I Analyzed Sherrone Moore & Here's What I Found... How Limerence Affects You

The shocking termination of Michigan head coach Sherrone Moore has dominated the headlines, but beneath the sports scandal lies a profound psychological phenomenon: Limerence. In this video, we break down the reports from USA Today and Sports Illustrated to analyze the behavior leading up to Moore’s firing. From the alleged years-long affair to the reports of stalking and the "kitchen scissors" incident, we look at these events through the lens of relationship psychology. Was this just a lapse in judgment, or was it the destructive cycle of limerence?

What You’ll Learn in This Video:
The 3 Stages of Limerence: Understanding Infatuation, Crystallization, and Deterioration.

Why Good People Make Bad Decisions: How brain chemistry changes during an obsessive affair.

The Reality of Stalking in Limerence: Why the person "left behind" often resorts to desperate, unrecognizable behaviors.

Hope for Marriage Recovery: Can a marriage survive a public scandal and limerence? (The answer might surprise you).

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What is limerence in a relationship? Limerence is a state of involuntary obsession with another person. It involves intrusive thoughts, an intense desire for reciprocation, and can lead to irrational behavior that the person wouldn’t normally exhibit.

How long does limerence last? Typically, limerence lasts between 18 months to 3 years. As seen in the Sherrone Moore case, once one partner enters the "deterioration" phase while the other is still in "crystallization," it often leads to conflict or stalking.

Can a marriage survive limerence and an affair? Yes. While the process involves a difficult "grief period" for the unfaithful spouse, many marriages can be rebuilt to be stronger than they were before the affair began.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Headlines And Firing Explained
• 2:12 Defining Limerence And Its Signs
• 4:10 The Three Phases Of Limerence
• 6:05 Stalking, Crisis, And Consequences
• 8:20 Why Limerence Always Fades
• 9:55 Guidance For Spouses And Recovery

