Page 11 - Advanced Romance

8 Advanced Romance*
humanity has at least vestiges of the phenomena of being “in heat.”This is what it’s called when animals switch into monomaniacal, sexual overdrive for sometimes weeks. One in which a lion couple might have sex up to forty times a day for seven days.5 Or
your normally tame neighborhood dogs fight and tunnel under deeply dug-in fences to get at a female. Or an entire community of flamingos will choreograph a group dance from which females choose the best dancers, like Balanchine’s rigorous auditions for his next ballet.6
It’s true that the menstrual cycle of humans smooths out the excesses of being in heat, but it also allows and encourages 24/7/365 romance.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov exhaustively
studied over five-hundred subjects “in love” and described common characteristics as the phenomena
of “limerence.”7 Tennov acolyte Lynn Wilmott calls limerence the “involuntary, potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts ... from euphoria to despair...”8 Though the scientific words are extremely grating, limerence surely sounds like being in heat. To poetize it a bit, limerence is the ability to hold your beloved on a shimmering pedestal so that their every movement, statement or action appears infinitely superior to anyone else— say as graceful as a Misty Copeland and as brilliant as an Einstein.