out whether the attraction is mutual all seem to offer a way out of the uncertainty. Moving toward him can begin to feel like the only way to breathe again.
The psychologist Dorothy Tennov named this state limerence: an intense form of attraction marked by longing, intrusive thoughts, and heightened emotional reactivity. But having a name for the experience does not necessarily explain it. Nor does the intensity of the feeling tell you what you should do with it.
The feeling may be real without its meaning being clear.
And when you are caught in it, clarity usually requires resisting the urge to turn the feeling into a story before you have understood what is actually happening.
Before You Decide What It Means
Once a fantasy becomes a confession, an affair, or even a secret emotional intimacy, the situation changes. There are suddenly consequences to manage, things to hide or explain, and another person’s feelings to consider. The attraction may still contain useful information, but it becomes harder to distinguish what belonged to the original feeling from everything that has grown around it.
So the question is not only, Do I want him?
What happens to you around him? What kind of person do you become? What kind of attention affects you so strongly? What does it allow you to imagine about yourself?
It is tempting to settle all of this with a simple explanation. Perhaps you have an addictive personality. Perhaps you are simply someone who loves being in love. Perhaps it is all dopamine. Those might be true, to some extent, but they don’t tell you much about this particular attraction, at this particular point in your life.
The more interesting question is what this person has brought into focus.
And it may not be entirely about projection. Perhaps he really is interesting and there is actual chemistry between you. Perhaps, under different circumstances, the two of you might have had something meaningful. You don’t have to assure yourself that none of this is real in order to decide not to pursue it.
That can be the harder choice, actually. It is easier to walk away when you have convinced yourself that the other person was never that special. It is something else to recognise that the attraction is real and still decide that it does not get to determine your life.
Letting the Feeling Exist
The usual advice is straightforward: cut contact, block his number, and walk away.
Sometimes that is exactly what you need. There are situations in which staying close simply keeps the fantasy alive.
But that’s not always the case. You may work together or belong to the same social circle. Or perhaps the prospect of a dramatic cutoff feels so overwhelming that it becomes another way of making the feeling larger.
If you grew up with Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN), there may be another layer to consider. When your feelings were rarely noticed or met with genuine interest, being deeply seen by someone can carry an intensity that is difficult to put into perspective. Attention can touch something much older than the attraction itself.
That does not mean every intense attraction comes from CEN. It does not even mean that this one does. But it may be worth noticing whether being seen by this person has awakened parts of you that have had very little room to exist.
Perhaps we can stop asking the feeling to make our decisions for us.
You can notice the glances without turning them into a private relationship. You can acknowledge the longing without feeding it with increasingly intimate conversations or imagined futures. You can maintain whatever practical contact you decide while keeping certain boundaries clear.
The feeling can exist without being given a future.
What Becomes Visible
Once the urgency has settled a little, curiosity becomes possible.
Perhaps what draws you to him is something about him. Or something about who you become in his presence. Or both.
You may notice that he seems playful when your own life has become relentlessly practical. His curiosity may remind you of a part of yourself that has gone quiet. His tenderness may touch a longing to be understood. His adventurousness may make your own life feel suddenly larger. You may find yourself remembering interests you had almost forgotten.
None of this means that he is simply a projection of your unmet childhood needs. He may genuinely possess qualities you value. What happens when those qualities meet something already present in you?
Sometimes another person does not create a longing so much as illuminate one.
For someone who grew up with emotional neglect, this can be especially significant. What was missing in childhood is not always a particular person or relationship as much as the experience of being taken seriously, being delighted in, being encouraged to explore, or simply being allowed to have a self.
A person who awakens those feelings can therefore become larger in the mind than the actual relationship warrants since the feelings have become attached to more than one thing at once.
And it is worth resisting the temptation to turn the entire experience into a childhood story, too. Sometimes an attraction really does illuminate something missing in a marriage. Perhaps there has been too little play, attention, eroticism, curiosity, or simply the feeling of being seen. That deserves an honest look. But discovering a need does not tell you, by itself, who should meet it. And it certainly does not prove that this particular person is the answer.
