18 July 20267 min readPsychiatry, Relationships, Philosophy

Whoever Was Standing There

A woman convinced a king secretly loved her, a serotonin study on new couples, and a philosopher's argument about non-fungible love converge on an uncomfortable answer: much of romantic obsession was primed to fire before the person who triggered it ever showed up.

In 1920, a Frenchwoman in her fifties presented to Gaétan de Clérambault convinced that King George V was in love with her. She had never spoken to him, and may have glimpsed him once, from a distance, outside Buckingham Palace. In her account this was enough: the King's silence was proof of feeling too large to declare, his security detail were agents keeping them apart against his will, and every public gesture he made, no matter how procedural, was a coded message meant for her alone. De Clérambault wrote her up along with four similar cases in 1921 and gave the condition a name that outlived him, erotomania. The clinical definition has stayed stable for a century: a stranger or near-stranger of higher status is believed to be secretly in love with the patient, and the belief generates its own confirmation from whatever the object of the delusion does, including nothing.

What should unsettle a psychiatrist about this case is how little of the machinery is unique to it.

In 1999, Donatella Marazziti's group in Pisa drew blood from twenty people who had fallen in love in the previous six months, twenty patients with a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and twenty controls, and measured the density of the platelet serotonin transporter, a peripheral marker of central serotonin activity. The newly-in-love group and the OCD group were statistically indistinguishable from each other, both roughly forty per cent below the healthy controls. On this specific biological measure, early romantic love and clinical OCD are not analogous for a window of months. They are the same state. Later reviews from the same group report the transporter levels drifting back toward baseline over the following year or two regardless of whether the relationship survives, a finding I'm citing more cautiously, since I could only find secondary reviews summarizing it rather than a primary follow-up paper.

So the felt experience of early romantic intensity, the loop of intrusive thinking about one person, the checking, the reading of small signals as freighted with meaning, runs on adjacent hardware to obsessive-compulsive cognition. Dorothy Tennov, who coined the term "limerence" in 1979 after interviewing hundreds of people about the specific state of involuntary, intrusive infatuation, described it in language that reads like an OCD symptom checklist: intrusive thinking about the limerent object, acute longing for reciprocation, inability to feel the same way about more than one person at a time, a marked resistance to the condition being under voluntary control. Tennov's subjects didn't report choosing who triggered this. They reported that it happened to them, the way de Clérambault's patients report certainty rather than choice.

The clearest test of whether this is about the person or about the machinery is whether the machinery generalizes across different people. It does. A 2002 meta-analysis by Chris Fraley found that attachment patterns measured in infancy correlate with attachment patterns in adulthood at r = .39 across nearly two decades, moderate, not deterministic, but far from noise. More telling is the rejection-sensitivity literature: people high in attachment anxiety don't calm down once they land a good partner. They carry the hypervigilance to signs of withdrawal, the escalating bids for reassurance, into whichever relationship they're in, largely independent of how that specific partner behaves. The trait travels. The partner is where it lands, not what produces it.

Stendhal noticed a version of this two centuries before anyone had a word for attachment style. In De l'amour, published in 1822 after his own unrequited infatuation with Metilde Dembowski, he described a mental operation he called crystallization, using an image from a salt mine near Salzburg: miners would toss a bare branch into an abandoned shaft, and months later pull it out coated in a crust of crystals so dense the original branch was unrecognizable. His claim was that this is what the lover's mind does to the beloved, not discovering hidden virtues but manufacturing them, projecting perfection onto whatever the branch happens to be and then experiencing the projection as a discovery. The branch is doing almost nothing. The crystallization happens in the cave.

Marazziti, Tennov, the attachment literature and Stendhal converge on an answer I don't think needs much hedging: a meaningful share of what gets experienced as being singularly, specially chosen by a devoted partner is the expression of a predisposition that exists prior to, and independent of, the specific person it lands on. The King didn't do anything. The branch didn't do anything. The person with high attachment anxiety would very likely have found a different partner to be hypervigilant about if this one hadn't been available.

But that isn't the whole answer, and this is where I think "found the one" versus "found someone who was already off-kilter" collapses two different things into one choice.

Niko Kolodny, in a 2003 paper that's become a standard reference in the philosophy of love, argues against two older theories: that you love someone because of their properties, their wit, their looks, their virtue, in which case you'd have identical reason to love someone with more of the same properties, and the idea, associated with David Velleman, that you love someone in response to their bare rational personhood, which doesn't come in degrees and so gives you identical reason to love anyone. Neither explains why love is non-fungible, stubbornly attached to the specific person rather than a replaceable instance of a type. Kolodny's answer is that the reasons for loving someone are grounded in the history of a relationship: the actual, accumulated, unrepeatable sequence of interactions and shared reference points that exists between two particular people and nobody else.

Kolodny wasn't writing about limerence or attachment style, but his framework separates the ignition of a romantic bond from its content. The dispositional research is almost entirely about ignition, why intensity gets triggered and by what kind of internal machinery. It has little to say about what accumulates afterward, because months of shared, specific, path-dependent history with this exact person isn't the kind of thing a predisposition can manufacture on its own. The person with anxious attachment would have found somebody. They would not have found this particular several years with this particular person, containing this particular argument about money in this particular apartment, resolved in this particular way that only makes sense given everything that came before it. That content is not fungible even though the ignition was.

So: does it matter that it could have been anyone? The honest answer bifurcates by which moment you're asking about. At the moment of ignition, the arbitrariness is real and the discomfort about it is justified. Something in you was primed to fire, and the person standing there when it did was, to a significant degree, incidental to whether it fired, if not to the exact shape it took. Irving Singer's distinction in The Nature of Love is useful here: he separates love that responds to a partner's appraised qualities from love that bestows value, elevating the beloved's importance independent of what an appraisal would justify. The dispositional research says a great deal of romantic obsession is bestowal wearing the costume of appraisal, the crystallized branch mistaken for a branch that was always that beautiful. But months or years into an actual relationship, the question stops being about ignition and starts being about what the two people built with the time since, which required this specific other person's actual choices, actual responses, actual failures and repairs, none of which a predisposition can simulate in advance or substitute after the fact.

This is also the real difference between de Clérambault's patient and an ordinary person in an ordinary obsessive early-relationship phase, and it isn't the presence of a predisposition, since almost everyone in early romantic love has one running. It's whether the other person ever actually enters the loop. Mme M.'s devotion never had anything to metabolize except her own projections, because the King never responded, never adapted, never became a participant in a shared history, only a fixed point her machinery could orbit indefinitely without correction. That's what made it a delusion rather than a relationship, not the intensity and not the origin, both of which have ordinary analogues in anyone who has ever fallen hard for someone new. What was missing was the second person's actual presence in what got built. Everyone's love starts partly manufactured, by machinery that would have activated for someone else if this person hadn't shown up first. Whether it turns into something real is answered not at the moment it starts, but by what happens once someone real starts answering back.

Further reading