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I've never met Sharon Moore, but I think right now I probably know more about him than he knows about himself. Now it sounds rather arrogant, does it not? But let me speak to it this way. It's been all on the news in the last couple of weeks that the University of Michigan fired their head football coach, Sharon Moore. He had been their head coach for two years, making some five and a half million dollars per year. And according to all the news reports like on Sports Illustrated and USA Today and even Daily Mail, that interesting piece of literature that comes out of England, they've had a lot to say about him and what's going on. And here are the facts. It says simply this he was caught in an inappropriate relationship, according to what the university had to say, with one of the staffers, and therefore he was terminated. He was terminated, but she was not because of the fact that he was an authority figure and she worked for him. And it said that an affair, according to her, had been going on for several years, and that she had ended the affair, and then that she was actually packing to leave town when he went to her house, and she claims that he'd been stalking her for a couple of months. Now, one of the headlines I found said, rather than saying it had been going on for several years, said it was the best kept secret there on that campus for the last two years. Now let me talk about it in a sense. On this program, we often talk about a thing called limerence. Now, I don't know Sheron Moore. I don't know even know the name of the woman with whom he was involved. Therefore, I cannot tell you that I know for absolutely sure that he was in limerence, but I'm telling you all the signs are there. So speaking of that, let me explain what I mean. You see, they've been involved for a couple of years, and that's going to become important in what I'm about to say. And then finally she broke it off with him, and he began to stalk her. According to her, for at least two months, maybe a little bit longer, he'd been stalking her. He'd been contacting her in various ways, texts apparently, emails, apparently, phone calls, apparently, and she was getting very tired of it. And then finally she told the university what was going on. And when she did, they terminated him. Now he goes to her house, the door's unlocked, so he barges in, and instantly, or at least immediately, I should say, gathered a group of butter knives, which are typically not very dangerous, and a pair of kitchen scissors, and then began to threaten that he was going to kill himself because she had ruined his life and that his blood was on her ends. Now I'm reporting all of that from what I read in the news, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, uh even on Google looking up things there. Now, why do I think that's limerence? Because everything seems to fit. And it's also going to help us understand as we start into the program today, some of the key things about limerence that we don't talk about that much, but that people need to understand. Now, limerence occurs typically gradually. It says she was involved with them for several years, but when we finally get down to it, they said two years, and that's about right. They got involved with each other, and it gradually grew into the point of having an affair, which meant that he obviously cared about her. You say, Well, how do you know that? Because of the fact that he was so distraught when she ended it that he started stalking her. He was pursuing her. Because you see, when you go to that first stage of limerence, which we call infatuation, you go from being not in limerence up to being in limerence, and it's a pretty varied path as to how you get there. It gets stronger more and more as you go through it, and the person that goes into it typically the first and the fastest will be the one that'll come out of it the first and fastest as well on the other side. Then you get to that middle state, which we call crystallization, which is pretty intense, and then finally it will become a state called deterioration. We have said that on this program many times, that eventually limerence will fade. It's actually a biological necessity when you think about it because it becomes so obsessive. Now I'm going to guess, based on what we know about limerence, having worked with thousands and thousands of couples, that she was the one that went in first. Now he had been married about ten years at this point. He has three children, the oldest of whom was about six, I would say. Oh, and by the way, his wife is still with him. On Sunday, he they got pictures of him going to his lawyer's office, and they had the youngest child who is very young in a stroller, and that she was walking with him, although just a little bit behind him. But so far, so far his wife appears to be staying with him. All right, now back to the limerick thing. It goes on for a while and eventually she starts coming out of it. Two years? Not unusual. As a matter of fact, it may have been going on for another year beyond that, that most people didn't know about it, because it typically doesn't get caught immediately. So let's say in our guessing here, it was about three years, and now she goes into deterioration. She's no longer feeling all those intense emotions about him. And he, because he's still apparently in phase two of crystallization, does everything he can to get her back. And so now he's stalking her. You say, does that stalking thing always happen? Pretty much. I can't say that it'll happen in every situation, and I can't I certainly can't say it will happen as intensely as it did in this situation. But yeah, it happens quite a bit. I'm gonna do everything I can to pull you back, because typically the person that goes out first, as I said, is the one that goes in first, and the other person, in this case it would be the coach, went in slower than she, if we're predicting this accurately. And she probably pulled him back into it a few times when he would try to get out when it was first beginning to develop. Now, do I know that for a fact? No, but I'm telling you I have seen that, I have witnessed that so many times, that uh if I had to place money on it, I would bet a big amount of money. That's exactly what happened on that side. And now on the other side, the third side, where they're coming out of it. He's doing everything he can to get her back. And notice that everything he does is pushing her further away. Now we don't have time right now to talk about the principle of push and pull because it's not part of this story right now, but everything he does to get her back speeds her up on her way from on her way away from him to the point where finally she's gonna stop him. I'm not living with this anymore. And the way she does that, she calls the university and tells them what's been going on. Now, obviously that puts her reputation in jeopardy, but interestingly it doesn't put her job in jeopardy because of the fact that he is her supervisor, and by their rules of that university, he now bears a responsibility because he had authority over her. And so he's fired. He said, But what about this bizarre thing? He's got these catching scissors. He says, I'm gonna kill myself, and all the blood is on your hands. It was the last desperate move to try to convince her to come back to him. Did it work? No, it never works. What did it cause? Well, she picked up the phone and called for the police, and therefore he either was gonna kill himself on the spot, which sometimes happens, or he would kill her, which sometimes happens, or he would flee. So thank God he was not so immersed into phase two, the crystallization that he killed her or killed himself, because sometimes that occurs. Here in Nashville a few years ago, a very well-known situation, again involving football, where that that she, the one who was still in limerence when he was coming out of it, she killed him and she killed herself. Now that kind of thing happens. And you say, Why are you telling us this? Because I want you to know that limerence always ends. And that even people that before were rational, that were logical, that that had good concern for themselves and had good ways of thinking about life. I mean, people that were good people. I don't know Sharon, I don't know if people were good or bad, but even good people can sometimes get so mixed up in this and become people that they themselves don't recognize. And part of it has to do with the brain chemicals that start changing because of this limerence. So, what would be my message to Sharon and to his wife? It's this there will be a way to get past this. Now, you may not coach football, or maybe you will at some smaller school at some point, but I wouldn't worry about that right now. The thing to worry about is this helping him heal. He will have to go through a grief process. And if she wants to save the marriage, which we would help them do, if if they call upon us, we'll be happy to help them do, then she's gonna have to help him grieve what he's lost. Oh, I know it doesn't sound fair and it's not fair. And you think, how in the world can anybody do that? We've helped a lot of people do it. And believe it or not, the marriage can be better after all this than it was before. Did he do wrong? Yes. Did he magnify it by the stalking and pursuing and the kitchen scissors? Yes. But all of us is still rescuable. So here's the point I want you to hear. If your spouse is in limerence and doing things you have never expected him or her to do, and they're doing it now and you're thinking, I don't know this person anymore, the answer is you're right. You don't. But almost always that good person is still in there. If you can just wait a little while, and if you believe the good person is still in there, we can help them get out of that. Or if you're somebody who's watching this and you're the one in limerence, whatever phase you're in, the first one where you're going into limerence, infatuation, the second one where you're deeply in limit limerence crystallization, or the third one when you're coming out, deterioration. It's not going to end the way you want it to. It's gonna be painful. If you're the first one out, or if you're the second one out, it's painfully the way. But we're experts in helping people deal with that. I myself lived through all of those things years ago.