What this episode is about
Why is it best not to get the one that got away? Because the moment you do, the divine glow goes out.
Justin Sun says he saw a photo of Jing Tian in a QQ ad and kept it for 19 years. Nineteen years later, he had become the richest man in China’s crypto world: he booked out hotels, flew his goddess around the world on private jets, and paid 30 million yuan in bride price—and then the fire that had been burning for 19 years simply went out. Everyone online said the story was uncannily like The Great Gatsby, but what really resembles it isn’t the “rags-to-riches comeback” plot. It’s the rule about love hidden underneath the plot.
In 1979, American psychologist Dorothy Tennov gave this fire its proper name in Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love: limerence, or infatuation. Tennov’s most important finding was this: the fuel of limerence isn’t how deeply you love someone, but uncertainty. It can live for a very long time on nothing but breadcrumbs; feeding it until it’s completely full is precisely the most effective way to bring it to an end.
This episode uses Tennov’s mechanism to connect the green light across Gatsby’s dock, Stendhal’s bare branch thrown into a salt mine, the final step Wong Kar-wai’s characters never quite take, Eileen Chang’s mosquito bites and cinnabar moles, and the three evolutionary rules Robert Wright discusses in Why Buddhism Is True—and to explain why your brain is bound to make you think, “Is that all there is?” once you finally get what you wanted.
The conclusion isn’t that you should give up. It’s that not getting what you want is, in the first place, the most beautiful form this thing can take. That green light was never meant to be reached; it was meant to be gazed at.
Highlights
- What keeps limerence alive: Tennov says it can “live for a very long time on breadcrumbs,” while feeding it until it’s full is the most effective way to end it—Justin Sun’s ending may have been sealed the moment he met the real person
- Intrusive thoughts: Why is that person like an app running in your phone’s background that you can never force-quit, with every trending search about them serving as another wake-up call over those 19 years?
- Stendhal’s “crystallization”: throw a bare branch into a salt mine and pull it out glittering from end to end—call a bad temper “personality,” call aloofness “cool, effortless charisma”; whatever you throw in, you pull out as a god
- The subtle moment when Gatsby and Daisy meet again: Fitzgerald saw through it a century ago—no amount of reality can beat an illusion someone has spent years sculpting in their mind
- Why Wong Kar-wai never gives you an ending: from the boarding pass in Chungking Express to the mountain that was never crossed in Ashes of Time, and then to the trap evolution laid for human desire
Jump to a section
- 00:00 A photo kept for 19 years, and a 30-million-yuan bride price
- 01:22 Limerence isn’t love: the fuel is uncertainty
- 03:00 The green light, the unkillable app, and the brain’s beauty filter
- 05:48 Fantasy collides with reality: the moment Gatsby meets Daisy again
- 07:22 Filters need distance: breadcrumbs become a Manchu-Han banquet
- 08:21 Not getting what you want: Wong Kar-wai’s solution
- 11:29 Evolution’s trap: everything you get will eventually fade
- 13:04 The green light was never meant to be reached
This book
- Title: Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love
- Author: Dorothy Tennov
- Publisher: Stein and Day
- Year of publication: 1979
- ISBN：9780812823288
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