Dorothy Tennov

Tennov was born in Montgomery County, Alabama.^[6] She received her BA from Brooklyn College in 1950,^[6][7] then did postgraduate education at the University of Connecticut, where she received her MA in 1950 and PhD in 1964.^{[7][8][note 1]}

Tennov was a professor of psychology at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut for twenty years.^[6] 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.^[9][10] In her studies, Tennov administered questionnaires, collected diaries and other personal accounts, and interviewed over 500 people on the topic of love.^[4][11][12]

In 1976, Tennov traveled to Paris, where she interviewed the French novelist and essayist Simone de Beauvoir for a PBS television station, WNED-TV.^[13][14][15] 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 ("limerence").^[16]

In addition to publishing Love and Limerence (1979), Tennov made a name for herself as a critic of psychotherapy.^[17][18] 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."^[19]

In 1986, Tennov left her post at the University of Bridgeport to become an independent researcher.^[9][15] She moved to Millsboro, Delaware, in 1987,^[7] where she lectured at a local senior learning academy and volunteered at a nursing home.^[9][6] 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.^[14]

Tennov grew up in New York City.^[7] She was married in 1952 to the psychologist Howard S. Hoffman, and they had three sons together,^[1][6][20] but they later divorced.^[10] Their son Randall died of leukemia in 1993.^[6][20] Tennov was a feminist, enjoyed classical music, gardening, and playing piano (having owned a Steinway),^[10][6][7] and had a small white dog "with an ear-splitting bark".^[7] She states in her collected works that she is "the victim of a disorder that adversely influences social interactions" and that she experienced job discrimination and sexism, despite ending up as a tenured professor.^[21] She died in 2007 in Harbeson, Delaware, at the age of 78.^[6]

Tennov published several nonfiction books, articles in scientific and educational journals, scientific book reviews, presentations at scientific meetings, essays on aspects of women's social conditions, and a prize-winning play about life in a nursing home.^[6][14]

• Psychotherapy: The Hazardous Cure; Abelard-Schuman; 1975 (ISBN 978-0200040280)
• Super Self: A Woman's Guide to Self-management; Funk & Wagnalls; 1977 (ISBN 978-0308102736)
• Love and Limerence; Scarborough House; 1979 (ISBN 0-8128-6286-4)
• Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love; Scarborough House; 1999 (ISBN 978-0-8128-6286-7)
• A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It "Limerence": The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov; The Great American Publishing Society; 2005^[22]