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When Longing Becomes Your Lover
Breaking from Infatuation, Rejection, and Perfectionism to Find Authentic Love: A True Story of Overcoming Limerence
Description
Author of the popular New York Times articles “Is It a Crush or Have You Fallen Into Limerence?” and “Does My Virginity Have a Shelf Life?” Amanda McCracken shares her honest, funny, and at times heartbreaking story of learning how to seek true love and intimacy.
Journalist and late-in-life virgin Amanda McCracken dated over 100 men by the time she was in her late thirties. She was so certain she was doing everything she could to find the loving, lasting relationship she wanted. So why wasn’t it working? After another breakdown in her therapist’s office, she came to a startling realization: she was addicted to longing.
This realization was part of a 10-year journey to understand the cultural, neurological, and psychological factors that shaped her beliefs about love, sex, and commitment. She began to understand that longing for someone feels good. It can even feel better than being in a secure relationship. Longing can provide a sense of control when life is uncertain and offers a safe place to hide from emotional vulnerability, especially in today’s online dating and hookup world. But longing can trigger an addictive neurochemical boost that can derail us from forming healthy, intimate relationships.
In this searingly honest book, Amanda shares the crushes, relationships, situationships, travel, friendships, hookups, bad dates, wins, losses, and brushes with fate that came with her journey. Starting with her early childhood hero fantasies and how they evolved in her tween and teen years into a commitment to the purity movement espoused at her church, she chronicles her profound longing for love that led her to her lowest point. She provides a deep, exploratory look into the state of mind known as limerence: an obsessive rumination on an idealized version of someone. Amanda weaves together her personal journey with research, storytelling, soul-searching questions, and quotes from experts and nonexperts alike to reveal the addictive nature of longing while providing hope through her journey of breaking her patterns and ultimately choosing the path towards healthy, authentic intimacy.
Journalist and late-in-life virgin Amanda McCracken dated over 100 men by the time she was in her late thirties. She was so certain she was doing everything she could to find the loving, lasting relationship she wanted. So why wasn’t it working? After another breakdown in her therapist’s office, she came to a startling realization: she was addicted to longing.
This realization was part of a 10-year journey to understand the cultural, neurological, and psychological factors that shaped her beliefs about love, sex, and commitment. She began to understand that longing for someone feels good. It can even feel better than being in a secure relationship. Longing can provide a sense of control when life is uncertain and offers a safe place to hide from emotional vulnerability, especially in today’s online dating and hookup world. But longing can trigger an addictive neurochemical boost that can derail us from forming healthy, intimate relationships.
In this searingly honest book, Amanda shares the crushes, relationships, situationships, travel, friendships, hookups, bad dates, wins, losses, and brushes with fate that came with her journey. Starting with her early childhood hero fantasies and how they evolved in her tween and teen years into a commitment to the purity movement espoused at her church, she chronicles her profound longing for love that led her to her lowest point. She provides a deep, exploratory look into the state of mind known as limerence: an obsessive rumination on an idealized version of someone. Amanda weaves together her personal journey with research, storytelling, soul-searching questions, and quotes from experts and nonexperts alike to reveal the addictive nature of longing while providing hope through her journey of breaking her patterns and ultimately choosing the path towards healthy, authentic intimacy.
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Praise
When Longing Becomes Your Lover gets into the stuff we don’t want to admit: why we’re drawn to people who don’t want us back, why we mistake chaos for chemistry, and why we become addicted to relationships that never actually start. Amanda McCracken doesn’t sugarcoat it. She uses real stories and actual psychology to break down limerence—the obsessive loop that feels like love but runs entirely on fantasy and what-ifs. This book is for anyone tired of their own patterns. It’s about recognizing the cycle, trusting yourself again, and choosing relationships that are grounded in reality instead of longing.
—Sabrina Zohar, dating and relationship coach and host of The Sabrina Zohar Show
When Longing Becomes Your Lover is a heartfelt chronicle of heartache and overcoming disappointments. Winding a path through a life of limerence, longing, and love, Amanda McCracken speaks from a bruised but generous heart to share the wisdom she has won along the way. Poignant, hopeful, and honest, it’s an engrossing memoir of negotiating misfits, Mr. Maybes, and her own confounding, conflicted feelings—all of which lead to an imperfect “happily ever after” (with unicorns, naturally).
—Tom Bellamy, PhD, neuroscientist, author of Smitten, and owner of LivingwithLimerence.com blog
—Tom Bellamy, PhD, neuroscientist, author of Smitten, and owner of LivingwithLimerence.com blog
Amanda McCracken has blended hope with science, cultural analysis, and personal anecdotes to create an excellent and one-of-a-kind guide to unrequited love. When Longing Becomes Your Lover is a love letter to anyone who has lost themselves and is ready to find a path toward authentic love.
—Alexandra H. Solomon, PhD, licensed clinical psychologist, adjunct professor at Northwestern University, best-selling author of Love Every Day, and host of the podcast, Reimagining Love
In When Longing Becomes Your Lover, Amanda McCracken writes with fierce vulnerability and luminous insight about the ache between desire and fulfillment, solitude and connection. This book is a meditation on yearning as both wound and wisdom—an invitation to befriend our hunger rather than outrun it. With honesty, humor, and grace, McCracken transforms longing from something to escape into something to embrace, offering a radical reframing of desire as a source of power, not pain.
—Melissa Petro, author of Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification
McCracken’s honest and vulnerable investigation of her lifelong love affair with longing reminds us that it is never too late to rewrite our own narratives in order to learn best how to love ourselves.
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Life
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Life