I travelled back home over the weekend and in the evening watched the sunset over the balcony. The air was thick from dust raised by speeding cars that went past our house as its by the road, warm, and smells faintly of cut grass from the neighbours freshly lawned compond.
The sky was a bruised purple at the edges, bleeding into a deep, honeyed amber where the sun is just beginning to dip. Everything looked more beautiful than it actually is. The shadows were long, the harsh edges of the world are softened, and for a few minutes, you feel like you are standing at the edge of something infinite.
This is the same aesthetic of the modern "talking stage." It is beautiful, it is glowing, and it is fundamentally designed to never actually become the night.
In 1979, psychologist Dorothy Tennov identified a state she called Limerence. It isn't love, though it wears love’s clothes. It is an involuntary, obsessive state of infatuation fueled by the "glimmer"—that initial spark of potential.
Limerence is the psychological equivalent of a summer sunset. It bathes the object of your affection in a light so flattering that you cannot see their flaws. You aren't looking at a person; you are looking at a silhouette against a bright sky. In this state, the brain is flooded with dopamine, creating a feedback loop where the person becomes a "star" around which your entire internal world orbits.
But limerence has a biological shelf life. It is an unsustainable high. To move from limerence into a "proper" relationship is to watch the sun finally set and the lights of the house turn on. It is the transition from the romanticized image to the prosaic reality.
In a natural world, the sun must go down. In the digital world, we have figured out how to keep it hovering right at the horizon.
Social media has effectively "hacked" the limerent process. Typically, limerence fades when "certainty" or "reality" sets in. If someone likes you back consistently, the mystery evaporates. If they reject you, the obsession eventually starves. However, social media provides Intermittent Reinforcement—the most addictive schedule of reward known to behavioral science.
Consider the probability of a "reward" (a text, a like, a story view) in a talking stage:
When the response is unpredictable, the dopamine spike is significantly higher than if the response were guaranteed. By staying in the "talking stage," we avoid the "Wait Tax" of real commitment and instead live in a digital loop of high-frequency, low-substance validation. We keep the sun at the horizon because the moment we move into a "proper couple," the mystery—and the dopamine—drops.
This creates what we might call the Limerent Loop. Because young couples are increasingly defined by their digital environments, they have become addicted to the anticipation of the person rather than the presence of the person.
We see this in the "talking stage" as a permanent destination rather than a transition.
- The Filtered Perfection: On Instagram or TikTok, we only see the "ornamented" version of the other. We see the "tiny castle" of their life, never the concrete block of their bad habits.
- The Fear of the Dark: To move beyond the talking stage is to invite the "night"—the mundane chores, the difficult conversations, the lack of filters.
- The Reset: When the limerence inevitably begins to dip, instead of doing the "maintenance labor" of building a real relationship, the digital environment makes it easier to simply find a new sunset. We refresh the page, find a new "glimmer," and start the loop again.
There is a tragedy in staying too long in the sunset. If you spend your whole life chasing the Golden Hour, you never actually learn to live in the light of day or the quiet of the night.
We treat our relations like we treat our manufacturing—we want the most "ornamented" version of a person with the least amount of production time. We want the "instant gratification" of a deep connection without the years of "dwelling with" someone that the etymology of conversation actually demands.
We are a generation of people standing on a beach, staring at a beautiful, orange sky, refusing to go home because we are afraid of what the person sitting next to us looks like in the dark.
Happiness isn't the sunset; happiness is the person who stays with you when the sun is gone.
Limerence is a trick of the light. It is a beautiful, fleeting thing that makes for great poetry but poor foundations. If we continue to build our world around the "talking stage"—around the intermittent pings of a screen and the curated silhouettes of our peers—we will find ourselves very rich in "glimmers" but very poor in warmth.
Eventually, the coffee gets cold, the summer ends, and the sun must set. The question is: who will you be dwelling with when the stars come out?
Currently listening to; Sweet Tea