More Than A Crush: Michael Reid on limerence and his new play Safety

I learned desire first through the lens of detection. At the all-boys school I attended in Glasgow from three to 18, I was the only pupil I remember being out as gay within those 15 years. Although statistically, I can't have been alone. Coming of age in an environment like that teaches you a type of second-sight. You study glances, silences, or when a furtive 'joke' about intimacy with a classmate suggests the lady doth protest too much. You need to ascertain who might hurt you, and who you can trust as well as who might like you, but be hiding it in plain sight.

When I discovered the city's goth and alternative scene as a teenager, it opened a door. Here was a world where the codes were different: boys applied eyeliner and nail polish on the steps of the GoMA, we took to the hazy dancefloors of the Cathouse, and drank White Lightning from the bottle as we overlooked the city from the Necropolis. Friendships with other boys could shade into something else, then inch back again. Sexuality was signalled, then retracted or denied. People wanted to try things without anyone knowing they had tried them. Mixed messages were a native language.

I know now that there is a word for what grew within me in that loamy soil. Limerence: the term psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined in 1979 for involuntary, obsessive romantic longing – the state in which another person's smallest gesture becomes evidence, and your mood hangs on your interpretation of it. It is more than a crush. It is desire sustained by uncertainty: the half-sentence you replay, or the text you do not receive but cannot stop answering in your head.

Without access to open, healthy possibilities for expressing and receiving love, my wiring as a young gay person forged a predisposition to interpretation, secrecy and longing. Nights of my adolescence were spent pining over boys who had, in truth, promised me nothing. I was writing my own scripts for these young men: taking a glance, a joke, a drunken exchange, and arranging it all into someone I fantasised could give me the affection I needed.

Limerence has had a cultural moment recently: TikTok explainers, a Lucy Dacus song and books such as Dr Tom Bellamy's Smitten have pulled the word into circulation. The reason it has stuck is simpler. It describes the way another person can become, with almost no input from them at all, the centre of your inner life. Nobody, as far as I can tell, has measured whether queer people experience limerence more often than anyone else, and I would not claim to know that we do. But I wonder whether a queer youth makes us unusually practised in it. We learn to read ambiguous signals for safety. It seems likely, then, that we are at greater risk of finding a form of desire that feeds on ambiguity.

I have never experienced the closet, at least not in its full architecture, but I wonder what conditions for limerence that must create for fellow queer people. To be alone with a longing that cannot be admitted; to desire someone without being able to test the reality of those feelings, confess them, or even name them; to build an inner life around glances, proximity, accidents, excuses. Feelings become intensified by secrecy while fantasy is strengthened because reality is forbidden.

In my twenties, a man I knew, a little older and publicly attached to heterosexuality, developed feelings for me that became romantic and sexual beyond the level that I reciprocated them. With that, I experienced limerence from the other side. I did not want to hurt his feelings. Perhaps I lacked the confidence to fully reject him. But the coded life he lived kept him circling me. To understand his feelings through the framing of limerence, or its frequent bedfellow co-dependency, would suggest he was not in love with me at all, but with the version of himself that might exist if he could be with me. I recognised the move because I had made it myself: turning a person into a doorway to a life I felt was outside my grasp.

I could not speak plainly about our dynamic to anyone, because to describe it risked outing him. So his closet became mine to keep. The secrecy I thought I had escaped returned in my twenties, retrofitted; this time, I was not hiding what I wanted, but what someone wanted of me.

My play Safety grew out of these vagaries. It is the story of a gay psychotherapist whose trained gift for reading subtext and the subconscious curdles into something with the power to harm instead of help. Ambiguity has been a historical condition of queerness, and longing behaves differently depending on where it finds us. The closeted teenager longs for what cannot be spoken or tested. The not-yet-out person may fasten too much hope to those who will keep their secret. And the adult who is otherwise out and proud can still be conscripted into someone else's unspoken wanting.

Trapping ourselves in the what-if and the if-only can make us accept so much less than we all deserve. What we all deserve is, simply, to love and be loved wholly and completely – which is indeed the opposite of limerence.

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Safety, Underbelly Bristo Square (Daisy), 5-30 Aug, 11.45am