Reviewed by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
In When Longing Becomes Your Lover: Breaking from Infatuation, Rejection, and Perfectionism to Find Authentic Love: A True Story of Overcoming Limerence (Worthy Books; Feb. 2026), Amanda McCracken tells us that at the age of 39, her life suddenly makes sense.
She has just been introduced to the term limerence — an intense infatuation, an obsessiveness, or an unfulfilled longing — by her therapist. Now, the intense crushes, the chasing after men who were unavailable or unaligned with her own deep values, the longing for a life that always felt just around the corner, one relationship away, yet somehow hopelessly out of reach, now can be viewed through this new lens. A late-in-life virgin, McCracken had built a permission structure around sex that became a barrier to the very relationship she sought: one of equality, depth, stability, reciprocity, and safety. Now, she could start figuring herself out.
In her efforts to understand why she keeps falling for unavailable men (and in looking internally to find and fix the issue), she turns to a somatic therapist, a Japanese psychic, a scientist, a rabbi, and an addiction counselor, among others. She wonders if the origins of her limerence are rooted in attachment and abandonment issues due to the three-week separation from her mother as a newborn necessitated by her mother’s stroke and seizure shortly after delivery. She wonders at her five-year-old self who conjures an imaginary husband complete with name and occupation (Dave the Watchmaker).
McCracken believes in destiny and soulmates and God’s divine plans for us all. And certainly, her limerence is also born of and embedded in church dogma. At 16 years of age, she made a purity pledge of celibacy until marriage in front of her church, as did most of her girlfriends. She viewed this goal as any other she has set for herself, including athletic goals of miles completed and marathons won. “Endurance is my middle name,” she tells us.
Amidst a hook-up culture that encourages casual sex, not the intimate, romantic sort McCracken is saving herself for, she loosens and emboldens herself with alcohol. She kisses and fondles, lets herself be “dry-humped” and spanked, all of which leave her feeling disposable, not empowered like the sexual revolution of the previous generation promised.
The way the author is treated by the men in her life brought out the mother in me. I wanted to warn her, to care for her, to tell her she was better than these guys. When a relationship that had seemed promising when they were in the same city fades when the partners move, when her emails go unanswered for long periods of time, when the commitment she longs for turns into “let’s see how it goes” and “well, I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing you,” instead of reading the tea leaves as rejection, the author clings to what she sees as “bread crumbs.”
As her behavior becomes more daring and self-destructive, as her Mr. Right seems more elusive, and as she questions the very premise of her life — that saving herself and her virginity for a man worthy of the kind of relationship she envisions becomes its own sort of prison, she begins to realize, “It was never about sex, just as anorexia isn’t about food. Virginity just became part of a mental transaction that kept me safely ‘trapped’ in longing for someone worthy of letting go for, when I was the one who didn’t find myself worthy of anything but crumbs.”
This is the message of her book and the point of her story, and she discovers it through her story. Writing her story, owning her narrative, brings not just understanding, but also agency. Writing becomes the reflective practice, the intense self-inquiry she needs to crack herself open. To embrace the abandoned newborn, to sober up the searching college student, to see the worthy wife and mother she could become.
Through writing, McCracken realizes that, though she did not give away her virginity for all those years, she risked giving away something more valuable: her voice, her agency, her self-worth. And she wants it back. She reclaims it by writing. She starts by writing about each man, each relationship she chased and what it had given her, what she learned. Then…she lets it go. “What I didn’t realize for almost 15 years,” McCracken tells us, “was that I had been repairing my path as I was writing my way into my own redemptive story.”
As a narrative medicine facilitator and teacher of reflective writing as healing, this does not surprise me. The difference between rumination, where we play the same stories over and over in our heads, and reflective writing, is that in the latter we ask ourselves the hard questions. What am I meant to learn from this interaction, this conversation, this relationship? What is this moment trying to teach me? McCracken asks the questions and now understands, “When we reframe perceived loss into moments of learning, our imperfect love lives blossom at their own pace.” And we cheer the author on when this finally happens for her.
Though for much of the book we are channeling our warnings to the author like a horror-moviegoer screaming, “Don’t open that door!” and “Get out of the house!” the redemption, self-discovery and worthiness she ultimately finds provides a satisfying ending for the book. More importantly, it lays out a path for others for whom limerence may also be holding them back from finding their own happily ever after.
Carolyn Roy-Bornstein is a retired pediatrician and the writer-in-residence at a large family medicine residency program. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, JAMA, Poets & Writers, The Writer magazine, and other venues. Her most recent book, A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing forHealthcare Professionals was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in April 2026.
