How Limerence Plays A Role In Long Term Affairs With Dismissive Avoida

How Limerence Plays A Role In Long Term Affairs With Dismissive Avoidants

When most people hear the word “limerence,” they think of a crush or an early infatuation phase that burns hot and then burns out. We imagine excitement, butterflies, late night texting, fantasies, and a feeling of being chosen. We do not usually imagine limerence lasting ten or fifteen years. We do not imagine it living alongside marriages, children, illnesses, career changes, and all the complications of adult life.

Yet I have worked with many betrayed partners who discover that their spouse had a long term affair that, on the surface, looks passionate, deep, and confusingly durable. They look at the length of the affair and tell me, “It must have been love. People do not stay in something that long unless it meant something real.” This is a very understandable conclusion, and I want to honor the intelligence and emotional honesty behind it. We are meaning making creatures, and we try very hard to tell ourselves the truth.

But there is another explanation for some of these long affairs, and it has to do with avoidance and fantasy. For some people, especially those who are emotionally avoidant or uncomfortable with vulnerability, limerence does not burn out quickly. In fact, it can last longer when there is distance, secrecy, and idealization. Those three ingredients keep the affair suspended in a dreamlike state. It never has to face real intimacy, real conflict, real caretaking, or real repair. It never has to answer the question, “How would this relationship survive if it lived fully in the daylight of real life?”

If you are in pain right now and trying to make sense of a long affair, here is a simple way to say it:

Fantasy is easy. Intimacy is hard.

Avoidant limerence lives in fantasy. It does not have to prove itself in intimacy. From the outside, these relationships look romantic. From the inside, they are often held together by longing, validation, and escape rather than love, responsibility, and emotional partnership.

Why Long Term Affairs Can Be So Confusing

Long term affairs often confuse people because we tend to use time as a measure of depth. We assume that if something lasted for many years, it must have been real, important, and emotionally deep. In many cases, that is true. But in some avoidant and limerent relationships, the affair does not grow in real intimacy over time. It grows in fantasy over time.

Fantasy thrives on distance, secrecy, and an imagined future. Years can pass without the relationship ever being tested by real world demands. Often, these affairs have a “stuck” quality. They do not progress like normal relationships. They do not move toward clear commitment or shared life. Instead, they hover in a suspended state where longing is the main fuel.

The couple in the affair may:

Talk about a future together for ten years but never actually choose it
Exchange emotional intimacy but not practical intimacy
Share dreams but not daily responsibilities
Connect during the “highs” but disappear during the “lows”

When you look closely at these relationships, they are often:

High in idealization
High in fantasy
High in validation
Low in vulnerability
Low in accountability
Low in repair
Low in reality

It is this “high fantasy, low reality” mix that keeps them going. The affair feels big and intense, but it is often not built for a real life together. It is built to be a psychological escape.

A Clinical Story: Comfort, Not Love

A woman I worked with discovered that her husband had a nine year affair with someone he saw regularly. There were romantic texts, holiday gifts, and shared fantasies about running away together. She looked at all of that and thought, “It must have been a deeper love than what he had with me. I cannot compete with a nine year love story.”

When I spoke with her husband privately, his description was very different. He said, “I loved that she never needed anything from me. She did not get upset with me. She did not challenge me. I could be who I wanted to be. I did not have to face my failures.”

That was not love. That was comfort, validation, and escape. The real test came when the affair partner began pushing for a divorce and a full real life relationship. Within three months of the affair being pulled out of fantasy and into reality, the relationship fell apart. Once the relationship had to stand up to honesty, conflict, stress, and true commitment, it could not hold.

The affair did not survive daylight. It existed beautifully in fantasy. It did not survive intimacy.

Why Avoidant People Can Sustain Limerence for Years

For people who lean dismissive avoidant in their attachment style, limerence often serves a purpose. It gives them the feeling of connection without the risk of true closeness. It gives them intensity without vulnerability. It allows them to be wanted without having to open up fully.

An avoidant person may use limerence to get:

Intensity without vulnerability
Excitement without responsibility
Closeness without truly being close
Validation without having to earn deep trust
Escape from real life without facing consequences

If you feel sick to your stomach reading this, please know that your reaction is very human. It is devastating to realize that something that looked romantic was functioning more like a coping mechanism. That does not make the pain smaller. But it helps us place the pain in a more accurate category.

Avoidant people can chase the feeling of being admired or wanted for many years. The pursuit itself can become soothing. It can become part of their identity. It can become a secret internal world where they feel important and chosen, especially during times in life when they feel ashamed, inadequate, or overwhelmed.

When It Looks Like Love From the Outside

One of the biggest misunderstandings is about duration. We often quietly assume:

Long means real
Deep means love
Consistent means meaningful

With avoidant limerence, the engine is different. Often, the inner equation looks more like:

Distance feeds idealization
Idealization feeds longing
Longing feeds limerence

From the outside, we see the “long” part and assume depth and love. From the inside, it is often distance and fantasy doing most of the work.

Another Clinical Story: Protecting the Fantasy

In another case, a husband discovered that his wife had been carrying on an emotional affair for thirteen years. They texted all the time. They shared intimate feelings. They fantasized about being together one day. The husband told me, “I cannot compete with a thirteen year love story. I feel like our entire marriage was second place.”

When I worked with the wife, she did not describe it as a love story. She said, “If we ever actually got together, it would fall apart. I know that. I do not want real life with him. I wanted a place where I felt seen and admired. I wanted an escape from the pressure I felt at home.”

She was not protecting some deep soul mate love. She was protecting the fantasy. The fantasy felt safer than intimacy. The “relationship” inside her mind felt safer than the messy reality of two flawed humans trying to build a life together.

