Ever heard of ‘limerence’? It’s the heady, obsessive state of new love – where your emotions become so overwhelming they begin to twist your sense of reality. In 2026, it provided fertile inspiration for pop culture. For those who like our films warm and fuzzy, Netflix’s Voicemails for Isabelle recycles a familiar premise of male fixation, packaged as romance. On the flipside is Obsession, which frames female infatuation as visceral horror.
It doesn’t take a PhD in Gender Studies to note the subtext: male romantic compulsion is cute (despite plenty IRL evidence to the contrary) whereas women’s feelings are grotesque and violent, a perception which belies a certain castration anxiety. See also: Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Killing Eve…and plenty of other examples. Now, two female-fronted debut shows at the Edinburgh Fringe say ‘enough’ to the stereotype and take us inside the minds of women under the influence of limerent attachment; and, in both cases, they’re inspired by the creators’ real lives.
The autofictional skew of these shows allow us a new interiority to these tales of fixation. At least, this is what speaking to writer and performer Catherine Taaffe suggests. The Brooklyn-based creative explains that The Only Man Who Won’t F*ck Me – her darkly comic play exploring a woman’s one-sided obsession with her trans male friend – was inspired by her own millennial existential crisis after a creative project fell through. “I was like, ‘I don’t own property, I’m not married, I know people who are having kids…’ when my career isn’t going well, it feels like this gaping hole,” she says. “I guess I started to sort of fixate on this relationship that I was in, or it wasn’t even a real relationship, it was my best friend who I had feelings for. I thought that if this person chose me, I’d feel, you know, whole again.”
This muddling of professional and personal boundaries is carried forward into Taaffe’s character who – informed by the writer-performer’s own lived experiences – is a successful sex worker. Cultivating desirability is part of her job, so when she comes across a man who isn’t just uninterested in her, but whose transness positions him outside of cis-heteronormative sexual politics, she spirals. “My character has built her whole life and understanding of herself on being desired. She meets this guy who’s not like her clients, and who happens to be a trans man, too,” Taaffe explains. “The mechanics of how to make men want her don’t work with this guy. It’s freeing but terrifying and it kind of breaks her brain a little.”
While Taaffe’s play deals with one-sided limerence, Harriet Richardson’s Creep deals with the grey, liminal space of situationships: showing how a lack of certitude can be ample fuel for romantic projection. The comedy show – which serves as the performance artist’s first foray into stand-up – explores a period of Richardson’s life following a brief online flirtation with a middling male TV comedian, one which blew up her long-term relationship. In Creep, Richardson explores how the banal personal tragedies and fascinations of romantic rejection and sexual desire in the digital age — where we can know everything about someone through a Google search, and bare our souls over DM, but never fully meet someone in the flesh – can transmute into a kind of fervent, almost religious ecstacy. “If someone is available enough to feel possible, but just out of reach enough to remain unknowable, I can turn them into an icon rather than a person. There’s both safety and risk in that. You get the intensity of devotion without the vulnerability of mutuality,” she explains.
The process is undoubtedly a lonely one, as all sides avoid putting the skin of true intimacy in the game. However, making a monument of another person is a highly creative process and, in her animated retelling of her own fixations and foibles, Richardson winds up rejecting the othered position of hysterical woman. Instead, she turns her male interest into a muse for her own artistic practice (women in male fields, much?). “Obsession has a deranged relationship to creativity. As soon as obsession takes hold, my artistic libido either has a fire lit under it or dies a death, depending on where I am in the cycle,” she says. “Reliving this period in pursuit of writing my debut hour has been, to say the least, artistically invaluable and personally inadvisable.”
If you’re raised or socialised as a woman, you’re sold a fantasy that a man will swoop in and save you – that romance will be your salvation from the cold and lonely world and that love is a pure, saving grace. Both Taaffe and Richardson’s shows explore, and implode, the impulse to turn to romantic love when you need to make sense of the world, or as a defence mechanism; exposing how self-destructive this fantasist line of thinking can be. But, most importantly, they encourage women to reject the shame and silence which can surround rejection, escapism, and limerence. “Obsession can feel so private, so deranged, so uniquely shame-filled, but it’s also deeply human,” says Richardson. “So is performance. So is exploding your life by having a lacklustre affair with the guy from the TV.”
The Only Man Who Won’t F*ck Me, ZOO Playground, 7-30 (not 17), 9.50pm
Harriet Richardson: Creep, Pleasance Courtyard, 5-30 Aug (not 17), 7pm