Suppression backfires, and limerence can look like love
The natural response to an unwanted thought is to force it out. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner spent years studying why that strategy reliably fails. In 1987, he asked participants to verbalise their stream of consciousness for five minutes with a single instruction: do not think about a white bear. Every time the thought returned, they rang a bell. The harder participants tried to suppress it, the more frequently it came back.
The mechanism is structural. Suppression runs two simultaneous processes: a conscious effort to fill the mind with other things, and an automatic monitoring system that holds onto the forbidden thought in order to scan for it. The monitor keeps the thought active precisely because it needs to track it. The two processes work against each other, and the thought wins.
For people experiencing persistent thoughts about someone they have romantic feelings for, psychologist Dorothy Tennov identified a distinct state in the late 1970s after years of interviews. She called it limerence: constant intrusive thoughts, intense longing, and a consuming need for the other person’s reciprocation. Unlike love, which tends to deepen with familiarity and survives contact with a person’s real flaws, limerence feeds on uncertainty and distance. The person experiencing it is typically thinking not about who the other person actually is, but about an idealised version assembled from limited information. Researchers have also found that limerence shares neurological features with addiction, including cycles of craving, withdrawal, and dependency.
Nostalgia, rumination, and a liking gap that persists for months
Not every recurring thought about someone is a sign of unresolved tension. Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut at the University of Southampton spent two decades studying nostalgia and found that it is typically triggered by psychological discomfort — loneliness, stress, or major life transitions. Rather than being a weakness, nostalgia functions as a buffer: it boosts self-esteem, increases feelings of social connectedness, and reinforces a sense of continuity between who you were and who you are now. When someone from a past chapter of your life surfaces during a difficult period, the brain may be borrowing the emotional warmth of that memory to stabilise you in the present.
Rumination is different. Psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema‘s Response Styles Theory, first proposed in 1991, found that cycling through the same thoughts about a person without arriving at resolution can function as cognitive avoidance — the mind using one problem to keep itself from facing another. Nolen-Hoeksema also found the pattern is self-reinforcing: the worse the mood, the more the rumination; the more the rumination, the worse the mood. That cycle can run for weeks or months because the thinking mimics the texture of working through something, while nothing actually moves forward.
Cooney and Boothby’s research produced one further finding that reframes the whole picture. The same studies that documented the thought gap also revealed a ‘liking gap’: participants consistently underestimated how much their conversation partners had enjoyed the interaction and how warmly they remembered it. The gap held between strangers, college dorm mates over weeks, and members of the general public at a personal development workshop — and it did not fade quickly. It persisted for months. If part of what keeps someone in your thoughts is the sense that you came across badly, the data suggests you probably didn’t.
