Dorothy Tennov
Dorothy Tennov was an American psychologist who invented the term "limerence". Her 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, has been called the seminal work on romantic love and credited as largely marking the start of data collection on the phenomenon.
Early life and education
Tennov was born in Montgomery County, Alabama. She received her BA from Brooklyn College in 1950, then did postgraduate education at the University of Connecticut, where she received her MA in 1950 and PhD in 1964.Career
Tennov was a professor of psychology at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut for twenty years. Her professional interest in romantic love began in the 1960s, when two young men told her that breakups had driven them to alcoholism and losing a semester at university, respectively. In her studies, Tennov administered questionnaires, collected diaries and other personal accounts, and interviewed over 500 people on the topic of love.In 1976, Tennov traveled to Paris, where she interviewed the French novelist and essayist Simone de Beauvoir for a PBS television station, WNED-TV. It was on the flight home from this interview that she is said to have discovered that limerence is not a universal human experience, finding that her longtime friend Helen Payne was unfamiliar with it. This is when she decided to invent a new term.
In addition to publishing Love and Limerence, Tennov made a name for herself as a critic of psychotherapy. She commented in 1976 that narcissism was becoming a common diagnosis at the time, because therapists seldom saw clients who had never been to therapy before. According to Tennov, "The people who go are a relatively small group who become therapy junkies."
In 1986, Tennov left her post at the University of Bridgeport to become an independent researcher. She moved to Millsboro, Delaware, in 1987, where she lectured at a local senior learning academy and volunteered at a nursing home. Near the end of her life, she was working on a play, and a book about the public and scientific reactions to the concept of limerence.