Love is not a life sentence; love is not successful only if somebody dies. Those are two pieces of advice that were given to me when I realized I needed to leave the relationship with my first love. I've also experienced limerence (and, curiously, I remember it MUCH more than I remember love right now) but I don't think that you necessarily experienced limerence instead of love just because you weren't the one to break things off. I think perhaps you simply experienced love with someone who could not love you indefinitely, rather than someone who didn't love you at all.

This thread and an external conversation on the same topic helped me realize that the reason I have trouble either remembering ever having been in love or crossing that boundary now (but limerence is easy!) is because I'm threatened by the fact that love makes people willing to automatically sacrifice to put the other person's happiness first, and in past loving relationships I did that to my own detriment and changed things about myself that it took me a long time to recover. There's a point, I think, in a relationship where even if you love someone, you have to stop and give some thought to what continuing to love them means, and whether or not you can sustain the feeling of their happiness being more essential to your happiness than individual fulfillment is.

When I left that first loving relationship, I was elated. It was hard to say the words and break up, but within days of doing so I finally felt that I could breathe again. That doesn't mean to me that I never loved him -- it means that I let love feel like a life sentence, instead of a choice. It was a lousy relationship in a lot of ways, but it was good in other ways, and I really do believe it was a love match, but it was one where I came to the point of choosing love with one of the millions of people in the world who I could love, or the ability to be a version of myself that I'm proud of. The fact that the two couldn't coexist doesn't make him wrong, bad, or any of that, it just meant it was time for an end.

Maybe that's what is happening in your relationships. You just come to a point where the other person does love you, but can't both keep loving you and be the person she wants to be outside the relationship. That doesn't make you wrong or unlovable, it just means you haven't met someone yet for whom who she wants to be as a person is the same as who loving you would make her become. I think that person is out there for everyone. I think there is someone in the world who will love me to the point of modifying themselves automatically over time, without thinking, to make me happier--and who will get to that "stop, look, evaluate" point and say, "Wow, I love the things that I've added to my character in this relationship." I believe that I will get to that point with someone, too. But I think that's really hard to find, and that it's endurance and compatibility, not love, that gets a relationship past the "stop, look, evaluate." Every love seems to come to that point, and being unable to pass it doesn't make it non-love.