Idol Limerence: "Obsessive" love for BTS is more than you think

A primer on the true-love phenomenon fuelling the biggest group on Earth.

V in Singularity’s music video. The imagery of masks and identity is woven throughout BTS’ Love Yourself era and is used as a metaphor in my book Idol Limerence to explain the fan/idol relationship.

When I first saw BTS on YouTube, they were performing IDOL, dancing for me, staring into my soul. Their eye contact was unwavering, it was as if they were peering into the internet and recognising me. As they danced, as they performed, their eyes whispered, “we’ve met before”. I walked away from my laptop that fateful day and swore to never think of them again. Three days later, they were all I could think about. I’d stay up late pouring over videos that explained who each member was, their names, their birthdays, the colour of their hair. I watched music videos and dance practices, and live performances. I became infatuated by the movement of their bodies in the choreographed sequences of Fake Love and DNA. Something deep inside of me had shifted, and every waking thought came back to them. Or rather, him, RM. Namjoon. It was like falling through a portal—one moment I was grounded in reality, the next I was suspended in a dreamscape made of movement, music, and myth.

Days became weeks, weeks became months, I started to write my love story with him. No matter how hard I tried to escape it, my feelings for BTS, and RM, grew stronger. I felt our emotional maps were the same, that we were walking a long and winding road together. That it was destiny. I was always meant to find them, they were always meant to find me. This is how I fell in love with a K-pop idol, and by extension, a group, who didn’t know I existed. And yet, it felt like they did. That’s the madness and the magic of it—what shouldn’t be possible begins to feel not just plausible, but ordained.

It’s not obsession, it’s idol limerence

As a sociologist, I had been theorising about true-love relationships that exist between fans and celebrity musicians. Originally, my research was on One Direction, more specifically Harry Styles, whom I had found myself developing an intense attraction to back in 2012. The media has us convinced that an attraction, a devotion, an infatuation is merely just obsession. Young, hysterical fan girls are the stereotype, and their desires are easily and readily dismissed. But that’s not what I had observed or experienced first-hand. This kind of single-sided love was powerful, transformative, all-consuming in all the ways. It had its own logic, its own rules, its own rituals. And no one was naming it.