Overview

What does it look like to be hopelessly, serially, persistently, and stubbornly in love not with someone, but with longing itself? Journalist and late-in-life virgin Amanda McCracken dated over 100 men before she realized she was addicted to longing, setting her on a 10-year journey to understand the fallacies behind her beliefs about love, sex and commitment. She invites you along for the sometimes thrilling, sometimes heartbreaking, always insightful ride. As Amanda endured one disappointment, letdown, and torpedoed fantasy after another, she began to understand that longing feels good. In fact, it can feel even better than actually being in love. Longing gives us a sense of control in our uncertain lives, and when we can always envision a more perfect relationship, we can ignore the very real problems that all relationships face. But longing can also become an addictive neurochemical boost that derails us from forming healthy, intimate relationships. Amanda describes 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. As she grew into young womanhood, her obsession with an idealized version of love led her to become addicted to longing - constantly craving the ideal partner in the ideal location at the ideal time, reveling in the high of anticipating the sex she knew she wasn't going to have. It became a protective mechanism in a ""sex positive"" dating world that demands physical intimacy but admonishes emotional intimacy, where options seem plentiful but connections ambiguous. In this searingly honest book, Amanda chronicles her many romantic encounters in today's dating world and what she learned about a concept called ""limerence"": an obsessive rumination on a version of someone that doesn't truly exist. 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 overcoming it and ultimately choosing of the path towards healthy, authentic intimacy.

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9781546008538

Table of Contents

Reviews

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 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

Author Information

Amanda McCracken is a journalist passionate about experiences that highlight the intersection of wellness, travel, and relationships. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Vogue, National Geographic, Elle, NPR, Outside, ESPN, SELF, Runner's World, and many others. She published her first article about longing in 2013, which led to additional articles featuring personal anecdotes and deep research and interviews with the BBC and Katie Couric. She is now considered a ""limerence expert"" and intimacy advocate. Her 2023 Ted Talk, ""How Longing Keeps Us From Healthy Relationships,"" highlights how longing can become selfsabotaging and shares how to change our patterns of longing. McCracken is also a part-time university instructor, massage therapist, triathlon coach, and competitive athlete. Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, McCracken put down roots with her husband and daughter in Boulder, Colorado, after a trip around the world aboard the Peace Boat.

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