The useful questions are more mundane.
What exactly are you longing for?
What do you experience around this person that you don’t experience elsewhere?
Who are you when you are with him?
And if something has been missing, what would it mean to make room for more of it in your own life?
I’ve put together Exploring The Spark, a free companion guide for examining these and other similar questions. You can also read When Limerence Begins to Make Sense: Three Personal Stories (+ Free Journal) and Why Limerence Takes Hold in Motherhood: The Man Who Doesn’t Know Your Mess (Part 1 of 3) for examples of how these dynamics can unfold in different lives.
The Life That Never Happened
Understanding the attraction does not necessarily make the longing disappear.
There can still be something to grieve.
When you decide not to pursue someone you feel intensely drawn to, you are not only giving up a person. You may also be giving up an imagined future: conversations that never happened, places you never went together, a version of yourself you imagined becoming beside him. Maybe there was a sense of recognition between you that felt rare enough to make another life seem possible.
Although none of it happened, the possibility was real inside you.
That can make the loss surprisingly difficult to explain. You may believe that staying in your marriage is the life you want and still wonder about the other road. You may feel certain about your choice one day and mourn it the next.
The mind can create a surprisingly detailed life around a possibility. It fills in conversations, holidays and the feeling of being known by someone new. For a while, the imagined life may seem brighter than the one you are actually living, partly because it contains none of the boredom, irritation, compromise, history, or practical demands that belong to a real relationship.
Grief and reality can coexist. You do not have to prove that the other road would have been wrong in order to stay on the one you chose.
You may still wonder what would have happened. You may still miss him. You may even have moments when the old possibility seems strangely alive again.
If this kind of grief is familiar, you may find useful companions: The Love You Recognize and Refuse: Films on Desire and Commitment and The Lives We Didn’t Live: How Choices Shape Character
When It Fades
If you stop feeding the fantasy and become curious about what it has brought to the surface, something may begin to change.
Sometimes the intensity fades gradually. There are good weeks, then an unexpected spike when you see him again or remember something small. Eventually the feeling takes up less space. It no longer seems to contain an urgent question that must be answered.
Sometimes understanding comes more suddenly. You realise that what seemed to be an overwhelming longing for another person was intertwined with something much closer to home: loneliness, a neglected part of yourself, a hunger to feel desirable or interesting again, or pain you had been trying not to feel.
And sometimes the truth is less tidy. You understand the pattern and still miss him. You know what the attraction revealed and still wonder what might have happened. You can see that the fantasy was carrying something larger than this particular man, while also knowing that he was a real person who genuinely affected you.
Understanding does not have to erase the feeling to make it useful.
Perhaps we need to simply learn to hold the feeling and the choice at the same time. The attraction can be real. The longing can matter. Something important in you may have been awakened by another person.
And none of that tells you that you were meant to have him. Sometimes the person who awakens something in us is not the person who is meant to receive it.
What matters then is not proving that the feeling was meaningless, nor finding a way to fulfil it, but becoming curious about what it was asking for, and finding a way to answer that question without handing your life over to the feeling itself.
Recommended Reading
📚Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love by Dorothy Tennov
If you’re curious to understand why attraction outside your marriage can feel so intense, this is an invaluable book. Tennov explores the overwhelming emotional state of limerence with compassion and depth, showing how it can reveal unmet needs within ourselves and illuminate parts of our hearts that long to be seen and nurtured.
If you’d like to read it in paperback and support my work at no extra cost, I’d be so grateful if you use this link. I choose Bookshop because each purchase also supports independent bookstores.
Explore Further:
The Love You Recognize and Refuse: Films on Desire and Commitment
The Lives We Didn’t Live: How Choices Shape Character
When Limerence Begins to Make Sense (+ Free Journal)
Why Limerence Takes Hold in Motherhood: The Man Who Doesn’t Know Your Mess (Part 1 of 3)
When Marriage Enters Autumn: Finding Our Way Back to Each Other (+Free Journal)
Why Couples Bicker Over Small Things: How Unmet Needs Fuel Conflict—And What to Do Instead
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