When Longing Becomes Your Lover: What 40 Years as a Virgin Taught Me about Intimacy, Desire, and Feminism

Amanda McCracken is an award-winning 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," and her podcast, The Longing Lab, highlight how longing can become self sabotaging 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. 

"A compelling read for anyone exploring the intersections of self-worth, relationship patterns, and personal growth."—Maria Shriver
"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

"Amanda McCracken infuses her sharp journalism skills and so much heart into everything she writes. I can’t think of anyone more suited to explore longing."

—August McLaughlin, journalist, Girl Boner Radio producer, and author of Girl Boner: The Good Girl's Guide to Sexual Empowerment
"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

"Part-memoir, part-cultural investigation, When Longing Becomes Your Lover is an astonishing story about breaking free from the self-sabotaging patterns that keep us from the love we claim to want. Amanda holds the subject of longing like a prism, analyzing the emotion from all sides and finding a curious beauty in its multifaceted image. With humor, raw vulnerability, and older-sister wisdom, Amanda reveals what it takes to stop fantasizing about connection and start building it—one authentic moment at a time."

—Anna Goldfarb, author of Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Your Most Valued Connections
"McCracken exposes an underreported effect of purity culture: that attempts to make girls more 'pure' by channeling teenage sexual and romantic hunger into dreamy yearning for the perfect, God-ordained husband can result in a lingering attachment to longing itself. Rooted in extensive research and personal experience, When Longing Becomes Your Lover is an important contribution to the purity culture conversation."—Linda Kay Klein, author of Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free
"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
"This book explores the overlapping Venn diagram of both purity culture and hookup culture. Though seemingly opposites, the two have much in common: both prioritize objectification over embodiment. And both diminish the importance of agency. And for these reasons, people deeply immersed in these two cultures may be particularly prone to limerence."—Anna Rollins, author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl
"This book is for every person who has ever had a crush, an unrequited love, a bad boyfriend, an almost-boyfriend, a fake boyfriend, an imaginary boyfriend, an idealized boyfriend, a Peter Pan boyfriend, or a boyfriend who defined you. Amanda will help you get over them and fall in love with yourself."—Elissa Bassist, author of Hysterical
"This book is a meditation on yearning as both wound and wisdom—an invitation to befriend our hunger rather than outrun it."—Melissa Petro, author of Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification