What causes a person to become obsessed with someone?

March 31, 2023 8:52 PM

I am curious to know what causes a person to become fixated or obsessed with someone or perhaps lust and become infatuated too quickly without truly knowing them?

Is there a myriad of reasons or mainly one reason? Can stress and emptiness or unhappiness cause this to fill a void?

posted by RearWindow to Human Relations (18 answers total)

I certainly don’t have a straightforward answer, but a useful term and framework for this, originally from Freudian psychology, is cathexis.
posted by staggernation at 9:08 PM on March 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Dorothy Tennov wrote a book about this: Love and Limerence. She invented the word "limerence" to describe the emotion you're talking about. The book talks about a number of things that can ignite obsessive limerent thoughts and behaviors. It's been a long time since I read it, and I've never reread it, because it does a really good job of making you feel the same excruciating desperation that her subjects are going through!
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 10:29 PM on March 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read this book a few years ago, and part of its thesis is that the person who is the object of the fixation has qualities that the person fixating on them either lacks or (possibly subconsciously) wants to develop.
posted by Lycaste at 11:49 PM on March 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

From personal experience, mine and that of others I know: loneliness, unbearable stress, unsatisfying personal relationships, and the refusal to give up on the situation that is producing the loneliness, stress, and discomfort.
posted by Peach at 4:55 AM on April 1, 2023 [15 favorites]

Distraction/fantasy from unfulfilled life or unhappiness; feeling insecure and seeing someone with qualities they would like to have and think they dont; unresolved attachment issues/past attachment trauma; becoming obsessed with fantasy of someone as a way to avoid an actual relationship (see previous); person reminds them of past figure in traumatic memory and they want to "make the trauma turn out better"(trauma bond)
posted by bearette at 6:17 AM on April 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

Lack of realistic, balanced, well grounded perspective.
posted by Dashy at 6:44 AM on April 1, 2023

Sometimes there are characteristics of the object of desire that can trigger the feeling. For example, I find slavic accents mesmerizing. They touch me in a deep way that I can't explain, and it is easy for me to imagine myself spending my life with someone once I hear them speak in English with that accent. Similarly, I find certain nose shapes flip a switch in me, perhaps because of my mother's oddly shaped nose.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 7:08 AM on April 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, please do read about the Freudian concept of cathexis. It covers almost every answer proposed in these comments and offers a generalized explanatory framework which (valid issues with Freud notwithstanding) is IMO really useful with many broad applications. For example, his paper "Mourning and Melancholia" (easily available online, Google it) applies the concept of cathexis to explain the difference between grief and depression in a remarkably insightful way that gave me a big AHA!.
posted by MiraK at 7:21 AM on April 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

When I'm under a lot of stress, or experiencing other sorts of mental-health issues, that's when I'm prone to various obsessions, including the type you (the OP) described.
posted by akk2014 at 7:35 AM on April 1, 2023

People with ADHD and some other neurodivergencies can hyperfocus on a new partner or relationship, falling in "love" quickly and obsessing over the new person. It's not a mental health (psychological) response stemming from depression, it's neurological--the brain is seeking stimulation from novelty. Some people are just wired to do this.
posted by donajo at 8:11 AM on April 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

Obsessive attachment, especially to someone unattainable, can be linked to trauma in childhood. Apparently, being profoundly neglected, physically or emotionally, makes someone especially vulnerable to this phenomenon.

Here is a summary of the issue. The Crappy Childhood Fairy also talks a lot about it on her blog and YouTube channel.
posted by rpfields at 8:37 AM on April 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m told that this is common with ADHD, autism and other neurodivergent profiles. It’s about novelty and excitement plus hyperfixating.
posted by shockpoppet at 8:56 AM on April 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Sometimes this has everything to do with some quality of the person that is the object of obsession, and sometimes it has everything to do with the dynamic (however fleeting or one-sided) between the individual object of the obsession and the individual person who is obsessing. And sometimes, and in fact often, it has to do with the nature of obsession itself and how that feels to the person obsessing.

Obsession is a state of being that is sometimes desired and any generally suitable object will do. It has to do with purpose and hyper-focus and powerful pleasure-denial-pain cycles that are rewarding in some specific way. A kind of psychological and physiological loop-de-loop one wants to get on for a time and then has troubles getting out of. Close to but not the same as addiction.

And, of course, all these things can be combined in an obsession, creating a truly overwhelming whirlwind.

Ultimately an obsession is a narrative process on hyper-mode: what happens now/next, what now/next, what now/next, what now/next, what now/next, what now/next. That process itself becomes all that matters, and its objects are irrelevant.

Hence its great potential harm.
posted by desert exile at 9:04 AM on April 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I go through these obsessions all the time. for me, I think there is definitely an element of a certain sort of boredom.
posted by supermedusa at 9:55 AM on April 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

From personal experience, unmet personal needs ranging from lack of feeling pursued (while happily married), boredom, and feeling stuck in current circumstances.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 10:08 AM on April 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Don't forget this is a spectrum. Becoming "infatuated too quickly" with someone you don't know well yet is not always a pathology, it's a crush, a fantasy, one of the classic painful joys of life, and if it winds up turning into a real relationship later on, it is replaced by something more sustainable and nuanced and full of how the beloved sometimes meets your needs and often doesn't meet them when you get to know the real person -- but the initial rush of limerence before you really know them is always part of the bedrock mythology of being smitten.
On the other hand being obsessed to the point that you don't recognize the other person's lack of interest, or fantasizing about someone who is not going to be available, or not being able to let go of it when the person has expressed no intent to reciprocate... that is something else and the other answers above seem to be exploring that.
So yes, myriad.
posted by rainy day girl at 10:14 AM on April 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

A quick meta-thought to dwell on: some of the same processes that feed fixation on one person feed the desire to know the root cause of complex phenomena.

Is it likely that there is one root cause of poverty? One root cause that differentiates people who find fulfilling romantic relationships from those that do not? No: these outcomes arise out of incalculably complex interrelationships among personal, social, cultural, and historical factors. Wherever we think we have found One True Answer, we find there are exceptions and contingencies.

Mammals do not like uncertainty. Obsession, fixation, and conviction share a core feature of reducing the field of view to something far less uncertain than messy reality. That doesn’t make “uncertainty” the root cause of obsession, but it helps explain why obsession, fixation, and conviction can still be appealing, even when they seem to cause us harm in other ways. (A parallel example might be how the identity validation and social reinforcement of belonging to a Group with Purpose can animate participation in hateful or self-harming behavior.)
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:21 AM on April 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

Elaborating on part of what bearette said, I have found that a trauma bond can cause a shockingly long-lived obsession with a person connected to the trauma.

1. Obsessing over the person can feel like useful work, an effort to find some series of actions that will unring the bell on a terrible event from the past.

2. Obsessing over the person can feel like a moral obligation, continually bearing witness to an injustice.

3. Obsessing over the person can produce an illusion of control over external events that are incomprehensible and unbearable by turning them inward and transforming them into shame, guilt, and self hatred.
posted by Ptrin at 7:27 AM on April 2, 2023 [2 favorites]