The Connection Between Addiction and Long Term Limerence

There is also an important overlap between limerence and addiction. I do not just mean addiction to sex or substances. I also mean an addictive relationship with intensity and escape.

Our brains are wired to respond strongly to novelty, anticipation, and reward. Limerence lights up the same systems that are involved in many addictions. It often interacts with:

Dopamine and reward pathways
Craving and anticipation
Relief and withdrawal

People who struggle with addiction often carry a lot of shame, emptiness, loneliness, and self criticism. They may have learned to cope by escaping into something that changes how they feel. That might be substances, work, gambling, food, porn, or an intense fantasy relationship. Limerence becomes another “drug” that takes them away from pain.

Psychologically, addiction and limerence often share:

Escape from the self
Escape from stress and responsibility
Avoidance of emotional pain
Needing more and more to feel the same relief
Living in two emotional worlds at the same time

When addiction and avoidance mix, long term limerence becomes even more likely. The affair becomes the “all weather coping mechanism” that the person uses whenever life feels hard. They may return to the affair, or to thoughts of the affair, when they feel:

Shame
Failure
Stress
Loneliness
Boredom
Grief
Insecurity

This is not romance. It is self medication through fantasy. That does not excuse it. But it explains why the person did not “just stop” and why it can drag on for so many years.

How Limerence Ends

Limerence usually ends when it loses the ingredients that keep it going. In avoidant people, it rarely ends because they simply get tired of the other person. More often, it ends when reality intrudes and fantasy becomes harder to maintain.

Limerence tends to collapse when:

Real life demands a clear decision
Intimacy and vulnerability are required
There are real consequences for their choices
Conflict and stress cannot be avoided
The fantasy cannot be kept separate from daily life
The person starts to do deeper emotional work on themselves

Once the relationship has to stand in the light of real life, it often stops feeling magical and starts feeling heavy, complicated, and disappointing. The “high” fades when the relationship is no longer an escape from reality and is instead part of reality. This is when many limerent affairs lose their power.

If You Are the Betrayed Partner

If you are trying to understand what all of this means for you, please know this. You are not trying to excuse what happened. You are trying to find an accurate story. You are trying to understand the “why” so your nervous system can settle and so you can decide what to do with your life.

You might find yourself asking questions like:

Was it love?
Why did it last so long?
Why did they not leave me?
What did the other person have that I did not?
Did they ever really love me?
Was this somehow my fault?

These questions are normal. You are not dramatic or irrational for asking them. You are a person who has been deeply hurt, trying to make sense of a nightmare.

Often, it helps to gently separate some ideas that have become tangled together. For example:

Love and limerence are not the same
Longing and intimacy are not the same
Duration and depth are not the same
Fantasy and reality are not the same

Once you start to separate these pairs, the story may become a little less unbearable. You may realize that you were not replaced by a “better love story.” You were temporarily pushed aside by a coping mechanism and a fantasy that your partner did not know how to give up yet.

What This Means for Reconciliation

If you are thinking about reconciliation, you might wonder what all of this means. Here is the hopeful part. Limerence is not love, and it is not true intimacy. Because it is not those things, it does not replace a marriage. It does not mean your relationship was meaningless. It means your partner was using something unhealthy to cope.

In reconciliation, the goal is not for you to compete with the affair partner. You are not auditioning for the role of “more exciting fantasy.” The real work happens when the unfaithful partner learns how to do the things that the limerent relationship never required them to do.

For reconciliation to be possible and healthy, the unfaithful partner needs to learn how to:

Tolerate vulnerability
Handle conflict without fleeing or shutting down
Repair injuries they have caused
Share emotional needs openly
Manage real life stress in healthier ways
Experience intimacy without running back to escape or fantasy
Face and soothe their shame rather than hide from it

These are grown up relationship skills. Many avoidant partners never learned them in their families of origin, or trauma made these skills feel dangerous. That does not mean they cannot learn. It simply means there is work to do.

For the betrayed partner, reconciliation often becomes less agonizing once they understand that they were not “second choice” in some romantic competition. They were the real life partner. The affair partner was part of an unhealthy loop of escape and validation. Again, this does not soften the betrayal, but it changes the meaning. You are no longer fighting a ghost story about a perfect love out there. You are dealing with real people and real wounds in here.

Couples who reconcile successfully tend to move through three big stages:

Stage 1: Truth and understanding. What actually happened, and why? What was the affair doing for the unfaithful partner? What did it do to the betrayed partner?
Stage 2: Grief and meaning making. What did we lose? What did this do to each of us and to our relationship? Who am I now?
Stage 3: Rebuilding and learning intimacy. How do we build something real, honest, and mutual? What new skills and boundaries do we need? How do we protect this new relationship?

Reconciliation is possible when the affair partner truly gives up the fantasy, the escape route, and the validation loop, and chooses the hard, sacred work of real intimacy. I have seen avoidant partners do this beautifully once they begin to understand what they were running from and what they were chasing. It is not easy, but it is possible.

And you, as the betrayed partner, can heal whether you reconcile or not. You can grieve, make sense of what happened, rewrite the story, and feel whole again. Some couples do stay together and eventually become stronger and more honest than before. Others part ways and each build meaningful lives. There is no single “right” ending, but there are many possible good ones.

If this topic speaks to you, I plan to share more about how long term limerence resolves, what tends to break the spell, how avoidant partners process grief and loss, and what recovery can look like on both sides. My hope is that understanding the psychology behind long term affairs makes your pain feel even just a little more bearable, and helps your brain and heart find a kinder story to live in.

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