Why Do I Think Someone Likes Me? Attraction Bias, Ideas of Reference, and Erotomania Explained
Why Do I Think Someone Likes Me? Attraction Bias, Ideas of Reference, and Erotomania Explained
Something about me surprises me sometimes — or maybe "embarrasses" is closer.
I'm unusually aware of other people's eyes. Walking through a crowd, I'll catch a glance from a stranger for half a second and feel, with a certainty I already know is probably wrong, that it was aimed at me. With someone I actually have feelings for, there's a quiet, persistent sense that I come across as especially striking to them. Not a conviction exactly, but a hum running under everything I can't quite stop.
I've started wondering whether that's normal. The technical name for the far end of what I'm describing, it turns out, is erotomania.
A glance in a crowd can feel aimed. Most of the time, it wasn't.
Erotomania has a reputation: the deluded conviction that a celebrity is secretly in love with you. But strip it down and the engine isn't just love — it's attention, misread as meaning. And that misreading is something many of us recognize, in smaller doses, as part of everyday life. The question worth sitting with is where the ordinary version ends and the clinical one begins.
In this article
What Psychiatry Calls Erotomania and Ideas of Reference
Psychiatry has a precise name for what I'd been half-joking about — though the first surprise, when I went looking, was that it wasn't the name I expected.
Erotomania is a subtype of delusional disorder: a fixed belief that another person, usually someone of higher status or a public figure, is secretly in love with you. WebMD frames it as a delusion that holds even when evidence flatly contradicts it — and that persistence is what separates it from ordinary unrequited longing. Cleveland Clinic's clinical overview adds a distinction worth sitting with: delusional disorder, including the erotomanic type, usually involves what's classified as a non-bizarre delusion — a belief in something that could plausibly happen in real life, like being loved from a distance, rather than something physically impossible. The content of the belief isn't the tell. What marks it as clinical is that it holds regardless of what's actually true.
Reading the definition, though, I caught the gap. Erotomania runs the opposite way from what I carry. It says they love me. What I feel is closer to they noticed me, or I must come across as striking to them — about their attention, not their hidden devotion.
The label that came closer was a quieter one: ideas of reference — reading neutral events as messages aimed at you, an overheard remark, a stranger's glance, a billboard. The two get talked about together, and they do share one skeleton: the self placed at the center of attention that was never pointed there. (The old clinical name, de Clérambault's syndrome, belongs to erotomania specifically — a detail I only picked up while reading around.) But the direction is the whole difference. One is a conviction about being loved; the other, just a hum of being watched.
The gap between a smile and a signal — and why the brain fills it in without asking.
The Attraction Bias Many of Us Carry
When researchers started examining how people actually read ambiguous social cues, the results mapped uncomfortably close to the clinical picture.
A 2026 review in Frontiers in Psychology pulled together the research on what scientists call the male sexual overperception bias — the documented tendency for men to read women's neutral behavior as romantic or sexual interest. What struck me was how ordinary the trigger is: a passing smile, simple friendliness, mild attention, all registering as a signal they were never meant to be. The reviewers don't settle on a single mechanism — cognitive, evolutionary, and sociocultural explanations have all been proposed — and the pattern turns up across study after study.
The part of the finding worth sitting with is how long this pattern has held up. The Frontiers review traces the bias back more than four decades of replication across cultures and research designs — though the reviewers flag a real gap in that record: no one has gone back to test whether the same tendency holds once people are over 40.
What I can't tell, reading as a layperson, is whether these are one mechanism at different volumes or just cousins that happen to resemble each other. The research stops short of that claim, so I will too — but the family resemblance is hard to unsee.
If you're curious what else shapes how sharply the mind reads a situation, this piece on research-backed habits that strengthen memory and focus covers what the science says actually changes the brain.
Erotomania at the Extreme
The clinical definition is clear enough on its own. An actual case makes the mechanism visible in a way a definition never quite does.
