When Longing Becomes Your Lover
Breaking from Infatuation, Rejection, and Perfectionism to Find Authentic Love: A True Story of Overcoming Limerence
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Readers of Glennon Doyle will especially appreciate this." — Publishers Weekly
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist McCracken (The Longing Lab) provides a candid examination of limerence, or an obsessive, unreciprocated infatuation with a romantic interest whom one has "illogically placed on a pedestal." Tracing her own experience with romantic infatuation, McCracken recounts how she sought solace from early attachment issues by falling for emotionally unavailable men whose unattainability fueled obsession but precluded real-life intimacy. Limerence, she writes, was partly a way of insulating herself from having to make real-life romantic decisions. More broadly, it was also a result of Hollywood-influenced expectations of romantic perfection and a purity culture that disempowers women from listening to their bodies and promotes passive longing. The author, who began to recover from her romantic obsessions at age 40, explains how readers can do the same by learning to tolerate imperfection and genuine intimacy; creating more realistic narratives about past heartbreaks; and engaging in mindfulness and body-based therapy practices. McCracken draws from psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality to illuminate how longing can function as both self-protection and self-sabotage, but it's her refreshing vulnerability that lends the narrative its openhearted relatability and insight. Readers of Glennon Doyle will especially appreciate this.