Psychology Today's coverage of celebrity stalking profiles the case of Robert Dewey Hoskins, who fixated on Madonna throughout the 1990s. Hoskins, who was homeless at the time, held a fixed conviction that Madonna would eventually marry him. He attempted to scale the wall of her Hollywood Hills property on multiple occasions, was shot and wounded by her bodyguard during one of those attempts, and was ultimately arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in state prison.
Hoskins's case is an extreme example, not a representative one. Erotomania does not automatically lead to stalking or contact attempts, though individual experiences vary.
What makes the case worth examining, rather than simply extreme, is how the belief responded to evidence.
According to Psychology Today, the rejections, the legal proceedings, and Madonna's direct statements did not break Hoskins's conviction. Each piece of contradictory evidence was absorbed, reinterpreted, and folded back into the narrative as further proof that the connection was real. The belief didn't crack under pressure. It reorganized the pressure.
The Hoskins case: a conviction that held firm against arrest, trial, and direct contradiction.
The Line Between Imagination and Delusion
There's a question this article has been circling without quite landing on: where exactly does the ordinary pattern end and the clinical one begin?
The clearest test I found came down to two variables. The first is persistence: how long the interpretation holds, and whether it survives contact with evidence that contradicts it. The second is function: does the belief start interfering with daily life, or with the relationships closest to the person holding it?
Cleveland Clinic's clinical profile of delusional disorder backs up that second variable specifically. People with the condition typically keep functioning normally everywhere except the one area the delusion touches — work, most relationships, day-to-day life can look completely ordinary from the outside. It's the preoccupation crowding out everything else, not the content of the belief, that clinicians weigh — one signal among several, alongside how long the belief has held and whether another condition could explain it better.
Those two variables point the same way. The line isn't the thought itself — "she noticed me," "that felt personal." That's ordinary cognitive variation, not pathology — and even the narrower, sexual-interest-specific version of this bias that Frontiers reviewed is treated by researchers as a common misfire, not a symptom. The line is whether correction still works.
GoodTherapy draws a distinction that maps onto this line: an idea of reference tends to shift when evidence points elsewhere, while a delusion of reference can persist despite strong evidence to the contrary. On the imagination side: you over-read a signal, someone points it out, and you adjust. On the delusion side: someone points it out, and you find a reason the pointing-out itself is wrong — the belief starts generating its own explanations for why the correction doesn't count.
I should pull back on how clean that line sounds. Psychiatric distinctions like this one are rarely as tidy in practice as they look written down. The real-world presentation is messier than any two-variable framework suggests.
The clinical boundary between exaggerated imagination and ideas of reference isn't always obvious, even to professionals.
A lot of people hear the word erotomania and immediately categorize it: psychiatric disorder, serious case, nothing to do with ordinary life. Looking honestly at what I carry day to day, I don't think that label fits me.
What I have feels more like an exaggerated version of something widely shared, the attraction bias the research describes, running a few degrees hotter than average. If it stays at that level, if it doesn't distort how I move through my life or damage the relationships that matter, I can hold it as a mental habit, a human tendency I happen to have in a slightly pronounced form.
But I know where the edge is. If the certainty keeps growing, and the feedback from reality stops registering, that's when I'd want to bring someone else into the room, a professional who can help me measure the gap between what I believe and what's actually there. Asking for that kind of help isn't a sign of weakness. It's closer to a maintenance check.
And still — I notice them. I can't entirely stop. Even if the thought never fully quiets, I can try to hold it as my own interpretation, a little overblown, rather than settled fact. That shift alone seems like enough to keep me on the right side of the line.
Sources and references
- WebMD — "What Is Erotomania?" — webmd.com
- Cleveland Clinic — "Delusional Disorder" — clevelandclinic.org
- Wikipedia — "Erotomania" — en.wikipedia.org
- Frontiers in Psychology (2026) — Obrecht & Agrillo, "Overperceiving desire, underestimating age: a review of a narrow research lens" — frontiersin.org
- Psychology Today — "Celebrity Stalkers" — psychologytoday.com
- CBS News/AP — "Madonna Stalker Robert Dewey Hoskins Recaptured a Week After Hospital Escape" — cbsnews.com
- GoodTherapy — "Ideas of Reference" — goodtherapy.org
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